The first thing Cade Merello became aware of was that he was drowning in something that wasn't water.

  His body convulsed. His arms thrashed. His fingers scraped against something soft and yielding, like the walls of a throat, and then he was through—breaking the surface of whatever gelatinous substance had been holding him, gasping reflexively though no air seemed to fill his chest.

  He rolled onto his hands and knees, coughing up gobs of translucent slime. He was completely naked.

  What the hell?

  The last thing he remembered was finishing up a set of bench press. The barbell in his hands. The familiar burn. His favorite bench, set to the perfect height, bare feet flat on the floor. And then... nothing. Just this.

  Cade blinked the slime from his eyes and took in his surroundings.

  He knelt at the edge of a shallow pool that glowed with a faint orange bioluminescence. The organic matter he'd emerged from was already sinking back into the earth, the opening sealing itself like a wound knitting closed. All around him rose enormous stalks of fungus—easily fifty feet tall, with caps the size of small houses. Moisture dripped from everything. A fine mist obscured whatever passed for a horizon here, and something felt strange about it—the mist seemed to shimmer with colors he couldn't name, hues that existed somewhere beyond violet and below red, painting the air with an impossible haze that made his eyes ache when he tried to focus on it.

  Above him, instead of sky, there was only a roiling ceiling of gray-white clouds maybe a few hundred feet overhead. Light filtered through them strangely—not just the diffuse glow he might have expected, but bands of illumination his eyes had never been designed to see, ultraviolet rays creating a shimmering corona around every cloud edge, infrared warmth visible as a dull red suffusion where the heat penetrated deepest. He had to consciously unfocus, to let the new spectrums blur into background noise, before he could see past them to the actual landscape. Through breaks in the mist, he caught glimpses of that diffuse glow—not quite a sun, more like the memory of light trying to push through an infinite overcast.

  The air around him felt thick and humid, but strangely, his chest wasn't moving. He wasn't breathing—not in any way he recognized. Instead, his skin seemed to tingle everywhere the mist touched it, a subtle absorption that somehow provided whatever his body needed without any involvement from his lungs at all.

  He pushed himself to his feet.

  And immediately stumbled.

  His body felt wrong. Too light. He'd pushed off with the force he would have used on Earth, expecting the familiar resistance of gravity, but instead he nearly launched himself into the air. It took three wobbling steps before he caught his balance, arms pinwheeling.

  Okay, he thought. Okay. Lower gravity. That's a thing. That's... that's not normal, but it's a thing.

  He forced himself to stay calm. To assess. Something he'd learned from years of training was that panic never helped. When a lift went wrong, when the weight pinned you to the bench, you didn't thrash. You stayed calm. You worked the problem.

  The problem right now was that he had no idea where he was, how he'd gotten here, or what was happening. He had no phone, no supplies, and no explanation for why the gravity felt like someone had turned it down by a third.

  Movement caught his eye.

  To his left, partially obscured by a cluster of smaller mushrooms, something was crawling out of the earth. Another pool, similar to his own, was opening—but much smaller. The creature that emerged was humanoid, glistening with the same slime that still coated Cade's skin.

  It was maybe four inches tall. Also naked, though it was so small he couldn't tell much else at this distance. Its skin, where the slime didn't cover it, was a solid slate gray.

  Cade stared.

  The tiny figure sat at the edge of its pool, wiping slime from its eyes with proportionally tiny hands. It had large dark eyes and features that were distinctly person-like despite its size. As Cade watched, frozen in disbelief, two more pools opened nearby. Two more miniature figures emerged, going through the same motions—coughing, wiping their faces, orienting themselves. One was a deep purplish-violet, the other a vivid turquoise blue. The colors were saturated and uniform, like they'd been dipped in paint.

  He watched them emerge, these impossible small people, and felt something settle in his chest despite the strangeness of it all.

  They're alive.

  The thought came unbidden but certain. Whatever else was happening—wherever he was, however he'd gotten here—these were conscious beings. He could see it in the way they moved, purposeful and aware. In the way they wiped slime from their eyes with gestures that were unmistakably frustrated. In the tiny figure who looked up, saw him, and screamed with a terror that required no translation.

