Adam spent the rest of his birthday doing normal things. He called Aunt Lena and let her cry a little. He told Marc it felt like logging into something, which Marc thought was the most Adam answer possible. He ate leftover pasta for lunch and studied academy coursework he'd already memorized, mostly out of habit.
The Bazaar sat in the back of his mind the whole time. Not demanding attention — it never did. Just there. A door left slightly open.
He lasted until about 4 PM before he opened it again.
The Hub access was listed under a separate menu from the shop — a navigation function rather than a storefront. Adam focused on it and felt a pull, like a thought that wanted to become an action. The interface offered a simple confirmation.
Transport to Hub? Duration unlimited. Return at will.
He was sitting on his bed. He thought yes, and the apartment disappeared.
No transition. No tunnel of light, no sensation of movement, no gradual fade. One frame he was in Northbank. The next frame he was somewhere else entirely.
Adam stood in the middle of a street that shouldn't exist.
It was wide — wider than any street in Kerenth, paved with something that looked like stone but felt faintly warm underfoot. Buildings rose on both sides, three and four stories tall, their architecture a mix of styles that didn't belong together. Arched windows next to flat concrete faces next to what looked like carved wood from a culture he couldn't identify. Nothing matched and somehow all of it worked, the way a market that's been building on top of itself for decades stops being messy and starts being textured.
The sky wasn't a sky. It was a ceiling — impossibly high, maybe a kilometer up, glowing with a diffuse warm light that had no source. Like permanent late afternoon. No sun, no clouds, no weather. Just light.
And people. Everywhere.
Adam had read about the Hub in his academy coursework. He'd watched videos filmed by Explorers who'd been given recording privileges. He'd studied the layout maps that the IEC published, which were apparently outdated the moment they were printed because the Hub shifted and reorganized itself on some schedule nobody understood.
None of that had prepared him for the scale.
The street he stood on stretched in both directions farther than he could see, lined with stalls and shops and open-front establishments. Hundreds of people moved through it — walking, talking, arguing over prices, sitting at café tables that spilled onto the pavement. Some of them looked normal. Jeans and jackets, could have been from any city on Earth Prime.
Some of them did not look normal at all.
A woman walked past Adam with skin that had a faint metallic sheen, like brushed copper. She was talking to a man twice her height whose arms were covered in what looked like bark — actual bark, cracked and layered, with green veins pulsing underneath. Neither of them glanced at Adam. They were having a conversation about supply costs.
Farther down the street, a kid who couldn't have been older than twenty was floating. Not jumping, not using a gadget — just hovering about half a meter off the ground, legs crossed, eating something out of a paper bag while he scrolled through his Bazaar interface with an absent look on his face.
Adam made himself walk.
The stalls were the thing that got him. Each one was a small business — some with actual storefronts, some just a table and a canopy — and they were selling things Explorers had brought back from expedition worlds. Items, gear, materials, consumables. Abilities were Bazaar-exclusive — you couldn't trade those person-to-person. But everything physical was fair game. Handwritten signs listed prices. Traders called out to passersby.
"Healing charges, combat-grade. Instant use. Hundred NP per charge, discounts for bulk."
"Fire resistance wraps — expedition-tested, L2 world origin. Seventy-five NP."
"Information packages — verified scout reports, Level 4 worlds. Current cycle. Serious buyers only."
Adam stopped at a stall that had a display board listing item prices. The trader dealt in expedition-sourced gear — weapons, tools, protective items. The prices varied wildly depending on rarity and tier. Common stuff went for pocket change. The rarer items had real price tags.
Reinforced Climbing Gloves (L1) — 35 NP Emergency Beacon, Single Use (L1) — 50 NP Stealth Wrap (L2) — 90 NP Adaptive Combat Knife (L3) — 250 NP
Adam scanned the listings. Even the basic stuff would have been useful in the right situation. But he didn't have the NP, and wouldn't until he completed an expedition.
"Looking to buy, kid?"
The trader was a woman in her thirties, lean and watchful. She had a scar running from her left ear to the corner of her mouth — thin, clean, the kind that came from something very sharp moving very fast. An Explorer. Had to be. Civilians couldn't access the Hub.
"Just looking," Adam said.
She gave him a once-over. He knew what she saw — a sixteen-year-old in street clothes, no visible modifications, no abilities, no aura, no nothing. Fresh connection. She'd seen a thousand like him.
