Hector watched as the assessor studied the case of silverware. His mother had loved the stuff. He never used it himself. Who wanted cutlery you had to periodically polish? Apparently, the answer to that was antique collectors on other worlds.

  “I don’t recognize the make of this and I’m an expert in this area. Are you sure you don’t have any information you can share?”

  “It was passed down in my family,” Hector answered truthfully.

  The assessor pulled out a book and looked down columns of numbers. “I’m willing to offer five thousand currents for the set.”

  Hector answered only with a grunt. The monetary value didn’t really matter to him. He could use that five thousand number to afford a couple nights in a hotel, eat vishly, and replenish the contents of his backpack. Getting more than that was really just a game at this point. And he was very, very bored.

  “No? How much do you want? Give me a number.”

  “I hoped for eight thousand.” It was a number pulled out of nowhere. Doubling the initial offer was too obvious of a py. Going too high also risked losing the interest of the collector. “I actually have some debts to pay off, so five thousand doesn’t do it for me.”

  “Are you firm on that eight thousand number?”

  “I might be able to go lower. First I’d want to talk to other collectors, though. Give me eight and you can have it right now.”

  “Eight thousand, then.”

  They shook on the deal and the man counted out a pile of bills into Hector’s hand. His next stop was a cheap hotel where he booked a stay. Then it was off to eat a meal, buy new clothes, and find a barber. Looking like a new man, Hector settled in to watch television while he drew in cosmic energy. This was the third world since he’d left home.

  It was the first one to have knowledge of the monsters. That knowledge was limited to the fact that they existed and that some science fiction ship appeared to wipe those creatures out of existence. In the process, the Jinn war barge punched a hole deep enough into the crust of the world that a new volcano formed. The famed schism beam was no joke.

  Unfortunately, the heroes did not stick around on this world to expin anything. He desperately wanted his odyssey to end in success. The fact that action happened here was both heartening and maddening. Why couldn’t they have left an outpost here to keep an eye on things? He could have contacted them and been on track to return home.

  As it was, Hector didn’t even know if home was still there. Evelyn simply could not narrow down the date of the attack. Even when she tried using tricks by having people hold up a current newspaper on the first day of the monster invasion, it produced wildly differing results. Somehow the fact that the attack would happen was set in stone even when the date was not.

  His knowledge of Earth was a month out of date by this point. Maybe monsters were rampaging. Maybe everything was cool still. He just had to execute on the pn they’d made.

  He found a video segment of the monster attack on a twenty-four hour a day news station. A garish rent in space let noxious fumes through, which condensed into the form of massive bulls. The herd tore apart a nearby small town in just a couple of hours, killing thousands of people. Bullets did nothing. Bombs dropped by pnes did nothing. The bulls rampaged without repercussion.

  Then a brilliant white beam of light sliced down from above three times, destroying several of the monsters each time it nced down. The remainder of the beasts died when magma oozed up from the ground to burn them alive. Cameras managed to find the flying aircraft carrier only a couple of minutes before space before it warped. The front of the Jinn war barge stretched forward into the spatial anomaly, shrinking and disappearing. The rest of the vessel followed and then space reverted to its usual state.

  No one had the slightest clue what had happened. Astrophysicists and military officials spoke earnestly with reporters about crazy science fiction plots. Hector couldn’t hold their wild ideas against them. If anything, the truth was even stranger.

  Hector briefly recalled the previous world, the second one he visited. It had been quite nice there. Pleasant climate and free meals three times a day at the soup kitchen. He’d found himself a pce to stay in the park among a homeless community. Those people selflessly shared all the tips for surviving on the streets in that city. They might have been a tad judgmental about him not trying to get a job with any of the construction contractors, but that was only because they didn’t know that him sitting quietly on a park bench was actually a form of work.

  The next day he took a break from cultivating chaos to shop for supplies. The first world had been a nightmare in terms of food security. He’d exhausted what he brought from Earth in two days, then failed at begging for a few days before deciding to steal whatever he needed. That left a bad taste in his mouth that lingered still. He would do it again, though. His mission must succeed.

