Axolotls were made for mud and for water. On a deep level, the heated mire was comfortable for Nic, and he lay just barely above the surface, head-fronds flicking with deep satisfaction as he blew slimy bubbles from his lips. All around him he could feel power gathering from the earth, a faint electrifying rumble that rolled in towards his body in steady ripples.

A gentle cleansing force flowed through his veins, catching against every blot of curdled impurity that had built up in his meridian channels. One problem with relying so heavily on his regeneration was that he took damage to his inner workings, again and again, creating a kind of spiritual scar tissue where enemy aura had embedded itself into his flesh.

Feeling all that be scraped out was better than picking the most obnoxious scab away.

Under the healing pool’s constant flow of rich energy, Nic felt the last of the ash clogging his meridians break apart and dissipate. As it left his scars and aches began to fade away, his regeneration filling his veins with a chirping, steady rhythm of energy that closed over the wound in his shoulder and replenished his failing strength.

If it wasn’t clear....

This was basically axolotl heaven, and Nic began to think it was a trap, a diabolical trap, a trap so comfy he’d never be able to get out of the mud bath again.

“If you do not get out of the mud now…” The toad-man said nearby, clearly dissatisfied. “It will be so filled with impurities it takes twenty years to replenish.”

Nic cracked an eye open reluctantly. “Now now?”

“Now in every sense. The striking of lightning. Sparks flying from the flint. Now now.”

With a huge, heaving sigh, Nic crawled out, bidding his personal heaven goodbye. The instant he left the pool the traces of grey, nearly bone-colored mud began to lose its miraculous power, drying to a husk around his body that cracked and fell away with every motion.

He stretched, breaking through the skin of mud like a snake emerging from its metamorphosis.

“So… Everyone else needs something… And I think you’ve earned it…” Nic said lazily.

“I do not need anything.” Halsa’Kar said.

“Oh, come on. There’s no way to get the pool to draw in power faster?” An eyebrow was raised.

“The earth moves at her own pace.” Halsa replied.

“So I have to wait, what, a year before coming back?”

“Two.” Halsa’s voice barely stirred.

Two years. Even with three more mud pools scattered through the marsh, it was a harsh sentence. Only being able to give out this kind of healing once every half-year, all calculated together, seemed a little stingy for a silver-ranked Spatial Bubble.

But Nic was probably underestimating how much value it had. He didn’t rely much on pills, for instance, and wasn’t constantly building up their toxins. Nor did he accumulate sinful karma or other slow poisons with an evil path.

Mostly he was just sour he couldn’t experience that kind of relaxation more often.

Lifting his arms overhead until his bones cracked, Nic scratched the last of the mud away and nodded to the druid. “Well, I’m glad you’re…”

Halsa looked at him with no emotion at all.

“Doing your druid thing.”

“Yes.”

The stilted awkwardness in the air was growing into an unbearable pressure. Nic turned towards the sky, and blinked.

“Wait, was I in there all night?”

“Yes. You were more wounded than you knew, I think.”

‘Fuck.’ Nic mouthed. Maybe he really was.

---

Nic sat on a stump and assessed the state of his body. First of all, the part he’d been dreading; he examined the threads of crystal that grew out from his blue jewel of a left eye. They had expanded into his brain, piercing into the gray matter like spears…

But it was more than that.

The geometric crystals actually formed into squared spirals etched with thin grooves; they had taken on the form of the brain they had replaced. Aleph marks drifted about, floating in and out of the crystallized portion of his mind.

“That…”

“Is a situation I am desperately curious about as well, Nicolas. It appears that we’ve found the function of the Aleph runes. They take invasive powers and they meld them into you, making them part of your strength. The crystal infection is no longer a dagger poised over your cerebellum, it is becoming you.”

“If you look closely, some of the longer spears have actually reached your brainstem. I believe that was the point when you gained the ability to access the High Narrative.”

“The…?” Nic was just dumbfounded.

“The flow of information and memory by which all Sophonts see the world.”

“The golden diagrams, got it.” Nic reached up and tapped against his crystal eye. It was a problem he’d tried to delay, ignore, and escape. And in the end, one problem had solved another. The equally-invasive Aleph markings had consumed the lesser trespasser on his body, converting them to something useful.

It was tempting to try and solve all his problems this way.

Maybe if he waited long enough, Azmin Hale would kill off the governor’s son for him…

He laughed. Unlikely. “Hmm…”

Nic looked into himself and found traces of root still etched into his muscle, the thorny vines of the parasitic flower entangled with the meat of his being. Thorns bristled through his skin at points along his arms. But slowly, they were ceasing to be distinct, alien modifications to his body, and taking on the properties of the surrounding flesh. “Do you think if my regeneration wasn’t stopped up, it would’ve eaten the dryad flowers as well?”

“Likely.” Sofia agreed.

The power to absorb anything that invaded his body…

To drink poison and fire.

Nic smiled softly as he ran rippling veils of energy through his body, searching for any lingering corrupted. He found nothing. His meridian channels were as clean as when the System made this body for him…

It was a beautiful morning and Nic felt better than he had in days. The suffocating prison, the dryad-sapling's deadly roots...

They felt like a memory in the bright sunlight. Nic wanted to roll around in the leaves and let his body be idle for once...

“Inkspur. Redjaw. Sunfire. Come out.” One by one, the shadows of his familiars leapt out from where he’d tattooed their base essence into his skin.

