Hector checked the bance of the joint account and cpped his hands in celebration. The funds from his retirement account were deposited. He would owe a ten percent tax penalty for performing an early withdrawal, but that wasn’t his problem. The important thing was that Jen had access to the funds. He couldn’t stand the thought of the money trapped in an account while no one knew if he was alive or dead.

  He had been busy over the past few days. Whenever he wasn’t cultivating, Hector was moving utilities over to Jen’s name, closing accounts, canceling services, and making detailed lists to remind Jen of what needed paid on what day of the month. A lifetime of work had set him up nicely and Jen would not be permitted to piss it all away with poor bookkeeping. Well, maybe she would anyway – but he could leave knowing he had put guard rails in pce to make that less likely.

  And he would be leaving soon. He had reached level four and was currently filling his soul with energy for his trip across worlds. In his dreams, Volithur was learning under the tutege of Master Zara, who proved an excellent instructor. Volithur, on the other hand, was at best a mediocre student. He was often told that his saving grace was that he recovered his energy reserves quickly.

  Which was ridiculously simple to do on Tian. You drank the water, ate the food, breathed the air, and your cultivation and body enhancement progressed. If you did a little work with your aura, it went even faster. If you combined body and mind and aura cultivation with an insight into chaos, your energy levels bounced back at lightning speed.

  Volithur had spent over a month just learning to form a transit sphere. It had been a process to mold his externality aperture into a hyper-sphere. Hector had copied the steps as well as he could and was pleased with the results. It wasn’t as good as his dream counterpart’s, but Hector was two levels behind Volithur. He couldn’t expect to match the achievements of someone four times as strong as him. Though he had come close.

  Once more, Hector realized that he was in many ways superior to the man he dreamed. Volithur had the better mental sense and had provided a powerful insight, but in every other way…. Was it because Hector had more life experience? It would be nice for once for his ever increasing age to be a benefit rather than a deficit to overcome.

  “Jen! The money transferred!”

  His wife entered the room with a frown on her face. “I’m starting to worry about this arrangement. It looks like you’re taking care of things for me before committing suicide.”

  “I’m not going to kill myself. Probably.”

  “Probably?”

  “Look, I’m going to travel between worlds without help from a teacher. There will be danger involved.” Especially considering how thin his margin for error would be. He did not have the energy reserves to make his first outing a safe one. All he had were the experiences of another man.

  Sadly most of those experiences were of failing to travel between worlds. Hector couldn’t be angry with his counterpart for that. Volithur was extremely stressed. Khana was pregnant and homesick. The only two meals they could reliably prepare were rice and beans and a pot roast. Their budget for fresh fruit was quite limited, making them look back fondly on the Fifth Household.

  “Do you have to rush into this?”

  “I do, Jen. I won’t be talked out of it. Now read through the list and see if you have any questions.”

  She folded her arms and tilted her head. “We’ve done this three times already. I’m not a child, Hector. I lived on my own before we were together. And again after.”

  “You didn’t even know how to bance a checkbook back then.”

  “Hector. Why is it always like this with you? I don’t want you to throw money at me. Just let me stay in the house and you can keep everything else. Don’t do some crazy trip to another universe stunt to prove how manly you are.”

  Hector squinted at Jen. “Prove how manly I am? When have I ever worried about that?”

  “You know. The weightlifting? You’re still at the gym every day even when you are pnning your suicide trip.”

  He turned back to the pile of papers before him. After a quick straightening out, he pced them in the drawer that was dedicated to such things. “I don’t want to come back here in a hundred years and learn you went bankrupt because you didn’t follow my instructions.”

  The remainder of the day passed in tedious energy gathering. His speed had doubled when his level increased, but it would still be a day or two before he was ready for his attempt. Though the ability to cultivate chaos meant he no longer had to search for good spots, Hector went to the rooftop bar and sipped a mojito.

  Whatever worry he should have been feeling for himself and his upcoming travel attempt he instead channeled to Volithur. A disturbing trend had become obvious tely. Everyone’s dreams seemed to end with death. About eighty percent of the popution had reached the end of their dreaming so far. Which caused a mounting tension within Hector.

  Was Volithur heading to his demise? The boy who had everything he needed to rise from foreigner to Amaratti Xian lord? Would he die in an attack from monsters or dragons? From the intrigues of nobles? From a clumsy mistake during transit between worlds?

  He supposed he would discover the answer soon enough. Hector stared up at the ceiling as he drew in chaos and sipped his drink. The dreams increasingly covered rger spans of time. The only exception had been the day that Volithur got married and a true insight was downloaded into Hector’s brain.

  Experiencing that other life had become deeply meaningful to him. Hector recalled his father speaking of Deronto. The dreams had given a great deal of joy to Terry Thoreaux at the end. Then they had grown disappointing before finally ending. Deronto died as a victim of a dragon attack. Shortly after experiencing that, Terry died as a feeble cancer patient in a hospital bed.

  How would it feel to lose Volithur? Hector thought it might leave a hole every bit as rge as losing his father. One that could be ignored with some effort, but one that would never be filled. He remembered being that boy. While the dreams hadn’t begun until after Volithur was numb from the shock of losing his parents, the things recalled by Volithur transferred over just as readily as events in the dream’s present. He felt like he had lived a whole second life. Or at least the early parts of one. It was hard for him to consider someone with fewer than twenty years under his belt as having lived a whole life.

  As he sat there, imbibing alcohol and chaos, Hector wished he could begin body enhancement. While he had a level four soul, his flesh was no more resilient than that of a mundane man. Decades of consistent weight lifting and cardiovascur training had given him undeniable benefits. Those benefits, though, were normal benefits. He was strong and fit in a non-mystical way. He could not perform single armed handstand push-ups or shrug off a fall from great heights. Hopefully that would not be a problem on the new worlds he encountered while searching for help.

  He would have the use of his aura to help him. It should be able to stop bullets so long as he had the energy reserves to spare. Which he likely wouldn’t when he first exited his transit sphere. Hector had to expect that he would be drained completely dry by every trip.

  The consensus on Tian held that travel should only be trained by people who had reached the sixth level. That gave them plenty of room to recover from inevitable mistakes in their training. Hector would be relying on his second hand experience to avoid those mistakes.

  Jen’s accusation of him taking a suicide trip held more weight than she might realize. Yet what could he do? A world hung in the bance. If he had a chance, then he had to take it.

  He left a rge bill to pay for the drink and cover the tip and walked out of the rooftop bar. It was time to dream again.