  He returned to the hotel with bags of hard tack, pemmican, and a bottle of vitamin pills. As he understood it, the hard tack was essentially a very dry, dense cracker. The pemmican was rendered fat mixed with meat. The vitamin was to make sure he didn’t develop scurvy if forced to subsist on those two food items. Based on the testimony of the guy at the hiking store, neither of the foods were particurly patable. They would st for years and had enough calories to keep a body going.

  While cultivating, Hector thought of Volithur’s life. He knew his dream counterpart was going down a bad path. Couldn’t the man see that he could have the entire world at his feet? Not just any world, Tian. He just had to chill out for a while and use his true insight. Pitting himself against the Lord General was insane. It wasn’t just the difference in personal power, either. There was the institutional power the man wielded. If anything, that was the main danger. The man had not only a literal army and a rge family, but the backing of an entire society.

  Then there was the casual disdain directed at Khana. Maybe it was hypocritical for Hector to object to that attitude. He’d certainly not been an attentive husband to Jen. But he always made sure that she was taken care of. Volithur gave generously of his time to Khana but withheld life-extending resources. Sure, they were both young still. But that wouldn’t hold true forever.

  Even Volithur’s advancement style bothered him. Hector thought that his counterpart should be keeping his body enhancement on par with his soul. Instead the boy was rushing ahead so that he could feel superior to people who’d slighted him in the past. Those levels would come anyway and rushing there only made him a hollow spear.

  “I wish I could smack some sense into that punk.” Hector liked to imagine that on his journey to find help that he would run into Volithur. That would be something special. His younger brother died long ago, but recently Hector began to think of Volithur in a simir fashion.

  All of which made his wonder. What would someone who dreamed Hector’s life think of his choices? Probably they would see the mistakes he made by pcing work above all else. Maybe they would shout at their bedroom ceiling that he was driving Jen away. Certainly they would feel the sting of losing all the people who mattered most to him. Bank bances, stock portfolios, and life insurance policies were unlikely to impress. In the end, he’d signed everything over when he left Earth behind.

  But… was he making any mistakes right now? That was a good question. Given what he knew, should he be doing something different during his hunt for help?

  He could think of nothing. Improving his emergency rations was a solid move. It might be convenient to have a sleeping bag if he nded somewhere cold next, but he actually couldn’t fit much more in his backpack. The size of his transit sphere didn’t give him much wiggle room. Literally there wasn’t room to wiggle. Also, what empty space existed held the oxygen he needed. Best not to take away from that.

  There was probably one thing he should change. He needed to eat more while he could on this world. Then, before leaving, he needed to transfer his funds to a usable form. Buy something like gems or precious metals.

  Hector did some research at jewelry shops and eventually decided to buy several gold rings. There was a glut of gold on the market at the moment because the country recently stopped backing their currency with precious metals. The treasury sold off its stockpile of gold just two years prior to his visit.

  Since he had paid in advance for five nights, the hotel kindly allowed him to extend his stay another three days without requiring payment. Hector then ditched the pce early in the morning to avoid paying more than necessary. He’d calcuted his spend down so that he ran out of money at about the same time he was ready to leave.

  Those calcutions required him to not pay for another night in a hotel until his st day. He intended to grab a shower and wash his clothes in the hotel sink before departing, so another hotel stay would be necessary. On the outskirts of the city, Hector climbed into the space between a pylon and the bridge it held up. He didn’t need to rely on his Xian talents for the climb, but it certainly factored into his willingness to make the attempt that he knew he could fly in an emergency.

  Once more, he cultivated. Or did he? The sergeant of the fifth household once told Volithur that the cosmic chamber attendants didn’t actually cultivate because they never used the gathered energy for their own advancement. They pulled in energy every day and then donated all of it that evening to the nobles they served. It was just energy in, energy out.

  What Hector did wasn’t much different. He stockpiled energy reserves, then formed a transit sphere to go somewhere else. Rinse, repeat. Hopefully the cycle ended before Earth. Otherwise he would feel like shit when he brought an army to the apocalyptic wastend that used to be his home.

  As energy flowed into his soul, Hector thought of Jen and Evelyn and Jeremy and everyone he knew back home. He didn’t intend to stay on Earth after he returned. Not after the wider multiverse became avaible. But he wanted – needed – to know home was safe when he left it behind.