56 - Advancement (Patreon)

Ekerinatoth of the Gold Bloodline wore a backpack as she swam through the depths of Ghostwater’s ocean.

The clan hadn’t seen fit to replace her void key, and she knew that it would take a very special achievement on her part to gain a new one. More than likely, it would be Sophara who gave her a replacement. 

Once disgraced, it was extremely difficult to regain one’s former position. Especially if the Monarch himself had laid witness to that disgrace. His own displeasure would be magnified many times over to all those under him. The Herald had made her own displeasure known, and everyone beneath her had seen fit to treat her as scum for her failures.

All except for Sophara.

The only one that still believed in her.

From Sophara’s armory, Ekeri had received the Goldstar armor, plated Forged golden madra suitable even for Underlords. Now anyone she encountered in this pocket world would be unable to even touch her. Not without paying a heavy price. 

A Diamondscale Sea Drake swam over to her in the distance, past the dark waters. If she had been forced to rely on her eyes—or even her spiritual perception—she would have missed it.

But a construct strapped to her arm had detected it for her, made sure that nothing could sneak past her defenses.

From her back, she pulled out a spear and a shield, and readied to face the incoming threat.

The Diamondscale Sea Drake rushed towards her, its hideous maw rowed with razor-sharp teeth open and ready to rend flesh.

She swiped her spear, activating its binding. A wave of razor-sharp golden death cleaved the Sea Drake in half.

The Remnant that formed from it was still on the attack. She activated the shield, allowing the Sea Drake made of bloody paint and sapphire gems to crash into it ineffectually. 

She didn’t move an inch from where she was floating in the water.

She swiped her spear again, dispersing the Remnant with a hiss of her tongue.

It was a useless opponent, but this minor victory brought a grin to her reptile lips. Things would be different this time around.

She gazed down at the depths of the water, towards the collection of seven lights that she had been following, forming a hexagonal constellation, with one principal star in the middle. 

Down there, a treasure fit for a Lord lay. 

A treasure that would wipe off her disgrace and allow her to return back to her wing in good standing.

Ekerinatoth stowed away her weapons and kept swimming.

000

Orthos was just snacking on entire carps at a time while I set up my cooking station. I had spoken to him after all the excitement had died down, apologizing profusely for not having given him a breathing apparatus that allowed him to work his techniques.

He looked at me like I was stupid and told me that he was a turtle. He never needed them to begin with, since he could hold his breath so well. Still, I doubted the truth of that statement; those attacks would have driven the wind out of anyone. Still, he hardly minded or noticed.

I tied a white headband over my forehead where ‘kiss the chef’ was written, gathered my knives, sacks of rice, cooking pots and pans, and a table that I hastily put together.

Sushi Chef Sky was in the house now. I had a pot of rice boiling in some salted Spirit Well water, a somewhat wasteful expenditure, but one that I would take because it was a special occasion. And on the table in front of me, I had a whole Silverfang Carp carcass, almost a meter long, ready for me to butcher.

The Crew and Palutin looked at me with rapt attention as I did my best to ape the ostentatiousness of a hibachi chef. 

“Ghostwater wildlife is just filled with Blood Essence,” I said, juggling my knives like an idiot. Not sure if hibachi chefs even did that, but I totally could. “Dross, why don’t you inform everyone of the specifics?”

“Certainly,” Dross said, piping up from where he sat cradled between Lindon’s crossed legs. “Our good friendly human Palutin has captured for us Silverfang Carp and Diamondscale Sea Drake. Now, the Silverfang Carp were not meant for human consumption. I honestly have no idea why you are so intent on eating them. See, they were raised as cattle to feed the Diamondscale Sea Drakes swimming around here.”

I started fileting a Silverfang Carp, keeping half an ear on the conversation as I concentrated on not embarrassing myself in front of my friends.

I wasn’t a chef.

But I would try, goddammit!

“Hold on a breath,” Yerin said, “You’re not pulling our chain, are you, Dross? We can’t eat these? Did you know this, Sky?” Yerin glanced at Orthos, happily gorging himself on the carp.

“Now this is a meal fit for a dragon!” He bellowed, and I chuckled. It was nice to see him being so lively. All I had known this past year was the geriatric, half-lucid dragon turtle that slept most of the day. If I had to put him in a human scale, it was like he had gone from being ninety years old to returning to his mid-thirties or even earlier.

“It does have a tendency to cause crippling deformities in humans,” Dross said, “Such as uncontrolled muscle and organ growth, which can lead to a variety of different health issues ranging from discomfort to chronic pain, memory loss, chronic shortness of breath, a coma, toxic shock, or even death.”

I sliced off a tiny piece of flesh and threw it to Lindon. He caught it with one hand, one eyebrow raised. “Eat it,” I told him.

“Pardon, but are you serious—” Palutin yoinked it out of his hand and snacked on it. 

“Ahhh!” He sighed, lying on his back, head resting against his rabbit friend Marigold.

All three of my friends except Orthos seemed to hold their breaths, looking at him. Nothing happened for several seconds after.

“Um,” I said, “I’m guessing you have an Iron body suited for this, right?”

“Eeyup,” Palutin said with a contented grin, “The Faminewrought Iron body lets me pull more outta good eatin' than anything else. I can go long stretches without chowin' down, too, but that's just scratchin' the surface of what it can do.”

I grinned as I sliced off another bit of Silverfang Carp flesh and threw some at Yerin and Lindon. “Steelborn Iron bodies and Bloodforged Iron bodies should be able to tolerate this as well. For you, Yerin, you’re just so strong that your body can control the changes perfectly. For you, Lindon, your Bloodforged Iron body can recover from the changes. But it will hurt.”