Redjaw was huge, an imperial presence of sluggish, slimy flesh and crawling limbs. His massive jaws dripped venom-laced saliva, but he butted his blunt, scaly skull up into Nic’s hand like a faithful dog. Inkspur perched on his shoulder, preening happily. Sunfire was the odd one out; the little lizard stood on its hindlegs, its small arms perched by its chest. The expressive, colorful crests around its neck flared open and shut, signaling uncertainty.

Nic reached over and scratched Sunfire underneath the chin, laughing as the creature’s bird-like, arrowhead shaped skull pushed into his palm, eager for more.

“Okay, okay… I owe y’all some gifts…”

From his bag, Nic took out a dark, opaque Shard. It resembled a lozenge of gray-blue stone flecked with reflective fragments of black. The Chainbreaker Shard.

It was tempting to take the precious Primary Shard for himself, but Nic knew he’d have to form a Core soon. Any Shard he absorbed that didn’t align with his previous choices would make that process harder by leaps and bounds.

Redjaw, however, still had an open path before him.

Kneeling down, Nic pressed the stone into the top of Redjaw’s skull. It began to dissolve, arcs of fiery light flashing around the Shard and dissolving it into motes of pure Essence; those sparks were drawn in by Redjaw, and slowly the Shard itself began to sink through the bone and muscle of his head, being subsumed into his being.

It would allow him to grow without end. His natural strength had already reached the limits of his Class, but the Shard offered a way to exceed them.

Redjaw huffed, foul-smelling fog puffing from his jaws. He reared up, tail swishing about, testing his new strength. With a sudden roar he slammed his tail down into an ancient pine, breaking it to splinters.

Nic grinned.

One gift down.

He turned to Inkspur next, rubbing the top of the wyvern’s beak. Inkspur pretended not to enjoy this kind of treatment, but the cattish creature lived for scritches behind the little spurs of horn that extended from the back of his skull.

“You, you’re a little trickier. Buuut…” Once again, Nic reached into his bag of tricks. Out came coins. Heaping fistfuls of silver, nickel, and copper printed with the symbols of the old world. Nic had swept up a huge amount alongside literal buckets of green paper scrip-currency. Makepeace seemed to find some value in these tokens- maybe they just hadn’t accepted that their old world wasn’t coming back.

But a while ago Inkspur had mentioned draconic creatures - even offshoots like him - needed a pile of treasure to fuel their evolution.

“Will this do.”

“I- ah- Mmhm.” Inkspur was nodding his head very fast. “Yes, yes I suppose that will suffice! Yes, ah…”

“Thanks?”

“You’re welcome.” Inkspur answered, smugly.

Rolling his eyes, Nic moved on to Sunfire. “Sunfire…”

Sunfire was the only one of his familiars who’d yet to take a Primary Shard. For that matter, while Redjaw acted as a defender for Nic, and Inkspur was his voice, Sunfire could only produce materials for Nic’s explosive toys; as a result he only came out to play when the way was clear.

Nic didn’t think the little creature was unhappy with its idyl life of sleeping, eating, and frollicking. It was a pretty fair trade in exchange for the supply of explosive crystals Sunfire made for him.

But…

He wanted Sunfire to have the same chance as the rest of them. The chance to grow, advance, and climb towards the heavens. “Sunfire, it’s time you choose a path of your own. I’m giving you 10,000 of my credits to spend. Sofia? You can help him decide what he wants…”

The little lizard tilted its head aside in confusion, but Sofia flickered into view moments later. “Of course, Nicolas. I’ll guide him towards something that will set a course.”

Nic could only buy from the Bounty List once, and the item received would turn to ash if he tried to give it away. On the other hand- there was no restriction to letting his credits go towards someone else’s prize, so long as the prizes themselves couldn’t be amassed onto one person.

Letting Sofia guide Sunfire through the list of low-level prizes in a soothing voice, Nic stepped away, finding himself an open place in the woods.

“Alright, Gwungo. Your turn.”

“Oh oh! Do I get a gift?” The slime-creature eagerly squirmed its way out of Nic’s bag, slippery little feet struggling to pull itself over the edge without any traction. It flopped onto the ground in the form of a tiny, transparently-blue axolotl, and quickly ballooned up to nearly match Nic in size.

Its wide, innocent face beamed as it tails wagged back and forth.

Nic made a showy flourish of taking out a large, succulent fruit like a pomegranate. “Fetch!”

He flung it out into the air. Gwungo bounded after, skittering left and right through the leaves and kicking them up into a storm. He came back proudly, the fruit digesting visibly within his belly.

“There’s more.”

“More?” The beast’s tiny, dark eyes widened, glistening like lumps of wobbling jelly.

“That’s right, but I want to see what you can do. So this time, when you go fetch…” He drew the next toy, a lumpy thing like a misshapen blue-white apple, out of his bag. He wound up slow and steady, broadcasting the throw…

“Your back legs have to stay precisely where they are…”

“Now!”

Gwungo took off. This time, instead of running, he stretched out- his hindlegs remained rooted as the rest of him twisted about into an elongating, ever-thinning ribbon of slimy material that shot off to chase the arc of the fruit.

A few moments later there was a rubbery twang and Gwungo was back, slapping itself himself with such elastic force he went rolling, dissolving into a shapeless tumbling blob-thing for a moment before regrowing his limbs and head.

“Uhhh…”

Sheepishly, he asked.

“More?”