“No current belongings, no previous organizations… Okay. Have you Awakened an Aspect?” the young woman in front of him asked in a complete monotone.

  Tyler’s Analysis called her Emery Ellis. It didn’t show any Aspect, though she did have an aura.

  Her face looked familiar, for some reason.

  “Yeah, the Aspect of Resilience?” Tyler replied, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. “I, uh, I’m actually a —”

  “Flare your aura.”

  “Huh?”

  “I said, flare your aura.”

  “Uh. I don’t know how —”

  “You don’t know how. Right,” the lady said, as if that were the most unbelievable thing in the world.

  On a laminated white badge, she wrote ‘UNAWAKENED: EVACUATE FIRST’ in big, bold letters. “Wear this at all times. Give it back immediately if you Awaken an Aspect. It’s against the rules to keep wearing it after Awakening.”

  “Wait. I don’t know if that’s —”

  “Next!” she called, physically pushing Tyler’s head to the side so she could see the person behind him.

  Tyler slumped, standing back up and weaving through the small line of people behind him to walk back to where Lisa and Brandon were waiting. A couple of people gave him sympathetic glances as he reluctantly put the badge around his neck.

  Brandon gave him a pat on the shoulder. “I know she can be a bit… one-track, but it’s good that you registered with a representative and got your evacuation badge. We haven’t needed to evacuate in quite some time, but in the case that we do, everyone should respect that and help defend you as you try to get away from danger.”

  “Yeah, that’s good to have…” Tyler trailed off, trying to figure out if he should even try to bring up the fact that he had Awakened, and it was just that there was a magic Curse from a magic banana that he’d gotten from a magic alien that was probably resulting in his lack of magical signature.

  It seemed everyone had an aura over here — that subtle spiritual pressure that he’d first felt from Savadiere in those last moments before he’d gotten locked in the cave, and then again with those horrible birds that had come when the Storm had hit him for the second time.

  He supposed that it was a pretty universal thing, so much so that nobody had even asked if he had any magic — they’d just assumed he hadn’t. But wouldn’t their Analysis have told them that he had the Aspect of Resilience? Why had the representative needed to ask him about that?

  Unless they didn’t have such a thing?

  “I dunno why we even need her,” Lisa muttered. She was looking intently at the left side of Tyler’s chest, where he assumed his heart was, and then back at the white badge with a squint. “All she does is take inventory all day. The Eye of the Main Branch is so pretentious, too — it sounds like some title we’d find in a cultivation manual, but she just made it up!”

  “It’s the official term that the Main Branch uses, Lisa,” Brandon said with a sigh. “We’ve been over this.”

  “Well I think it’s dumb, just like how they steal our cultivation manuals —”

  “They’re not stealing them —”

  “And I think she’s wrong on top of all that! Isn’t that right, Tyler?”

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  Tyler blinked. “Huh?”

  “About you.”

  He hadn’t even gotten the time to process the statement before Brandon shook his head and dragged them down the hall and into a larger room. “Anyways, we’re about to head to the pantries. We source our food from a couple of magical farms scattered around this base, and some edible monster meat gets added…”

  She was talking about my Awakening, right?

  He nodded to her as they tailed Brandon through the sterile corporate halls given character by the magic of their new residents. He wasn’t sure what the best way to bring it up was, but he appreciated that someone had his back. Then again, maybe it was a good thing that everyone else didn’t know his true capabilities — he was still getting a feel for this little community he’d found himself in.

  So he let himself get swept back up in the tour, that sense of wonder coming back to him as he marveled at just how incredible it was being back not just with people, but with a whole small community of people with magic.

  It turned out that a lot had happened for the rest of the world while he’d been stuck on the island, and then even more had occurred in the nebulous amount of time between when he’d fought the bird and when the siblings had found him.

  In total, just over seven months had passed since the start of the apocalypse. Common theory was that the Dimensional Storm had enveloped the Earth that first day it came, breaking off pieces of it and melding them together with chunks of other worlds into this strange landscape that they now saw. And even today, people were finding stragglers who had just been transported over by the Storm — other humans who’d woken up, thinking that not a day had gone by since the magical phenomenon had enveloped them.

  The mini-continent where they resided was less than two hundred miles across, and surrounded by deep ‘cosmic ocean’ on every side. It was split into many different environments, and there were islands all around it as far as the eye could see.

  The aptly-named Flooded City was wrapped around most of the edge of the mainland — a sort of concrete swamp bridging ‘open water’ and the overgrown suburb biome that occupied most of the center of the continent. It seemed the entire mainland was built of human-made environments, but twisted in some way or another. And of course, the Dimensional Storm was constantly dropping chunks of other worlds into the fray.

  A great number of people had died in the first couple of days as the remnants of humanity struggled to fight magical enemies without the technology they’d grown accustomed to, but some had taken to this life very well, just as Tyler had. Because along with threats, the chunks of other worlds also brought gifts — tools, weapons, magic.

  After a month, almost every remaining person had Awakened some sort of Aspect within them, and factions had begun to form as people gathered up into groups and conquered this new world piece by piece. They scavenged training resources and cultivation manuals from the ruins of alien civilizations, allowing them to advance along this strange new path to power.

  But when Tyler had told them that he’d already been exposed to magic and monsters for a couple months now, the siblings had seemed surprised that he didn’t know of the Stormchasers. Doubly so when he also hadn’t known about either of the other two major factions — the Crimson Tide and the Central Coalition, he thought they’d said. Apparently the three factions’ combined territory stretched across most of the landmass, and the vast majority of survivors chose to cozy up with one of them, either through directly joining or through forming an alliance. That was actually how the 21st Branch was started — they’d just been a band of survivors, and the Stormchasers had come and annexed them.

  Tyler was surprised at how offhand Brandon had made the annexation seem, but apparently it had been a net benefit for them. The people around here had been split up and scared, barely scraping by against the horrors that haunted this place before the Stormchasers came.

  “They gave us a banner to gather under, and they protected us against the monsters when we were still weak. Then even raised one of our own to Journeyman — she’s now our Branch Leader.” Brandon smiled at that. “We owe our lives to them, even if the Main Branch can be… overbearing at times.”

  The thought of three human factions dominating the continent felt weird to Tyler, though. Especially if a sole Journeyman was enough to lead a group of two hundred people. That was the same advancement as him. Surely others like Savadiere must have dwarfed any human who had only started cultivating a couple months ago, right?

  “What about the aliens?” He asked them probingly. “Aren’t they incredibly powerful?”

  “Yeah, duh. That’s why we gotta get stronger ourselves,” Lisa smirked.

  “No, I mean… like don’t they have factions too? How are humans taking over everything here?”

  “Oh. That’s because the aliens aren’t here.” Brandon answered with a pensive frown. “Well, I mean alien monsters are, obviously. You can’t walk five feet here without stepping onto something that wants to tear your face off. But the people who built those temples, who wrote those cultivation manuals? Not a lick — at least not that we know of, here in this little backwoods area. It really makes you think, doesn’t it? What are the chances that from all those clearly thriving civilizations, not one person gets transported here?”

  None of them have met an alien. Not like Savadiere.

  He had half a mind to tell them about his experience, but he held his tongue. He still understood far too little about how things worked here.

  But as they began to show him around, Lisa blabbing on endlessly and Brandon exasperatedly trying to keep them on task, he couldn't help but like them.