With Lena at his side, the market becomes—if not hospitable—then at least marginally less predatory—less spiritual meat grinder, more curated trauma safari. Gone are the vendors who, moments ago, sniffed him out like spiritual bloodhounds scenting a first-time buyer with more ambition than assets. Now those same merchants smile and bow like domesticated alley cats, purring with deference under Lena’s cool gaze.

  Divine Favor, if inherited, comes with better perks than Enlightenment.

  What Aster expects to be a bartering war—complete with emotional blackmail, price obfuscation, and at least one attempted soul appraisal—is over in under an hour. No screaming. No curses. No one even tries to sell him ancestral forgiveness on a subscription model.

  It’s suspicious. Offensive, even.

  He feels like someone has replaced his training arc with a sponsored speedrun.

  Lena moves like she’s doing grocery shopping at a war memorial—breezy, unbothered, and just a touch disrespectful to the weight of the occasion. She flicks through his shopping list with one hand and cherry-picks Astral materials with the other, passing them to Aster with practiced grace.

  “Here,” she says, not breaking stride.

  Aster absorbs each item into his Stomach Palace with theatrical nonchalance—Will flaring, interface flickering, posture straightening like he’s channeling divine authority instead of doing basic inventory management.

  By the fourth item, his chest is puffed out like a peacock that has discovered capitalism. By the fifth, Musa and Lena exchange a silent glance that says, should we tell him this is the magical equivalent of learning to use a USB port?

  They don’t. Mercy, it turns out, isn’t just a Material Plane trait.

  “There,” Lena says, handing off the final item with a wink. “All done. No hidden clauses. No posthumous payment schedules. Just the essentials.”

  Aster turns it over in his palm, impressed. “Honestly thought I’d have to fight someone for at least one of these.”

  “You still might,” she says brightly. “But I pre-ordered. Family advisor owes me a favor.”

  Aster deadpans. “Ah. The ancient rite of I Know a Guy. A sacred art passed down through generations of people who’ve never had to stand in line.”

  “Exactly,” she says, grinning.

  He gives a genuine nod, his bravado finally cracking into sincerity. “Thanks, Lena. Really. I’d have ended up soul-bonded to a cursed coupon booklet without you.”

  Her smile softens. “Well, you did get soul-bonded to a cursed NII, but that wasn’t under my watch,” she laughs.

  Her tone softens further.

  “I also needed the same help when I first got here. Only difference is, I had family. You don’t. So… I figured I’d be that for you.”

  The words slip out like she hadn’t meant to say them. Her expression glitches—half vulnerability, half abort. She turns too quickly. “Anyway. Time to head back. Our material bodies aren’t going to reinhabit themselves.”

  Aster doesn’t reply. He follows in silence, something warm blooming in his chest cavity where existential dread usually sets up camp.

  They drift through the thinning market, past the remnants of organized chaos. The crowd has settled into a lull, like the realm itself is exhaling after a day of extorting newcomers. Golden light filters through canopies of rune-threaded cloth. Vendors pack away their bottled regrets and ethically sourced nightmares. Somewhere, a child barters for a tooth that grants anxiety.

  Aster’s body aches like he’s been politely mauled. Not pain, exactly—just the psychic soreness of someone who has emotionally cartwheeled through four career changes and a minor possession.

  His mind, however, is static. Not calm. Not clear. Just... buffering.

  Matter is gone. The sealing has happened. A ritual has turned his brain into shared tenancy with a void wyrm and a flirtatious zoological ghost. He’s survived a market designed like a psychological escape room run by loan sharks, enrolled in Astral University, and gotten spiritually negged by an item with an orgasm tab.

  And still—it doesn’t feel real.

  “You still look like you’re trying to remember your own name,” Lena says, nudging him with her shoulder.

  Aster blinks. “That obvious?”

  “You’re walking like someone just explained emotions using a spreadsheet.”

  He runs a hand through his hair. “Everything hurts and nothing makes sense.”

  Lena laughs. “You’ll adjust.”

  “Will I?”

  She doesn’t answer. Just walks beside him, quiet and present.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  He exhales. “Feels like I’ve been here for weeks.”

  Lena laughs, soft and warm. “Time moves weird when everything’s new. You’ll adjust.”

  Maybe. Maybe not. The idea of normal feels more fictional by the hour. But he doesn’t say that. Just nods and lets the quiet return between them.

  As the academy comes back into view, its towers rising like monoliths out of the waking dream of the market, Aster feels a weird tug of nostalgia for a place he’s only just started calling his own. The gates stand wide and waiting. The mirror shimmers nearby, the path back to his Material Vessel pulsing faintly with the promise of gravity and exhaustion.

