Jace stared at the cascading lines of text, his mouth suddenly dry.
"Okay," he muttered, "this… this is new. And not in a good way."
"Is this… a character sheet?" Jace muttered, squinting at the floating display. "Am I actually supposed to make sense of this?"
The words blurred together—attributes, essences, progression—all familiar enough terms, yet strange when thrown at him like some bureaucratic checklist of existence. He rubbed at his temple, shaking his head in disbelief.
"At the very least," he grumbled, "it could've picked a game system I actually know. Maybe something with skill trees, or at least a stat spread I can recognize."
Still, his eyes drifted back to the glowing text. One word stood out.
"Map," he read aloud, as if trying to anchor himself with something familiar. "Okay. I know what a map is. How do I—"
A new screen blinked into existence in front of him, as if responding to his voice. Now there were three overlapping panes, all vying for space in the air. Jace leaned back instinctively, trying not to drown in windows.
"Bit crowded," he muttered. Then, half on a whim, he thought: Close the others.
The moment the thought formed, the extra screens winked out of existence, leaving only the map. Jace's stomach tightened.
"That… I'm sure that's good."
It was getting harder and harder to rationalize. A voice-activated hologram? Possible, maybe. Some kind of advanced AR headset he hadn't noticed? Unlikely, but within the realm of science fiction. But thought-responsive windows? That was something else entirely.
Jace rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly aware of how often he was talking out loud. "I'm becoming… increasingly concerned. Also, yeah, I'm definitely narrating to myself more than usual. Totally fine. Definitely not a coping mechanism to keep the panic at bay."
Against his better judgement, he started testing the system. With little more than a thought, he could summon and dismiss the screens at will, like an omniscient desktop UI lodged in his brain. Open. Close. Swap. Easy. Too easy.
"Maybe you're unconscious," he told himself, clinging to the most comforting explanation he could muster. "Maybe this is a coma-dream. Or a brain tumor. Yeah, maybe you're in a hospital bed right now, hooked up to machines. Or…" His voice dropped to a whisper. "Passed out on the ground, hallucinating in an asylum. A nice one. Big gardens. Friendly staff. No hedge maze."
He groaned, squeezing his eyes shut. "Fantastic. This is how I comfort myself? Really?"
A long breath in. A long breath out. He forced himself to reopen his eyes. The map screen was still there, floating, waiting, patient as ever.
"Fine," he sighed. "Go with it for now. Suspend judgment. Gather data. That's rational. That's safe."
He focused on the hovering map. It looked exactly like something ripped straight from a video game: bold outlines, stylized terrain, and a blinking marker to show his location. There was even a neat little sidebar with a location list, as though someone had prepared a digital tourist guide to whatever bizarre world he'd woken up in.
Zone: Vane Estate (Hedge Maze).
The title hovered at the top of the display in crisp lettering. Like the minimap of a video game, most of it was shrouded in fog, with only a tiny sliver revealed—the section of the hedge maze Jace had already stumbled through.
Curiosity pricked at him. He willed the map to shift, and it obeyed, gliding smoothly beneath his mental touch. He zoomed in, zoomed out, rotated, panned. The interface was seamless, responsive in a way that no software he had ever used could match.
When he pulled back far enough, the hedge maze dissolved into insignificance, and the display widened into a full world map. Jace's breath caught.
It was both familiar and alien. He could make out the rough outlines of continents, but they weren't quite right. Subtle differences piled up until the world became unrecognizable.
South East Asia had collapsed into a single massive landmass, swollen and fused, nudging Australia south and east until it seemed to have devoured New Zealand. Entire peninsulas were missing—the Iberian and Arabian gone as if history itself had erased them—leaving Africa an isolated giant cut adrift from the rest of the Old World. Sri Lanka had swollen grotesquely, stretched southward into an island-continent squatting in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Jace frowned at the display, a tight laugh bubbling out of him. "Well, that's not what the world looks like. Poor cartography? Or some kind of knock-off planet?"
The map marker placed him in southwest Africa—Namibia, if this map could be trusted. Jace glanced at his surroundings, the lush hedges pressing in on either side, the grass beneath his bare feet soft and cool. The air was hot but thick with moisture, almost tropical.
"This sure as hell doesn't feel like the Kalahari Desert," he muttered.
