The quiet in Dao's living room was heavy with the weight of my declaration. Finding my mother. It felt like announcing I wanted to catch a star.
Niran broke the silence, ever the pragmatist.
"Okay. Cool. Epic goal. How? The afterlife's kinda... big."
"Preposterously big,"
Kephriel added from his corner, still looking drained from the teleport.
"It is an infinite filing system with no centralized index. You might as well try to find a specific drop of water in the ocean."
"It is not entirely without a system," a nerdy voice interjected, crisp and sharp.
All eyes turned to Lamia. She set down her temp agency paperwork with an air of finality and stood up, adjusting her cracked glasses. This was her domain.
She reached into a pocket of her pink hoodie and produced two items: a small, intricate stamp made of polished obsidian and a vial of ink that swirled with a faint, internal golden light.
"This,"
she announced, holding up the stamp,
"is a Tier-3 Cross-Dimensional Reality Anchor Permit. And this,"
she held up the vial,
"is Quintessential Ink, distilled from the light of a newborn star and the silence of a forgotten memory. It is non-refundable."
We all just stared.
She sighed, the sound of a perpetually put-upon civil servant.
"Must I explain everything in small words? Very well."
She walked over to the coffee table and cleared a space.
"The so-called 'afterlife' is not a single place. It is a near-infinite series of overlapping spiritual strata, dimensions, and metaphysical jurisdictions. Attempting to navigate it is futile. You would be lost forever."
She uncorked the vial. The room suddenly smelled of ozone and old libraries.
Preecha coughed.
"That stinks...-"
"However," she continued, dipping the stamp into the glowing ink,
"everything requires paperwork. Even existence. By applying this seal—this permit—to a stable spiritual location, we are not merely 'marking' it."
She looked at each of us, her magnified eyes deadly serious.
"We are filing a formal request with the universe itself to recognize that location as a fixed point. We are adding it to the cosmic ledger. It becomes a... a spiritually sanctioned checkpoint. A beacon."
Julia's eyes were wide with rapturous understanding.
"You're creating a saved point! Like in a video game!"
Lamia's nose wrinkled.
"I am creating a legally binding anchor point in the fabric of reality, but if that crude analogy helps your mortal brain, then yes."
Niran whistled, looking at the tiny stamp with new respect.
"So we drop one of these... beacons... in a place, and we can always get back to it?"
"Precisely,"
Lamia said.
"Kephriel's teleportation, while currently... underwhelming... functions on spiritual coordinates. With a beacon in place, he has a fixed, stable set of coordinates to target. It transforms his aimless blundering into precise, scheduled travel. We can conduct expeditions. We can go... and we can return."
The implications washed over us. This changed everything. It wasn't a suicide mission anymore. It was a mission.
"The problem,"
Kephriel said, a flicker of his old interest returning as he studied the stamp,
"is finding a suitable location to place the first one. Somewhere stable enough to hold the seal. Somewhere not actively trying to unmake us."
Lamia nodded.
"The initial anchor point is crucial. It must be a location of significant spiritual traffic, a natural crossroads. Somewhere with... infrastructure."
Kephriel's lips curled into a faint, grim smile. He knew.
"There is only one place to start,"
he said.
"The only market that deals in the currency we have in abundance."
He looked straight at me.
"Welcome to the next level, Raf. We're going back to the Purgatory, near the Markets. And this time, we're not just passing through. We're finding your mom."