  He stops a few paces from it, turning to look back one last time.

  Behind him, the market buzzes on. Vendors hawking bottled emotions. Caged beasts with glowing eyes. Soul-loans with interest rates high enough to reincarnate into debt. It’s all there, shimmering and surreal.

  And ahead—school.

  Structure. Routine. Danger packaged as opportunity.

  He’s not sure what he’s signed up for.

  But he knows this much: the story is his now.

  And it’s only getting started.

  Waking up is, for once, the easy part.

  Aster opens his eyes to the grey-washed ceiling of the real world, blinking slowly as the damp cotton of the Material Plane settles back over his senses. The colors here are duller, the air heavier, like someone has swapped out reality for an old VHS tape with bad contrast. No celestial grandeur. No soul-rattling pressure. Just dust, stillness, and the faint hum of city life leaking in through the windows.

  He exhales through his nose. The Astral Plane is gone, and with it, the kaleidoscopic chaos that has somehow become his new baseline. Now all he has left is gravity. And guilt.

  Matter is dead. And that fact, sharp and simple, presses against his chest like a boot that won’t lift. It doesn’t make sense—not just the death, but the whole self-sacrificing ritual bit. Aster had barely known the man. A few cryptic visions, a handful of wry exchanges, and then boom—a divine napalm of intention, carving a parasite into his soul and a crater into his memory.

  He stays still for a moment, hoping the ache in his chest will turn out to be a dream too. It doesn’t.

  The worst part is how rested he feels.

  His body—the traitorous meat husk—has been comfortably comatose for over twenty-four hours while his astral self went on a spiritual acid trip, and now it’s stretching and realigning like it’s just come back from a spa weekend. The joints pop, the spine cracks, the limbs creak back into function—functional being a generous term.

  With a groan that feels more emotional than physical, Aster swings his legs off the chair and stands. His knees protest, but not enough to win the argument.

  His stomach growls like he hasn’t eaten for a month. Remembering that his final exchange with Matter happened just over twenty-four hours ago, he realizes he hasn’t eaten since Matter first told him to start fasting over two weeks ago.

  He’s starving.

  Breakfast. Coffee. Maybe after that, some kind of psychological processing—but only if there’s time.

  He descends the narrow stairs from the attic like a ghost in reverse, each creaking floorboard a reminder that this is real, that this is the world he’s tethered to again. The kitchen greets him with the familiar scent of dust and cheap detergent, and he begins pulling ingredients from the fridge in a daze. Eggs. Cheese. Tomatoes. Onions. The holy quadrinity of not entirely hating your life.

  The coffee machine wheezes to life like it, too, resents being awake.

  As the omelet sizzles and the cappuccino gurgles to completion, Aster finds himself struck by how deeply surreal it is that after spending what amounts to a metaphysical eternity battling eldritch bureaucracy and being introduced to installable psychosis, his biggest triumph of the morning is not burning his breakfast.

  With plate and mug in hand, he returns to the rooftop—the same spot where, not long ago, the world had ended and begun again in the same breath. The city sprawls out below him in its usual organized indifference: concrete veins, steel bones, glass teeth. It’s rigid. Predictable. Dead in all the ways the Astral Plane was not.

  He eats slowly, watching the skyline. No floating islands. No cosmic fauna. Just a flock of pigeons that seem aggressively underwhelming in comparison.

  By the time he drains the last of his cappuccino, it’s ten a.m. He has a whole day to kill before class at 6:30 p.m. back in Galamad. Plenty of time to spiral. Or not.

  The house behind him looms like a mausoleum. Every corner still holds the ghost of Matter, the faint hum of intention that hasn’t yet faded from the walls. Aster didn’t know the man well, but that hasn’t stopped the grief from crawling under his skin like a virus with good posture.

  He can already feel the thoughts coiling inside him, sharpening their claws: You could’ve saved him. You should’ve asked more questions. He died because you existed.

  No.

  No, not today.

  He stands abruptly, brushing off crumbs and melancholy in equal measure. He won’t spend the next eight hours spiraling in place like a dying top. There’s too much coming—too many uncertainties ahead—to waste the day wallowing in regret he can’t fix.

  He’s been stuck inside 7 Heart Lane for the past three weeks now, and he needs movement. Noise. Distraction. Something louder than his own thoughts.

  Matter told him the Wyrm Eaters would stop hunting him after he completed the ritual. Time to put that to the test.

  And so, with the weight of the city pressing down from above and the silence of the dead whispering from below, Aster shoves his hands in his pockets and steps out into the day.