The Bazaar's lower edge smelled like cinnamon, and incense. Color bled from every surface. Banners and silks fluttered like tongues of flame above cluttered stalls. I kept low, a flicker in the corner of a hundred distracted eyes. Floor 2 had become routine. Predictable.

  The Aether-step Greaves buzzed under my skin, a low, insistent hum. One pulse, lightweight, silent, I bounded over a merchant's canopy, boots skimming the fabric. Another pulse and momentum surged into my calves, and I kicked off a sandstone pillar, twisting midair to avoid the gaze of a passing guard.

  The guards here were different. Their armor had once been ceremonial, probably. Then it looked like memory wrapped in rust. They moved with sluggish menace, dragging too heavy axes and swords behind them like they’d forgotten how to hold them right. I didn’t need to fight. Not yet. Better to pass unseen.

  Thumbs trailed behind me, licking the last of the mushroom jerky from his claws and humming some tuneless, goblin melody. He was supposed to stay quiet. He didn’t. At least the noise was soft. once I was out of the range of the guards, with the exit to the next room in site, I made my move.

  I flicked my wrist and whispered, “Elemental Summon.”

  A ripple bent the air. The spell came alive on the parchment beside me, glowing briefly before curling inward and vanishing. Dust materialized in a flutter of pale green wings, her body nothing but pollen and poison and the faint outline of a moth. She drifted into a stall’s shadow, wings barely moving.

  “Elemental Summon.”

  The parrot crackled into view on my left shoulder, feathers made of jagged static. He clicked twice, then mimicked my voice in a harsh whisper: “Don’t get caught, Squawk! Don’t get caught!”

  I rolled my eyes. “Helpful as always.”

  “Elemental Summon.”

  A soft golden glow, then the turtle appeared at my feet, his shell etched with sigils I still hadn’t translated. He blinked up at me with sleepy holiness.

  With all three summoned, I moved.

  The Greaves pulsed, pah-pah, and I hit the alley wall, sprinted two steps across it, then kicked off to land behind a crate of saffron and rotting dates. The spice-seller hadn’t noticed. None of them had. The crowd was too loud. Too bright. Too human. Real people, not projections or puppets. That’s what made this place so wrong.

  I caught my breath in the shadow of a spice-stack, heart thudding with restrained momentum. Dog waddled up beside me, glowing faintly, while Dust nested in the rafters above. Squawk chewed on a fraying tarp string, cackling to himself.

  A guard clanked past. I held my breath. He didn’t see us.

  Good.

  I turned toward the next archway. It was time to move deeper. The Floating Carpet Chaos trial waited somewhere in this maze of color and cruelty. The sooner I got there, the sooner I could forget what was happening to the penitents locked in pillories just a square away.

  Survival first. Always.

  The bazaar’s heat gave way to stillness the moment we reached the arched exit.

  Thumbs halted at the threshold, one foot raised, nose twitching. His ears perked back and his eyes narrowed, squinting into the dark beyond. The carpets. They drifted like lazy predators, glowing faintly against the dark, some turning in place, others vanishing downward into the chasm below.

  Thumbs sniffed the air. “Bad wind,” he muttered. “Worse rugs. Carpet-men whisper too much.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Carpet-men?”

  He nodded solemnly. “Whispers like chewing. Chewing! Chewing! bad thoughts!”

  I sighed and reached into my pouch. A single coin caught the light as I flicked it toward him. “Go find the path. No touching anything that’s glowing and looks like it might eat you.”

  Thumbs caught the coin midair with both hands. He bit it, hard. There was a tiny crack, and I didn’t know if it was enamel or currency. Then he puffed up his chest, nodded with all the fake confidence of a goblin on a death mission, and scampered forward into the dark.

  He leapt onto the nearest carpet.

  It dipped. Wobbled. Dropped.

  “Thumbs!”

  “Masterrrr!”

  He vanished into the abyss like a bad idea tossed off a balcony. The scream faded fast.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose and exhaled through clenched teeth.

  {Efficient use of resources,} Malikap offered, his voice sliding into my skull like oil on glass. {Minimal investment, maximum entertainment. Shall we award a style point for the landing?}

  I scowled into the void. “Did you really enjoy this?”

  {Of course. It was better than anything on the other channels.}

  I frowned. “Other what?”

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  {Ah. Right. No television in this plane.} His amusement tickled the edges of my brain like a feather dipped in mockery. {Think of it as a magical window box where you can watch people suffer for fun. Yours would be filed under 'Tragic Comedy,’ just after ‘Doomed Ambitions’ and before ‘Goblin Fails Spectacularly.’}

  “Okay. So you were just saying words then.”

  {One grew bored in eternity. Humor kept the rot away.}

  I muttered, “You should try silence sometime.”

  {You should try landing your minions properly.}

  I sighed, stepping to the edge. The carpets below drifted and spun in patterns I’d never be able to explain or even care to. Some circling like sharks, others twitching at odd angles. Blues meant forward. Red meant dead end. Yellow meant… somewhere I’d already regretted going.

  The Greaves pulsed faintly around my calves.

  “I would find him. In an Aerlyntium,” I muttered. “Eventually.”

  {Eventually. Assuming you don’t follow him into the great rewinding void.}

  “I wasn’t planning to fall.”

  {And I wasn’t planning to interfere. Yet there we were.}

  I crouched low, picking my mark. One carpet drifted closer, pulsing a soft, steady blue.

  I tracked its arc. Steady oscillation, about a ten-second window between dips. Wide enough for a jump, too narrow to second-guess. Another spun close behind it, twitching red and white. Wrong combo. The last time I’d hit that one, I got flung like a skipped stone and woke up with a skull fracture and a very smug Overseer.