"First day?" she asked.
"Yeah."
"Word of advice. Don't buy gear until you know the market. Prices fluctuate. What's two hundred today might be one-fifty next week if a big raid event floods the supply." She paused. "And don't buy anything without checking the Bazaar verification stamp. Counterfeit items look identical but fail when you need them most. Seen it happen."
"Thanks," Adam said, and meant it.
She waved him off and turned to another customer.
He kept walking. The Hub got denser the farther in he went — the streets narrowed, the stalls pressed closer together, the crowds thickened. He passed what looked like a training arena set into a courtyard between buildings — an open space with a sand floor where two Explorers were sparring. One of them was fast, almost too fast to track, moving in bursts that left afterimages. The other was planted, barely moving, absorbing hits with a body that seemed to ripple on impact like the surface of water.
A small crowd watched. Money was probably changing hands.
Adam watched for a few minutes, analyzing. The fast one was using some kind of movement technique — a speed-type enhancement that let him cover ground in sharp bursts. The planted one had a layered defense build — reinforced body, some kind of energy hardening that made his skin ripple on impact. The fast one would win eventually. Tank builds always lost to speed over time because defense cost more energy than offense. The moment the big man ran dry, one clean hit from that speed would—
The fast one blurred, changed direction mid-burst, and landed a strike to the back of the tank's head. The big man dropped. The crowd reacted — half cheering, half groaning. NP was changing hands through the Bazaar interface; Adam could tell from the way people's eyes unfocused for a second.
Speed beats armor. Every time. Nobody studies this stuff.
He moved on.
The deeper sections of the Hub were different. Less market, more institutional. He found the information brokers' district — a row of establishments that sold intelligence on expedition worlds. Scout reports, power system analyses, known threats, timeline projections. The prices were posted outside and they were steep. A comprehensive Level 3 world briefing started at five thousand NP. Level 5 briefings went for twenty thousand or more.
Adam didn't need any of them. He had better intel in his head than any scout report could provide. But he stopped and read the posted samples anyway, checking their accuracy against what he knew.
One of the Level 3 briefing samples caught his eye. It described a walled civilization under siege by humanoid giants — primary threat biological. It listed creature sizes, movement speeds, and known weak points. Mentioned specialized mobility gear as a world-specific tool.
Adam read it and felt a strange chill. He knew this world. Not from any briefing — from a story. A story he'd watched in another life, on a screen, in an apartment that didn't exist in this dimension.
The briefing was accurate as far as it went. It described what scouts had observed. It didn't describe the truth — the conspiracy behind the walls, the enemy nations beyond the sea, the power hidden in the royal bloodline. The kind of information you could only know if you'd seen how the story ended.
The best intelligence Earth Prime's scout network had produced over decades of expeditions was surface-level. They knew what they could observe on short deployments.
Adam knew everything else.
That was his edge. Right there, measured in the gap between a five-thousand-NP briefing and what he carried for free.
He found a quiet spot — a bench near a fountain that didn't seem to have a water source, the liquid just appearing at the top and vanishing at the bottom — and sat for a while. The Hub moved around him. Explorers of every level, every build, every nation and background, going about their business in a pocket dimension that existed outside of normal reality.
It was real. All of it. The abilities, the worlds, the danger, the opportunity.
And he was sitting here with zero NP and a body that could run three kilometers.
Adam stood up and went home.
The apartment felt smaller when he got back. Same bed, same desk, same corkboard with the study schedule. The framed photograph of Henrik's family on the nightstand. Everything exactly as he'd left it, but it all felt like it belonged to someone who didn't exist anymore. The person who'd left this apartment an hour ago was a kid preparing for a distant future. The person who came back had seen that future up close and wasn't interested in waiting.
He sat at the desk and opened his academy binder. The final-year schedule was pinned inside the front cover: one more year of structured training, first sanctioned expedition at seventeen. The standard path. The safe path. The path that gave you a year of final coursework before you faced a real threat.
Adam closed the binder.
He thought about Instructor Brandt. Two years under the man at Westfall — a gruff, one-armed veteran who ran combat fundamentals and would be leading Adam's final-year expedition training starting next term. Brandt had a way of looking at students like he was calculating their odds of survival in real time. Adam had liked him from the first week. Brandt was the kind of teacher who'd tell you the truth even when the truth was that you weren't ready.