Lindon sighed, but nodded. Yerin shrugged and popped the strip in her mouth.

“What about me?” Mercy asked.

“You’re in the same boat as me, probably,” I said, “But I don’t actually know. Do you think you could handle this fish? My Iron body is incredibly fragile, and I don’t know what yours does,” I said. Well, that was a partial lie, but it was hardly time for me to drop a train of revelations on her. Baby steps, baby steps. 

“Oh,” she said, a little disappointed.

“But as I’ve told you before, I am a Refiner, so we will approach this scientifically.”

I dipped my hands in a specially prepared bowl of mundane water that I wanted to use to rinse off my hands mid-cooking, and ducked back into my void key to retrieve a basic chemistry set: petri dishes and some vials of Life Well water. “Worst comes to worst,” I said as I walked up to where Mercy sat and crouched in front of her, “We’ll use the Life Well to straighten out any deformities that may occur. But I would sooner just determine a smarter way to go about it than one that wastes resources. Drip some of your blood into this dish, then after you eat a nibble of the fish, drip some into the second dish, and I’ll observe the changes.”

Mercy took the dishes and nodded, grinning brightly as she did.

Then I returned back to my station.

Lindon’s eyes were closed, and he was concentrating deeply. Veins started pushing through his skin as he breathed in hitches, like he was cycling the Purification Wheel.

Yerin just shrugged when I looked at her. “Don’t feel much different, to tell the truth.”

The rice was done cooking. I began the process of creating sushi, pressing the rice into a bowl and then draping a strip of carp meat over it, pushing that together. The meat was bright red, and in my aura sight, it was positively gushing with blood essence. For experimentation’s sake, I also cooked down some of the carp.

Just as I expected, the blood essence in the meat reduced as the fish cooked. I’d have to get a third petri dish, then. 

The process would go as follows: one petri dish for control, pre-consumption of any fish, another post-consumption of raw fish, and another post-consumption of cooked fish. Between the latter two, I would have Mercy and myself drink a little bit of Life Well water in order to drag our baselines back down to equilibrium.

I would be looking for the rate at which our blood would regain equilibrium, if cooking the fish would promote faster return to stability than eating it raw, and to what extent that was the case. I would also test out a couple of things, to see if a return to equilibrium could be cheaper than just drinking priceless Life elixir between each bite. 

I could get really boneheaded about it and stuff down as much Silverfang Carp as my stomach could hold, and then as I became paralyzed with all the runaway blood essence, someone could pour Life Well water down my throat.

I wasn’t totally eager to do that, honestly. Mostly for one reason: I knew that it wouldn’t just take one vial of Life Well water. 

Bruno would have his share.

Like always.

He was the reason I couldn’t use the Heartseeker Pill to its fullest extent, and he was also the reason the Life Well water hadn’t saved me immediately; despite Eithan’s restrictions. 

The Blood Shadow had created its domicile in the spiritual equivalent of a cyst around a part of my core, but specifically, around the lower part of my core, where the lion’s share of blood and life essence were passively transported through my central channels and refined into madra. It was impossible to cut him off from this process, no matter how many restrictions he was put under. The Blood Shadow was a parasite in every sense of the word, and would always be levying a tax on anything I ate, any elixirs I processed. Meaning it would keep getting stronger; it was honestly all I could do to hold him back from breaking through Eithan’s Soulfire seal, the one he had imbued on that needle that I had used.

I was walking on eggshells as it was. Perhaps it would be smarter to take things slow and steady? Cooking the meat until well past well done, burning off the excess blood essence and subsisting off of that alone. That would indeed take care of a lot of my dietary needs as well. And it would let me skip out on the fasting pills I had stocked for this exact scenario.

Palutin was first in line to get his sushi. I gave him a plate, with a tiny bowl of soy sauce on top, and he gratefully accepted it before plopping down roughly a quarter of the sushi available on the plate before running back to Marigold to lie his head on her while enjoying the fish. 

Yerin was up next. “About time,” she muttered, “My stomach was beginning to touch my back.”

“You better not croak on me,” I muttered with half a grin as I flipped  the carp filet over on itself in the pan, “We only have so much Life Well water left after you dumped most of it on me.” I get that the situation had been very stressful for the both of us, but that Life Well baptism had been a little… much. Why she assumed that the elixir was topical of all things was beyond me, but all’s well that ends well. We still had like an entire barrel, and ninety percent of another barrel left. Even though the total volume was less than I had hoped from the Life Well, we still had more than enough to make as much Ghostwater as Northstrider’s remaining stockpile of Soulfire would allow us.

“Keep pointing fingers at me and you might just lose them,” Yerin said warningly.

I raised my hands placatingly. “In the interest of keeping my fingers, I will just retract that statement, and tell you again how eternally grateful I am for that. Now please enjoy my cooking. This one is, of course, on the house.” I smirked in a way that I knew would irritate her. She rolled her eyes. “Grab some for Lindon as well.”

Yerin shrugged and did exactly that. Once done, Mercy walked up to my cooking station, one petri dish filled with blood. “Uh, where should I put this?” she asked.

“On the table where I’m cooking food for us all is fine,” I said with a shrug, taking the petri dish from her hands and putting it down on a corner of the table, farthest away from the food. “Glad you’ve come. First, we’re going to have some of the raw carp, then just a sip of Life Well water, then cooked carp. Then we can see how much we can handle.”

Mercy gave a sunny smile and a nod.

