He sighed as he thought of Sophie’s soup with the onions and the bones. He thought of her standing in the kitchen in the labyrinth, furious with the fact that she could not get the recipe right for the second time. He thought she would like the sweet cakes. He thought she would want to know what was in them.

He thought: seven days for a spatial ring. Months for the real climb. I am beginning.

...

They found a room as the city’s light shifted.

The housing district closest to the Guild had several options for hunters on a budget. They found a small building, a rooming house run by a soul who did not ask many questions and charged twenty-two points per week for a room with three pallet-beds, a window, and access to a shared washing room with running soul-water. Bruce paid the week upfront without bargaining. Stability now was worth the points.

The room was simple. Three beds, a small table, a window that looked out on a side street where two souls were having a quiet argument over something. The walls were pale soul-stone. The floor was the same. There was no decoration.

Theron looked around it for a long moment.

"It’s nice," he said.

"It’s functional," Kael said.

"For someone who died alone in a small room in the physical realm," Theron said, with no self-pity in it at all, just honest accounting, "this is nice."

Neither Bruce nor Kael argued with that.

They set their new equipment out, carrying frames, hide sacks, skinning kit, soul-seal paste jars, hooks. Laid out on the small table it looked like the proper inventory of a working party. Theron folded each piece of bark-cloth that had wrapped things during the market walk and stacked it neatly. Kael hung his coat on a nail beside the door. Bruce opened the map on the table and looked at it for several minutes, memorizing the portal locations and the dungeon zones while the others sorted gear.

Then Bruce rolled the map up, tucked it into the frame’s side-clip, and said: "Sleep."

No argument from either of them.

The three of them lay down on the pallet-beds, which were, for soul-furniture, unexpectedly comfortable, the padding some kind of cured beast-hide over a soul-wood frame, and the city outside the window made its quiet city-sounds.

Bruce lay still. The thin thread to his physical body was there, as it always was. He felt it for a moment, the faint pulse of connection, the reminder that somewhere very far away his actual heart was not beating, his actual chest was not rising, his actual wife was sitting in an actual labyrinth watching over him.

He sent the wordless thought along the thread again.

I am all right. I have a bed. I am all right.

He did not know if it reached her.

He closed his soul-body’s eyes.

He was asleep before the city outside had finished settling into its night-sounds, and he slept deeply, and his soul-body healed in the quiet the way a well-fed, well-rested body always heals, steadily, without drama, ready for the morning.

The carrying frames waited on the table.

The first day in Xiltra was done.

...

That night Bruce tried moving his soul back to the physical realm but for some reason he couldn’t...

Maybe it was because their soul points reached the criteria, but Stan, kael and Theron wasn’t disturbed

Bruce woke before the others.

He did not know how he knew it was morning. There was no sun in the Soul Realm, no sky that changed color, no birds, no light shifting through a window the way physical-realm mornings announced themselves. But something in his soul-body had its own clock, the same internal rhythm that had woken him before rounds in the hospital, before surgeries, before every early start of his previous life. The body, even a soul-body, kept time whether you asked it to or not.

He lay still for a moment.

The room was quiet. Kael was on his back on the far bed, one arm thrown over his face, breathing in the slow even way of someone genuinely asleep. Theron was curled on his side facing the wall, one hand tucked under his cheek, the faint glow of his soul-body soft and steady, the glow of a soul that had eaten well and rested fully, no cracks, no dim patches.

Bruce looked at the ceiling.

The soul-stone above him was plain and pale, with a faint natural luminescence that was just enough to see by without being enough to bother sleep. He had stared at many ceilings in his life. This one was not the strangest.

He thought, in the quiet before the day started, about Sophie.

Not with longing, exactly, longing was too soft a word for what he felt when he let himself think about her. It was more like weight. A specific, familiar, chosen weight, the kind you carry because you want to carry it, because the alternative is to set it down and that would be worse. He thought of her in the labyrinth, sitting beside his still body. He thought of the way she would have organized herself around the waiting. Sophie did not simply wait, she arranged things. She would have found tasks. She would have made the space around his still form neat and purposeful, because purposeful was how she processed anything she could not control.

He hoped Lily and Lucy were with her. He hoped Axiom was behaving itself. He hoped the clone had not done anything alarming.

He thought: seven days for the ring. Then what? He thought about the climb. F to E. E to D. The harvester had said that the realm existed to purify souls, that it was designed, at its core, as a place of processing and return. He was here against that design. He was here because he had walked in the wrong direction through the cycle’s gate, and the realm had not stopped him because he was strong enough that stopping him would have cost more than letting him through.

He was in the realm’s house, using the realm’s resources, working against the realm’s purpose, and the realm had chosen to simply let him. He doesn’t know why theres no rules or laws against ascendants like him and kael, he made him suspicious, but he’s okay with it. For now at least.

He thought about what that meant for a while.

He did not reach a conclusion. He filed the question with the others.

He got up.

...

He did not wake the others yet.

He took his time washing at the shared washing room down the hall, soul-water ran cold and clear from a simple spout in the wall, and it felt like water, fully, the same way food tasted like food and sleep felt like sleep. The soul-body’s sensory honesty was one of the more surprising things about this realm. He had expected something dimmer. Something approximate. He had gotten the full version of everything.

He dried his hands on a rough cloth left on the washing-room rail and looked at himself in the polished soul-stone that served as a mirror.

His reflection looked like him. His face, his build, his age as he had been when he descended. The glow was there, steady, even, the full bright glow of a well-rested soul with no cracks, and he turned his face to examine the glow’s quality the way he once turned a patient’s face to examine the color of their skin. It was honest data. The glow told him his soul was whole, well-fed, and recovering from the previous day’s exertion.

He was ready to work.

He went back to the room, sat at the small table, opened the map, and began planning.

The F-rank portal they had used yesterday was the nearest one, and it was good, the forest dungeon, the deer-things, a clean ecosystem with clear prey and manageable risk. But Bruce had noted, on the map and in the market, that there were four other F-rank portals within the Xiltra island’s hunting range, each one marked with a different color that the map’s small legend explained corresponded to dungeon type.

The forest portal was green. Natural terrain, fauna-type beasts.

The second nearest portal was marked in pale blue. Aquatic terrain, aquatic-type beasts.

The third was marked in grey. Stone terrain, mineral-type beasts.

The fourth was dark red. Heat terrain, flame-type beasts.

The fifth was marked in silver. Open field, mixed-type beasts.

Bruce ran his finger across the distances. The forest portal was ten minutes from the Guild. The aquatic and stone portals were twenty. The heat portal was a longer walk. The open field was between the stone and the heat.

He thought about what he knew of his companions’ talents.

Kael’s fire worked in every terrain he had seen so far. Fire was fire. It would work underwater no better and no worse than anywhere else, worse, possibly, in the aquatic portal, since water resisted flame in the physical realm and would likely do the same here. But Kael was not limited to his talent; he could fight plain too, and had.