  They're people.

  Years of carefully considered choices had taught him to see personhood where others saw only difference. The intelligence behind an octopus's eye. The social bonds of elephants mourning their dead. The capacity for suffering that existed in creatures nothing like himself, deserving of moral weight simply because they could experience their own existence.

  These beings were far more obviously people than any animal he'd ever advocated for. Small, yes. Alien, certainly. But people.

  Which meant he needed to be careful.

  He stepped back, trying to look less threatening, trying to show he meant no harm—

  His heel came down on something soft.

  There was a wet crunch.

  Cade's stomach dropped. He lifted his foot slowly, already knowing what he would see, praying he was wrong.

  He wasn't wrong.

  The fourth tiny figure—the one that had been behind him, the one he hadn't seen—lay crushed against the mossy ground. Its skin had been a warm amber color, now dulled. Its limbs were bent at impossible angles. Dark fluid leaked from beneath its body. It had been a person. A tiny person, freshly emerged from its own pool, and Cade had stepped on it like it was nothing.

  No.

  The word didn't make it past his lips. It just echoed in his skull, over and over. No no no no no.

  Something happened.

  Power flooded into him—there was no other word for it. A surge of energy that rushed through his veins like electricity, filling spaces in his body he hadn't known were empty. His muscles tensed. His vision sharpened. And then, impossibly, he felt himself growing.

  His perspective shifted. The ground fell away beneath him.

  When it stopped, Cade was staring down at his hands in horror. They were his hands, still calloused from the barbell, still marked with the familiar triangle of birthmarks on his left thumb—three small dots he'd had since childhood. But everything around him was smaller now. Or rather, he realized with dawning dread, he was bigger.

  He had grown at least five inches.

  From the tiny figures below—the ones who were still alive—came voices. They were speaking, he realized. And had no slime on them, and had clothes and little hats to keep the rain out. They were speaking in a language he had never heard before and somehow understood perfectly.

  "Tier-zero," one of them was saying. Its voice was thin and reedy, scaled to its size, but the words were clear in his mind. "That was a tier-zero surge. Did you see that? He absorbed Kern's anima like a tier-zero. Nothing that large should grow at all from killing a tier-zero."

  "He's enormous," another protested. "Look at his size. He spawned at least tier-five. That doesn't make any sense."

  "None of this makes sense. Look at his pool. It's taking forever to close. And his body—what's wrong with his body? Why does he look like that?" The gray one was gesturing at multiple things now.

  Their words reached him without crossing the space between them—no vibration in the air, no sound waves his ears could track. The voice simply existed in his awareness, as if it had always been there.

  Cade couldn't focus on their words. He was still staring at the crushed figure on the ground. Kern, they had called it. Him. They had called him Kern.

  "I'm sorry," Cade tried to say.

  His physical voice emerged first—a rumble like distant thunder that made the followers flinch. Too loud. Too much pressure behind it.

  But he'd heard how they spoke. Their words had arrived in his awareness without traveling through the air, without any sound he could trace. Like thoughts that weren't his own, but external. Present.

  He reached for that. Not his throat, not his chest—somewhere deeper. Behind everything. A place that had nothing to do with vibration or breath.

  "I didn't mean to," he managed.

  The words came out wrong—distant, echoing, like he was speaking from the bottom of a well. But they came out there, in that shared space the Kindred used, without his physical voice booming alongside them.

  The gray one tilted its head. "That's... strange. You sound very far away. But I can understand you."

  It would have to do.

  The figures exchanged glances.

  "Oh, it's fine," one of them said, apparently deciding to ignore whatever was happening with Cade's voice. It had climbed to its feet and was brushing slime off its shoulders with an air of casual indifference. "Kern was somewhat newly spawned. He'll be back in a few days. It's just a minor inconvenience for him, really."

  Cade opened his mouth to respond, then closed it. He didn't trust what might come out.