After finishing up the carp fillet, salted and basted with butter and a mixture of herbs, I put the resultant food on a plate, and garnished it with a stalk of rosemary. Mercy clapped appreciatively. 

Then I took the plate of fish, and the petri dish, and put it on the ground beneath the table, along with with everything else that I needed for this science experiment, and sat down. Mercy followed, sitting on the other side of the table.

I slid the petri dish with blood on her side, and claimed an empty petri dish, and a scalpel brought for this exact purpose. I sliced the tip of my finger, dripping out some blood on the dish. Then I wrapped my finger up in a bandage, quickly tying it together. 

“The idea is to observe the changes in the blood culture, between the control dish and the other two,” I said. “We’ll take turns eating and drinking, in case one of us gets locked up and needs the other to feed them the elixir. I can go first.”

“Go ahead,” Mercy said, “I’ll give you the Life elixir in case of anything.”

“Alright,” I said with a nod. “Remember, just a tiny sip.” I took a carp sushi in hand, dipped it in the soy sauce, and ate it whole, as was proper. It had a strong fish flavor, fresh as could be. It genuinely tasted great. I assumed it would taste like blood—

That flavor hit like a runaway train, and almost choked me. I quickly swallowed what I could and doubled over, bowing my head.

I had to cycle the essence, like I would madra. But my God did it fucking hurt.

Mercy, bless her soul, didn’t immediately feed me the Life Well. Instead, after waiting patiently for a minute, scanning me intently as she did, she cut up the tip of another finger, fed it into the petri dish, then pushed my head up to fill my numb mouth with some Life Well elixir. Just a trickle, really, from what I could tell with my eyes. Exactly like I had told her to. I couldn’t have asked for a better lab partner.

Swallowing that was… tricky. I simply couldn’t. Not on purpose, at least. Once the liquid crossed some threshold in my throat, my body swallowed on its own.

I felt near instant relief as the elixir settled on me. My life aura immediately cycled the essence on its own, putting everything where it needed to be, and finishing up within seconds.

“Thank you,” I said to her with a sigh of relief.  I began to clean up my fingers, discarded the bandages safely and away from us, and thoroughly cleaned the scalpel, vowing to do so between every round. “How about you have the first round of raw carp while my system settles to an equilibrium?” I flexed my muscles to see what had changed. I felt a little lighter as I sat up with a straight back, but could also just have been my imagination. I couldn’t tell my strength by the ease of my posture. Between my well-toned body and the fact that I had an Iron body, I felt about as weightless as I could be.

Mercy took the carp sushi and dipped it fish-first into the soy sauce as she had seen me do. “Normally, I would have more confidence in my Iron body, but I don’t really have much access to its benefits at the moment, so I might as well play it safe.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” I nodded as she plopped down the carp whole, and slowly locked up, head bowing as the numbing effect of the carp took over.

I let a minute pass before I moved to gather a sample from her, cutting her finger open and putting the blood in one of the three empty petri dishes left. Just as I was about to feed her the Life Elixir, she started raising her head. I tipped the contents into her mouth and she swallowed with ease. Then she sighed with relief. “That was a little rough, but I think I could have handled it.”

Let’s leave that conclusion to this little science experiment.

Though in all honesty, I did have confidence in her Iron body. Just because its coordination was impaired didn’t mean that its resilience was. And a Monarch faction’s Iron body had to include a whole host of neat features, such as being able to gather and store vast stores of blood essence.

It was my pet theory, barely a theory at all, really, that almost all the contenders of the Uncrowned King Tournament had a baseline level of strength far higher than the average. Physical parameters were the backbone of combat, whether or not sacred arts techniques were in play. Not having that advantage would be debilitating. Enforcer techniques could only enhance what was already there.

Same as how I used Nova Blade, back then named Solar Point, on those branches in the City of Broken Stars, or when I had channeled Solar Flare through that butter knife on Lindon, if the object that the technique was channelled through couldn’t pass muster, there was only so much it could do.

“Alright,” I said as I began cutting up a large portion of the cooked carp and plopped it all into my mouth. I moaned in delight at the taste of this. The thick coppery taste was gone, and all that was left was pure flavor. 

I had no doubt that this was because the ingredient itself was world-class. My cooking was medium-grade at best. My selling point was being able to follow instructions, which could take one a sight longer than you’d expect.

Still, this was delightful. I had another bite.

Immediately, I felt quite lethargic.

Still, I was able to move, so I opened another wound on my finger and dripped the contents on the last petri dish, and had a tea-spoon’s worth of Life Well water to clear away the exhaustion and slight numbness.

Mercy followed suit a moment later after I cleaned up after myself as I began to investigate the dishes. I began by using a monocle-like construct that worked as a microscope, only you had to wear it. I already knew the basic composition and configuration of healthy blood and its associated form of essence. With a healthy blood sample, I could compare the post-consumption samples with that sample, and over time, note any changes. The petri dishes were filled with a cell culture that simulated a living body—its lymphatic system, detoxifying organs, and an assortment of other factors. They were as good a representation of the human body as anything I could scrounge up on my limited budget and the space available to me in my void key.

My own samples seemed to be making good progress before my very eyes. The physical mutations were being wiped out by the remnants of my body’s immune system, absolutely drenched in strengthening life aura. I noted down a number denoting the percentage of mutated cells to healthy cells, also noting that the cooked carp sample was by far the healthiest, and would likely clear up first.

Then I moved on to Mercy’s samples.

They were all the same.

Pre-consumption and post-consumption of the raw carp and the cooked carp.

