Chapter 145: Reentry
The white light eats everything.
It isn’t like entering Thirstfall. It’s the inverse. Reality is being vacuumed back into me 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 dimensions—translucent, no walls, no ceiling. Floating shelves with empty slots line the air in front of me. 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 filament locks into the slot, vitrified.
[Scales: 20,013 → 19,513]
Done...
The light swallows me again.
I wake up drowning.
Liquid invades my nose. My eyes. My lungs. Dense, freezing, with the bitter taste of medical 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 memory don’t exist yet.
I cough. Spit. My chest convulses, trying to expel the gel and pull air at the same time. My pressure spikes—I feel my heart hammering in my throat, in my eyes, in my fingertips.
Vision blacks out. Comes back and blacks out again.
Then hands grab me.
"He’s seizing—first diver fit!"
"Stabilize him." A man’s voice.
The voices arrive underwater. Someone rolls me onto my side. I vomit gel onto the white floor of the room.
More coughing. More gel. My diaphragm doesn’t remember 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 comes in like a blade, dry and hot.
Earth air.
It smells like nothing—dust, disinfectant, the absence of life. Thirstfall smelled of salt, blood, rotten wood, and OXI. Earth smells 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.
Some emergency immersion tank. Concrete bunker.
I’m still in Sub-level 50 of the District 4 Clinical Center. The same bunker I walked into weeks ago with ten minutes on the clock and a panicked technician at my elbow.
The nurses help me 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-metal box, the size of my hand. The WaterStrand is inside.
Even in this gray, dead bunker, the filament 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 fragment 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 come back.
Because each filament can call rain.
And... Each filament is worth a fortune...
And I’m holding a Rank C, the lowest grade, and even this turns the room silent.
"Containment 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 metal.
They hand me disposable clothing. Thin gray cotton pants. White shirt. I lace up my old, worn-out sneakers from a personal locker they gave me.
The elevator climbs without urgency. Different from the last descent.
Earth has no HUD, but if I close my eyes and concentrate, the timer 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 same. A line of people waiting on hydration vouchers.
Armed 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 come back with anything worth selling. Most come back with nothing.
A lot don’t even come back.
"WaterStrand. Rank C," I say to the cashier. I set the containment tube on the counter.
The man behind the bulletproof glass looks at the tube. Looks at me. 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, medicine, the side bills.
I take it.
He hands me 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 shimmers 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 time 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 metro—cheaper, and honestly, I’m tired of trains.
Fifteen minutes later I step off on our street. Each step on the hot pavement reminds me 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 come with us to Earth.
I reach the building. Third floor. The memory of arriving home once and finding my family dead still drops a chill into my spine.
I stop in front of the apartment door.
My hands are shaking but not from weakness.
The last time I saw my mother, I ran out to the clinic without saying goodbye. The last time 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.