For a long time, there was only silent darkness.

  Roland figured this had to be what free fall felt like. There was a sense of movement, but there was no frame of reference to tell speed or direction, so it might be all in his head. All his senses were shut off, except for that feeling you get when you are on an elevator that’s going just a little too fast for your body to compensate, so it pulls or pushes you.

  Pushed or pulled, but towards what? He had no idea.

  Raven?

  He thought he heard the faintest hint of a croak, but it was so weak it could have been his imagination. His brain had no stimuli. Roland had heard that after a while, people in sensory deprivation started having a variety of mental issues.

  Luckily for him, he could meditate and watch the pretty lights inside his soul.

  Things had been going nonstop ever since his last attempt at fixing the damage, the one that had come close to murdering an entire neighborhood. He’d still managed to give nightmares to dozens if not hundreds of people.

  Things had been so hectic in the last two days that he had no time, no energy, to check his Pattern. Well, now he seemed to have nothing but time, at least until this weird express elevator to wherever came to its final stop.

  Roland checked his status first. Reaper’s Dance was still toggled on, but his Mana had stopped dropping. It wasn’t regenerating, either; he should be getting one Mana point every three seconds or so, but it remained stuck.

  He looked at his clock app. It was frozen in its two displays: real and dungeon times; not a second ticked by. Weird. If there was a time differential, the System should have alerted him.

  He tried activating low-risk Skills: Analyze and Cleanse. Nothing happened. He didn’t lose Mana, either. It was like his System access had been locked.

  Great. Now I have nothing.

  Roland looked within, and to his great relief, he found he could see his messed-up Pattern, Dantians and Meridians. Mana glowed inside his channels but didn’t move. It was as if his engine had seized up.

  Screw this.

  Roland tried to cycle Mana, starting from the Third Eye Dantian.

  At first, he got nothing. Everything seemed to be stuck on pause. He stopped trying after a while and just looked at the entire thing, even the area he hated looking at, the big wreck that had once been the center of his cultivation.

  Once again, he thought he caught glimpses of something else, something that looked a bit like a Pattern. Like those old paintings that turned out to be covering an even older painting. Canvas was expensive as eff back then; sometimes an artist would just grab some other dude’s life work and paint over it.

  If I’m not just seeing random energy fluctuations, which I shouldn’t, on account of everything being frozen, then I actually laid down a Pattern over a pre-existing Pattern, like somebody covering their bathroom tile with a new one.

  And then the Ninja chick came over and tore through the new tile and uncovered the old one.

  The only question nagging at Roland was, who laid down the original Pattern? The only answer that made any sense would be his Bloodline. He had thought the weird pseudo-genetic heritage gave you visions and possible help him learn Skills or Techniques, kind of like the scrolls and books he’d studied at the Chapel. But this was a whole new level.

  More like reincarnation. Which is a thing, according to the Chapel, and not considered part of the unknown mystery of the afterlife. More like a lateral move.

  Frustrated, Roland reached for the barely visible lights. Nothing happened.

  Okay, back to cycling Mana. Trying to, at least.

  He almost gave up a dozen times, but gritted his teeth and went back to work. Start small, he decided. He ‘grabbed’ a single point of Mana, the smallest quantity the System used to produce work. Push. Pull. When it finally began to change position, he didn’t believe it at first, but soon after he got it moving. He made the single point flow from his head Dantian into a Meridian, then do a victory lap around his Class Core.

  Going any further down would take the Mana point to the forbidden zone, where pieces of the broken Pattern promised nothing but pain if he ventured any further.

  How about I try something a little different?

  Emboldened by his success, Roland directed the Mana point toward the phantom Pattern. It wasn’t anywhere near his Meridians or Dantians; in fact, it looked like it was outside his body, a good six inches behind his back, and yet it felt like it was part of his body. There was a sense of distortion about it, like he was looking at a funhouse mirror reflection.

  It took more effort to get the Mana point down there than it was to get it moving in the first place, but this time he could see progress and it encouraged him to keep pushing.

  When the Mana point got close to the ghost lights, it was sucked in like a comet falling into the event horizon of a black hole.