He dismissed the map with a weary sigh. The screen winked out of existence, leaving him once more alone with the inexplicable.
"This is… some very strange business."
Almost by reflex, he summoned his character sheet again. The familiar lines of text appeared, stark against the air:
Racial Abilities — Outworlder
[Interface]
[Quest System]
[Inventory]
[Map]
[Astral Affinity]
[Mysterious Stranger]
Jace stared at the list, the last entry prickling uncomfortably at the back of his mind. Mysterious Stranger. It was the kind of thing that would get you killed in a game—or worse, recruited.
"Yeah," he muttered. "That's reassuring."
"Shouldn't my race be… human?" Jace muttered, squinting at the glowing words. "What the hell is an Outworlder supposed to be?"
He half expected the system to answer, to pop up another smug screen and spell it out for him. Nothing happened. Just the same silent list, waiting.
"Fine," he sighed, dragging his eyes down the abilities. "Interface. Sure, that's obvious. Quest System, makes sense given the nonsense so far. Inventory?"
The word triggered a response. A new window bloomed into the air, filling most of his vision. It was a grid, five spaces tall and eight wide, forty empty slots in total. At the bottom sat six stylized coins, each with a neat little counter—every one of them displaying a very depressing zero.
Jace arched an eyebrow. "Well, that's… certainly a classic RPG inventory. Nice and barebones. No doubt designed to remind me I own absolutely nothing."
His eyes snagged on the one occupied square in the upper left corner. A tiny crimson icon glowed there, sharp against the emptiness.
"Okay," Jace murmured. "One slot filled. Time to find out just how crazy I really am."
He reached out. At first he tried tapping, then dragging, but eventually—almost by instinct—he simply plucked the icon out of the glowing screen. The symbol winked out of existence, and in his palm materialized a solid object with the weight and warmth of something undeniably real.
Jace blinked. "Right. Because that's normal."
The object was a medallion, broad as his palm, smooth and cool like polished red marble. Golden engravings laced both sides, catching the light in elegant, curling designs. It was warm in a way stone shouldn't be, almost alive, as though faint heat pulsed through it with each beat of his heart.
On one side was a beautifully carved image of a firebird, wings outstretched in eternal flight. On the other, a line of symbols shimmered faintly, as if written in molten gold.
Authority of the World Phoenix.
Jace swallowed, his fingers tightening around the medallion. "That just… appeared out of thin air." He gave a brittle laugh. "That's definitely not possible. And… wait a second. Why can I read this? I don't even know the language. I never even managed Japanese properly."
The thought of his father surfaced unbidden. Ken Asano, born in Japan but raised in Australia almost from the cradle, had long since traded his heritage for beer gardens, footy matches, and the holy rite of weekend barbecues. He'd embraced the culture so thoroughly that Jace's mother's family—miners, farmers, bushrangers' descendants, convicts turned settlers, and threads of indigenous blood woven through generations—accepted him without question.
Jace snorted quietly. "Yeah, Dad made sure I was as Aussie as meat pies and bad cricket commentary. Language lessons? Not exactly top priority."
Yet here he was, holding an impossible medallion inscribed with words he shouldn't be able to understand, in a world with two moons and maps that didn't line up with reality.
"Yep," he muttered, staring at the firebird's gleaming wings. "I'm officially losing it."
Ironically, it had been Cheryl—his thoroughly Australian mother—who carried the torch for Japanese culture in their household. She was the one who bought the language books, introduced the food, and tried to nudge her children toward their father's heritage. Despite enthusiastic support from Jace's grandmother, the results were… inconsistent at best. Jace could say konnichiwa without mangling it, but that was about where his fluency ended.
Now he found himself staring at an artifact inscribed in a script he shouldn't have been able to decipher, as if the universe itself was mocking his childhood indifference.
With a cautious breath, Jace decided to see if he could reverse the process. He held the medallion out toward the glowing grid and awkwardly tried to push it against the screen. To his astonishment, it worked. The moment it touched the display, the object vanished from his hands with a ripple of light, reappearing neatly as the same red icon in the corner of the inventory.
He blinked. "That's… disconcerting."
Each new revelation gnawed at the edges of his sanity. The floating screens had been strange enough, but at least he could imagine some high-tech explanation, hidden projectors, AR illusions, something. But the thought-controlled interface had rattled him, and conjuring objects from nothingness? That was something else entirely.