With the well of gambling profit dried up, Theo could only eye his total and hope the numbers worked out in the end.

He'd received his salary for another month, which took him a hundred and ten Fithan Discs closer. Some of his plans for Aathal had been deemed viable by House Blacksilver, but not as immediately profitable as the granitebile. Instead of a percentage, they'd given him flat payments. Combined with his ongoing income from the petalfilter work, that earned him roughly another two hundred.

So in all... only nine hundred. Over a hundred Fithan Discs short, which was no small sum.

Of course, he'd gain it in another month, but he was concerned that the drysupernova wouldn't be available by then. He almost considered gambling again, though challenging the House of Coin was clearly too risky. The others might have loaned him the money, yet he was already in their debt and they didn't have much, having purchased their own sublime materials.

One possibility was to begin selling off what assets they had, though it was a bad option that would cost them in the end. The Deuxan sleigh, for example, couldn't be easily replaced and saved them money each month. Nauda reminded him that they still had the eryo claws, which definitely had some value, but he wanted to save those for a time when he was truly desperate. His deadline might be highest priority, but a single sublime material wasn't worth losing irreplaceable assets.

If he had one skill developed on Earth, it was preventing depressing thoughts from overwhelming him completely. Despite falling short and feeling the increasing pressure, Theo didn't let up in his soulcrafting routine even slightly, throwing himself into every task he had available.

The most successful of those was his work soulcrafting a pure speed room. He'd researched the yellow crystals from the mine and discovered they were named, unsurprisingly, tornadogems. Imbued with wind as they were, they had a clear tie to concepts of speed and could definitely find a place in his soulhome.

For the first time since his return, however, he found himself having to build the room to dampen the essence of a sublime material instead of enhance it. They simply generated too much wind, clashing with his gravitational concepts of mass and pressure. So instead of placing them on an altar, he'd built a box for them out of leftover eclipsebasalt. That had contained them far too well, however, storing them inertly.

In the end, he'd forced himself to purchase some glass with his House merits, though he didn't like dropping further from his goals there. He still needed well over a thousand merits total, and his recent activities had been less successful at acquiring those than earning money.

Once he forced himself, however, the chamber came together quickly. He built a hollow cube of eclipsebasalt, then replaced the four sides with dark window panes. The top was a lid, through which he poured all the tornadogems he'd collected from the quarry. Once shielded from the rest of his soulhome, they began to spin around one another, soon forming a tornado of cantae. Their force passed through the dark window panes and was transformed into a much more palatable energy.

It all would have been much easier and cheaper if Fiyu had been able to create the glass for him, but it wasn't an option and he was actually uncertain if it was even theoretically possible. Such matters had been at the very edge of his understanding when he'd been a Stronghold, so he held the rules he remembered lighter.

In any case, the glass worked well enough for now. He had the force of a tornado inside his soulhome, and he could strengthen it simply by acquiring more tornadogems. Still, whenever he had time, he did his best to carve the walls of the room into a proper speed chamber.

He could definitely feel the results, able to move much more swiftly than he had before. When he tried sparring with Nauda, her enhanced speed was no longer overwhelming, but he still wasn't satisfied. Even if Nauda was as fast as Esaire had been before, he'd be even faster by the time of their duel. The speed chamber was a good start, but he needed more.

Which just brought him around to the same old flaw: his second floor chambers would work more efficiently if he could move his singularity upward. To do that, he needed the drysupernova, and that required the money he didn't have.

Eventually, after another mundane assignment, he realized that he needed to relax if he was going to think of a breakthrough. That had always been one of his greatest flaws, in a sense: he'd been so focused on gaining strength that he'd missed Vistgil's schemes, then so obsessed with returning to the Nine that he'd lived a miserable life on Earth. It seemed efficient only through tunnel vision, but with perspective he could see that it limited him in the end.