That… couldn’t be right. I examined it even more closely, then I gingerly started dripping reagents into the dishes to get a better overview of the reactions. They all seemed more or less similar to a very narrow margin of error.

Hm. 

Kudos, Akura Malice. Mercy’s Puppeteer’s Iron body was clearly in a class of its own. The way it processed consumed blood essence was almost completely seamless. 

And this was while it was almost completely gimped, except for some baseline durability that almost all Iron bodies had.

I’d have to get Lindon’s samples as well. I knew for a fact that he could heal completely without any consequence from ingesting the carp.

Though that likely wouldn’t be reflected in the blood sample. His Bloodforged Iron body worked by pumping the diseased parts of his body with madra, by filtering out foreign elements and impurities. The dishes would not be able to simulate that action. All it measured was passive regeneration, done completely by the body.

That, however, wasn’t a fully accurate estimation of a sacred artist’s natural healing process. All sacred artists had some level of regenerative abilities from cycling madra. The spirit Enforced the body naturally, promoting recovery on a far shorter scale than the usual.

From this, I could easily infer that the carp were totally safe for Mercy’s consumption, and mostly safe for myself as well, over time. I still needed this experiment more than anyone else, however, since my spirit was godawful at promoting the recovery of my body.

But why exactly was that the case, however? The Ethereal Iron body made more room for my spirit, and less room for my body, reducing my mass and physical strength. Why did that impact my recovery ability? My longest standing theory, corroborated by Eithan’s own musings, was that below a certain threshold of blood essence concentration in the body, spiritually enforced physical recovery was significantly more difficult to achieve. If that was correct, then this carp would solve every problem of my Iron body in one fell swoop.

That theory held a certain extra credibility in my mind because it dovetailed with my other observations and… personal experiences. 

Life Path spirit medicines were, as a rule, bottlenecked by the quality of the lifeline–an experience I had personally suffered only hours before. And as I had seen, sacred artists with fraying lifelines gradually lost the ability to process the effects of life Path spirit medicines into their bodies until they, well, died. On the flip side, sacred artists with healthy lifelines could process spirit medicines easily without bottlenecks. There was probably some kind of relation or parallel between the blood-path problems of my Iron Body and this general rule of life Path spirit medicines, though I lacked the education to examine the first principles of the matter, I was no life artist; but it meant that if I took this opportunity to add as many metaphorical bricks as I could to my body’s blood/life foundation, the spiritual problems of this Iron Body that I had long suffered through would be resolved–permanently, if my theory was even halfway accurate.

But what if that rebalancing of body and spirit negatively affected my Path techniques? Obviously, I would just have to wait and see, starting small, and then building up further if the worst wouldn’t come to pass, and my Collapsing Star madra didn’t turn against me.

I decided that Lindon’s samples would probably not be particularly useful in this endeavor, and with gingerly words, I gave Mercy my professional opinion. “The blood samples seem to have stabilized remarkably quickly. My best guess is that the carp should be as safe for you as it is for Lindon and Yerin.”

“And what about you?” Mercy asked.

I looked down at my blood sample again and shrugged. “I’m cautiously optimistic, but I will be pacing myself regardless, for other reasons.”

I started packing away the lab equipment, and put the half-eaten cooked carp back on the table, next to the large carcass from which it had been dug out from. I intended to share this with the rest, since it was really quite tasty.

I glanced at Yerin, whose plate was empty. She seemed to be cycling, but her body didn’t look to be any worse for wear: her posture was straight, and her body clearly hadn’t lost its strength. I’d have to ask later how it had affected her.

Lindon’s plate was half full of carp sushi, and Lindon himself was just laid out on the floor, utterly insensate. Mercy saw that too and gasped. “Should we help him?”

“No,” I said, not wanting to waste any more Life Well water, “Lindon is the least likely to succumb to this kind of thing. Yerin and Orthos, too.”

Orthos was currently just a shell, slowly rocking as he snored away, after having ripped apart three carp entirely on his lonesome. I’d pay top scales to feel how he was currently feeling, honestly. I bet he was just having the time of his life. 

Marigold had stripped two carp down to their bone before falling asleep, and that was after she had ducked her mouth into a specially prepared bowl full of Spirit Well water that I had procured. I gave the same treatment to Dolph, who hadn’t eaten any of the fish. More than likely, he had had his fill while he and Palutin had hunted.

All that was left was about eight carp.

And, of course, the Diamondscale Sea Drake.

I had wrapped that thing up in bandages covered in preservative script. The bandages covered almost every inch of its massive, five-meter long body. That had finally put a stop to the thick smell of blood in the air, as well as the blood essence gushing out in rivers so thick that a blood artist would be happy to just cycle in its presence. That thing’s body was a natural treasure in its own right. 

Just why was the wildlife in Ghostwater so lousy with blood essence? It was normally supposed to take entire ladders of natural food chains and resultant biological accumulation to concentrate blood essence to this degree. There was a reason why in the outside world, blood essence generally only concentrated like this in Lord-level apex predators. But here, even the damn carp–literal bottom feeders–could be considered akin to low Lord-level natural blood treasures. To say nothing of the Sea Drakes. Why? What did Northstrider do?

A thought for another time.

Depending on whether or not Yerin felt any difference in what she had eaten, she might be able to directly jump to eating the Sea Drake. I had no idea what Palutin’s plan with it was, but I doubted that he wouldn’t share it, seeing as it could probably keep all of us, sacred beasts included, fed for a week even if that was the only thing we ate every day. 

