The mists peeled back, revealing a vast valley of red trees, surrounded on all sides by mountains. They were sharp and rigid, like Earth’s mountains, but they jutted from the ground at an angle that seemed slightly otherworldly. Too sharp, too folded over. Regular clouds clung to their peaks, and Blake was pretty sure he spotted a massive flying Echo shaped like an eagle dipping in and out of them.

  He knelt at the edge of a ridge and glanced back. He couldn’t hear the cultivators behind him, and though he couldn’t linger for too long, he could spare a little time.

  Taking a deep breath, he tasted the pine sap in the air and the distant smoke of a village and campfires. It made his heartbeat slow down slightly.

  “Where do we go?” Blake asked Ethbin. “Any idea where I might find a sect?”

  I don’t recognize this place, either, Ethbin replied. But then again, if this was a world that got integrated with yours, I wouldn’t.

  “Any chance you could tell me why the Integration happened?”

  I cannot. For your stage, that would cost me too much energy. I physically cannot; the ring’s limitations are too powerful.

  Blake grimaced.

  The good news is that you are not ready to hear it yet.

  “Not sure if that’s good, or just making me more worried.” Blake stood up on the ridge. It was made of some sort of glassy gray stone, and colourful moss crept up its side. He jumped down off it and landed on the ground below. It was slightly spongey, but in the way a forest floor was, not in the way the swamp behind him was.

  He was expecting the climate to be slightly cooler, but he didn’t know why, and it wasn’t true. It was still effectively the same planet, even if it didn’t feel like it. That meant it was still summer, and the sun would dry off his shirt soon enough. It was his boots that would take the longest to dry out. But he could do that once they found a sect.

  The real problem was figuring out how to do that.

  Most villages will know where the local sect resides, Ethbin said. You could ask someone.

  “Okay, but next problem. We haven’t gone very far at all. What if someone recognizes me? And tries to turn me in?”

  You think Svarikson and his Green Bears don’t have enemy sects who would love to harbour you? An enemy of your enemy is your…temporary ally.

  The next time Blake reached a rocky outcropping on his descent through the valley, he stopped and looked out over the landscape. In the distance, pillars of smoke rose up into the air, filtering through the midday sun. He began walking toward them, pushing through the undergrowth until he reached a trail.

  The trail was just packed mud, and two ruts where wagon wheels had paved a path through the forest, but it was better than braving the thick branches and thornbushes. He’d accumulated a lifetime’s worth of scrapes and cuts on his legs lately.

  “Should I be looking out for any monsters or anything?” Blake asked.

  You’re safe outside the merge-mists during the day, Ethbin said. Perhaps a howler will get through, but no fiends. It’s much like your home, in that regard. But don’t drop your guard. You don’t want to get caught flat-footed by a cultivator.

  Blake nodded. “I absolutely do not.”

  He kept walking for an hour. The trail descended down the valley’s slope until it reached a river, and curved to run along the river’s edge. Every once in a while, it’d pass a skeletal set of sandstone ruins that had probably been here from well before the Integration, judging by how much patina they had.

  When he finally arrived at the village he’d seen from a distance, the trail split off in two directions, carving out a wider clearing. Houses were packed into it. They all boasted wood and plaster walls, with thatched, peaked roofs and horse-shaped ornaments on their eaves. Their chimneys chuffed gray smoke, and people scurried about the streets, going about their daily business. They strung up clothes to dry, butchered meat, forged tools in ancient-looking blacksmith shops, or lugged buckets of water back and forth from the river. A faint breeze rustled their dull-coloured robes, and most had long hair bound behind them in a ponytail.

  There was a sign at the very edge of the village, which displayed the place’s name in some local script he couldn’t read, and then once more in Dynasty script below it. He squinted at it for a few seconds, before eventually deciphering the word: Clearflow.

  It was as normal of a village as Blake had ever seen in the past decade, and if he hadn’t known better, he’d have said he just found a medieval hamlet.

  But some of them used frying pans that were clearly Earth-made. Old car mufflers hung from a large tree at the center of the city, making a wind-chime, and flocks of Blended sparrows with miniature antlers flitted about the rooftops. They used insulating cups from old power lines as jars, and heaps of scrap metal lay in the back of wagons, waiting to be forged into something more useful.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  “This place seems…rustic,” he said softly.

  You’ll find that most rural villages are like this, to a certain extent. Your world was an exception when it came to technological improvement—it seems that, to compensate for your lack of mana attunement, you tried to explore the stars in your own way. Ethbin paused. Of course, there are some massive cities. I doubt any of them will be familiar to me now, but the larger worlds of the Nords must be more advanced than this. Surely, if you ever make it that far, the Cohongs will have larger cities than this.

  Blake walked down the village’s central road, dodging horse-drawn wagons. A Blended fiend-ox with four horns dragged a log behind it—a log much too heavy for a single regular ox to carry—but the fiend-ox managed just fine.

  When Blake reached the main square of the city (which did have a few paving stones buried beneath a layer of leaf litter), he stopped beneath an old, tall tree at the clearing’s center. He turned in a circle and looked for the nearest person.

