Kestra woke some hours later. It was hard to tell inside the cave, but she thought the sun might just be up already. She yawned, stretched, and climbed out of the bed roll. Sleeping in her travel clothes didn't make her feel great, but it was better than waking naked amongst strangers.

The sleeping area was segregated by sex, which made it quite obvious that there was between a 3 or 4 to 1 ratio of men to women. That raised warning flags for Kestra. Back in the nation of Druerjan, such a disparity in the sexes happened in bandit and slaver camps.

She wasn't sure if she could believe her hosts about the curses attached to violating oaths to the realm, but she wasn't about to test the theory herself. She hadn't found any oath bindings during her psychic probing, but she also hadn't been feeling her best.

And she still needed to figure out how to get a class again. Playing back the last evening's conversation, she realized she had volunteered far too much, and gained next to nothing.

She straightened out the bedroll in which she had slept and went looking for water, and a place to relieve her bladder.

Tank seemed to pop up out of nowhere. He handed her a cup of tea. She looked at the decoction, then back up at him. He seemed amused as he took the cup back, sipped the tea, and returned the cup to her hands. "Not drugged or poisoned, I promise."

Kestra nodded. "That would be acting without integrity," she agreed. She took a small sip, attempting to analyze the flavors and affects. She had had a fairly high Cooking skill and found the synergy between it and Alchemy let her detect the subtle effects that good food could have on a body, which had led her to finding more harmonious formulas for her ingestible potions.

This had a bit of bite that opened up the sinus and left a chilled sensation along the mouth. The diluted taste of a sweet berry juice offset the mild stimulant of a bitter leaf.

"Hm. Three ingredients? Not counting the water." She asked.

"A mint the locals call Xonzi's Breath, some mashed strawberries, and a green tea base," Tank confirmed. "You got all that from a single sip?"

"Which is the bitter, this 'mint' or 'tea'?" Kestra asked. "And, yeah, a good Alchemist and a good Cook both can parse the flavors of a recipe.

"Tea's the bitter one. Mint's the, well, the minty one," Tank answered, looking like he was storing away her comment.

"So, you never did say what classes this realm has, or how to get them," she said while taking another analytical sip of the morning beverage.

"That's because there aren't any, near as we can tell. You get experience by raising skill ranks and killing things, plug your boosts into your stats, and cultivate. That's the path to power here."

"Cultivate, as in gardening?" Kestra asked.

Tank shook his head. "As in open your mana apertures and temper your body. Cultivate your personal power."

Kestra took that in. "Well. That's different. This E.X.P. is a special kind of experience, then? And, ah, why are there so few women compared to men here?"

"Yes, E.X.P. is experience, and turns out it's not uncommon for the strong to take what they want in this realm. Most families try to hide their girls from the local lords because the lords like to sweep them up, stick 'em in a seraglio, and dole them out as rewards to their loyal officers. Naturally, the lords keep the prettiest girls for themselves. Older women are usually safe enough, but enough families have lost their daughters that we're gathering a bit of a rebellion force here. The disparity is only worse outside of our camp."

Kestra frowned. "That's not sustainable."

Tank huffed. "Yeah, well, maybe that's why there's so many Transmigrators right now."

Kestra turned up a palm. "Well, I need to reach a realm anchor for my quest, but it looks like doing so isn't going to be all that easy. Oh, and I'd like my blade back."

Tank said, "I don't see a sheath for it. How do you carry it?"

"Same way you carried whatever you used to bind me up, I'd guess," she said, her eyes watchful.

Tank blinked, then looked at her fingers again. He frowned and looked her over, obviously pausing at different parts of her garment that might have been enchanted with runes of Holding.

"Personal storage domain," she said, giving him a misleading truth since he seemed to not recognize her soul-bound ring of Minor Holding. She frowned. "Are you a transmigrator, too?"

"Yeah, from Earth," he agreed with hooded lids, looking wary now.

"Earth? The Compound Master said one of the twice born he met called their first life home that. Said that there wasn't any mana so people did strange things with machines. Sound about right?" Kestra asked.

Tank sucked in a breath. "Yeah, only I wouldn't say strange. Industrialization only really took off in the last three hundred years, so we've gone from barely dipping our toes in the ocean to flying across the globe."

Kestra scrunched up her nose. "How did you have any soul-bound items to bring with you without mana?"

"We didn't. When we were brought over, anything that wasn't nailed down in a two meter radius came with us."

That made Kestra frown. Why didn't she get that luxury? Eh, no matter. She arrived with a lot more than she would have been able to carry if not for her ring of Holding.

Tank asked, "Your clothes are soul bound?"

"No, but my personal storage domain is," she said. "One thing the twice born warned about was that mana expresses differently in different … realms? Worlds? The words aren't that clearly defined back home. Anyhow, that meant leaving behind anything enchanted or infused. Don't want mana bombs detonating in my storage space, let alone in my hands. Or worse, in my gut for potions. Soul-bound items, on the other hand, are so infused with your own personal mana that they work as intended as long you do the same. They also grow with you. Your body gets harder to damage? Your soul-bound armor gets harder to damage, might even take on elemental resistances."