  A moment later, the ghost Pattern lit up, as if the Mana point had thrown a switch and revealed the mother of all Christmas lights. Roland saw it for the first time, the whole thing, a Pattern that encompassed the three standard Dantians, but also the artificial Dantian on his hypothalamus, and a fifth Dantian that was in his body, but somehow outside of it. Its position was strange as hell: at first, he thought it was located between the Middle and Heart. When he shifted his viewpoint, the Dantian seemed to recede to a tiny point far away in the distance, a bizarre optical illusion. If it was an illusion. The Pattern lines followed the shifting Dantian and twisted when it appeared to move.

  It made no sense. Patterns were supposed to be stable, fixed in place.

  The shifts in position made him think of the vanishing point used in drawing, a point at the horizon where lines converged to create the illusion of distance. Except this wasn’t an illusion: the Dantian vanished into an extra dimension. If the vanishing point in a 2D drawing created an illusion of three dimensions, this point created a fourth one.

  Maybe the fifth Dantian was a converging point between this reality and a different one.

  Looking at that shifting area for more than a few seconds gave Roland a feeling of vertigo, like he might fall into the vanishing point and go – somewhere else.

  This is beyond me. I wish Raven was here. Or Trixie. Father Takeda. Even Barton might have a better handle on this than me.

  He watched the Pattern – it was much more complex than the one that had almost killed him – for as long as he could. It started to fade out after a few minutes or hours – trying to tell time was a fool’s errand here – but fade it did. He felt the Mana point run out of juice as the Pattern disappeared and became vague lights that most would call simple fluctuations.

  If I can somehow imprint that Pattern – it’s got to be at least a tier above Mythic. That would be Supreme; the next one over is Celestial, and that’s the very top.

  There was a small issue with that idea. He needed a working Dantian to even begin to think about improving or rewriting his Pattern.

  He spent more time cycling more Mana and then sending it to illuminate the Pattern, watching it like a starving man staring at a picture of a full buffet. When it faded again, he repeated the process.

  Shortly after the third viewing, the falling sensation that had never left him picked up speed. The darkness was replaced by gray light.

  Roland hit a solid surface. His senses came to life again, tingling like a limb waking up. His eyes took some time to adjust to what turned out to be a slightly less dim form of darkness.

  “Good. You made it,” Raven said out loud. “Do not drop your Reaper’s Dance if you’d rather avoid death and worse.”

  “You got it, Big Bird,” Roland said, struggling to his feet. Even though he was in his ghostly form, everything felt perfectly solid.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  His Mana was regenerating again, and Reaper’s Dance was not consuming its regular twelve points a second. Those were the first things he noticed.

  The next one was the biting cold. It felt like the dead of winter. Although his high Constitution made him immune to the effects of most earthly temperatures, this chill was uncomfortable even through his heavy jacket. Below the waist, the discomfort was far worse.

  The ground had a chalky consistency that crunched under his boots as he stood up. In the dim light, gray with purple undertones, he spotted bones mixed in among the dust. A chicken leg bone, the skull of a small animal, maybe a squirrel, and a broken bone that had to be a human femur.

  He grabbed a handful of dust and ran it between his fingers. The dirt might have been off-white under normal lighting. The consistency was like a fine sand. The presence of the larger pieces made him guess that the dust was ground bone.

  Roland looked around. He was in a flat area, completely covered in that sandy bone meal. He couldn’t even begin to estimate how many bones would need to be ground into powder to fill a geographical feature.

  Dark tower-like shapes loomed in the distance. They had to be as tall as mountains but looked like man-made structures. Or made by something else, something he probably didn’t want to meet.

  The sky was a swirling maelstrom of black and purple clouds spinning at hurricane speeds. The clouds kept shifting into almost hypnotic shapes. Some of them formed faces, but not at all like the vague shapes on Earth that, if you squinted long enough, sort of looked like Jesus or Buddha or Joe Exotic.

  These faces looked horribly realistic, and they leered at the earth below them, some sporting cloudy teeth and fangs. Roland decided that staring at the sky might be hazardous to his mental health, so he stopped.

  He didn’t see any sign of a sun, moon or stars before he lowered his eyes, just the endlessly moving clouds.

  As Roland looked around the field of bones, he felt the presence of several familiar Concepts. Lots of Death, unsurprisingly enough. Just as much Spirit; this wasn’t a physical realm. Not anymore, at least.

  He thought this might have actually been on a planet a very long time ago. Maybe even one of the millions of Earth copies floating around the universe.

