The text cost him eighteen marks.

  Zelig had been watching the Pale Accord’s back counter for three weeks before he asked about it. Not because he needed three weeks to decide. Because he needed three weeks to make sure the man behind the counter did not know he had been watching, which meant going in for other things first, small purchases, nothing that pointed anywhere, until showing up on a Wednesday afternoon and asking about Base dissolution sequences felt like a casual thing a person might do.

  The man looked at him for a moment.

  Then he went into the back and came out with something thin wrapped in cloth and named his price.

  Eighteen marks. Zelig paid without negotiating. Negotiating would have told him too much.

  He read it at the table that night while Marie slept. Twelve pages, handwritten, ink gone brown at the edges. The title was plain. Base Dissolution and Challenger Reformation. A Practical Sequence.

  He read it three times and then sat with it in his hands for a while thinking about the things it was not saying directly but was saying anyway if you read it right.

  Four things required. A Resonance Stone. Stillness. Pain tolerance, which the text called significant internal discomfort in the way that people who want you to do something call it manageable. And time. Three to four hours minimum.

  He had the stone already. He had bought it two weeks ago along with two other components he had not needed, so that the stone was not the thing anyone would remember him buying.

  What he needed was a day when Marie would not be home.

  She had a full day Middling Ring job the following Saturday. A wardrobe overhaul, the particular client who sent diagrams of thread. She had been preparing for it all week, pressing her own clothes the night before, setting out her kit. Zelig watched all of this and said nothing and on Saturday morning watched her leave from the window and waited until she turned the corner off Arbor Street.

  Then he sat down cross legged on the floor in the center of the room with the Resonance Stone in his palm and the sequence in his head and began.

  The first part was breathing. Specific rhythm, pulling the mana pool to the surface the way you pull water up through a pipe. He could feel his pool clearly now in a way he could not have six months ago. The Metarealm had given it edges, made it something he could locate and hold.

  The Resonance Stone warmed. Then hummed. A low vibration that moved up through his hand and into his wrist.

  The dissolution started on its own after that.

  It felt like his chest was being taken apart by someone who knew exactly what they were doing and had not asked permission and was not going to stop. Not sharp. Methodical. Each layer of his mana structure coming loose from the one beneath it with a sensation the text had called discomfort and which Zelig was now prepared to call a significant understatement.

  He did not move.

  He focused on the rhythm. In, four counts. Hold, four counts. Out, six counts. The anchor. Without it the dissolution had nothing to reform around. He knew this. He held the rhythm the way you hold something that is the only thing keeping you from going somewhere you cannot come back from easily.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Somewhere around the forty minute mark his body made the decision to lie down without consulting him.

  He did not fight it.

  He came back to himself on the floor.

  The light through the window had moved. Two hours, maybe three. He lay still for a moment taking stock of everything. Head aching. Chest aching. Hands shaking with the fine tremor that stopped after about a minute.

  He reached for his mana pool.

  It was bigger. Not loudly. The way a room is larger than you remembered. Same room, more of it.

  He sat up.

  The Resonance Stone had cracked down the middle on the floor beside him. Single use. He put both halves in his pocket.

  He stood in the center of the room and stayed very still.

  Challenger rank. Unregistered. Unknown. A fact that existed only in his body and nowhere else in the world yet.

  He went and got water and drank most of it in the hallway and came back and sat at the table and waited for his hands to stop shaking completely.

  They did, after a while.

  That night he went into the Metarealm.

  He had not planned to. He had told himself he would rest, recover, let the new pool settle before testing it. But he lay down and closed his eyes and the shift came faster than it ever had before, like the realm had felt the change in him and moved to meet it. The purple came up around him before he had finished deciding.

  He landed and stood still.

  Something was different.

  The sand was the same. The heavy air was the same. The stones in every direction were the same.

  But at the far edge of his vision, at the place where the purple horizon met the purple sky, something was breaking the line.

  He walked toward it.

  It took a while. Distance here was not reliable. But he kept walking and it kept getting clearer and eventually he stopped and looked at what was there.

  A pyramid. Stone, dark, enormous in a way that was hard to fully process because only the very top of it was above the sand. Just the apex, maybe two meters of it, the rest buried under the purple expanse in every direction. It had not been there before. He was certain of that the way he was certain of things he had catalogued carefully.

  He stood in front of it and looked at it for a long time.

  He did not touch it.

  He circled it slowly. Four sides, perfectly even, the stone surface carved with something he could not read in the dim Metarealm light. Old. Whatever this was it was old in a way that the stones were not, in a way that made the stones feel recent by comparison.

  He crouched down and looked at where the pyramid met the sand. The sand was undisturbed around it. It had not pushed up through the surface the way something rising would. It had just become visible. Like it had always been there and his eyes had simply not been capable of seeing it until now.

  He stood up.

  He looked at it for another moment.

  Then the light hit him.

  Not from the pyramid. From his left, sudden and white, the same strobing light that had taken him the first night, the same light from the first stone, going straight past his eyes into whatever lived behind them. He had not touched anything. He had not been near any stone.

  The vision came anyway.

  The masked man. But not fighting this time. Standing. Looking directly at him across a purple expanse that looked exactly like the one Zelig was standing in. The mask covered everything above the mouth. The mouth was not smiling. It was not doing anything except being the lower half of a face that Zelig somehow knew.

  The masked man raised one hand and pointed.

  At the pyramid.

  Then the light cut out and Zelig was standing in the sand alone with a headache starting behind his eyes and the pyramid sitting at the edge of his vision, apex just visible above the surface, patient and enormous and waiting for something he did not yet have enough of to give it.

  He stood there until the headache sharpened.

  Then he let the realm push him out.

  He blinked back into his room. Dark outside. He had been in there for hours.

  He lay on his back on the makeshift bed and looked at the ceiling and thought about the pyramid and the pointing and the masked man who had not fought this time but had simply looked at him and pointed.

  Telling him something.

  He filed it away.

  Below he could hear Marie moving around, the specific sounds of her closing up the room for the night, the chair scraping, the lamp going out.

  Challenger rank. A pyramid in the sand with most of it still buried.

  He closed his eyes.

  He had a long way to go.