His eyebrows lifted. "That's interesting." Then he looked a bit chagrined. "So, ah, maybe don't say that you have a personal storage space so loud. In camp, you should be fine, but, like I said, most people we've met in the realms are used to the strong taking whatever they want. Getting x.p. for killing just seems to make it easier to justify atrocities against our fellow man."

"I'll hold the lesson. You mentioned the boosts. How do they work?" she asked.

Tank shrugged. "You can do things, training mostly, to increase your strength and stamina and what have you. That's your base, the first number. The plus number, that's how many boosts you've applied with your leveling. Your body goes numb for a while as you apply the boosts. How long depends on how big an overall change you're pushing. Most humans start between 3 and 5 points, and they don't get to start leveling until they're prepubescent, around 10 in Earth years. So far, it looks like you need at least one point of agility to control every two or three points of strength, and the higher your stamina, the longer you can push on. The more mana you have, the bigger spells you can cast, though mana recovery is more important for most of the useful spells. Oh, and more stamina also means more healing you can take at any given time."

"And you just, what, will the boosts to be applied?" she asked.

"Yeah, about that," Tank said. "I recommend at least sitting down first, if not lying down. There's supposed to be a cap, only being able to put a hundred boosts to any of the six stats, and so far as the First Horizon's common knowledge goes, getting past level 80 is an incredible feat."

"What about opening these apertures and tempering?" Kestra asked.

Tank pursed his lips. "You have to circulate mana, get enough built up in your mana core, and then drill through each of the closed ones. It gets harder as you go, too. Most of that's a mental struggle, and if you don't have a safe place to sit around, you're not going to make much progress."

"Are they physical or metaphysical, then?" she asked.

Tank shrugged. "I was a field medic in a recon team for the U.S. Army and Puck was one of our riflemen. Magic is something we're learning as we go, so hell if I know."

Kestra dipped her head. "If these apertures are physical, then they are unequivocally an aid provided by the same entity behind the blue screens or the voice of the world, like the universal language imprinting. Metaphysical, and they're as like an expression of the mana of this realm as an aid provided by the realm's gods.

"There's a great grand philosophical debate that's been ongoing back in my realm about where an entity ends, specifically in connection with whether the land is as separate from the people living on and within it as we can be of the land. If mana is the lifeblood of the land, then the more powerful in moving mana the inhabitants, the more powerful the land, essentially. If the entire realm is a single being, it exists on a level that is quite far beyond mortal ken, which gives a reason for gods to act as intermediaries between the realm and we pesky sapients that make up the character and mana movers within it."

She held up a forestalling finger at the question she could see forming on Tank's face. "That matters because mana does take on the character of those who use it, and the more one is subjected to such character-rich mana, the more one's personality bends to match it. Dungeons are needful mostly because they leech out the character and the affinities in mana and return it in a purer state."

Tank glanced over at someone coming up behind them, and guided Kestra over to a more comfortable place to continue their conversation. "So, mana picks up and lays down personality, got it. What's this about universal language?"

"The words coming out of my mouth are not the words of my native Druerjan. The glyphs used for written language are not the script I learned to write with. I tried to write in my native language and it took a great deal of sweating concentration to do so, only for me to watch my script turn into this realm's glyphs. Did you not notice a similar effect when you first arrived?"

Tank leaned back, his gaze turning introspective. "No, but it makes sense of some of the things that felt like they should have rhymed, but didn't."

Kestra shrugged. "No mana on Earth, right? Or at least, none anyone can manipulate? It would make the people and creatures of Earth very easy to integrate into another world. Well, at least those of you who have managed to form a soul. The soulless amongst you could only be touched by physical mana manifestations.

"And, well, I doubt I would have noticed the imprinting if not for feeling my connection break to the voice of the world I came from, and this new, different connection thrust upon me."

Tank's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean, soulless?"

"A person's soul is the stabilized spark of mana that carries their personality. You can attach other bits of mana to a soul, knowledges mostly, or leashes to items that become soul-bound gear, but attempts to alter the personality almost invariably end up destroying the soul in some pretty spectacular bursts of mana explosions. It can even cause blights, and cleaning those up is nasty business. If you can catch a mana seed before it turns into a well or a dungeon, you can send in a sacrificial team to plant the dungeon and let it eat through the bad mana, but if your team survives, they're going to be decades recovering from the damage. Still preferable to fighting through hordes of the restless dead empowered by the blighting to return to the physical plane."

Kestra paused a moment, frowning. "Hm. I don't know if this realm has mana seeds or dungeons or wells, come to think of it, or if they would act the same as I'm used. Just have to hope no one makes blights, I guess."