  And then Death and something else had come calling. Another type energy swirling in the very non-air he breathed included Undeath, and maybe more intellectual Concepts like Destruction, Desolation, or Dismay, all the cheerful Ds.

  Maybe Doom. Imagine having a Doom Affinity. You’d have to take over an Eastern European country and wear a metal mask all the time.

  Maybe he was in hell. A cold, lifeless hell.

  His mind wanted to gibber incoherently.

  You get a Dark Tower, and you also get a Dark Tower! Dark Towers for everyone! Everywhere!

  Raven looked up at him from a horned skull he’d been perched on.

  “Welcome to the Dread Lands, Roland Webb.”

  * * *

  Roland rode through the desert on a pale horse with no name.

  Here and there, skeletal shapes protruded from the bone dust like mockeries of trees. Some were too big to belong to anything that had been alive after the Cretaceous Era, unless they were blue whales and the like.

  “What is this place?” had been his first question to Raven.

  “It’s a Realm. A place outside the Many Worlds that yet touches them all. Not even your System holds sway here. Not entirely, at least.”

  Roland looked at his status sheet and a notification popped up. He read it as he realized no notification prompt had been in his field of vision like it normally would, not until he made the effort to look at his sheet. The rest of his interface was there, though.

  Warning: You have left a System World!

  You are in Lands of Dread (Otherworldly Pocket Universe, SSS-Grade Equivalent, ???)

  Ambient Mana is sufficient to allow normal System Operations.

  System Pylons detected. Closest System Pylon is within 23.2 subjective miles of you.

  You must remain within 50 miles of a Pylon to register any status changes with the System.

  Congratulations! Your Willpower has increased to 62. Your Perception has increased to 51.

  “It says there is a System Pylon about twenty-odd miles thataway,” Roland said. There was a little arrow in his field of vision pointed there.

  “Sadly, we must go thisaway,” Raven replied, and fluttered to a bone tree that was not quite in the opposite direction, but close enough that they’d soon leave the Pylon’s limits.

  “Okay. Let me just check a couple of things before we get out of range. Not sure what’s going to happen then.”

  Roland went through his sheet and decided not to make any changes.

  He still had access to his former Party’s stats (there was a function that let him watch any Party he was in). Just to reassure himself, he went through their character sheets one final time before they got out of System range, hoping they would be able to handle the Dungeon until he got back. Or until they made it to the fourth level and the next exit.

  Everybody looked good. With their high-tier Classes, they should kick ass, especially if the Dungeon adjusted to his absence.

  Something he hadn’t noticed before caught his attention, though. Dahlia’s Legendary Class was great, and she shared a Death Affinity with him. But her Death perk was much worse than his. Was it a Caster versus Warrior thing?

  He asked Raven about it.

  “You should have the same Perk. Strange,” Raven said, sounding slightly surprised for the first time since Roland had met him. “May I look deeper into your System information?”

  “Sure, why not? If you wanted to screw me over, you could have done it a dozen times over.”

  Raven looked straight at Roland for a good minute. Roland spent the time admiring his surroundings and finding very little to admire.

  At least it’s a dry cold, he thought.

  “Ah,” Raven said, followed by several amused croaks. “This explains many things. Why you have survived so many situations that should have killed you, for starters.”

  “What?”

  “You have a non-standard System attribute. An Energy Pool, to be precise. Vital Energy.”

  “But wait, it’s right on my character sheet! How isn’t it nonstandard?”

  “Let me show you what anybody on your character sheet sees, under your Death Perks. Including your Guide and, until just now, myself.”

  *Death: 1/5 of all damage you inflict on living beings will replenish your Health; if your Health is full, the stolen life force is lost.

  “That’s the same thing Dahlia has,” Roland said. “But that’s a crap Perk. I mean, it’s better than nothing, but if that was all I had...”

  Remembering the dozens of times Vital Energy had saved his ass sent a cold chill down his spine. He would have been dead a dozen times over without it. At the first Challenge. In the damn Chapel. Every tournament, pretty much. The Yeti. He would have been so freaking dead when he fought the Yeti.

  “And it’s not like I go around saying, ‘your power means nothing against the might of my Vital Energy!’”