So instead of continuing to be unsociable, he found Nauda when she wasn't working and they both went to Fiyu's room. House Blacksilver had windowless rooms designed for Ichili, and Fiyu had customized hers since they arrived, reinforcing the door to reduce sounds and veiling all the lights. Only when checking to make sure Senka wasn't underfoot did Theo realize that he hadn't seen her recently.

"How are you, Theo?" Fiyu had been soulcrafting, but emerged to smile at him. He could only shrug.

"I need to think about something other than soulcrafting. What have the two of you been doing?"

"Mostly soulcrafting," Nauda said, but Fiyu regarded him seriously.

"I have a question, Theo. If soulcrafters do not exist on Earth, what was your profession? Were you a gambler?"

Theo coughed in surprise, struggling not to laugh. No, the only gambling he'd done had been preparation for a return, not trying to run any serious operations. "No, I wasn't a professional gambler. Honestly, I wasn't much of anything. It's not a very interesting time of my life, even though it's the majority of my life."

"It would be interesting to me." Fiyu continued staring, and he swore he could feel a supernatural sense flowing over him. "Your world seems strange to me, more strange than any one of the Nine Worlds. It is okay if you do not want to speak of it too much, but could you tell us what you did for a living?"

As the two of them watched him, Theo realized that this was very nearly a first. In his first life - no, he kept falling into that pattern, and it led him to make the wrong separations. Of all the people he had met on his journey through the Nine, essentially none had asked him much about his home. They'd treated him as if he was a brand new person, without a world that would be strange and exotic to them.

Yet he remembered his friends, and they had been vibrantly curious people. He wondered if perhaps he had been the one who had caused it, wanting to forget that he had ever lived elsewhere and exist wholly in a new life. But his silence had stretched on for too long, and they deserved an answer.

"I was an operations manager." When they both blinked at him, clearly not having heard the words he intended, he tried again. "Imagine an organization larger than a House, employing many more people and selling products over a much larger area. When a structure becomes that big, you can't just have a few leaders deciding everything. My job was managing supply chains, supervising the work of others, and maintaining quality."

Nauda stared at him with an unreadable expression and eventually shook her head. "Well, that might explain a few things about you."

"I think I understand the purpose," Fiyu said, "but I cannot imagine what your actual work would have been. Did you enjoy it?"

Theo snorted. "Not at all. At first, I was convinced that I was going back to the Nine Worlds at any moment, so I wasted my early years. When I realized it might be a long time, I took stable jobs that supported me and let me travel. It paid well enough, so I could explore my world, hoping to find a place close enough to the Nine Worlds to have a door back."

"I see." Fiyu bobbed her head as if pleased with his answer, though he thought it was a terrible one. Meanwhile, Nauda balanced her staff across her legs and tilted it back and forth, eventually coming up with a question.

"So what happens to that money, back on your world?"

"It probably stays in the bank, where I left it." Thinking about such details felt deeply wrong to him, somehow, as if he should have abandoned that life entirely. Instead of flinching away from the thoughts, as he often had, he pushed harder. That was part of his life, and ignoring it would cost him.

"And to your friends, you just disappeared?"

"Hah, as if I had real friends. If anyone thought about me, they probably assumed that I just cut them off."

Fiyu shook her head. "That is sad. It is good that you were able to return to the Nine Worlds."

"I hope it is." For a while he sat back and reflected on that, wondering just how they were connected. A very long time ago, Vistgil had spoken to him as if his old life had ended, an irrelevant prologue before his true life began.

Now it was clear that those words had been meant to manipulate him, but how? Vistgil must need people from Earth for some reason, which meant he had to keep them ignorant. The problem was, Theo couldn't think of anything he'd done before that was so important that someone else couldn't have done it. Surely someone as powerful as Vistgil could do his own dirty work. What he needed to remember was that Earth did matter, somehow, or there wouldn't be traps set up to destroy him.

