Chapter One
I Think Something Went Wrong
The 18:42 from King’s Cross ran four minutes late, which James Kingsley considered deeply appropriate given the general trajectory of his life.
He had a window seat — not by luck, by the particular science of boarding early and claiming it with the practiced ease of someone who had nowhere urgent to be and no one waiting. Outside, London dissolved into the grey smear of North London suburbs, terraced houses bleeding past like watercolour left in rain. Someone two rows back was eating a pasty. The smell of it, hot meat and pastry grease, drifted over him with the persistence of something that knew it wasn’t welcome.
James did not look up from his phone.
The novel he was reading — Reborn as the Demon King’s Butler, Volume 11 — had just reached the part where the protagonist, one Haruto Yamamoto (naturally), discovered that his [Infinite Growth] skill had somehow retroactively rewritten the laws of his new world’s magic system. James’s thumb hovered over the screen. He’d read three series like this in the past month. Four if he counted the one he’d abandoned after the harem hit double digits.
Wish fulfillment dressed up as consequence, he thought, not unkindly. But at least Haruto has somewhere to be.
He locked the screen. Stared at his own reflection in the black glass — sharp jaw, dark circles, the faint suggestion of someone who’d been handsome enough to make it inconvenient. The kind of face that got him second looks on the Tube and then nothing, because he reliably failed to follow through. His dark hair needed cutting. His blazer, secondhand, needed pressing. His life, to be honest, needed something, but he hadn’t worked out what that something was and he’d largely stopped losing sleep over it.
Twenty-two years old. No family. No flat of his own — the university accommodation agreement expired in eleven days. An undergraduate degree in History that he had completed with a 2:1 and the emotional investment of a man ticking boxes.
He picked up his phone again.
The novel was still there. Haruto was mid-monologue. James’s thumb moved to scroll and then —
The notification appeared.
Not on his phone. Not on the carriage’s overhead display. Not anywhere that belonged to the physical fabric of the world. It hovered roughly thirty centimeters in front of his face, luminous and faintly blue-white, like something had punched a small clean hole in the air and decided to put text in it.
◈ SYSTEM NOTIFICATION ◈
Candidate Profile: JAMES KINGSLEY
Soul Resonance: EXCEPTIONAL [RARE VARIANT]
Compatibility: World of Arcania — 99.7%
An irregular soul has been identified.
Arcania requires a soul of extraordinary
mana potential. Yours qualifies.
Do you wish to accept transit?
[ YES ] [ NO ]James looked at it.
He looked around the carriage — the woman across the aisle was scrolling through Instagram with the hollow fixation of someone who had stopped processing what she was seeing twenty minutes ago. The man in the aisle seat was asleep, chin to chest, a copy of the Evening Standard creasing under his elbow. The pasty smell had intensified.
No one else was looking at a glowing menu box in the middle of the air.
He looked back at it.
Ninety-nine point seven percent. Part of him was offended it wasn’t a hundred.
He tilted his head. The box tilted with him, anchored to his perspective rather than to space, which was either reassuring or deeply alarming depending on how you approached it. He’d read enough isekai to know exactly what this was. He’d also read enough of them to know that knowing what it was didn’t actually tell him anything about what came next. The genre had a distressing variance in outcomes. Some protagonists landed in palaces. Some landed in dungeons. One memorable fellow had landed inside a slime.
Soul compatibility, the notification had said. Mana potential.
He thought about the hostel he was going back to. He thought about the job listings he hadn’t opened. He thought about the history dissertation that had taken eight months and been read, as far as he could tell, by himself, his supervisor, and possibly no one else.
James Kingsley pressed YES.
The last thing he registered was the pasty smell, which felt like an indignity.
The field came at him all at once — not a transition, not a slow fade-in, but an abrupt arrival, the kind that knocked all the air from his lungs and deposited him on his knees in tall grass before his brain had finished processing that he was no longer on a train. His palms hit earth. Real earth — dense and slightly damp, fragrant with something green and vegetal he had no name for. The grass was up to his mid-chest and the individual blades were the wrong shade, not the tired grey-green of English fields but something richer, almost blue-tinted, like grass that had never heard of pollution.
He stayed on his knees for a moment.
“Right,” he said, to no one.
He stood. His phone was still in his hand, which seemed like a deeply petty thing to have survived the transit. He checked it out of reflex — no signal, battery at 43%, the novel still open on page 847. Of course.
The sky above him was enormous in the way skies only got when there was nothing to interrupt them, a vault of deep amber and violet that suggested early evening, though the angle of the light was wrong for anything he’d experienced in Britain. Two moons hung low on the horizon — one large and pale, washed in silver, the other smaller and distinctly red, like a bloodshot eye. They were both visible despite the lingering daylight, which he filed under things that would require some adjustment.
Somewhere behind him, a bird called — three sharp descending notes, nothing like a wood pigeon, nothing like anything. The grass moved in the wind with a sound like distant whispering.