  The figures were talking amongst themselves now, their voices doing something strange—present without pressure, clear without volume. It was like they were speaking directly into his mind while his own words had to bludgeon their way through the air.

  "Can you—" one of them started to ask him something, but Cade's response came out as another teeth-rattling boom and they winced away.

  He had to fix this. He couldn't communicate if every word was an assault.

  Cade focused on that thin, sourceless whisper—the one that had cracked through when he'd lost control. It had felt like speaking from somewhere deeper, behind his throat. He tried to find that place again, to push his voice down and in rather than letting it rumble up through his chest.

  "Sorry," he managed. The word came out reedy and strained, like he was talking while someone pressed on his windpipe. But it didn't shake the ground.

  The gray one tilted its head. "That's... better? You sound like you're dying, but at least you're not deafening us."

  "I'll—" Cade started in his normal voice, flinched at the boom, and forced it back down to that strangled place. "—work on it."

  "IS THIS EASIER?" the gray one bellowed at him, using what Cade was beginning to realize was their physical voice. It was higher than his, scaled to their smaller bodies, but it had the same quality of actual sound moving through actual air. It was also clearly uncomfortable for them—the gray one's face scrunched with effort, and the others kept shooting it sympathetic looks.

  "You don't have to—" Cade's voice cracked thunderously on have before he wrestled it back down. "—don't have to do that."

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  "IT'S FINE," the gray one shouted, though it obviously wasn't. "WE CAN JUST—"

  "Please," Cade managed in his strangled whisper. "Please stop. That sounds painful."

  "It's not great," the gray one admitted, dropping back to its normal voice with visible relief. The words arrived in Cade's ears without any sense of crossing the distance between them. "We don't use the physical voice much. It's for emergencies. Warnings. Mating calls, if you're old-fashioned."

  "And I sound like I'm making a mating call. Constantly."

  "More like a warning," another native offered. "A very loud warning that something is wrong."

  Cade pressed his fingers against his temples. "I understand. I'll keep—" He gestured vaguely at his throat. "—doing this."

  The strangled voice it was, then. He could feel how wrong it sounded—thin and mechanical, lacking the natural presence the native had when they spoke. But it was functional. It didn't cause pain.

  He'd figure out the rest later. When he was alone. When he could fail without an audience flinching at every mistake.

  "Good enough for now," the gray one said, studying him with an expression Cade couldn't read. "You'll want to practice, though. You sound like someone trapped at the bottom of a river."

  "I'm aware."

  "Just making sure."

  Cade's brain circled back to trying to process where they left off. "But you said… Kern will be... back?"

  "From the spawning pools. Obviously." The figure peered up at him with something like suspicion. "You do know how death works, don't you? You must have received your message."

  "My message."

  "Your last-life message. The one you left yourself before your previous death. Everyone gets one." The tiny figure was watching him carefully now. "Unless... you didn't leave one? Some choose not to, I suppose. The ones who are giving up. Or the truly new souls."

  Cade's mind raced.

  He understood, on some instinctive level, that this was a pivotal moment. These creatures—these people—had a framework for understanding their world, a set of assumptions about how things worked. He had stepped outside that framework the moment he'd emerged from that pool at the wrong size, and now they were trying to fit him back into their categories.

  If he told them the truth—that he had no idea what was happening, that he had no memories of a previous life, that he had somehow been transported here from another world entirely—what would happen? Would they help him? Fear him? Report him to someone?

  They had mentioned tiers. They had seemed confused by his size. And he had just absorbed power from killing one of them, enough to make him grow five inches taller in an instant.

  Be careful, he told himself. You don't know the rules here. You don't know who's listening.

  "No message," he said slowly, testing the words. "I didn't receive anything."

  The three figures exchanged glances. One of them—the one who had spoken most—made a gesture Cade didn't recognize.

  "Probably a true fresh soul," it said. "That's... rare. Very rare. And at your size..." It trailed off, shaking its head. "We need to take you to the Coordinator. This is above our understanding."

  "The Coordinator," Cade repeated.