  Still, I hesitated.

  “Don’t think,” I muttered, pulse syncing to the Greaves’ low thrum. “Just move.”

  I flared the runes, kicked off, and leapt.

  The wind caught me as the void stretched wide, and I knew, deep in my gut, that Malikap was still watching.

  I landed hard, knees bent, breath caught, arms steady.

  “One coin,” I muttered. “That was all he was getting next time.”

  The rush hit instantly.

  Magic flooded through my arms, a spark surging into every thread of my body. Exhaustion, numbness, even fear, drowned in that moment of raw connection. My vision flared, color bleeding at the edges.

  {AERLYNTIUM ORB ACQUIRED: 46 / 100}

  A parchment flickered into view beside me, unfolding in gentle curls. The glow was soft, steady, earned.

  {You acquired:

  ? 1x Carpet Whisperer

  ? 1x Thumbs

  ? 10x Floating Dock Segments

  ? 3x Illusory Carpet Traps

  ? 15x Woven Mana Strands

  ? 1x Featherfall Charm (Single Use)

  ? 17x Ornate Tassels

  ? 1x The Steady Weaver

  I exhaled. Hard. Then laughed once, dry and breathless.

  “All that,” I said aloud, “and not even a cushion. Well, at least the overseer wouldn’t be here this time.” I stared at the name of the new npc. The Carpet Whisperer. And wondered if I should place her.

  On one hand, the overseer had given me a decent reward. On the other hand, I could still feel the shadow of the bruises from his last "challenge." And the bite marks. And the burn.

  I shuddered as a memory played out. Not a core, but just my actual, working for once, memory. The cores had been coming less and less, and I’d been recalling more and more. Weird.

  Through the chaos, the Aerlyntium grid pulsed faintly in my vision, offering a solution. I clenched my teeth, willing a Patchwork Platform into existence. A square of golden light appeared, locking into place beside me. Grabbing the opportunity, I lunged onto the platform, its sturdy glow holding firm against the violent drafts. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to anchor me, to give me a moment to breathe before the wind struck again.

  But there was no rest, not with him watching. The thought struck me again to just use the aerlyntium and make him disappear, but I wanted to prove myself to this idiot.

  The Overseer loomed in the distance, his crooked staff tapping against the carpets with an almost lazy rhythm. Each tap sent a ripple of dark energy coursing through the path. Without warning, a carpet nearby shuddered violently and crumbled into the void. I barely leaped back in time, my heart hammering in my chest.

  “Faster, boy!” the Overseer called, his voice dripping with sadistic amusement. “Surely you can do better than that!”

  The path ahead twisted into new, more treacherous forms. Carpets no longer lay still, no longer merely shifted or flickered; then they turned. Large sections rotated in slow, deliberate circles, their motion deceptively calm. Each revolution created fleeting openings, moments where the jagged edges of one carpet aligned with another. But those moments were brief, and mistiming a jump would send me plummeting into the endless void below.

  I studied the grid, the translucent overlay mapping the rotations in faint pulses of light. My heartbeat thudded in rhythm with the spinning tiles. I had to act, and I had to act then. Timing wasn’t just important. It was everything. I darted forward, pausing on the edge of a rotating platform as it lined up with the next. My legs coiled, muscles taut, and I leaped.

  The jump landed perfectly, but my victory was short-lived. A low, guttural sound rose from the void below, sending a shiver racing down my spine. I glanced downward and froze.

  “Here’s to poor decisions,” I muttered.

  I placed the new person down.

  The carpet beneath me twitched.

  A seam split the gold-weave rug down the middle, not cut, but unpicked, thread by glowing thread. It parted slowly, like a wound remembering how to bleed.

  And from that wound, she rose.

  Tall. Wrong. Her silhouette was barely humanoid, too long in the limbs, too narrow at the joints. She was draped in rags spun from contradiction: silks and rusted wire, velvet and soldered thread, cloth still damp with lingering magic. Her arms hung limp like half-filled sleeves, joints bending the wrong way like her maker had run out of patterns.

  No face. Just a veil, fluttering gently even in the windless dark. And beneath it, a mouth. Always moving. Not speaking. Just humming.

  A tune with a weird melody that always seemed to change just before I caught it. A loop that never resolved.

  It made my spine itch.

  I didn’t say anything at first. Didn’t move. I just let her rise and let that humming burrow into my ears like a worm looking for purchase.

  A parchment unfurled beside her shoulder. The ink didn’t write itself so much as leak into place. And then Aurentum mentioned:

  {NPC SUMMONED: THE CARPET WHISPERER Status: Listening Role: Path-Seer, Floor-Bound Note: Do not place in Overseer’s domain whilst the overseer is present.}

  I swallowed dry air and stepped back once, just in case she unraveled too. The Whisperer tilted her head slightly. Her mouth never stopped moving.

  And then, she spoke.

  One moment he’s dying in a warzone — next, he’s naked on a moon full of real cultivators.

  Jake Sullivan just woke up in the wrong body, on a moon called Verdis, inside a cultivation academy where failure means getting culled back to Earth to live as a powerless mortal—and probably die uselessly in the upcoming alien invasion.

  His memories are mostly gone, but his spirit’s intact. His classmates? Rich kids with qi crystals and family techniques. The school? Doesn’t give a damn. Let the strong survive. With enemy agents already on campus, Jake will need to out-cultivate, outfight, and outsmart everyone around him. He has only one year to become a real cultivator.

  No dying this time!

  Dark humor. Sharp dialogue. Flower picking, teeth flying. A fresh blend of sci-fi, xianxia, and LitRPG.