Chapter 248: Breakthrough

Chapter 248: Breakthrough

The two weeks Rain and Ameliah had spent in Nadir had been both eventful and uneventful, depending on your perspective.

They’d been uneventful in that there’d been no significant drama to speak of, almost suspiciously so. Nobody had died, nothing had exploded, and no rank shifts or beast tides or blood feuds had broken out to shake things up. In fact, it was positively routine.

Each night, they’d gone out to hunt, slaying countless monsters, all in the name of preserving the tranquility of the cavern. Their patrol team had changed from day to day, with new members joining and others leaving, but always without issue. Each dawn, they’d returned to their rented bungalow, spoils in hand—though less than they’d have liked from the freshspawn.

Legruz had stopped by more than a few times, sometimes bringing the Fledglings with him, sometimes not. Mora had stopped by once, dragging them out to join her and the Beardy Brothers for lunch—which had been delicious and somehow uninterrupted by upstart Guilders looking to test themselves against the mysterious mercenaries or other such nonsense. Say what you want about the houses; they ran a tight ship on the frontier.

No, everything eventful had happened inside their souls.

Progress Report

marker_1: pre_nadir [3061 First Harvest 05 09:09]

marker_2: just_two_weeks... [3061 First Harvest 21 12:00]

Span: 16.1 days

Essence

Intake Capacity: 449 kESS/s -> 116 MESS/s

Generation: 9.42 kESS/day -> 7.25 MESS/day

Refinement: 457 kESS/s -> 16.8 MESS/s

Chaos: 74 kESS -> 1 GESS

Potential: 20.9 GESS -> 134 GESS

Soul: 13.2 GESS-> 111 GESS

The dialog had changed, as no longer did Rain bother to track paltry trivialities like experience, skill levels, and stat synchronization. Those problems were behind him, as he’d had ample time to put them to rest. With ample chaos to fuel his time acceleration, two weeks had stretched into almost four years.

He was sure he’d have gone insane if he’d been on his own.

Dozer got him through the long stretches between the sporadic vacations he got to spend in his real body. Those moments spent with Ameliah were patches of light in the darkness—breaths of fresh air in the unending toil that had become his existence.

She’d made progress too, of course. She hadn’t invested anywhere near the amount of time he had, but she hadn’t needed to, keeping up just fine on her own, as Clarity’s cognition speed boost wasn’t the be-all and end-all when it came to the esoteric effects of stats on the soul. Strength magnified force of will, and Recovery helped that will restore itself. Endurance made everything tougher, more real, and Vigor improved fine control. Focus improved visualization and concentration, letting you better make your ideas reality. Each stat came with other benefits, too, ones that were hard to classify and even harder to train. The point was that with her balance and the boost offered by her class, Ameliah could do with a wave of her hand what would take him hours of subjective effort.

He wasn’t bitter.

It just meant he had to put in the time.

And so he had. Oh, so he had.

Gone was the mess of cables and pipes in the inner spaces of his bastion, replaced with clean, efficient routing. Gone were the janky machines, their insides a mystery, replaced with glowing racks inset smoothly into the walls. Gone were the points of failure, the centralized systems, and the lack of redundancy. Gone was all sense of weakness. His station was armed, armored, and ready for war.

Even the system’s intrusions, he’d gotten a better handle on. Four years of study wasn’t enough to truly understand how the system augmented his soul, but he’d at least been able to classify and compartmentalize its structures.

Mostly.

He still had a junk drawer. No home was complete without a junk drawer.

In any event, the change was night and day, especially when looking below the surface. His soul bastion’s superstructure and all its non-critical systems had been rebuilt from rank-twenty-three essence, the maximum quality he could refine without active will investment. He’d known the rank-twenty-four pattern for ages, but without his mind to guide it, invested soul couldn’t manipulate uninvested potential of its own rank. The essence for the final layer of the refinement tower, the station’s armor and ramscoops, and its thousand-odd distributed reactor and computer cores had needed to be produced the hard way. One unit at a time.

All told, his station represented what would have once seemed an ungodly quantity of baseline essence, not even including the massive, overfull storage tanks of potential awaiting refinement or the growing bubble excess now pooling in the void between the armored hull and his paling.

Things were...a bit backed up...thanks to the rank-twenty-five pattern.

It was being a right little shit.

“Come on...come on...” a hollow-eyed Rain muttered, pacing back and forth through the grid of programmable assemblers. Each was a massive cube of machinery, built upon the same core principle as the latest line of printers he used to forge refinement cells. The difference with these was that they could make anything—at least in theory—not just copy one design over and over. They relied on his will to run, allowing them to manipulate rank twenty-four essence despite being of that same rank themselves. Only through boosting his Focus and Vigor was he able to drive this many of them at once, and even then only because he’d constrained their control systems. The parameter list was merely the length of his arm.

“Come on...come on...come on...” Rain continued his muttering, both figuratively and literally willing the machines to completion.

The wait was agony, all the more because he knew he was close.

Or, sometimes, just what she’d felt like at the time.

Not everything had to be efficient. Not everything had to have a purpose.