  "She handles all the newly spawned. Collects the messages, helps people reconnect with their loved ones from past lives. If anyone can make sense of you, it's her." The figure began walking, its tiny legs carrying it through the moss and moisture with practiced ease. "Follow us. And try not to step on anyone else. Some of us have been here a long time and wouldn't appreciate a random relocation."

  The words hit Cade like a slap, even though he didn't think they'd been meant cruelly. He looked down at Kern's body one more time—already, other small figures were emerging from nearby pools, going about their business, barely sparing the corpse a glance—and something cold settled in his stomach.

  He had killed someone, for no good reason.

  It didn't matter that they said the victim would come back. It didn't matter that they treated it like a minor inconvenience. He had ended an innocent life with his careless step, and he had felt something flow into him because of it. Power. Growth. Whatever this place's twisted system was, it had rewarded him for taking a life.

  Cade had spent years carefully considering every animal product he avoided, every choice he made to minimize harm. He had structured his entire diet, his entire lifestyle, around the principle that sentient life had value. That causing unnecessary suffering was wrong.

  And in his first moments in this new world, he had crushed someone underfoot.

  The tiny figures were already moving through the fungal forest, navigating paths between the massive stalks that Cade could barely see. He followed, stepping with exaggerated care now, hyperaware of every inch of ground beneath his feet.

  As they walked, he noticed more details. Clusters of smaller mushrooms growing in the shadows of the larger ones, their caps studded with colorful nodules. Narrow streams of water trickling downhill in narrow cracks—downhill toward what, he couldn't say, but the gradient was clear. The amount of water flowing underfoot brought forth a memory of the time he'd slid down the driveway all the way to the street while shoveling snow because his driveway was on a slope. This wasn't quite that steep. No risk of sliding down into the unknown... yet. Other tiny figures moved in the distance, going about tasks he couldn't identify—their skin colors a riot of variety: emerald green, deep crimson, pale lavender, burnt orange, some patterned.

  And all of them bald.

  Not just hairless on top—completely hairless. No eyebrows. No body hair visible on any of them. Smooth skin from head to toe, like dolls or mannequins, distinguished only by their varied colors and facial structures.

  Cade reached up to touch his own head, where the slime was still washing away in the misting rain.

  Nothing. Just smooth scalp where his short-cropped hair should have been.

  He glanced down at his arms. His legs. His chest.

  Bare. All of it. Not a single hair anywhere on his body.

  He'd arrived in this world naked in more ways than one, apparently.

  No one else seemed disturbed by his presence. A few glanced at him with curiosity—he supposed his size must be unusual, even accounting for whatever "tier" system they operated under—but no one screamed or fled. Life here, it seemed, went on.

  The mist thickened as they walked, and then, without warning, a wall of rain swept through. Not gradual. Not gentle. One moment the air was merely humid; the next, Cade was being pelted by droplets that moved sideways as much as down, driven by winds that seemed to shift direction every few seconds. At least it was washing the slime off, but that just made him feel more naked.

  The figures didn't even slow. They were already soaking wet from their emergence, and a little more rain apparently meant nothing to them. Cade ducked his head and pushed forward, watching the rain curve in ways that didn't make sense, as if the world itself was spinning fast enough to bend the path of falling water.

  As the slime sluiced away from his body, he heard whispers from his tiny guides below.

  "Look at his skin," one of them murmured to another. "It's not uniform. There are spots. Variations."

  "And those marks on his hand—did you see? Little dots, darker than the rest. Like something damaged him."

  "Damaged? Or diseased? I've never seen anything like it. The color itself is wrong—that pale pinkish tone. It looks... unfinished. Like the pool ran out of pigment halfway through."

  Cade couldn't make out their words clearly—they were too small, too far below him, their voices lost in the sound of rain. He had no idea they were cataloging every freckle, every mole, every slight variation in his skin tone as evidence of some profound wrongness. To him, his skin was just skin. He'd never thought twice about it.

  Then, as quickly as it had come, the rain turned into foggy light mist again.

  "We're here," the lead figure announced.