Lindon, I felt, could use more carp until the effects weren’t as harsh on him as they were currently.

Mercy was picking up half a dozen carp sushi from the communal tray to eat for herself, satisfied with my go-ahead.

I, on the other hand, was content to just wait and see what became of my blood samples.

In the meanwhile…

I walked up to where Palutin was chilling on top of Marigold. Dolph was playing around with some fish bones as well. Palutin perked up as he saw me and threw me a grin. “Hiyyah!”

I put down the bottles of Life Well water I had brought with me and placed them in front of his feet. “For you,” I said to him with a sincere grin, “And for Dolph, of course,” I said, looking over to the dolphin. He perked up and swam over to me, giving me some yips of what I assumed was appreciation. “It’s Life Well water. Precious beyond belief. Please take it—”

Palutin snatched the bottle up and took a swig. After having his drink, he gave a satisfied sigh and poured some into Dolph’s waiting maw, and then Marigold.

I grinned. Then I bowed at them at the waist. “Thank you so much for helping us out, Dolph and Palutin. You may not consider us friends, but I consider you mine. I’m in your debt. I speak for everyone when I say this. Just say the word, and we’ll move mountains to come to your aid.”

“Debt?” Palutin asked, head tilted. “You reckon you owe me somethin’?”

I nodded. “We owe you a ton.”

“Keep cookin’,” Palutin said. “You said you owe me, right? I need you to keep cookin’ for me then.”

I opened my mouth, but closed it. I both did not expect him to latch onto the favor he had with me so fiercely, but also expected him to ask for something more reasonable than my continued services as a shitty sushi chef.

Then I shrugged with a grin, “The menu’s pretty lean, but if you’re into fish, you’re in luck.”

“Yeah, I reckon we can be friends,” Palutin said with a satisfied grin.

“Oh—okay!” I said.

This went a lot better than expected, holy shit.

000

Unfortunately, because human beings had bodies with finite spaces within, there was only so much elixir you could drink or food you could eat before you simply could not eat any more. 

Lindon would never have thought that he would ever contend with gluttony in his life, but the presence of so much Silverfang Carp as well as so much potential to grow in strength only made him regret that he did not have the same bottomless appetite as Palutin.

Sky had sliced up several more of that strange dish; light-blue rice—made that color by the Spirit Well water it was cooked in—fastened to strips of raw fish. He had continued making them to the point that his pot of rice, enough to feed ten people, had emptied, and the Silverfang Carp he had been butchering was stripped to the bone.

Palutin hadn’t even stopped with just that. He had taken the fish and begun to nibble all over the bones, gnawing out pieces of meat, and then had gone to work on the head itself.

He was second only to the sacred beasts in how much he would eat.

It was incredible to look at, and slightly disgusting.

Lindon stood up and began trying to test out his movements. He felt lighter on his feet, but not by an enormous extent. This strength did not feel particularly new or extraordinary, either. He jabbed the air several times, trying to see if he could notice any changes.

It was by and large futile.

He wondered if he could maybe try and compare his strength to the others in the Spirit Well room, but how could he do that when they had eaten the same strength-enhancing food as him?

Sky was seated on the floor, hunched over three glass dishes that each contained smears of blood, focusing intently on them. As Lindon approached, Sky looked up, one eye-glass construct covering his left eye, where a scar still remained. Why the Life Well hadn’t healed those, but had fully washed Yerin’s skin clean, was a mystery that likely had to do with the near-bald man’s Iron body. Lindon would have asked, but he was juggling more than enough mysteries and puzzles to keep him busy for the time being.

Sky raised an eyebrow at him. “How do you feel?”

“Not much different, to be honest,” Lindon responded. 

“Hm,” Sky said. “We can try using Orthos as a weight to measure any increases in strength, I guess. We’ll do that tomorrow. Right now, I’m just… dead tired.”

Lindon frowned, “Don’t we have the Dream Well water? Apologies, I assume you mean to save that for a—”

Sky’s eyes widened. “No—wait, you’re right. We could totally keep working. I’ll bring out a barrel and give it out to everyone.” He stacked up the three round dishes together. “Before that, we should be moving on to Dross. Where is he at the moment?” Sky looked him over. Lindon looked over his shoulder, where he had left Dross next to Yerin, who was busy cycling with her master’s sword resting on her lap. She had drunk a whole bottle of Spirit Well water. It was a waste, but the well was so full that nobody seemed to care, not even Sky.

Though it… bothered Lindon, to some extent. They should be stretching this valuable resource as much as possible. Once they finally began to notice a dip in the well’s water level, it would be too late to start rationing. He would bring that point up at some later time.

Quickly, he jogged over to Dross, picked him up, and ignored his babbling as he brought the construct to Sky.

“Ah, hello, Glassy Sky! It’s always a pleasure talking to the brightest mind in this habitat,” Dross said, “I reconnected with the surveillance constructs in this room, and your well of insight seems almost bottomless. You would not have been out of place as a researcher during Ghostwater’s heyday, I’ll tell you that!” Sky grinned with self-satisfaction as Dross went on and on. Lindon suppressed his boredom.

“Good day, Dross,” Sky nodded, “We were just talking about your evolutions. You have to borrow Lindon’s body to drink the Spirit Well water. You will be having to digest it for two weeks.”

“Ah, yes,” Dross happily agreed, his construct blinking rapidly in agreement. “That sounds much more efficient than spending another fifty years soaking in the well water. It gets… boring, you know? There would be no one to talk to but the nascent Dreamseeds, which does seem rather pointless.”

