Clive had already been aware that in Jason's time away his soul had undergone some extreme changes. While he had no knowledge of what a spirit domain was, he understood that something had saturated Jason’s cloud house with his presence in a way that Emir’s cloud house did not replicate. Jason’s spirit realm escalated that feeling drastically. Where the spirit domain was Jason imprinting himself on reality, the spirit realm was a reality forged from Jason himself.

The rest of the team had various responses to Jason’s spirit realm, but none had spent a lot of time in it. Mostly they seemed to look at it as a personal power that operated like a cloud house. Even so, they all got a sense that spending time in the spirit realm impacted their feelings in ways that Emir’s cloud house did not.

Other than Clive, Humphrey was the member of the group who had the best sense that Jason’s new ability was more than just a storage space that could hold people. Humphrey had encountered abilities of that nature and knew that Jason’s spirit realm was something very different. He had felt it the moment he stepped into the spirit realm and felt Jason's presence pervading everything, even while Jason was outside it.

Humphrey and Clive had discussed it a little but where Clive was driven by curiosity, Humphrey’s reaction was concern. Jason was clearly not ready to tell them everything about what was going on with him and Humphrey strongly suggested Clive eschew his normal approach of peppering Jason with questions every time he told Clive about his latest absurd power.

Humphrey suggested that Clive explore the spirit realm when he had the time. He pointed out that Jason opening it up to the team was an invitation and that Clive experiencing it for himself might be the best way forward.

Clive strongly suspected that there were caveats to being in Jason’s spirit realm that he hadn’t told the team about. Having deduced exactly what it was, he realised that opening it to anyone was an incredible display of trust. He doubted that anyone could harm Jason here but it exposed everything that he was, unadulterated and unhidden. The fun and inviting parts. The imperious and threatening. The garden estate was beautiful and welcoming but with dark corners and the promise of terrible things in the face of transgression.

Clive found himself uncertain as to the exact size of the place, suspecting it to be in a perpetual state of change. He had taken a meandering path that wound back and forth, the looming tower always seeming far off in the distance. Yet the moment he was ready to meet Jason he found himself stepping into an open pavilion at the tower's base, not entirely sure how he got there.

Jason was standing in front of a wide well that was closer to the size of a public fountain. Instead of water, the well contained a starry void in which many items could be seen floating around. Jason’s spirit vault had undergone many changes in its progress to becoming a spirit realm, one of which was how it contained his inventory items.

In the spirit realm’s current iteration, the items were all held in stasis within the well in front of Jason and Clive found him doing inventory management. Items were flying out of the well and floating around Jason from where he either directed them into a pile next to him or sent them back into the well. The pile was seemed to be mostly leftovers from consumable items like empty potion vials and throwing darts whose one-use magical effects had been expended.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to remove the garbage outside of your spirit realm, where you can dispose of it?” Clive asked as he approached Jason.

“You have to remember that this place is a garden,” Jason said, “and in a garden, you compost waste.”

“I don’t understand what that means,” Clive said.

“As it turns out, I can take the lingering power from magically strengthened vials, potion dregs and the like and feed them to my gardens. Anything with small amounts of lingering magic is perfect because the gardens can’t absorb a lot at once. Feeding them this stuff won’t do much, but give it a decade or three and the results will stack up.”

“What does that accomplish?” Clive asked. “If you’re feeding your soul magic to make it stronger, that’s incredible.”

“Nothing that helpful, I’m afraid,” Jason said. “It just helps with my soul’s defences. The soul is inviolable, as you know, but attacks against it are… I’m not sure you can comprehend how unpleasant they are until you experience them for yourself, which I hope you never do. Feeding my garden makes me a little better at enduring them. Or it will, eventually, once I’ve fed it enough. I have no idea what else this place can do and I’m learning as I go. Maybe you can help me figure things out.”

“I’d like that,” Clive said. “I’d like that a lot.”

Jason gave him a sympathetic smile.

“How are you doing after what we saw out there?”

“I don’t…” Clive began before trailing off, uncertain of himself. “Farrah said that you’ve seen worse.”

“It’s not a contest,” Jason said. “Death is death, horror is horror. We’ve all seen the people we couldn’t save and counting the dead doesn’t make one person’s experiences more important than another’s.”

“I feel better for walking around in this place,” Clive said. “It’s calming. Intimate. Is it weird to say that?”

“No,” Jason said with a laugh. “This is about as intimate as it gets. You’ve figured this place out I assume, you being you.”

“The basic idea, I think. Thank you for letting me see it.”

“You don’t know how glad I am that you could,” Jason said. “But I think it’s time I showed you something else. A distraction so that instead of living in your head for a while you can wrap it around a problem.”

“Your mysterious project in the basement of the cloud house?”

“Yeah. I was waiting until we had more time but I don’t think that’s happening any time soon. We’ll have to snatch our moments when we can.”

Jason waved a hand an archway rose from the floor, granting them an exit from the spirit realm.

***

The three main islands of Rimaros were Livaros, Arnote and Provo. Livaros was the centre of wealth, power and adventuring, with the vast majority of sky islands being in proximity to it. This had come with a price when the Builder’s city attacked Livaros, with many of the sky islands suffering damage in spite of their formidable defences.

Arnote was the least developed, with sleepy little towns and a laid-back lifestyle. Despite the small-town sensibilities, however, it was also a bastion of the wealthy, being home to adventurers and merchant barons who preferred to enjoy life at a more relaxed pace. While individuals like Argy might appear as colourful locals, his name was derived from a massive agricultural industry of which he was a leading figure.