  They had arrived at a structure—the first Cade had seen that wasn't grown but built. It was constructed from what looked like hardened fungal material, shaped into walls and a roof, with an opening that served as a door. Beside the entrance stood a figure that was notably larger than the others, perhaps eight inches tall. Her skin was a deep indigo blue.

  "Coordinator," the small figure called out. "We have an... unusual case."

  The Coordinator emerged from her structure and looked up at Cade.

  Her eyes were the same large, dark pools as the others, but there was a sharpness in them that the newly spawned lacked.

  "Well," she said, her voice carrying despite her size. "That certainly is unusual."

  Cade felt her gaze move over him, assessing. He was acutely aware of his nakedness, his muscular frame—which apparently stood out here, where strength came from something other than physical training—and his sheer improbable height.

  "He absorbed Kern's anima," one of the small figures reported. "Grew from it. But look at his size. He spawned looking like a mid-tier, I think."

  "I saw the surge from here," the Coordinator said. Her eyes hadn't left Cade. "And I saw the pool that opened for him. It was... not normal. Nothing about this is normal." Her gaze lingered on his forearm, on the subtle variations in skin tone that Cade had never given a second thought to. "Come closer. Carefully. Let me see you."

  Cade knelt, bringing himself closer to her level. It felt absurd—he was still enormous compared to her, could have crushed her as easily as he'd crushed Kern—but something about her presence commanded respect.

  "No message," she said. It wasn't a question.

  "No."

  "And you don't remember your past lives."

  Cade hesitated. This was the moment, he knew. The moment where the lie would either hold or unravel. "I don't remember anything before the pool," he said carefully. It was true, in its way. He remembered everything before the pool—just nothing that would make sense to these people.

  The Coordinator studied him for a long moment. "A fresh soul," she finally said. "New to the cycle. It happens, from time to time. When a soul chooses oblivion or to migrate through the Labyrinth, another must take its place. But never like this. Never at this size, and never with a pool that behaves as yours did."

  "What was wrong with my pool?"

  "It was huge. Opened wrong. Sealed wrong. Felt wrong to be near." She shook her head. "The spawning pools connect to something deeper than we understand. They've functioned the same way since before recorded memory. For yours to behave differently... it suggests something unprecedented."

  Cade filed that information away. Unprecedented. Different. He was an anomaly here, and anomalies attracted attention.

  "What happens now?" he asked.

  "That depends on you." The Coordinator gestured at the misty landscape around them, at the endless fungal forest, at the clouds churning overhead. "This is the Outer Ring. The place where life is gentle. The pools spawn here because the pressure is light, the gravity is kind, and appropriate food grows freely for those who know where to look." She pointed at one of the nodule-studded mushrooms nearby, then glanced back at Cade's massive frame. "You... probably won't starve here. You won't be hunted. Most who dwell in the Outer Ring are tier-zero by choice—those who have decided that a simple life is preferable to the struggle of advancement. Their memories return immediately upon spawning, you see. No need to claw their way back up to whatever tier they reached before death. No pressure, no risk, no loss. Just an endless succession of gentle lives, each one remembered clearly from the start."

  "And the alternative?"

  "The alternative is to grow. To push toward the Lower Rings, where gravity crushes and heat burns and only the powerful survive." Her eyes were sharp. "You absorbed Kern's anima. You felt the surge. A third of the way to tier-one, from a single accidental killing. That's the way of it—power through death, growth through dominance, in one place or another. It's not a path everyone chooses, but it is the path to strength."

  Cade felt sick.

  "I didn't mean to kill him."

  "Intent rarely matters. The cycle cares only about action." The Coordinator's expression softened slightly. "Kern will return. His death was an inconvenience, not a tragedy. But I suspect you don't see it that way."

  "He was a person."

  "Yes." For the first time, something like approval flickered in her dark eyes. "He was. And he will be again. That's the nature of this world—death is not an ending, only a transition. But your reaction..." She tilted her head, studying him anew. "You grieve for a stranger you killed by accident, in a world where death is temporary. You're either very foolish or very interesting."