  Come to think of it, nobody he’d met had displayed an extra stat. It was always Health, Mana, Endurance. Undead didn’t get Endurance, but it was still listed on their sheet. He was the only one. He should feel special. Instead, he felt that, sooner or later, the proverbial piper was going to hand him a bill he couldn’t cover.

  “Is this a Bloodline superpower? Like Dread Glare?”

  “It is not listed as such, and I can’t tell. It activated when the System inducted you. The System knows about it, of course, but it has chosen to keep it hidden.”

  “Why?”

  “Because others would give much to gain such an ability. Instant healing and resource recovery from a large pool that is filled by harming others? That is worth killing for. Or capturing and experimenting on the source until the effect can be replicated.”

  “The System is protecting me? That’s funny, because I didn’t feel protected when that Ninja chick ruptured my Dantian.”

  “Direct, overt intervention is not the System’s way. Even giving it motivations or intentions is not accurate. But we’re wasting time. Let’s go.”

  Roland summoned the Pale Horse, the skeleton bike that came with his father’s jacket, and they took off.

  The Pale Horse was the most badass wheeled contraption he’d ever seen, let alone ridden. The classic Harley design, in bone instead of chrome, had a high backrest and long handlebars. It rumbled beneath him, sounding more like some great beast than something with an engine made in Milwaukee. And when he took off, it went from zero to eighty in under three seconds, and to its full one-eighty in another three or four. It was a monster.

  The sandy soil parted before it, leaving behind a deep trench like the wake of some unstoppable dreadnought. The wheels beneath the skeletal superstructure never lost traction; it was the smoothest ride he’d had, never feeling any bumps on the roadless surface. It was as if the bike was floating off the ground. It probably was.

  Shortly afterwards, they left the Pylon’s range. Roland’s display didn’t change, though. The local Mana levels were high enough to keep his virtual engine running. Just to make sure, he got off the bike – it remained standing, its engine purring softly like a happy cat – and he tried out a couple of Skills.

  He discovered that Reaper’s Dance let him do Reaper’s Dash at its normal cost, even though its maintenance cost seemed to be turned off. He figured that the Dread Lands were a ghostly Realm, so being a ghost there didn’t cost anything.

  His Mana regen was working fine. The twelve points he spent on Reaper’s Dash regenerated after just under thirty seconds. He had to count out the time, though, because his clock app still wasn’t working.

  Back on the bike he went. Roland roared through the Plains of Bone. That’s what he’d name the place in his memoirs, should he ever write them.

  His questions and doubts were washed away by bleak boredom.

  “Where exactly are we going?” he asked Raven after what felt like two hours.

  The bird had been keeping up with his bike even though he was going at a hundred-and-eighty mph, which had to be faster than a raven if not a falcon or whatever bird had the top spot. But Raven flew by Roland’s side with slow, deliberate flaps that propelled him as if he was shot out of a cannon with every beat.

  If two hours had gone by, the Pale Horse would have expired, and it was still going strong. His timer app remained broken. But when he checked the jacket’s Significance, it had ticked up by two points from the five he had spent summoning the bike.

  Maybe duration wasn’t a thing in the Dread Lands. Which could lead to all kinds of fun exploits.

  Besides making timepieces useless, something about this place drained him in ways Energy Pools didn’t measure. Even the discovery that his Bloodline superpower was the only reason he’d made it so far didn’t instill much in the way of feelings. Just another data point.

  “We’re going there,” Raven said, flying up in the direction of a colossal tower that had somehow sneaked up on them.

  Sneaked in, because Roland was positive no tower the height of Bear Mountain and the width of Manhattan Island had been that close a minute ago. He was sure he’d have noticed it.

  “They build them big around here,” he said as he turned the bike towards the impossible structure. It was less than a mile away. No way he had missed seeing it before now.

  Freaking trippy dimensions and space-time infractions irritated him.

  “Consider yourself lucky you don’t have to climb it,” Raven said. “What we seek is on the ground floor.”

  “The System said this is an SSS-rated Realm. Does that mean the op-force is going to be at those levels?”

  “No. The ground floor is F- to E-Grade. The level below is F- to D-Grade. As you climb the tower, the power of its dwellers will increase. If we don’t stray, we will encounter enemies we can handle.”

  “And we’ll kill them. Because the mood I’m in, I could use something to kill.”

  Raven cawed amusedly.