“Pardon,” Lindon said, while Sky snorted. “But how can Dross use my body when he’s inside a physical vessel?”

Dross’ purple form exited the Eye of the Deep crystal, zipping in front of Lindon’s face. 

“Ah,” Lindon stared at Dross’ purely spiritual form.

“Yeah, he could always do that,” Sky muttered, “Well,” he gestured towards the floating, purple orb of light, “That’s how. Just… make room in your spirit for him.”

“How do I do that?” Lindon asked, askance. He was already beginning to feel a mounting sense of reluctance at this proposition. Taking in a foreign spirit inside his own spirit? One that had true intelligence at that? 

Still, his curiosity won over his better judgment, and he put his fleshy hand under Dross’ floating form. Dross tried to press himself down into the hand. “I’ll just squeeze right in—uh, like Sky said, would you mind making some room for me?”

“I’ll… still my madra as much as I can,” Lindon said, as he held his breath and then slowly breathed out until there was no longer any air in his lungs. His madra became as sluggish as his momentarily air-starved brain as Dross slid smoothly into his hand, and through his channels. It felt like a bunch of earthworms were painlessly digging itself through his spirit. Profoundly uncomfortable, all in all.

“Wow,” Dross said in his head, “Roomy in here. Were you born with two extra large cores? I’m sorry, that sounds rude, but do feel free to answer.” 

Lindon momentarily became concerned about the effects of the Purification Wheel, but then Sky spoke up. 

“One day, all of your abilities will be revealed to him, and your successes will be his. You don’t have to feel shy about cycling that technique with him inside you. It should take you about two days to advance on your Path of the Black Flame, and two weeks for Dross’ next evolution, but that being said,” Sky stood up smoothly on his own power. It brought a spark of joy to see the man with an able body. He folded one arm across his chest, pinching his chin with his other hand as he looked at the Spirit Well, “I wonder if Dross might be able to eat those Sylvan Dreamseeds that Little Blue is playing with right now.”

Lindon’s mind came to an abrupt halt, “Pardon?”

Sky shrugged uncertainly, “It might take him two weeks until he’s ready to do something like that. Why don’t you tell me what he says?”

“Maybe. It wouldn’t hurt to try, actually. Come to think of it, those dream spirits do look mighty delectable.”

Lindon looked at Sky, then at the dream spirits. Then at Little Blue, a Sylvan Riverseed. It seemed like he was the only one that took issue with this situation.

“Aren’t they… like Little Blue?” Lindon asked.

“Not yet,” Sky said, “They’d need some Soulfire and lots of dream madra to make that push to a higher state of existence. As they are now, they’re more like plants. Or seeds. Or unfertilized eggs.”

Lindon frowned at that, but it did make sense. Little Blue had hardly had much of a personality before Eithan had meddled with her. Why would these formless blobs of shifting purple light and half-formed images be any different?

“How do I take them in?” Lindon asked. Then Sky winced and hissed, like he was in physical pain. He looked at Lindon’s prosthetic arm regretfully.

“You would have consumed them,” Sky said. “With the arm. But that ship has sailed now. You would have had a weaker Consume binding that you could have used for this task.”

“Would have?” Dross asked. “How does he know all of this? Actually, I do wonder how he knows all that he does about me, to be honest. Surely I wasn’t that famous in the outside world, was I?”

“What if the arm just consumes them by itself?” Lindon asked, “As a passive property of the madra it’s made of?” While handling some constructs, Lindon had noticed that the spiritual material sometimes had a tendency of melting into the hand itself, though that process was largely non-destructive. 

It wouldn’t hurt to try, however. They walked up to the Spirit Well, and Lindon made to grab a Dreamseed nearest to the rim. It would have been easier to enlist Little Blue in this endeavor, but he had… mixed feelings about involving her at all, to say the least.

He grabbed the formless blob of pale purple madra in his Remnant hand. The Dreamseed squirmed as it sunk into the hand slowly, like it was sinking into a tar pit. He pressed his fleshy hand to the Dreamseed, pushing it the rest of the way in. “Dross?” Lindon asked.

“Ah, it’s in your channels now, I can reach it. Hold on, let me just—” Lindon could feel Dross’ madra scooping for the Dreamseed, but the spirit’s structure remained entirely unharmed. “No, nevermind. That thing is tough. I’ll need more madra before I can break it down.”

Lindon pulled his hands apart, wondering if the Dreamseed would leave on its own. He cycled his madra to his hand, and that immediately ejected the Dreamseed out of it like it was a Striker technique.

“Alright, now let’s have some of that Spirit Well water,” Dross said. Lindon looked to Sky.

“Would you take out the Dream Well water, please?” Lindon asked. 

“Happily.”

000

In two days, just like I had predicted, Lindon had advanced on the Path of the Black Flame. It would take him weeks to knock on the door to Truegold on either of his cores afterwards, and that was while he was also juggling Dross’ advancement. He had two cores as well, so that made things extra difficult for him. Extra large cores also meant an extra large helping of Spirit Well water to get him up to capacity so that he could continue pushing for advancement.

I had none of those disadvantages.

By now, I had already determined that I could safely eat not only the cooked carp, but even the raw carp without any destabilization of my madra or Path techniques, or without any permanent damage. Instead, in order to naturally recover, I would have to take about three to six hours just lying down and cycling the essence through my body, which posed a rather steep opportunity cost. Namely, the tablet library.

Here was the sum total of almost all the knowledge that Northstrider himself deemed was important for his research. The research of a Monarch.

And here I was trying to inflate my scrawny-ass body with muscle instead. It was a travesty.

