I’m not sure we can even call the pickle that Jack and I ended up finding ourselves in, “almost” dying. Normally, when you find yourself experiencing a peril that rips you from the world, and takes away your body, you’d count that as dying. I had to stay in the illusory world to keep that monstrous hairball from escaping into the real world. Jack insisted on staying in the illusory world with me because I couldn’t talk her into letting me face the hairball myself.

Together we drove the monstrous-hairball and the illusory world into the thrashing, crushing, tearing, shredding teeth of the cosmos. Helplessly hoping that staying in our private dimension would protect us from the deconstructive machinery that processed and re-processed the matter, energy, and space that made up the material plane. A plan that only barely worked, though it “did” thankfully deal with our hairball problem.

So here’s my question, if your last-ditch effort to survive has left you largely non-corporeal, and floating in some far-off region in the space between the worlds, i.e, the spirit world, have you failed or have you succeeded? I’ve no clue what the answer is, but I’ll optimistically state that Jack and I have just barely survived our ordeal.

Our bodies and most of the contents of our private dimension were unable to resist the destructive elements that the cosmic machinery that we used to kill the monstrous-hairball, but thanks to the fact that the private dimension was a world whose energy, matter, and logic were completely under our control, we were able to narrowly avoid dying.

We eventually made a comeback. Well, first we were knocked out for quite a while. Being left 9/10th of the way dead was still pretty damn rough after all. When we were re-awakened, we came back as spiritual bodies. Basically, we were ghosts, with just a little bit of extra-oomph backing us up. It took...I don’t know how long...for us to actually recover. Things were a bit touch and go for a while, not the least because there was a point where things got painful enough that either Jack, or I, but thankfully never both of us at the same time, would find it hard to remember why we were trying so hard to cling to the state known as “life”. But eventually, we “did” come back.

What’s more, we were floating in the grand nebula that lies between the worlds, drifting through the region of the nebula that our Shattered World knew as the “Chaotic Sea” came with its benefits. The nebula, and by extension the chaotic sea, were filled with all sorts of valuable materials and pockets of rich, anomalous, energy. There was plenty of material for us to use to rebuild our bodies and spirits even more strongly than ever.

We cannibalized our core-treasures. Maybe cannibalism is too strong a word. Our shattered world was a world primarily populated by the descendants of tool-spirits, beast-spirits, and elements. Transcending one’s mortal flesh and becoming an immortal, meant returning to the foundations of what we were, and fully integrating with one’s core. I believe this was the “thing” Jack and I were experiencing all that time, back when we were in the Shattered World. Nearly dying and being forced to rebuild while we were barely more than souls clinging to fractured core-treasures, greatly hastened this process.

Thus, Jack lost her grimoire, and I lost my idle-clicker system, which you’d think I’d be more upset about, but like I’ve just said, even before that damned crew of idiots, and that big, bloody, hairball showed up and made a mess of things, I suspect that we were both about to outgrow those things.

I was becoming hollow and empty, the void that was opening within my soul was rapidly being filled by the contents of countless stories. The empty archive was rapidly increasing its claim on me. Jack became increasingly hungry, gradually turning into an embodiment of primordial gluttony.

Then Jack and I got chewed up by the cosmos, and as a side-effect to nearly dying, and getting our everything twisted, bent, and torn in three directions, we gained a whole lot more control over how we were developing. The near-infinite resources of the chaotic sea allowed us to experiment, while we built our new bodies and repaired the damage that had been done to our spirits.

I became an Empty-Archivist as planned, but I became the keeper of an archive that wasn’t quite as restrictive as it might have been. I wore my knowledge as a mantle, and was able to use the endless nothingness that should have hollowed me out, as a source of strength. Turning the principles, and logic, of cosmic expansion into a source of continual growth that replaced my Idle-Clicker System’s passive effects.

Meanwhile, Jack became a devil of gluttony that could swallow entire galaxies. It’s a good thing that the Chaotic sea was a realm fed by multiple dimensions, because we might have emptied out the Shattered World’s pearls if we needed to keep her fed using the mortal realm’s resources.

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Once we had bodies again, and were fully recovered, I used our Empty-Network to contact our friends back home to let them know we were okay. I was relieved to find that Alina and Sigi were still doing well. The money they’d made with the produce we’d supplied them with, had allowed them to start a company that could allow them to rival Alina’s old employers, the Rose-Boar Trading Company. Which in turn gave them the economic back to fight back against anything that Rose-Boar might try to do to them. I had Alina and Sigi inform Trefor, and the TPV of our survival.

Then after restoring the private dimension, I resumed sending materials and goods to Alina and Sigi, to help support them, and help with the development of the things we’d been working on in the mortal-realms. Unfortunately, even if I could send things down to the Shattered World via the Empty-Network, I couldn’t send Jack and myself down through the same means.

We were too far away from the mortal-half of the shattered world, and our data was far too complex, for regular teleportation to work, and the process I was using to send materials would have half-killed us again. Entering the spatial equivalent of a compressed-file wasn't something either of us could survive at that point. Thus for the foreseeable future, we’d be living in the chaotic sea until I figured out a way for Jack and us to descend down to the mortal world.

Neither Jack and I were particularly upset about this. Besides Alina, Sigi, and maybe a few of our brothers and sisters in the sect, we didn’t really have any close friends back in the Shattered World. Our ties to the Forest of Life and Death, and the Tree of Passionate Verdance, were pretty solid, but it wasn’t like we were desperate to return to the sect. Also, now that we were corporeal again, and feeling pretty strong, we were feeling a growing sense of wanderlust. Nearly dying had given being alive a new freshness, and we found ourselves wanting to explore this strange new dimension we’d found ourselves in.