Looking down at the console, I was greeted with the details of my payout.

  REB CONTRACT SETTLEMENT

  Contractor: Ren

  [Accept Ren as True Name Y/N]

  Provisional Operation Group Tag: Champs-436

  Affiliation: Lower REB Custodian (Contractor)

  Contract Status: FAILED

  Dimensional Integrity: Terminal

  “How am I supposed to interpret the information?” I asked Aisling, who looked like she was in the middle of an existential crisis.

  She lifted her head and blinked, as if coming out of a daze.

  “Uhh, right, sorry. If you want to keep your name in the future, accept the true name prompt. I'm not sure how it works, but reality aligns itself with your name. In future worlds, you’ll always be given that name at birth,” she replied, with a sniff. Halfway through speaking, she switched to System Default, and I followed suit.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, recognizing her reaction. It was the expression of someone who just realized they were at a net loss after completing a job. With the result being that they couldn't feed themselves until they found more work.

  Did we have to feed ourselves? How did the Nexus work?

  I accepted the True Name prompt. It just felt easier for continuity’s sake if I kept the same name… wait, why was that important?

  “I’ll be fine. Don't worry about me. The next category is your Operation Group, which is our team. If you even still want to stay with us after that mess…” Aisling trailed off as her eyes drifted to the floor

  “Of course I’m sticking around… even if it might be more difficult since half the team doesn’t know who I am anymore. As long as they are okay with me being here, then I don’t plan on hopping to another team,” I said, leaving the fact that I had no interest in meeting a whole new group of people and trying to figure out their tempo unsaid.

  “Right, okay, then it lists the Contract Status, which should be obvious. I already concluded the Contract on my end, but we didn’t complete the objective, so we failed. As for the integrity of the dimension. The only reason it isn’t Null at the moment is that we closed the only overlap present. If we had any shot, we could still hop back in using another life… but we’ve already received our Emergency payout, there isn’t really another reason to attempt it,” Aisling explained, before letting out a sigh. “The next section is your earnings. You won’t receive anything there besides your onboarding credit. Unless you somehow completed a secondary objective without me noticing, which I find incredibly unlikely.”

  Looking down, she was right, I barely earned anything.

  EARNINGS

  Contract Completion Bonus: 0 Dust

  Emergency Contract Bonus: INELIGIBLE

  Secondary Clause Payouts Completed:

  [NONE]

  Dust Total: 3685

  ON-BOARDING CREDIT

  REB Sign-On Bonus: +5000 Dust

  Dust Total: 8685

  At least I’d be starting with more than I did when I first signed the Contract… and a full set of Stats already applied.

  “Then you should see a list of Assets you can purchase. The System logs everything you interact with while deployed. Items, species traits, magic frameworks, even roles you temporarily occupied. Most of it gets stripped when you leave a world, because those features are tied to local rules and you can’t take physical objects with you in death,” She hesitated, eyes flicking back to the screen before turning back to me. “Assets are the exceptions. Things you’ve formed a strong enough connection to, or systems you’ve internalized deeply enough, that the System can justify making them persistent. The stronger the bond, the less Dust making the connection permanent will cost.”

  “You know, I think that’s more words than I’d heard you speak in the entire time I’ve known you,” I said with a hum, meeting her eyes for the first time.

  She blushed and looked away, eliciting a huff of a laugh from me before I turned to look at what Assets I could buy with my limited funds.

  Asset Requisition Index

  Character Assets

  Name: Hu Xinyu

  System Description: An infoform temporarily assigned a role within the host’s theatre.

  Role Description: Hu Xinyu is playing a Twin-tailed Huli Jing, a fox spirit that, through cultivation, has gained a human form.

  Permanent Cost: 25000

  Weight: 2

  Yeah… that’s what I figured. She was far too valuable to be easily obtained permanently with her ability to sever karmic bonds. Assuming it could even be used outside of a country where anomalies were restricted to developing with traits from Taoist or Buddhist mythology. It depended on how versatile her ability actually was.

  We also didn’t have that close of a bond… I’d barely known her for a day before she died.

  Name: Aurin

  System Description: [Redacted]

  Role Description: [Redacted] Love Interest.

  Permanence Cost: 2000

  Weight: 1

  “Uhh, Aisling, is it normal for Assets to be redacted?” I asked. Was this because of the method she used to get onto my Stage?

  “Sometimes?” she said, rubbing at her sleeve. Her eyes were pointed at the table as if she were reading information from it. “If the System thinks the description itself would be hazardous. Usually, that means the Asset does something you’re not supposed to know how to recreate, or if the knowledge could break a world. Why, what is it redacting?”

  “Aurin’s… everything. Everything about her is redacted,” I replied, but I would purchase her anyway. There was no way I was going to let her go. But it would be nice to have information relating to her as an Asset just so we knew what she even was.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  -2000 Dust

  Dust: 6685

  Aisling said something, but I had already selected Aurin and wasn’t paying attention to her anymore.

  A chair appeared next to me, containing Aurin, who stared into space, glassy-eyed for a moment before breaking out of her trance and turning to me. A tear rolled down her face as her expression broke.

  “Ren… I’m sorry I saw, but I didn’t know—” she started.

  “Shhh, it’s okay. I’m okay,” I cut her off, wrapping myself around her and pulling her in close. “No harm done, and I’m still me.”

  “You died…” she mumbled into my hair.

  “And you sold your soul. I guess we’re both a little weird, and that’s fine,” I said, burying my face into her shoulder.

  “At least I still look the same,” she said before letting out a long breath and squeezing me.

  It took me a moment to process what she said, but when I did, I sat up straight, pulling myself from her arms and looked down at myself.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, my body looked the same… huh?

  Touching my chest, I realized there was nothing there, not that I possessed large assets in my past life, but there was at least something. Now I was flat as a board.

  “You’re… a little different,” she replied, then turned and noticed Aisling was sitting here with us and waved to her. Aisling kept her head down but raised a hand in acknowledgement.

  While I looked around the room, frustrated that there wasn’t a reflective surface in sight, a window appeared in front of me, offering a mirror for ten Dust.

  “God fucking damn it, fine!” I yelled into the room, then purchased the mirror.

  -10 Dust

  Dust: 6675

  Snatching it out of the air, I held it up to my face and immediately saw what Aurin was talking about. I looked incredibly androgynous to the point I couldn’t guess my own sex if someone put a gun to my head.

  Glancing down, I realized that was more literal than I thought. I was like a fucking Ken doll down there… no, that wasn’t quite right. It was more like I didn’t have anything at the moment, because whatever should have been there existed in superposition. The instant it was observed, the wavefunction would collapse, and my sex would be selected.

  I… didn’t really care? I’d never understood gender roles and didn’t have any attachment to my sex. It was just the meat sack I happened to be inhabiting. If I had been put in a different one, I wouldn’t care, besides the external effects that would be caused by switching my gender.

  It wasn't like I'd ever need to know Earth's gender roles ever again anyway.

  Given that I had given Aurin my own tastes, I knew she was absolutely still interested in me despite my current lack of gender.

  “I think I'm sitting somewhere between sexes at the moment. Is this a common occurrence?” I asked Aisling.

  “I have no idea. I’ve only ever met Vivi and Makesi in this state. We’re not actually inhabiting bodies right now; this is kind of just an expression of your soul being projected into a temporary space attached to Earth. Your Archetype is strongly influencing how you look since you don't have a species Asset,” Aisling explained. Now that I thought about it, she seemed a lot more verbose when explaining things to me than she was with other topics. Has she always been like this?

  “I thought this was the Nexus,” I said, only to realize I didn’t actually see an exit to the room we were in. Nor were there any windows.

  “No, we probably can’t even go back there. Vivi doesn’t have a backup Nexus body to possess after she lost her last one, and she doesn’t have enough Lives to burn one creating a new body,” Aisling said.

  “How the heck did Vivi lose her last body?”

  “You don’t want to know,” she replied with a groan.

  I was pretty sure I did, but I would accept that answer. For now. Maybe I could get Vivi to tell me… once she met me again and we reacquainted with each other.

  Letting out a sigh, I leaned on Aurin and talked about nothing with her while scrolling through the rest of the Assets I could buy.

  They were either too expensive, like the legs I had purchased and barely gotten any use out of before dying.

  Item Assets

  Name: Legs of the Travelling Lord

  System Description: A pair of anomalous doll legs that may be swapped with your own with a thought. The swap is instant and painless and may be reversed at any time.

  Item Description: A pair of legs defined by the authority that they carry. Designed to allow the user to traverse between destinations with ease. When the user is standing still, the weight of their role settles into the minds of nearby sapients.

  Permanence Cost: 7500

  Weight: 2

  “Why would I want to pay that much to keep an item? The cost doesn’t seem worth it, and it takes up a lot of weight by the looks of it,” I asked.

  Aisling shrugged softly.

  “It allows you to always have them with you, for one. Even if the Threshold State isn’t high enough to allow the weight of the purchase, you’ll see how much of an issue that can be on the next contract we take.

  “Local laws of physics also interfere with what kind of anomalies can be manifested on the spot. Maybe in one dimension you’ll be able to get certain types of items for a lot cheaper, but guns won’t exist, for example,” she replied, tapping her lip as she spoke. “Then there’s the fact that any Permanent Asset you own will upgrade over time with use.”

  That was interesting. It was a shame I could only afford two of the Permanent Item Assets.

  Name: Libidinal Signal Collar

  System Description: A jade penda…

  But I wouldn’t be wasting Weight on that.

  “Aww, I found it so much fun to play with you when you wore it, though,” Aurin whined while running her fingers along my arm.

  I resisted her feminine wiles… that I didn’t associate with having anymore? That was weird; my mind shouldn’t have shifted already unless I was under the influence of my Archetype.

  Name: Boots of the Monarch

  System Description: Boots that [Redacted] to replace your current footwear whenever you so desire.

  Item Description: [Redacted] will appear to be your other footwear to outside observers unless you choose otherwise [Redacted]|

  Permanence Cost: 0

  Weight: 0

  Then there were these.

  I chose them because why the fuck not? They were completely free. Hopefully, they will be unredacted someday. I really wanted to see what the fuck they actually did, if anything. My System seems insistent on me having them, so I might as well listen.

  Maybe they’d upgrade into something useful if I kept wearing them. Asking Aisling, she said that was entirely possible, but that they would probably start using Weight then.

  Species Assets

  Name: Human

  System Description: Error: NoInfo

  Permanence Cost: 1.564 x 10^16

  Weight: 50

  I’m not sure what I even expected. Were humans overpowered, or was I just so disconnected from being a human that the cost and weight were ridiculous? It didn’t really matter in the end. Even if I could, I wouldn’t choose to keep human characteristics. Not when the multiverse existed and likely contained a near infinite variety of species, it would be a joke to pick the most bland option.

  With that done, I opened up my Grade to check how much progress I had made towards the next one.

  Grade: 1 (4717/50000)

  I still needed so much Dust to get even close to the goal. But that was fine, it was all in a day’s work.

  “So what now?” I asked Aisling, who looked like she was also done, and was staring at the ceiling.

  “We wait until—”

  “Wait until what?” Vivi asked, suddenly seated between Aisling and me. “Actually, more important question. Who are those two?”

  I couldn’t stop myself from bursting out laughing. “Vivi, why do you look like a three-dimensional video game character?”

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