Our group only took a moment to celebrate his success before we got back to business again.

Not one hour later, Mercy followed him into Highgold.

Mercy stood around awkwardly as we congratulated her. I could imagine how she felt: she had left Lowgold behind ages ago. The second time around couldn’t possibly have been as special.

Palutin spent most of his time either sleeping around with his friends, watching them drink the Spirit Well while he himself slept, or would go out to hunt more carp for himself, because our stockpile of food was just downright not enough for him.

The Faminewrought Iron body, huh? I had heard of it. As far as Iron bodies went, it was… well, it was a peasant variety. Very common, especially in disaster-stricken areas where food was scarce. It was induced by eating a very common poisonous plant that would have you shit and vomit all your guts out and put you on the brink of dehydration and starvation for days. It had a rather low survival rate, but those who did end up surviving were more than equipped to migrate towards places where food was more abundant, where they could once again rebuild their cultures.

Palutin’s Iron body, from what I could see, was clearly a notch above the common variety. He must have run into some decent elixirs as a Copper to make it all the way to Truegold, and also become the Beast King’s disciple.

He would always turn down my offers to give him or his friends some of the Dream Well water. They clearly didn’t view advancement as being such a high priority as we did, because I doubted he was turning us down in order to not be beholden to us or create a debt. We were already indebted to him as it was.

Thankfully because of that, we had more than enough to eliminate every need for sleep. Rather than eighteen hours, I now had twenty-three hours for training. I only needed one hour to stabilize my madra.

I spent six of those twenty-three hours recovering from the carp meat. I spent five more just sitting on my ass, cycling the Spirit Well.

The remaining twelve?

I used those hours being a scholar.

I started by going for an Archlord dream tablet left by Nelius Cornider on the Path of the Sublime Sun, fire and light.

His thoughts were the mental equivalent of a loudspeaker blaring right next to your ears.

Even if that didn’t stun you into disorientation, leaving you dizzy and stumbling, you would hear nothing. Nothing but the aftershocks of an impact. That was sound in high enough concentrations: just a forceful impact. Like getting punched in the brain.

I admit that I had approached this with some level of arrogance after I had scrubbed clean every useful impression I could of the Script Lord’s thoughts on pure madra’s seven principles. It had felt empowering to be so much more capable than Lindon was in this area.

In all actuality, our relative levels weren’t that distant. When it came to the breadth of knowledge, I had him beat by miles, but his comprehension wasn’t poor either. He, too, had grown up in a library. He knew how to self-study. And I had left him dozens upon dozens of tomes on not only Soulsmithing, but also what little the College could offer on the sacred arts, while I was still a Scholar.

He had kept up admirably.

I kept trying different Archlords, and kept getting the same result. A brain punch. I would wake up moments later, head swimming, and in need of Dream Well water to recover mentally. Thankfully, it didn’t seem to carry any physical repercussions. Just mental exhaustion, which the Dream Well could quickly heal.

After the sixth Archlord, I was beginning to… get the hang of something. I didn’t know what it was. It almost reminded me of pulling back my spiritual perception so that a person with a greater advancement than me wouldn’t cause me to lose control over my madra.

Soon it became clearer what I was doing: closing off my comprehension, narrowing my eyes and plugging my ears, letting in just a trickle at a time, and not any greater context.

Archlord Estus on the Path of the Healing Flask, world-renowned refiner, on the subject of the fundamentals of the healing elixir.

Fundamentals are all that any master ever talks about when they wish to spread the message of what made them great or competent. Even now, while he presided over the hall filled with Golds, each and every one prospective Refiners, he would continue to emphasize this point. Nothing new.

But one insight that he felt uniquely capable of sharing, was the power that a story could have on a healing elixir.  The story of its ingredients. Like the circle of life. Take the grass, the chicken that fed on it, and the fox that fed on it, and the grass that fed on the fox’s carcass, and blend all those ingredients together—as long as they had value as Refining ingredients—and you could conjure up an elixir that suggested far, far more power than its components would merit. Gold level components and a dash of Soulfire, and it could be useful to even an Overlord.

For example, his Phoenix Rebirth Elixir, brimmed with… It was an unmistakable feeling, and it mirrored that sensation he already felt in his soul, that…

I heard a distant, melodious caw of some celestial fowl of myth and legend resonate in my heart, leaving behind an impression of void, of some unknowable aspect that I could not even begin to guess at. My mind raced as I scratched and clawed for the memory. Try as I might, I couldn’t find it. I was forgetting. All I could recall was a void.

What the hell was my problem? I was the memory guy! I remembered everything! What’s more, I could learn everything! Everything that I observed, I had the potential to grasp and learn. That was exactly what had gotten me to these heights, what had allowed Arakmedes to pass his inheritance on to me, safe in the knowledge that I was even capable of continuing his work.

Why was this so emphatically beyond me?

Why was I forgetting?

No. Not quite. I had an inkling about what was happening.

I tried the dream tablet again.

I got to that same point.

I let my observation widen a hair, to get more out of this thing.

The thing passed, and I was just as dumbfounded as before.

This time, I had a concrete memory. A memory of my observation failing to capture a concept. I hadn’t forgotten what I had seen. All I could recall was a void, but I did recall it. 

I had failed to see it, and so in my memory, it was a void. What’s more, it was a tiny and meaningless piece of void. I was staring at a single scale on an unimaginably large dragon. Meaningless data that could barely represent the wider whole.