  A farmer marched through the city, carrying bushels of hay on his back. Blake ran up to him. “Excuse me, sir, can you tell me where—”

  The farmer glanced at Blake and grumbled something, then began walking faster. He said nothing, but Blake knew the man had seen his rank seal.

  At first, Blake considered going after the man and demanding that the man tell him what he wanted to know, but that was what a regular cultivator would do. That wasn’t right. Blake let the man go on his way.

  He tried again with someone else. The village’s citizens were all humans, and most had fair skin and dark hair, but none had glowing turquoise eyes, and none were Blended. No one had a rank seal—they were all mortals, or close enough to it that it didn’t matter.

  Blake grimaced. He was about to sit down on a bench when a middle-aged woman with a broom ran up and shooed him away.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” Blake said, hopping up. After a few seconds, he asked, “Could you tell me where the local sect is?”

  “Blended housing is across the river,” she said quickly. Then, a moment later, her eyes flitted up to the rank seal on his shirt. “A cultivator? And a Blended?”

  Immediately, she looked down. Probably torn between decorum when dealing with a cultivator, the knowledge that he was still relatively weak in the grand scheme of things, and seeing that he was Blended. On top of it all, a fiend-blend.

  Finally, she shook her head and said, “Blended thralls live and work across the river. If you’re looking to get paid, you can work in the fields, not a sect.” She pointed to the far shore, where the forest had been cleared for crop fields, and where complex channels of irrigation flooded the land, making it soggy enough to grow rice. All the crops were still green, being the middle of the summer, but various Blended humans walked along paths, hunting for pests or watering the plants.

  There were no humans mixed with fiends. A couple wolf-blends, sure. Some treelents, and a couple who had ruby crystal growths jutting out from their bare backs. No fiends.

  Blake swallowed. “Apologies, ma’am. I’m not here for work. If you could tell me where the local sect is, I’ll be out of your hair.”

  She scowled, grumbled something, took another look at his rank badge, then finally muttered, “Head upriver a few miles, and you will reach a pavilion of the Hunter Sect’s outer court. If they let a fiend-blend in, I don’t know what the world’s coming to.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Blake said, ignoring her last comment. He marched off, putting the village behind him as quickly as he could. As soon as he was back in the forest, comfortably out of earshot from any villagers, he asked Ethbin, “Is it true that they won’t take a Blended in the sects?”

  Ethbin laughed. That’s superstition. Mortals don’t know the inner workings of sects very well, so they paint their own biases onto it. But no, Blake. Sects care about one thing: power. They will let you in as long as you demonstrate it. They may not treat you as fairly as the other members. But they won’t outright reject you.

  That set Blake’s mind at ease a little more. He walked in silence as long as he could, until finally, as the afternoon grew later, he arrived at a white brick wall and a wooden gate. The wall itself seemed mostly decorative. It was only a head taller than him, and there were no ramparts, only angled shingles.

  The gate lay wide open, granting a view into the pavilion beyond. Rows of neatly organized longhouses stood behind groomed gardens and ponds. Gray brick trails paved walkways throughout the structure and formed a promenade around a central lake.

  Cultivators moved through the pavilion with purpose, like they had somewhere to be. They wore dark blue tunics with faux-runic hems, and everyone who looked over twenty years old had a Body Tempering rank seal. With cultivators, judging age could be tricky, though. If a Body Tempering cultivator looked twenty, they could be anywhere from actually twenty to forty.

  Still, all of them had glowing turquoise eyes. There were a couple who had pointed ears, but they weren’t Blended—simply a race of near-humans from somewhere else in the galaxy.

  Two guards stood at the gate, each boasting a Body Tempering stage three rank seal. They watched Blake as he approached, and when he drew closer, they pointed their spears at him.

  “Alright, that’s enough,” one said. “Apologies, but you must have taken the wrong turn. This Hunter’s Sect pavilion is closed to mortals at the moment, unless you’ve gotten a permission slip from an outer court elder.”

  “Look, Svel, he’s got a rank badge,” the second said.

  “Apologies,” Blake said. He came to a stop at the center of the road and bowed before them. “This one humbly requests to join your sect.”

  The two guards glanced at each other. They whispered between themselves, but not very quietly. Blake caught a few occasional comments, like “He is a cultivator…” or “He’s much older than any of our other recruits” or “Looks like he came through the merges.”

  Now would be a good time to show them the pelts you gathered, Ethbin suggested.

  Blake pulled his backpack off his shoulder and unzipped it, then tugged out the howler pelts he’d gathered in the last few days of his time in the mists. They were still soggy, but he’d kept the gorey side rolled up on the inside, so it didn’t make a mess of his bag. He didn’t exactly know how to properly prepare a pelt beyond that, though.

  Then he tossed them at the guards’ feet. “I can hunt,” he said. “And I’m willing to learn. If you bring me to whoever’s in charge of recruitment, you can have the contribution points or whatever you call it from bringing in these pelts.”

  The two guards stared at each other. Finally, the first said, “Right this way. I’m sure Elder Ulfreld will be more than happy to meet a…uh, productive new hunter.”