In the near distance, perhaps a kilometre across the field, a cluster of structures rose above the tree line. Stone walls. A squat tower with a pennant he couldn’t resolve at this distance. The silhouette of something that had once, in a different context, been called a market town.
Small kingdom, he thought. Reasonable starting area. Not a dungeon, not a slime. Good sign.
He exhaled slowly. The air tasted clean in a way that made the inside of his nose feel scrubbed — no exhaust, no damp concrete, no Central Line. Just green and earth and the faint mineral coolness of somewhere that had never been industrialised.
Then the second notification appeared.
◈ ARCANIA SYSTEM ◈
WELCOME, TRAVELLER
A soul has been received from beyond.
The System recognises your existence.
Your Status Screen has been initialised.
Would you like to view your Status?
[ VIEW STATUS ]“Obviously,” James said.
The screen bloomed open.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ STATUS SCREEN ║
║ [ SYSTEM REGISTRY: ACTIVE ] ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ Name : James Kingsley ║
║ Age : 22 ║
║ Race : Human (Otherworlder) ║
║ Class : Unassigned ║
║ Level : 1 ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ ATTRIBUTES ║
║ Strength : 9 ║
║ Agility : 11 ║
║ Endurance : 10 ║
║ Intelligence : 17 ║
║ Perception : 14 ║
║ Charisma : 15 ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ MANA : ∞ [UNCLASSIFIED] ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ SKILLS : None ║
║ TITLES : [Otherworlder] ║
║ [Soul of Irregular Type] ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════╝He read it once.
He read the mana line again.
The infinity symbol sat there with the serene indifference of mathematics, flanked by the word UNCLASSIFIED in brackets that seemed to suggest even the System wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it.
James stared at it for a long, measured moment.
Then he closed the Status Screen, opened it again to confirm it said the same thing, and then — because there was no one watching, because the grass was tall and the field was empty, because twenty-two years of orphanage corridors and university bedsits and grey English mornings had never once offered him anything that looked like this — he let out a single short laugh that startled the wrong-note bird into silence.
Then he jumped.
Not a small, contained jump. He left the ground properly, both feet, arms out, and came down in the tall blue-green grass with a crash and an involuntary “YES” that he would deny, under any sufficiently serious questioning, having made.
He jumped again. The grass swished around him. The amber sky burned overhead. The red moon had drifted slightly higher.
Infinite mana, he thought, landing for the third time, breathing hard, grinning at the horizon with the full unguarded force of someone who had forgotten, just for a moment, to be detached about things. Infinite. Not ‘very high.’ Not ‘exceptional.’ Infinity. As in the concept. As in the mathematical construct that breaks every upper limit ever devised.
He’d read about mana systems in enough novels to understand what it meant. Mana was the engine of everything in worlds like this — magic, spells, skills, advancement. Every mage in every story he’d ever read was constrained by their pool. Some had large pools. Some had small ones. None of them had the symbol that appeared when you divided by zero.
His class said Unassigned. His skills said None. His level was 1, which was the most appropriately humble number he’d ever seen attached to something sitting on top of an infinite resource pool.
He checked his Intelligence score — 17. Decent. Perception 14, Charisma 15. The physical stats were embarrassingly average, which tracked. He’d never been what anyone would call athletic.
The good mood lasted approximately three more seconds.
Then the sound reached him — not the bird, not the wind. A lower register. The particular quality of a large group of people in a state of distress, carried over the distance from the town walls: shouts, and underneath them, something rhythmic and mechanical that he’d heard in enough historical lectures to recognise without wanting to.
Drums.
Military drums.
And, drifting toward him on the amber evening air, the very specific smell of something burning that was not a campfire or a hearth. Something that had been standing before it was burning.
James turned slowly to face the town.
The pennant on the squat tower was clearer now in the dying light. He could make out the colours — black and deep crimson — and below the walls, movement. Horses. Columns of armoured figures arranged with the patient geometry of people who had done this before and intended to do it again.
His Status Screen glowed softly in his peripheral vision, patient and uninstructive.
Great start, he thought. Fantastic. Couldn’t have landed in a field during a Tuesday, could we. Couldn’t have had one single boring afternoon to orient myself.
He looked at his phone. Forty-three percent battery. No signal. An open isekai novel about a man who had solved all his problems by chapter three.
He looked at the army.
He looked at the town, which had, he now noticed, no visible gate guards and a wall section near the eastern approach that appeared to have recently and catastrophically become a wall-former section.
James Kingsley had a 17 Intelligence, infinite mana, no skills, no class, and eleven days left on a university accommodation agreement that no longer applied to any universe he currently occupied.
He pushed the blue-green grass aside and started walking toward the smoke.
Whatever this is, he thought, at least it isn’t boring.
He paused after three steps, turned back, and picked up the phone he’d dropped during the jumping. Some habits were load-bearing.