If Adam called Brandt right now and said I'm thinking about deploying tonight, the man would tell him he was an idiot. And he'd be right, from any reasonable perspective. A student who hadn't finished his final year, with no purchased abilities, no team, no expedition experience — walking into a world on the day he connected? The statistics on that were worse than bad. They were a punchline.
But the statistics included people who didn't know what they were walking into.
Adam knew.
He pulled up the Bazaar interface and navigated to the expedition deployment menu. It was simple — almost aggressively so. No fanfare, no warnings, no "are you sure?" prompts.
EXPEDITION DEPLOYMENT
Current Level: 0 (Pre-Expedition) → Level 1 upon first deployment
World Assignment: Random (Level 1 classification)
Deploy?
That was it. One thought and he'd be in a Level 1 world. Could be anything — a war zone, a survival scenario, a political thriller. The Bazaar didn't tell you where until you arrived. Random.
He didn't have Nexus Points. He couldn't buy Reinforced Physiology or Combat Instinct or any of the foundation abilities he'd planned to have before his first expedition. He'd be going in with nothing but a sixteen-year-old body that was fit for its age and a head full of information that might or might not match whichever world the Bazaar dropped him in.
It was a terrible idea.
Adam got up and paced the apartment. Four steps to the window, four steps back. The kitchen counter. The bed. The desk. The window again.
One year. That was what the academy wanted. One more year of training before he touched an expedition. By then he'd be seventeen. Other Explorers who'd skipped the academy — or whose academies had shorter programs — would already have a year of NP income on him. A year of ability purchases, Hub connections, team-building. He'd be starting from zero while some of his peers were already at Level 2.
Unless he started now.
Level 1 worlds had no supernatural elements. That was the whole point of the classification — they were the training wheels, the introductory tier. The threats were human, environmental, and situational. A smart person with no Bazaar purchases could survive on wits alone. The system itself said so.
And Adam wasn't just smart. He was a thirty-year-old programmer in a teenager's body with two years of academy training and a head full of stories, plots, and power systems from a lifetime of consuming fiction. Level 1 worlds had no supernatural elements — just humans and human-scale threats. He didn't need purchased abilities for that. He needed his brain, his training, and his meta-knowledge. And he needed to stop sitting in classrooms when the actual game was right there.
He'd be walking in without abilities, without a team, without gear. Just him.
Just like the first life, that voice in his head said. Except this time you're choosing it.
That was the difference. In his old life, going in alone and unprepared was what happened when you were too passive to build anything better. In this life, it was a calculated bet. He knew the odds. He knew the worlds. He knew himself.
He could wait a year and do it the safe way.
Or he could go now and have a year of head start on everyone who thought the safe way was the only way.
Adam opened his phone and stared at Instructor Brandt's contact number. The man gave it to all his students — "Call me if something comes up. Day or night." Adam's thumb hovered over the call button.
He put the phone down.
Then he walked to his bag and repacked it. Spare clothes, a water bottle, a small first aid kit, a folding knife his uncle had given him two birthdays ago. Basic stuff. Mundane stuff. The kind of things a person brings on a camping trip, not an interdimensional expedition.
It would have to be enough.
Adam sat on the edge of the bed and opened the Bazaar interface one more time. The deployment menu was still there, patient and indifferent.
EXPEDITION DEPLOYMENT
Current Level: 0 (Pre-Expedition) → Level 1 upon first deployment
World Assignment: Random (Level 1 classification)
Deploy?
He read it twice. Then a third time.
Then he thought about Henrik stocking the fridge. Lena's toast. Sophie's little flame emoji. The hug that was brief and firm and awkward. Be smart, his uncle had said.
This was smart. It didn't look like it from the outside, but it was. Every day he waited was a day he fell further behind the curve he'd been planning to get ahead of. The meta-knowledge in his head was a depreciating asset — the longer he sat on it, the more expedition cycles passed, the more the worlds diverged from the canon he'd memorized. Going early preserved the value of the only advantage he had.
Be smart.
Adam accepted the deployment.
The Bazaar didn't ask if he was sure. It didn't give him a countdown or a loading screen or a last chance to back out. The interface processed his confirmation with the same mechanical indifference it brought to everything else.
DEPLOYMENT CONFIRMED
Level 1 Expedition Assigned World: [REDACTED — revealed upon arrival]
Estimated Duration: Variable
Completion Rating: Pending
Deploying in: 3... 2... 1...
The apartment vanished.