  Cade didn't know what to say to that.

  "There will be questions," the Coordinator continued. "About you. About your pool. About why a fresh soul spawned with the body of a warrior and the anima of a newborn. I will do what I can to manage the curiosity, but word travels. Even here in the Outer Ring, there are those who listen for unusual news."

  "What kind of those?"

  "The kind you should avoid, until you understand this world better." She turned toward her structure. "For now, rest. Eat. Learn to walk without killing anyone." The words were dry, not quite cruel but close. "Your muscles are strange—thick in ways I've never seen. It suggests you trained your body before your soul, which is backward but not unheard of. Combined with you being a newborn, though, that is unprecedented. You may find your physical strength is an advantage here, even at tier-zero."

  Cade looked down at his arms—bigger now than they had been an hour ago, scaled up by whatever growth surge he'd experienced. Years of training, of careful nutrition and progressive overload, written in the definition of his deltoids and the thickness of his forearms.

  Here, apparently, that was unusual.

  "One more thing," the Coordinator said, pausing at her door. "The anima you absorbed from Kern—you felt it, yes? The way it filled something empty inside you?"

  Cade nodded slowly.

  "That hunger will grow. It's part of what drives cultivators toward the Lower Rings, toward conflict and conquest. You'll feel the pull of it, the desire to absorb more, to grow stronger. How you respond to that hunger will determine what kind of being you become."

  She disappeared into her structure, leaving Cade standing alone in the mist.

  Around him, the tiny figures of the Outer Ring went about their lives. Some were tending the mushroom nodules. Others were building small structures or moving between the massive fungal stalks on errands he couldn't guess. A few newly spawned were emerging from pools in the distance, wiping slime from their eyes and orienting themselves to a world they'd known before—each one a different vivid color, like scattered gems against the gray-green moss.

  Cade was alone in a way none of them could understand.

  He looked down at his hands again—still his, still marked with the small evidences of the life he'd lived. The calluses. The triangle of birthmarks. The shape of his fingers. Everything else was different now: his size, his height.

  But his hands were still his.

  He clenched them into fists, feeling the strange lightness of the reduced gravity, the dampness of the perpetual mist, the faint pull of something inside him that whispered of hunger and growth and power.

  I need to understand this place, he thought. I need to understand the rules. And I need to figure out how I got here and whether there's any way back.

  But first, he needed to learn how to walk without killing anyone.

  He picked a direction—away from the Coordinator's structure, away from the pools where new souls were emerging—and began to move carefully through the fungal forest, one deliberately placed step at a time.

  He didn't get far before he noticed them.

  At first it was just one—a tiny figure trailing behind him at what it probably considered a safe distance, peering around fungal stalks whenever Cade glanced back. Then there were three. Then seven. By the time he'd walked for what felt like ten minutes, a small crowd of four-inch-tall people was following in his wake, whispering to each other in voices too quiet for him to catch. They were a rainbow of colors—coral pink, forest green, bright yellow, steel gray—every shade except anything resembling his own pale complexion.

  They were newly spawned, he realized. Fresh from the pools, still glistening with traces of slime, with no established lives in this area to return to. No loved ones waiting for reunion, no familiar paths to walk. Just curiosity, and a giant stranger who didn't fit any category they understood.

  Cade stopped walking. The crowd stopped too, freezing in place like children caught sneaking cookies.

  He considered telling them to go away. Considered that he didn't know where he was going anyway, that he had no plan beyond not stepping on anyone, that in a world this strange, maybe having witnesses wasn't the worst thing.

  He sighed—or rather, he let a sigh travel through his soul voice, the emotional content of exhaustion and frustration carrying without any actual exhalation. Strange how natural that had become. His body didn't breathe, but his communication could still convey all the small sounds that breathing used to provide. In any case, the sigh came with a renewed awareness of his nakedness

  Above him, the clouds churned in their eternal ceiling. Around him, the mist whispered against his skin. Behind him, tiny footsteps pattered through the moss, a growing parade of the curious and the rootless.