An Unbound Soul

We flew to the coordinates of the mana anomaly anyway; the messages Serlv received never explicitly mentioned portals, so it was possible it was something different. And if it had been a portal, it was possible someone came through and it closed immediately behind them. We needed to check it out.

The anomaly was located in a mountainous region north of the ark. The area was completely barren, and we found nothing there. If they'd sent through an unmanned, automated drone, it was possible it could have flown out of range. The same could be said about a manned aircraft. We could be fairly certain nothing came through on foot, though.

"I see nothing to suggest anything has happened here," rumbled Serlv after criss-crossing the landscape a few times.

"Mana density is lower than it should be, but only slightly," I answered. It looked like a portal had been sucking it up, but not all of it. I didn't have enough experience with portals to translate that to a timespan, beyond knowing it couldn't have been open long. My other senses, esoteric or mundane, picked up nothing whatsoever.

"Then we have little choice but to note this occurrence and wait for the next."

"Next time, start flying immediately, and I'll teleport in en route," I suggested. We could also bring someone with tracking skills, but I'd seen evidence back on Serpent Isle that they relied on System shenanigans to function, and thus may well be useless on anyone detached. Not to mention I had no clue what they'd make of an aircraft, manned or otherwise.

"Even that may not have been sufficient, but I shall try."

And there really wasn't much more to do than wait. I could ask Harry, but he wouldn't have magically gained new knowledge just because Serlv picked up a new mana anomaly. Gregory would have a slightly better chance, but it still seemed unlikely that he'd have gained information between our last communication a couple of hours ago and now, only minutes after the anomaly. Better to wait.

Although I should at least inform Harry, even if I didn't expect him to offer new information. He hated me enough already, so anything to earn extra points would be worthwhile.

"I'll teleport back to Dawnhold then and let the other Earth humans know what just happened."

Serlv grunted an affirmative, so I teleported away from her back, leaving behind my finger, which she deftly caught as it fell off. A few minutes was all it took to get from home to the institute.

"Now what?" grumbled Harry, unhappy to see me again so soon.

"Someone just tried to open a portal. We think. It didn't last anywhere near as long as yours, and had closed by the time we reached it."

Harry and his colleagues stared in disbelief.

"That's impossible," flatly said Abigail. "There is no way they could have built something from scratch by now."

"She's right," agreed Calvin. "Even if the four of us were helping, with all our previously collected data at our fingertips, we couldn't have been close to functional yet."

Cara nodded her own affirmation. While Harry, I noted, was wearing a complicated frown.

"You have a different opinion?" I asked.

"No. They're right. It would be completely impossible to build functional equipment from scratch by now, no matter the resources that were poured into it. There's an upper limit to how fast it can be calibrated."

The frown remained.

"So you suspect it wasn't 'from scratch' then?" I guessed.

The frown deepened.

"What?" exclaimed Calvin. "If anyone represented on that island had prior knowledge, they hid it damn well."

"I haven't heard from or seen Maximilian since first contact."

"Oh," said Calvin.

"Who the heck is Maximilian?" I asked.

Harry remained silent, so I looked at the others, who had sprouted thoughtful frowns of their own, apparently working their way through the implications of someone vanishing. Another one of the researchers? Who had jumped ship the moment my hand crawled through their portal? He'd been helping someone else build a portal since then?

"The guy who funded our portal research," answered Abigail after a period of silence.

"How much of our research did he have?" asked Cara.

"All of it. He had read-only access to all our servers. But he used to ask me about progress at each of our meetings, so I'd assumed he'd never used it."

"You think he's been building a portal generator of his own?"

"I... honestly have no idea what to make of him. Well, you should know; you've met him. Eccentric doesn't begin to describe it."

"Someone specific was funding your research?" I interjected. "It wasn't publicly funded or some corporate longshot?"

"Heck no," answered Calvin. "Who would pay people to fire lasers at other lasers? It started before my time, and took a couple of decades for anyone to realise it was a viable method of power generation. Until then, it was just... well, fun."

Paying them to do something they all thought was pointless?

"So... he was deliberately leading you into building a portal generator?"

Three faces frowned again as they considered it. One didn't.

"I admit... that I've had thoughts along that line," said Harry, slowly.

"Wait, what? So there was someone on Earth who knew about this world, and who spent decades waiting for you to build a portal generator here? And now he's nicked your design?"

"It's not theft; contractually, he owns all rights," said Harry, which wasn't really the point.

"But how did he know?!"

Harry shrugged.

"Ugh... This keeps getting more complicated. So now we have yet another player on the scene? And what are his goals?"

"No idea. He once told me he was born to grow lilies. Make of that what you will."

Oh, so it was that sort of eccentric. The sort of person who only avoided labels involving bat excrement by being too rich for them to apply.