The last island was Provo, the one Jason had yet to visit. This held the vast majority of the Rimaros population as well as being the largest trade hub. Livaros dealt with the kind of extreme cost speciality goods that adventurers desired, but most of the airship trade between the continents to the north as and south of the Sea of Storms passed through Provo.

For this reason, Provo was a bustling place full of strangers, even during a monster surge. Home to one of the largest sky ports on the planet, the Builder attacks had left it largely unaffected, only interrupting the operations for a couple of days. Regular trade had been largely suspended already, outside of necessary supplies, but the Adventure Society had commandeered the trade fleets to move critical resources. Land travel via the road Network connecting the continents was dangerous without a powerful escort and sea travel was worse. Airship travel wasn’t exactly safe but so long as the airships regulated their speed they could make a journey with only one or two monster attacks. Sky transport required fewer adventurers to escort it compared to other means short of portals, which were largely occupied with forming rapid responses to monster manifestations.

The result of this ongoing activity was that Provo was still full of travellers. This was useful to those with less than wholesome agendas who sought to access Rimaros without drawing attention. One such person was the Purity priest, Laront. He disliked being dressed in the typical garb of a moderately successful trader but his preferred white would get people immediately assuming he was a priest of Purity.

The Purity forces in the sea of Storms all belonged to the Order of Redeeming Light. The extremist faction’s core principle was to purify the unclean and turn it into weapons against that which resisted purgation. Their methods were highly effective for long-term planning and isolated emplacement as they could grow their forces by turning tainted enemies into purified allies. There were flaws to the methodology, however. In many cases, there were distinctive, telltale signs left on the purified that could single them out to those with sufficiently powerful senses.

The result of this flaw meant that with the Purity church under threat of divine sanction, sending the redeemed into populated areas was a risk. As such, Laront, as an ordinary priest who never passed through the flames of purgation, was the only upper-echelon member of the local forces that could safely visit the city. They had a series of low-level infiltrators and informants, many of whom didn’t even realise their true allegiance, but sensitive issues required personal involvement.

Many of the cafés around the massive Provo sky port had individual dining rooms for traders to hold private meetings over meals. In one such room, Laront was meeting with a minor Adventure Society functionary assigned to the administrative centre in Provo. He was an iron-ranker named Derian and Laront detested both the man and his perpetual sneer. They sat across from one another at a small table, the food between them going untouched.

“You have the information I asked for?” Laront asked.

“They banished me to this place to spend my days sending second-rate adventurers on third-rank assignments, so I don’t have access to the Rimaros records anymore.”

“Does that mean no?”

“I have it, but the price has gone up.”

“We had a deal.”

“One made before the flying cities started appearing in the sky. With everything going on now, I had to trade some serious favours to get this.”

Laront was confident that Derian wasn’t lying about needing to trade favours to get the information. He suspected it was less about access, though, and more about people not wanting to deal with Derian. The functionary was the kind of man who constantly wondered why all the people around him were idiots who somehow failed to recognise his superior talent. He couldn’t understand why his career stalled when it was obvious how much better things would work if he were in charge.

“This is an information exchange and I brought all the information you wanted,” Laront said. “If you want more information than all of it I’m going to have to start making things up.”

“I want off this island,” Derian said. “Who knows when the next Builder attack will come? But they won’t let Adventure Society staff quit during a monster surge, just because we signed some crap agreement before it started, and now I can’t leave the island without getting flagged. How was I meant to know the city would get attacked when I signed that?”

Laront pressed his lips tightly together as if trying to prevent his instinctive response from escaping his lips.

“I don’t have the means to get you off this island,” Laront said, his tone carefully measured.

“How do you get on and off the island?”

“The normal way,” Laront lied. “I didn’t sign an agreement that I wouldn’t. I can’t forge documentation or know who needs to be paid to look the other way. You are the one with the contacts, here. What I can do is give you all the money you’ll need to bribe your way off the island and arrive wherever you choose to go a rich man. How does that sound?”

“You’ll just give me a pile of money?”

“Money is easy,” Laront said. “I have more than I can spend. Information is my coin of the realm, which makes you a very valuable man. If the Adventure Society isn’t willing to pay you what you are worth, I’ll do it and thank them for the opportunity.”

Laront untied a dimensional pouch from his belt and placed it on the table.

“You could buy an airship with the contents of this bag,” Laront told him.

Derian opened the bag and took out several small, flat wooden cases with sliding lids. Checking them, he each one filled with neatly stacked spirit coins. He eyed them hungrily before putting them back in the bag.

“The information, too,” he demanded from Laront. Laront reached into another pouch and took out three recording crystals.

“This has everything, but do you still need to blackmail your way back into your old job if you’re leaving?”

“No. Now I get to do it for fun.”

“Now, the information, I asked for.”

Derian nodded, picked up a satchel that had been leaning against the leg of his chair, He took out a folder and handed it across the table.

“You’re lucky,” Derian told him. “That team you're interested in has contracts already scheduled for almost two weeks in advance. A couple of sweep-and-clears but mostly investigating the ruins of the fallen Builder cities.”

Laront opened the file, glancing over a few pages before putting the file away in another dimensional bag. Derian was already getting to his feet, which Laront didn't mind. Killing the man in their current location was too traceable.

Derian paused at the door before he left.

“You’re paying for the food right?”