Ameliah chuckled to herself, imagining what kind of crazy shit Rain had to have made when he was just fooling around. She wanted to see it, but that would have to wait. Forever, maybe, unless one of them found a way to visit the other. The liminal void was the path to that, she was sure, but she wasn’t willing to shatter her own paling to find out. There were other things she had to take care of first.

Climbing back to her feet, recovered after only a few moments’ rest, she raised her arms.

The sky rivers heeded her call. Mighty streams of essence rushed forward, colliding and condensing into a new island as she lifted herself into the air with her will.

This one would be a fortress—part of the outer shell of barrier islands nestled in the clouds veiling her golden paling. In her inner world, her paling was the sun, though it was far too brilliant, hence the clouds. Chaos, for her, manifested as darkness, much as it did in the liminal void, and there wasn’t very much left of it now. She’d need to expand the island she’d dedicated to storing it. After all, it was the fuel for change. As they’d discovered, the raw, unrefined energy was vital for your stats inside your inner world, though only Clarity was consumed automatically.

The others took a bit of training.

The flow of potential around her redoubled as she put that training to work, obsidian walls forming in seconds as animated suits of armor were forged to defend them. This fortress would be a big one, anchoring those around it. Its guardians would rush out to capture and kill any unauthorized intruders, reinforcing the other outposts as needed.

Constructs were another area where her balanced stats let her keep pace with Rain. She could make convincing facsimiles of animals, while the best he’d managed was something called a Roomba, though that had been days ago, and with how quickly he was improving...

I WILL keep up.

So passionate were her thoughts and so caught up in the process of creation was she that it came as a complete surprise when her power flickered, sending half-formed essence flying as she lost control. Catching herself before her stumble became a fall, she quickly realized what had happened.

She’d run out of chaos. Looking through the eyes of a bird on the other side of her soul, she confirmed it, finding the dark island drained to reveal barren and corroded stone.

Huh. First time that’s happened. Also, I need a better solution for storing chaos. Even with my Endurance, the stone anchor’s not holding up that well.

She was brought out of her musing by a voice.

“By the gods, Turnip! This is—ooph!”

“Shit!” Ameliah cursed, squeezing her father tightly as they crashed into the half-constructed fortress island.

“Gah!” he cried as he landed on top of her.

“Sorry!” Ameliah cried, lifting her father off her from where she’d sheltered him from the impact. She hadn’t expected her chaos stockpile to recover quite so quickly, and in her excitement, had put more power into her tackle than she’d meant to. She got up quickly, setting him upright as she likewise found her feet.

“Are you trying to kill your old man for good?” her dad demanded, brushing the dust from his ragged cloak. “A simple hello would have done just fine.”

“I...got a little carried away,” Ameliah said, caution tempering her initial response as she looked with more than just sight. The system was running all through her father’s body, mixed up with what had to be his reddish-brownish soul. It wasn’t hers; that was for sure. It was almost like looking at another person’s paling, folded into the shape of a person.

Belatedly, she noticed her armored sentinels were rushing to confront the intruder and called them off with a thought, shoving away the one that had been hopping forward on one leg before he could notice it. She turned her attention back to her dad to see him plant his hands against his lower back.

“Gods, you’re strong,” he said, arching his spine hard enough to make it pop. “Ahh, that’s better. Good thing you can’t kill the dead.”

“Dad...” she said, not quite sure what to say.

“What?” he asked, misreading her hesitance for admonishment. “I’m not going to dance around the fact that I’m feeding the worms. Honestly, I’m over it.” He turned away from her to the edge of the half-built island, throwing his arms wide to encompass the entirety of her creation. “Now, as I was saying, holy shit! How did you do all this when you’re still silver? This is just...wow. Just wow. You’re not supposed to be this good yet. I mean, actively refining potential? I’m starting to question whether you even need me at all, Turnip. It’s as stable as a rock in here.”

“Uh, Dad,” Ameliah said, her level of wariness rising. “Not that I’m not glad to see you, but can we back up a minute? Why are you here, and how? Do you remember last time?”

“Yes, I remember,” her father said, turning with a smile. “Things got a little heavy last time, so I’m trying to keep it light. And yes, before you ask, I’m still made from your memories, more or less. Can’t remember your aunt’s name, you know?” He knocked on his forehead with his knuckles. “Anyway, I’m here to help you, so that’s the why. As for how....” He paused, sucking his teeth, and her wariness suddenly became much harder to maintain.

He’d always done that when he was thinking. She’d loved making fun of him for it.

I will NOT cry this time.

“Well,” her father said, rubbing at his scraggly beard—another thing he’d always done. “The system takes an imprint of everyone’s soul when they die, which it calls an echo. That’s the framework. Add some essence to power it, sprinkle in a few compatible memories borrowed from the host, plus a bunch of raw information I’m supposed to translate for you, and”—he clasped his hands before gesturing to his artificial body—“one soul guide made to order. No refunds. Sorry.”

I know it’s not him, but...it’s him.

“Dad...” Her voice cracked despite her best efforts, and then he was there.

The embrace felt strange, her being the taller one, but it felt...right. He began rubbing her back gently as she struggled to regain control, which didn’t really help her keep composure.

And then he started humming Dog in the Yard—the song he’d used to soothe her as a child.

“Take as long as you need,” her father said as the first sob wracked her. “I’m not going anywhere.”