The man who stepped forward was not what he had expected.

  He couldn't have said what he had expected. Someone visibly undone, maybe. Someone whose face showed the weight of what they were carrying — the specific exhaustion of a person who had been holding an impossible thing and was finally putting it down.

  Director Helius Vance looked like none of that. He was perhaps sixty, perhaps older, with a face built by decades of precise thinking rather than by grief. He stood at the front edge of the raised platform and looked out at ten thousand people who had survived the death of their world, and he did not look sorry for them. He looked like someone who had a great deal of work to do and intended to begin.

  He let the hall find its silence. It took time — ten thousand people settling, the murmuring and shifting gradually compressing into something almost still. He waited for it with the patience of someone who understood that silence, properly waited for, was worth more than anything said into noise.

  When the hall gave it to him, he spoke into it.

  "What you are about to hear will be difficult to believe. But everything you believed possible died with Earth. So I ask that you simply listen."

  The hall went the rest of the way quiet.

  He watched from the middle rows. Watched the way the silence had been managed — waited for, not demanded, arrived at through patience rather than authority. He filed this the way he filed everything: automatically, without deciding to. Someone who knew how to work a room. Someone who had either done this before or had prepared for it with the kind of thoroughness that produced the same result as having done it before.

  "Our instruments have detected 93,412 planets in the surrounding dimensional zone. We are still scanning. They fall into fourteen distinct categories — fourteen types of worlds, each operating on a different fundamental power system. There are enough individual planets for every single one of you. Each of you has been assigned to one specific planet based on compatibility testing conducted while you slept. You did not choose. The science chose for you."

  The number landed. Then took a moment to be understood.

  He felt it in himself — the mind reaching for the scale of ninety-three thousand four hundred and twelve and finding the scale larger than the reach. Around him he heard the processing of it, not as sound but as a quality of changed attention. Ten thousand people recalibrating simultaneously.

  A voice from somewhere to his left: "How many planets per person?"

  "Approximately nine. We are still scanning."

  A pause. "Each person only gets one."

  "Correct."

  "What happens to the other eight?"

  "They remain unoccupied. For now."

  He sat with those two words. For now. He stared at the number on the display behind the platform and turned the phrase over until he understood what it was doing in that sentence. For now was not the language of a closed system. It was the language of a beginning. Someone had just told ten thousand people that eighty thousand planets were sitting empty and had chosen to describe that as a temporary condition.

  He filed it. He did not yet know what to file it under.

  The panel shifted. Director Vance stepped to one side and a second figure came forward — older, considerably older, with the unhurried quality of someone who had long since stopped measuring time the way younger people did. Eighty, perhaps. Past it, perhaps. He moved to the edge of the platform and the hall's attention changed. Not toward authority. Toward something quieter than authority.

  "Category One," he said. Almost reverently. "Cultivation worlds. Spiritual energy. Progression from mortal to immortal. Theoretically, to godhood."

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  He turned the word over once. Put it down.

  "One additional note: cultivation worlds do not receive foreign matter easily. The world itself will rebuild you upon arrival. Do not be alarmed."

  Dead silence.

  Then from near the front, a voice that was almost not a question: Rebuild us how.

  The old man — Scientist Zhao, someone behind him murmured — had anticipated this. He could see the small preparatory stillness before the answer, the gathering of someone who had thought carefully about how to say a thing that could not be made entirely comfortable.

  "You will still be you. Same face. Same memories. Same everything." A pause. "Simply… made of different material."

  The silence after this was a different quality from the one before. The first had been the silence of people receiving extraordinary information. This was the silence of people trying to locate the line between extraordinary and impossible and finding it had moved without their permission.

  He examined the phrase from several angles. None of them made it a small thing to say.

  A younger scientist stepped forward next. Sharp features, the manner of someone who had rehearsed precision.

  "Category Two. Magic and fantasy worlds. Power through mana — elemental and arcane systems. Spells, magical affinity, internally generated energy." A brief pause. "Dragons have been confirmed real in four of the surveyed worlds."

  The hall sat with this. Someone near the back said, in a tone of someone establishing facts rather than asking: "Real dragons."

  "Confirmed real. Four worlds."

  A longer pause from the hall. Then, from somewhere: "What kind of dragons."

  The scientist looked at his notes. "The data does not currently specify."

  "I'm asking because some dragons are — you know. The kind you fight. And some are more—"

  "The data does not currently specify," the scientist said again, with the tone of someone closing a door.

  A third scientist replaced him.

  "Category Three. System worlds, also designated LitRPG. Reality in these worlds operates on structured progression logic — divine systems, status interfaces, levels, classes. Power is quantified and displayed. Advancement follows defined frameworks."

  He looked up at that. Reality operating on game logic. He turned it over in his mind, examining the implications, and found that he could not locate the angle from which it was not an enormous thing to live inside of.

  "So we get a status screen," someone said.

  "In effect, yes."

  "And levels."

  "And levels."

  A silence. Then, with the energy of someone who had just decided they were fine with this: "Honestly that sounds manageable."

  Several people laughed. Surprised laughter — the kind that comes from recognising an absurd truth. He felt the corner of his mouth move again.

  "Category Four. Apocalypse worlds. Currently mid-collapse. Dangerous. Rapid power growth for survivors who adapt."

  The reaction came from several directions at once.

  "We just survived an apocalypse. You're sending some of us into another one?"

  "The compatibility matrix does not consider irony."

  The laughter that followed was the most unexpected thing he had experienced since boarding. Not performed — genuine, rising from somewhere that needed to release something and found this the only available exit. He felt it move through the section around him like a wave finding its shore. He felt something in himself adjacent to laughter — a pressure valve locating its purpose.

  He noticed he had smiled. He hadn't decided to.

  Scientist Okonkwo — that was the name, confirmed now — waited for the room to finish with the expression of someone who had not planned for the laughter and was not displeased by it.

  "Category Five. Mecha and interstellar worlds. Power through advanced technology — mechas, warships, weapons systems, scientific mastery. The closest analog to pre-disaster Earth."

  Four rows ahead and to his left, a cluster of people sat noticeably straighter. Not all at once — sequentially, one then another then a third, the way attention sharpens when something becomes directly relevant. Engineers, he thought. Or certain kinds of scientists. People for whom advanced technology meant something specific and useful that they had perhaps been hoping for across the preceding categories.

  He noted them. Moved on.

  "Category Six. Necromancer and dark magic worlds. Power through death energy and soul manipulation. High ceiling. Psychologically demanding."

  The hall received this with a quieter kind of unease. Not shock — something more considered. The particular discomfort of people imagining what psychologically demanding actually meant when applied to a world you had been assigned to live in permanently.

  Nobody made a joke about Category Six.

  "Category Seven. Beast taming worlds. Power through contracted bonds with creatures. Human and beast develop together — the bond itself is the source of strength."

  This one landed differently. Softer. He watched several people visibly relax at it — the release of tension that comes from hearing something that sounds survivable, even appealing. A woman two rows ahead turned to the man beside her and said something he couldn't hear. The man nodded. They both looked like people who had just received unexpectedly good news.

  He looked at the display. Seven categories announced. Seven remaining plus whatever came after fourteen.

  He had been counting without deciding to count. He was always counting. He didn't know why but he had stopped asking why and simply let it happen.

  Seven more.

  He settled back into his seat and waited for them.

  End of Chapter 3