Realizing that he'd fallen into his thoughts again, Theo smiled at both of them. "One thing I can say: I'm glad I'm here, and I'm glad I met you. This is my third shot at life, and I'd like to get it right this time."

Nauda smiled and touched his arm. Fiyu bobbed her head pleasantly. Senka slid out from underneath the bed and screeched, "Senka too, Senka too!"

All of them flinched in surprise, and Theo very nearly flattened her into a puddle. Not out of panic, but because he really didn't want to deal with her at the moment. Before he could decide whether or not to do it anyway, Senka suddenly thrust a large sack against his chest.

"Senka stole this for you!"

He looked down to see what junk she'd taken this time, hoping that it contained some money or items of decent value. But to his surprise, the entire sack was filled with Fithan Discs, not a single piece of trash in sight. After quickly calculating the value at over a hundred total, he looked up to Senka, only to find her staring at him with unusual intensity.

"Senka doesn't want you to hate Senka. Senka isn't a Senkahead all the time."

Theo met her gaze, wondering if there was really something there. "Senka, you..."

"Sporp!" She abruptly flopped backwards against Nauda's legs, then tried to chew on the end of her staff. When Nauda pulled it away, she began to thrash on her back and wail. The abrupt shift left all of them staring at her, not quite sure how to take it.

In the end, Theo hefted the sack. "There's enough here. If you meant to do that, Senka, thank you."

"Give Senka yummies right now!"

While Fiyu tried to console her, Nauda instead stepped closer. "Are you going to buy it tomorrow, or...?"

"Right now." He saw her expression and grinned in response. "I might have worked a very boring job, but I know something about doing things efficiently. If this works out, I'll be unsociable again for a while."

"Just so long as you keep your ultimate goals in mind."

She let him go, so Theo rushed to take the sleigh. A cynical part of his mind was convinced that the drysupernova would have been purchased just before he arrived, or someone would attack him on the way, or Vistgil himself would descend from the sky. None of those happened: he simply walked into the store, purchased the drysupernova from a polite clerk, and left.

He toyed with it all the way back, marveling at the power burning within. Though he was certain it would fulfill its most basic purpose, he wasn't sure how much of the cantae would be lost in the process. This was one of the points of his blueprint he wasn't completely satisfied with, since he'd been dependent on Brigana's design for a core and was trying to rework from first principles.

Back in the Blacksilver complex, he locked his door and practically leapt into his soulhome. It actually hadn't been so long since he'd been forcing work on his speed chamber, exhausted, yet the short time with the others left him rejuvenated. That, and the potential for a breakthrough.

First, he pulled the singularity up as high as it would go, the space between floors. Then he set the drysupernova hovering in the center of the shaft, which it did easily. It really was a remarkable sublime material, ready to explode and begin generating immense energy. What he needed to do was subvert all of that, make sure that the energy didn't damage his soulhome but did leave the glossy black residue like before.

Though he started with the old model, something about it felt wrong, so he prepared his own plans. This wasn't kindling a heart chamber for the first time, after all, but expanding on top of the singularity he already had. After considering every angle as well as he could, Theo took a deep breath and let cantae flow into the drysupernova.

This time he had a split second view of an explosion before his back smashed against the wall of his second floor, blinded by stars. He staggered upright, struggling to blink them away, trying to see the results properly.

His fingers touched the obsidian-like stone before his eyes recovered, and he let himself smile. The central chamber had been dark eclipsebasalt before, but now instead of rough stone, all the walls were glossy. Some of the explosion had made it into the outer rooms as well, coating parts of the walls. That might be a problem later, until he found a way to work the strange stone, but he couldn't bring himself to care.

Because his singularity pulsed more powerfully than before. Not only had it survived the explosion, it seemed to have absorbed most of the cantae, growing far denser than before.

This time, when he pulled it to the center of his second floor, his soulhome held firm. The power flowed throughout every chamber more intensely than before. He had the heart chamber he needed, now it was just a matter of putting it to use.