Tank looked like she just gave him a huge pile of worries.

"So, my sword?" she asked. "Oh, and a place to relieve my bladder. That would be good, too."

That got a twitch of amusement, and Tank showed her to a crevice in the caves they were using for sanitation deposits. He waited outside the privacy section, then escorted her over to get breakfast and then to reclaim her sword from Puck.

"It's a nice toothpick," the brawny man said, and it did resemble more of a knife than a sword on his proportions.

Kestra took it back and equipped her back sheath between her shirt and jacket from her Holding ring. She used the act of sheathing the short sword to cover up the small wiggles she needed to go through to settle the sheath rig comfortably.

As Tank had said, it served her no use advertising that she had a Holding ring. She didn't like directly equipping gear from a Holding container because even with hours of practice, she still felt the need to twist and wiggle to get her gear to sit just right. Dualla had told her often enough that it was just a trick of her mind.

There was an appreciative light in Puck's gaze, as well as more than a few of the men in the cave, as they watched her wiggle the rig into its proper place. Mentally, Kestra sighed. Hopefully, she didn't need to poison too many tea pots to cool the masculine ardor down. Then again, she hadn't had an excuse to salt itching powders in sleep rolls for ages.

"So, ah, ya wan' me to introduce ya 'round?" Puck asked.

Tank sighed. He probably wasn't trying to be obvious about it, but the long suffering patience he expressed had Kestra laughing.

"No," she cheerfully declined. "The less I know, the less I have to worry about revealing by accident. And one thing I'm quite sure of is that I don't want to be anywhere near a nation that's devolved to rebellion. That's messy. You clobbered me hard enough to concuss me, then healed me, so I'm inclined to let that be, and then we've had an interesting exchange of information. I'm willing to swear silence about your camp and our acquaintance up to the point where my life is credibly threatened.

"Are there other realm anchors than in Sortalheim? And what do the anchors look like? What are they?"

Puck now wore a worried frown. "Ma'am, ya might be resourceful as all git, but iffin' ya go out there with just a pig sticker ya gonna get ya self in trouble."

Kestra shrugged. "Probably, but that's what makes life interesting."

Tank said, "Eh, we needed to make a run to Caispberg soon. We can at least escort you there, help you get some local currency and clothes. People around here will assume you've begun tempering your body; skin tone goes darker the more tempered you are, and you're about as dark as someone with one, maybe two steps along that cultivation path. That should at least bluff the guards and most of the common folk from picking fights with you."

Tank, Puck, Kestra, and two other men headed out of the camp in a north-easterly direction and went on for maybe an hour or so before Tank gathered them up.

"Alright," he said. "Here's the real plan: we're heading for the village of Song. I think we have a spy at camp, which is why I said Caispberg. We'll be looking for signs of an intercept squad leaving the city.

"Finishing the welcome quest is worth it for the guide book alone. For us, it went over the major differences from Earth, and your's I'm guessing will do the same for wherever you came from. If your map has Sortalheim marked, then that's the anchor you have to go to. They're obelisks, four sided pillars that go up about fifty meters, narrowing from three meters to a side on the base to a handspan at the top."

Kestra tipped her head to the side. "I thought your silence vow protects you?"

"But not you," Puck replied, his expression a mix of somber regret.

Kestra nodded. "Ah-ha. If that's the case, why don't I just leave you now and find my own way?"

Tank said, "These woods have more than a few mid level monsters roaming, and getting to the second level may be quick, but most people in the First Horizon don't make it past level eight in their lifetimes. It's not safe to travel alone.

"Also, we have a trustworthy contact in Song that can at least get you native garb. That way you won't stick out as an interesting foreigner."

She looked over the people around her. While she had Tank's vow not to harm her, she didn't have the other's. "You're asking me to place a lot of trust in your group, one which you've just told me you suspect has been infiltrated by your enemies."

One of the men behind Tank frowned, the sense of his offense palpable. For his part, Tank said, "Ma'am, I'm trying to do the right thing."

Kestra shook her head. "What's the age of adulthood amongst your people?"

Tank pulled his head back a little at the non-sequitor. "Eighteen, why?"

"And how old are you?" she asked.

"Twenty-four, but what's that got to do with anything?"

Kestra nodded. "You've been an adult for a quarter of your life, then. I've been one for just under half. Your first responsibility needs to be to your community, and I am not among them. Even if your purpose is to stop the lords from enslaving the multitudes, you have to put your people first or you have no one to stand with you in your opposition. I have already told you I'm not joining your fight.

"A common saying among my people is, 'Words are whispers before the shouts of actions, and results speak loudest of all, while it is intention that separates man from monstrosity.' Your intentions may be good, but you need to think about how best to achieve your results."

So saying, Kestra waved. "I'll leave you here." She slipped into the woods, not giving them time to react.

She heard Tank say, "Let her be. We each have to live and die by our choices."