What was even more, that scale was a color and a shape entirely foreign to me. This dragon’s scale was not only far too small to even mean anything useful, it was fundamentally something outside of my grasp, something beyond my ability to observe.

I didn’t lack powerful enough senses. I lacked an entire kind of sense, an organ built to decode and digest this new kind of information.

But what was it? A Soulfire art? Or was it authority? Perhaps this Archlord was on the cusp of Sagehood? That elixir it had brewed brimmed not only with madra, aura, or the Soulfire that I could just barely sense, but clearly something else too.

It was authority. Had to be.

And it wasn’t that I lacked the correct type of sensory organ. I just lacked an evolution in the sensory organ that I already had, the one I had received at Jade: my spiritual perception. That evolution was the Underlord spiritual perception, the one that would not only allow me to go farther, but deeper.

It would allow me to expand my view of the ephemeral and small, like a microscope would. Go deep enough, far enough into reality itself—no need to cast a wide net as reality was everywhere—and you could uncover the structure behind it. 

Icons were tricky. Yerin busted her ass trying to sense the Sword Icon, and she had Adama’s Remnant to show her some of the way, and she still hadn’t reached Sage first. Lindon had perfectly embodied the concept of the Void, and Dross had helped him sharpen his senses to a truly inhuman level, allowing him to pierce the cloak of the Way with only his underdeveloped Underlord senses. 

…Showing that it was possible.

Lindon didn’t have anything special, sense-wise. Dross was special, but he worked with what Lindon physically and spiritually had on hand. He couldn’t pull more madra or a more powerful Jade sense out of Lindon’s ass. He worked with what Lindon had, and Lindon had that power.

Perhaps that self-embodiment of a universal ideal was the great barrier to Sagehood that many faced. There wasn’t much you could do about it except to dedicate years and years chasing that ideal. The problem with that was how frustrating chasing a role was, instead of embodying it, instead of being it.

But you could train your senses the way you trained anything else.

You could train your will the way you trained anything else.

Repetition and increased intensity.

Have an overabundance of those two out of three pillars of Sagehood, and perhaps you could overcome a deficiency in the third? Perhaps you didn’t have to have a childhood of spiritual disability, being called empty and soulless all your life, to have a defining characteristic reflected by an Icon?

I had not been a sacred artist until a year and a half ago, and even then, I hadn’t really started on anything until Jade, which wasn’t even a full year ago. It had barely been a year since I had learned my Path. What foundation did I have with the Spear Icon? I’d never touched a spear in my childhood. What about some other random Icon that I may have been able to summon if that had been reflected in my childhood as it currently was in my madra, like the Speed Icon, or maybe the Sun Icon or something?

From the perspective of the Way, I was an unidentifiable upstart with no glaring defining characteristics. Until I had reforged my body in soulfire, I wouldn’t have the metaphysical mass to even exist as a ping on its radar, or perhaps have the reach to grasp for it in the first place.

A hypothesis was beginning to crystallize in my mind. What was soulfire? To sacred artists, soulfire was the stuff of Lords, leaders and emperors and the strong. A consumable resource with a higher quality of reality-warping properties than madra. A weapon, in short, as things always went with sacred artists. But what was soulfire to the Way?

Seen through a theistic lens—though I was reluctant to acquiesce to theism where more grounded language could suffice—it was like performing an ablution to make one ready to interface with divinity. A divine cleansing, ridding oneself of the impurities of mortality, making you worthy to contact the heavens.

It was the catalyst for ascendance to the heavens via a transmutation of the mortal into the immortal.

Or more realistically, it was like slapping on some extra inches of steel on your car’s chassis, to make it spaceworthy. That was being facetious, however. A car would require complete re-engineering from the ground-up to survive space conditions. Soulfire achieved a similar effect on the human body: A holistic improvement from top to bottom.

Soulfire created grails, not out of gold, but out of blood and bone. The bodies of sacred artists were mere unimportant base matter, potentially up to thrice-reforged as a result of the affirmation of their own ideals—and the world accepting those affirmations, which is why the unity of aura was necessary. And these affirmations created empty vessels that were primed for the descent of universal ideals into mere mortal bodies. Assuming for sufficient virtuous compatibility between vessel and blessing if we were continuing the thread of theology, or man and Icon in more realistic terms.

That was the real purpose of soulfire, with relation to the sacred arts. It was meant to prime mortal bodies for their purpose as containers of blessings, by giving them the metaphysical mass to serve as vessels for even the smallest aspects of higher reality—the Icons—without shattering to splinters.

There were holes in this theory. I didn’t know how to explain the existence of Lord-level sacred beasts without their own sapience, nor could I explain why a spirit could never touch an Icon unless it advanced to Herald, even after being bathed in soulfire. But the logic felt… close to right. 

But circling back around to my own situation, taking into account all I knew about Icon resonance and becoming a living symbol—which required that you embody a certain ideal since childhood—, all I could conceivably control was willpower and sensory training. Those were my only hopes of reaching Sage.

But at least now, I knew what to look for, by looking around what I couldn’t see. By looking at the gaps, I could perhaps only guess at what lay within the murky depths that lay beyond my soul’s eyes.

Even if I had a low resonance with the Icons, I would force a connection anyway, through willpower and deep perception. I would seize greatness out from the deep universe through sheer, hard work.

One hour of cycling.

Six hours of recovering from carp meat.

Five hours of cycling the Spirit Well water.

That left twelve hours to do this.

And it was twelve hours for a damn good reason. It still hardly felt enough.

---

Many thanks to the patrons that gave their edits in the google doc, and special thanks to Coldbringer/SnowGN for his help :D