As they walked on across rocky desert landscape, the dry heat started to overwhelm Jason. His head throbbed worse and worse until he was no longer walking in a straight line. They found a rocky outcropping to rest in the shadow of, Rufus helping Jason along.

The others fetched out bronze spirit coins while Jason sipped at his water, laying back on the warm rock.

“You don’t need water?” Jason asked Gary. The enormous leonid was covered in fur, which can’t have been pleasant in the desert heat.

“Gary’s people require a lot more exertion than the rest of us to get tired,” Rufus said. “Another one of his racial gifts.”

“Also, when you have a full set of essences, you don’t need to eat or drink anymore,” Gary said. “You can, of course, but it’s just for pleasure.”

“To actually sustain ourselves,” Rufus said, “we need a concentrated source of raw magic.”

He held up the spirit coin he was holding.

“There are various ways to get it,” he continued, “but spirit coins are the easiest, by far.”

“You’re lucky I even had that water,” Farrah said, “because we don’t need it. I just like to be prepared.”

“If you’re using coins,” Jason said, “what about the after-effects? Using those coins knocked it right out of me.”

Rufus popped the spirit coin into his mouth.

“It’s about not going over your limit,” Rufus said. “We’re bronze-rank adventurers, so a bronze coin will sustain us without stressing our bodies.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Jason said.

“What, bronze rank?” Gary asked.

“Also, adventurer,” Jason said. “Is that where you guys hang around in a tavern until someone hires you to kill forty gnolls in a dungeon?”

“What’s a gnoll?” Gary asked.

“And why would there be forty of them in a dungeon?” Farrah added. “Is gnoll a kind of criminal?”

“There’s an organisation,” Rufus said, forestalling more unhelpful questions. “It’s called the Adventure Society. They give out jobs to people like us, mostly to deal with monsters that are threatening towns, villages or whatever.”

“But sometimes to investigate a cult full of bloodthirsty cannibals,” Gary added.

“As for bronze rank,” Rufus said, “that’s related to your essence powers. Once you have all four essences, you become iron rank, and you can work your way up from there. Bronze is one rank above iron, but you can worry about that later. Reaching iron rank will fundamentally change you. Make you powerful.”

“Not that powerful,” Farrah said. “Not straight away. But you become partially resistant to attacks that don’t have any magic behind them. You live on magic instead of food and water.”

“But my world doesn’t have any magic,” Jason said. “Doesn’t that mean if I became iron rank or whatever and then go back to my home, I’d eventually run out of coins and starve?”