Was it someone from this world? A reincarnate in reverse? That wouldn't make sense, though; someone reincarnating from here would have no idea how to build portals. Unless he was from the previous civilization? But he'd have been reborn as a human on Earth, and would have died of old age long ago. It could be someone who crossed over in body, rather than soul, to avoid the war, but even then, he'd surely have died of old age by now. Or there could have been a time lag between death and rebirth. Too many options, and no evidence to decide between them.

Was he from somewhere else? I already had suspicions about the beastkin progenitor. How many worlds were there, floating around right next to each other? Perhaps he'd reincarnated from another, more technologically advanced world, and was trying to get back there? In which case, coming out here would be a mistake, so why would he keep trying?

"Has anyone mentioned the beastkin progenitor to you?"

"The what? Like, the first of the beastkin?"

"Exactly. There's a statue of her in the Emerald Nest. A catkin. Supposedly, she decided that humans sucked and so she didn't want to be one anymore."

"Huh? If you're trying to justify your behaviour, this is an odd time to pick."

"Not at all. I'm pointing out that she's catkin. And that this world has no (cats)."

Harry paused, opened his mouth to speak, then paused again.

"So?" asked Calvin. "Yes, the catkin I've seen have (cat)-like ears and tails, but they aren't literally (cats). The appearance could easily be coincidence."

"When I was first born, my status appeared in English. All beastkin were called after Earth animals, not just catkin. It could be coincidence, and the System just used names that were familiar to me, but it's one hell of a big one if so."

"You think she came from Earth, and used magic like you do to change herself?" asked Abigail.

That was actually an option I hadn't considered, but I supposed it made sense. Although given how old she was... Or perhaps that didn't make any difference? As a well-known example, ancient Egyptians worshipped cats, so it wouldn't be strange for one of them to want to be one. But what about the other beastkin subspecies?

"I suppose that's possible, although this would have been thousands of years ago. But I was thinking that since humans exist on two worlds, why not more? There could be an entire multiverse out there."

"No, Maximilian getting stranded and wanting to find a way home doesn't make sense," said Harry carefully. "He's too patient. He's waited decades for us to build a stable portal, never pressuring us for progress. If he had a home to get back to, I'd expect him to be more pushy. And... it is plausible there's another, more technologically advanced world out there."

"It is?"

"When you left your hand behind the first time, we ran its DNA. The results indicated that our ancestors had interbred, somewhere of the order of ten-thousand years ago."

"Woah... That's one hell of a bombshell. So you think that ten-thousand years ago, a bunch of planets got seeded with humans?"

If it was deliberate, why would the colonies be abandoned and regress technologically? Could it have been an accident? Darren said us and Earth were really close, but did that distance change over time? Could we drift further away, or, perhaps, collide?

But, while I didn't know much about DNA testing, there was one question that sprung to mind.

"Could you really get that from a single DNA sample? Don't you need a range of samples to get any certainty?"

"No, one was enough," he replied, but [Mana Sight] showed his heart rate had jumped.

"You did have more than one. All those goods we passed through the portal had been handled by others. You could easily get skin and sweat off them... And some of the early stuff was handled by Vargalas. Did you test his elvish DNA? Stupid question, of course you would have."

"We tried. Our equipment failed to process it. The researchers think he had non-standard base pairs, which would make elves truly alien."

"Then we're back to coincidence, because they look pretty damn human, pointy ears aside."

Harry shrugged.

I'd come here just to inform them of the suspected portal, not expecting any new information, but ended up finding out that humans here and on Earth were related and that there were potentially other populated worlds out there. That explained why the System picked up Earth humans as a proper human sub-species, but what was I supposed to do with a suspicion about other worlds?

Particularly if it was true that the latest portal attempt came from someone who wasn't a native of here or Earth. Just how much more complicated could things get? We had an ever-expanding number of questions, and no answers for any of them.

"Maybe it would be worth sending a range of blood samples next time we open a portal, from all the races."

"You want to deliberately give us DNA to test? And we might be interested, but it's not like we can send samples to any lab, nor can we present this at an anthropology conference just yet. I can't promise anything."

"I'm as interested in the answers as you are. And it might have relevance to the motivations of this Maximilian of yours."

Assuming it really was him. All we knew was that someone had tried to open a portal long before these four thought was possible. While they were the foremost interdimensional portal experts in either world, and they were probably correct, it wasn't guaranteed. Perhaps someone had stolen working parts from the island. Heck, if Maximilian had some secret purpose, why assume he was only funding a single lab? There could have been any number of them, each being led to tunnel to a different world.

"There's no harm in asking. Perhaps we should shift the date for the next... Peter?"

"Hey, are you okay?" asked Abigail.

I was, but someone was prodding a detached beacon again, and it didn't take long to work out who. "Serlvrenalliacta is calling," I informed them, dropping to the floor and activating [Redistribute]. From the way she was already flying through the air, it seemed that whoever produced the latest portal was operating on a far more rapid schedule than one per week.