The scrape of the grey rock against his cheek was his first anchor in the disorienting sea of pain and confusion. Eason lay still for long moments, the phantom sensations of impossible speed and tearing separation slowly receding, leaving behind the ache in his ribs and a profound emptiness where Allison and Artur should have been.

  He blinked, tasting grit and the metallic tang of ozone—or perhaps dried blood—in the air. Slowly, testing aching limbs, he pushed himself into a sitting position within the shallow crevice he’d landed in.

  Jagged, dark rock stretched away in every direction; sharp edges defined against an unnaturally cloudy sky. He found himself perched on an expansive ledge on the side of a steep hill that formed the island's spine. Above him, the rock face climbed sharply upwards, disappearing into low-hanging, grey clouds that existed and crowded only around the upper slopes. A few feet ahead of him, the ground fell away into a sheer, hundred-foot drop to more jagged and broken rock below. No beach, no gentle shore, just harsh, unforgiving geology surrounded by a dark, turbulent sea. No vegetation broke the monotony, only rock and shadow. In the distance, around the base of the hill, he saw tiny, dark shapes skittering rapidly across the barren ground; a sight that did little to ease his racing anxiety.

  Staring at his empty hands, he processed the alien landscape, the exciting weather, the extreme sense of safety and the crowded companionship. And he started to laugh.

  It wasn't a sound of mirth, but a harsh, grating noise that scraped his raw throat. It bubbled up from a place of deep, bitter irony. For months if not years, he’d walked around in a daze of tentative happiness, constantly questioning if Allison was real, if Artur’s easy friendship was genuine, if the Nevins' quiet acceptance could possibly last. He’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the universe to correct its apparent mistake and remind him where he truly belonged.

  He’d half-expected people to be playing some elaborate trick. But no, it wasn't people this time. Reality itself had stepped in. All the time he was sceptical and wary, he could notice anything that might happen and either prepare for it or accept the reality. But the one time he accepted, the one moment he’d genuinely accepted things felt right, it snatched him and threw him across realities.

  That too in a place that felt like a physical manifestation of all his deepest insecurities. Dull, chaotic, surrounded by jagged peaks and a sense of instability that vibrated in the air.

  It felt... fitting.

  A cruel cosmic joke confirming his place was not in the warmth of a campfire surrounded by loved ones, but alone on a broken rock at the edge of nowhere. The laughter choked off into a ragged cough, the irony tasting like ash.

  Despite that, he was alive, he had another chance to fight. Long dormant raw survival instinct, buried beneath layers of quiet introspection and doubt, finally asserted woke up. Panic won't help. Despair is a luxury. Survival depended on the weapon of Understanding.

  He took deep, shuddering breaths, the dry air rasping in his lungs, and forced his mind into overdrive—the one usually lost in books or theoretical diagrams—to engage with this hostile reality. He focused, trying to understand the feel of this place beyond the visual desolation.

  There was power here, undeniably. A low, resonant thrumming vibrated up from the rock beneath him, a sense of vast, potent energy held just barely in check. But layered over it, simultaneously, was a profound dullness, a wrongness—or perhaps just something so fundamentally different it resisted comprehension.

  The air lacked the vibrant 'charge' he sometimes sensed back on Earth after a thunderstorm, or even the steady background hum of the farm. Here, the energy felt unpredictable, chaotic?

  It felt like the descriptions of raw chaos from fantasy novels, or the scientific concept of extreme entropy made tangible—energy resisting patterns, tending towards unpredictable randomization. Maintaining order here would be like trying to collect water using a sieve.

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  The air itself seemed to shimmer unpredictably at the edges of his vision; faint static seemed to crackle just beyond hearing.

  The jagged, fractured nature of the rocks, the utter lack of stable plant life despite the thrumming power – it all spoke of a place where predictable patterns failed, where entropy held sway. A place governed by chaos.

  The laughter was gone now, replaced by the cold grip of reality. This wasn't just a desolate island; it felt fundamentally inimical to the kind of ordered existence he knew. He forced himself to stand fully, leaning heavily against the cold, jagged rock wall of the crevice, his body screaming protest. One step at a time. Assess the immediate area. Look for water runoff, potential shelter further up or down the slope. Avoid the sheer drop. Keep an eye on those distant, skittering things. The vastness of his isolation pressed in, but the immediate, unnerving presence of this unstable, chaotic energy provided a sharper, more immediate focus. He had to understand it to survive it.

  As he took that first shaky step, stabilizing himself against the rock face, a crackle, like static, drew his attention. The air directly before him shimmered, coalescing from faint lines into a solid-looking, translucent screen. The very air around it seemed to writhe, actively trying to break the screen apart, yet somehow it stabilized, hovering silently in the biting wind like something ripped straight from one of his RPGs. Simple text appeared on its surface, written in plain, unadorned English, yet feeling utterly alien. There was no grandiose to it, no fluff, just simple plain information.

  Could this mean there is a system here?

  If yes, there should be mana.

  If there is mana, there is possibility of magic, growth and maybe a lot more…

  The text flickered violently, characters dissolving and reforming nonsensically. No…

  The relocation option dimmed and then vanished entirely from the screen. NO! NO! NO!

  It felt as if a storm was being channelled directly through him, raw and untamed, making his teeth vibrate and his vision blur. Power surged through him, not from him, making his muscles clench involuntarily. He wasn't controlling it; he was just the path of least resistance for whatever the hell was happening outside. As if the chaos around him finally found a way out, they coalesced and channelled, impacting the flickering System screen with him as the central conduit. Capturing barely but a glimpse before darkness claimed him was the screen changing one final time: