Chapter 145: Reentry
The white light eats everything.
It isn’t like entering Thirstfall. It’s the inverse. Reality is being vacuud back into
instead of projected outward.
The armor goes first. I feel the Horizon dissolve off my skin like smoke being pulled into an exhaust fan.
Then the weight of Eventide on my hip.
Then the air.
Then the floor.
Before everything disappears, a space opens up.
No color. Just void. An antechamber between dinsions—translucent, no walls, no ceiling. Floating shelves with empty slots line the air in front of . Each slot tagged with runic the system auto-translates.
The user inventory. Mine.
[Item Transfer: Thirstfall -> Earth]
[Cost: Scales per unit of mass / rank]
I open my inventory. The WaterStrand sits there, glowing with that multicolor instability that shouldn’t exist outside of Thirstfall. I lift it onto a shelf. The system charges the toll—five hundred Scales—and the filant locks into the slot, vitrified.
[Scales: 20,013 → 19,513]
Done...
The light swallows
again.
I wake up drowning.
Liquid invades my nose. My eyes. My lungs. Dense, freezing, with the bitter taste of dical gel. A respirator is in my mouth, but now that I’m awake it’s misfiring.
I tear it out.
This body has never done this before. First reentry of this life. Ten years of muscle mory don’t exist yet.
I cough. Spit. My chest convulses, trying to expel the gel and pull air at the sa ti. My pressure spikes—I feel my heart hamring in my throat, in my eyes, in my fingertips.
Vision blacks out. Cos back and blacks out again.
Then hands grab .
"He’s seizing—first diver fit!"
"Stabilize him." A man’s voice.
The voices arrive underwater. Soone rolls
onto my side. I vomit gel onto the white floor of the room.
More coughing. More gel. My diaphragm doesn’t rember how to breathe without fighting first.
I know how this works. I went through it in my first life. Knowing doesn’t help when the body is new and the panic is biological.
"Slow breaths, kid. Slow."
I try.
The air cos in like a blade, dry and hot.
Earth air.
It slls like nothing—dust, disinfectant, the absence of life. Thirstfall slled of salt, blood, rotten wood, and OXI. Earth slls like plastic and old sweat.
The pressure starts to settle. Heart drops out of my throat and back into my chest. My vision clears.
I look around.
So ergency imrsion tank. Concrete bunker.
I’m still in Sub-level 50 of the District 4 Clinical Center. The sa bunker I walked into weeks ago with ten minutes on the clock and a panicked technician at my elbow.
The nurses help
out of the tank. My legs don’t fully respond—gelatin with bones inside. I brace on the rim. My whole skin is coated in translucent gel, dripping.
I drag myself out with the staff’s help and wrap a synthetic sheet around my shoulders.
When the shaking stops, I press the back of my right hand against a drawer just below the tank.
On the first dive, they implant a subcutaneous chip that doubles as the key to the quantum drawer holding your Thirstfall items.
The drawer slides open.
A surgical-tal box, the size of my hand. The WaterStrand is inside.
Even in this gray, dead bunker, the filant vibrates with impossible energy. It glows in colors that don’t exist in our world—blues, greens, golds folding into one another in a continuous pulsing flow.
It looks alive.
A psychedelic fragnt of another reality refusing to obey our physics.
The nurses stop moving. Their eyes track the colors.
Everyone on Earth knows what a WaterStrand is. It’s the reason Divers exist. It’s the reason they send us down and pray we co back.
Because each filant can call rain.
And... Each filant is worth a fortune...
And I’m holding a Rank C, the lowest grade, and even this turns the room silent.
"Containnt unit," I say.
A nurse runs out.
She’s back in thirty seconds with a cylindrical tube. I lower the WaterStrand inside. The tube seals with a pneumatic click. The colors disappear behind the opaque tal.
They hand
disposable clothing. Thin gray cotton pants. White shirt. I lace up my old, worn-out sneakers from a personal locker they gave .
The elevator climbs without urgency. Different from the last descent.
Earth has no HUD, but if I close my eyes and concentrate, the tir is still there.
[95:51:41]
Four days to leave one world of madness and step back into another that is dying slower.
The lobby of the Clinical Center is the sa. A line of people waiting on hydration vouchers.
Ard guards.
The heat pressing against the glass doors like an animal trying to break the air-conditioning.
I head to the trade window of District 4. The line is shorter here—few Divers co back with anything worth selling. Most co back with nothing.
A lot don’t even co back.
"WaterStrand. Rank C," I say to the cashier. I set the containnt tube on the counter.
The man behind the bulletproof glass looks at the tube. Looks at . Looks at the tube again.
"Five thousand GNC."
Five thousand...
Two months of expenses for Mom and Lili. Three if they ration. Rent, food, water, dicine, the side bills.
I take it.
He hands
a credit card, thin and short like a flash drive, loaded with the money.
I walk out into the street.
The sun is almost an assault. The asphalt shimrs with heat. The air ripples in mirage waves above the concrete. The trees lining the sidewalk are gray skeletons with leaves that gave up a long ti ago. A man pushes a water cart with empty yellow jugs, the plastic warped from heat.
Earth.
The planet that sent its children to die in another world’s ocean because it couldn’t manage its own water.
I take the bus instead of the tro—cheaper, and honestly, I’m tired of trains.
Fifteen minutes later I step off on our street. Each step on the hot pavent reminds
that this body is weak. Skinny. No Horizon, no Eventide, no OXI. Just bone and skin, beat-up sneakers, and five thousand credits on a magnetic card.
Even so, I’m stronger than most normal humans because the stats of Thirstfall co with us to Earth.
I reach the building. Third floor. The mory of arriving ho once and finding my family dead still drops a chill into my spine.
I stop in front of the apartnt door.
My hands are shaking but not from weakness.
The last ti I saw my mother, I ran out to the clinic without saying goodbye. The last ti I saw Lili, she was asleep in our mother’s lap.
I lift my hand. Close the fist. Open it. Trying to shake the tremor out.
Then I put the key in and open the door.
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