As the fight ended and the crowd broke apart, Nic found the man he’d saved waiting for him.

“Hey,” The man said, a nervous grin on his face. “Thanks.”

And he tossed Nic the bracer containing the formation runes for the practice array. As the crowd watched the last of the Convocation’s choices being made, they talked.

The man’s name was Royce and he had never meant to inherit a Settlement. Instead, he’d agreed to serve as one of the three founding pillars simply so he could access a Node and hasten his ascension towards E-Class.

What he hadn’t counted on was the Settlement’s creator turning on his two allies. You needed three people to start a Settlement, after all, but not to hold one. From a certain point of view...

It was worth getting rid of the dead weight.

Royce had barely come out of his first mistake alive, killing the traitor by what he called a ‘stroke of luck’ and what Nic suspected was some degree of genuine talent Royce wanted to underplay.

As for why he’d walked out of trusting one bad partner into nearly selling himself into the hands of another enemy, Royce could only smile and admit he made bad bets.

The two of them parted ways as the auction ended, and Nic stepped back out onto the balcony where the portal awaited.

“One second, esteemed guest.” His guide seemed to appear out of the shadows, stepping forward from nowhere. “You are allowed to see the next week’s prizes in advance.”

He held out another golden bracer. The generosity of engraving these on precious metals was a clear message of strength.

Nic took it and examined the writing. Most of the formations within were basic but…

One jumped forward. It was on the level of the church or the lightning rail, but nowhere near as expensive in raw resources to build. A living statue of an ancient general who had fought in some ancient war. It would serve to muster and control any other troops that the Settlement commanded, making them more intelligent and able to do battle.

Considering his current lack of living soldiers, he was glad for anything that reinforced his defenses.

But it was also the clear winner among the auction’s prizes.

Next week…

He’d need to cleanly sweep the competition away.

“The kingdom of Mossau watches and sees with amusement the hand you play.” The undead caretaker said in his strange, musical voice.

Nic paused. “And what do you get out of this? Like, you really pulled out the stops. Why? What do you get out of impressing us?”

“There will come a time when the esteemed guest establishes relations to the outside world. When that time comes, the kingdom would like to be remembered as a friend.”

Nic nodded. Nothing in this world was free. Least of all the friendship of powerful people.

He stepped through the portal and returned home.

---

For the rest of the day, Nic secluded himself deep below the temple. There were flooded rooms where murky green water lapped at seemingly-ancient statues, and gardens of kelp algae grew from the tiled floors. He swam happily, luxuriating in the feel of the cool water, until he came to the meditation room.

It was beautiful and quiet here.

In the faint movement of the water, the intricate patterns of white etched and inked into the lapis blue walls took on a hypnotic flow, as if the spiriform designs were drawing him inwards. As he settled onto the stone slab in the center of the room, he felt a faint power running through him, pressing down from above like the warmth of an unseen sun.

After three breaths, he sank into a deep meditative darkness, without thoughts. In that darkness he could see the patterns of energy flowing through his skin, filling the meridian nodes like lakes, drawing in towards his Shards like they were vestigial hearts. Each time he breathed in, the pressure would rise, unleashing like a tide bursting from a dam when he exhaled.

For a long time he simply observed, sweeping away small impurities and smoothing over places where his cultivation had grown rough or unruly.

When Nic was ready he stood, half-floating in the submerged room.

His eyes snapped open and he said to Sofia, “Let me see.”

A wave of information flooded his consciousness. Over the runes carved on the walls, a second set appeared, describing their purpose and function in golden text. The water, the algae, every aspect of the room became outlined in moving characters

“You’re getting better at sustaining the mental load, Nicolas. This is called the High Narrative, the flow of information Sophonts have gathered and maintained for thousands of years. It may seem overwhelming, but I assure you, I see the world like this every day. You will adapt to it.”

Nic winced. The sheer complexity was beginning to hurt. Every time he looked at one of the golden runes, its meaning shot into his mind like a spike of knowledge.

“Could you- could you turn it down a little?”

There was a faint crystalline hum. The runes receded, and Nic let out a tight-held breath, bubbles spewing from his mouth.

“Alright…”

“You should raise your Mental Acuity next. It will help you maintain this, and deal with whatever happens next from our…” She paused, uncomfortable.

“From having crystals in my head?”

“Yes. If you want to know, the initial jewel which contained your connection to my consciousness has grown to double its original size. More worryingly... It’s manifested tendrils which have reached out and grafted themselves directly to your brainstem.”

Now it was Nic’s turn for awkward silence. Until an idea occurred to him. “Wait, that happened after I got the Mark of the Aleph, right?”

“When you started to see the High Narrative, yes. The odds of such a thing being coincidental...”

“Yeah, yeah I think I’m seeing what’s happening. This Aleph is changing how our brains get crushed together.”

“The jewel isn’t really my brain but…”

“And that means I have some control over it.”

“It means this might be survivable without relying on the Samsara Trees. At this point, to cure this would mean rebuilding your body from nothing. It’s an inseparable part of you now.”

To Nic, the Samsara Trees had never been a path he was willing to take. Reshaping his body was powerful, but it required him to be helpless and dormant for a long time. That simply wasn’t an option as he saw things.

Nic relaxed back down, kneeling on the mat.

The goblin-heretic had been practicing the Aleph by warping other creatures. Nic seemed to bring it out by accident, whether he was creating Gwungo or breaking the seal on the time-locked warriors enough to carry away a fragment of the scroll.

Neither of these were an ideal path.

He looked down at his left arm. It wouldn’t be fun, but…

There was a path to survival.

He pushed energy into the Aleph marks on the skin and bones, watching them begin to glow until his skin was covered in blazing brands. As the streams of Essence crossed through, they took on physical shape, splintering into jagged veins of crystal that speared through his flesh. Nic set his jaw, sucking in air through his nostrils.

“Steel…” He thought. Living steel.

The material changed. Streams of flowing, half-liquid metal poured outwards from the runes, running across his bones and tendons. With a rippling motion the edges of his fingers hardened and transformed, becoming shining chrome. The change rose higher and higher. His palm, then his wrist. The bone was crystal. The blood was molten glass. Skin, muscle, tendon- all metal.

The more energy he fed the Aleph runes, the brighter they glowed. The entirety of his arm was blazing, the marks on the bone below turning the flesh above translucent.

And then something went wrong.

A twisting developed. A warp in the weave. Something snarled and snagged, developing a strange inert lump within the muscle, and as the energy poured forward that tumorous space began to expand, to split and divide. A gasp of pain broke through his lips as the limb began to distort, twisting as cancerous masses the size of fists pushed up from the flesh. With a sudden break, one of the blisters snapped open. Jagged spines of reflective metal shoved upwards to unfold like the petals of a bladed flower.

Nic didn’t wait any longer.

Lifting the resonant greatsword, Nic chopped down. His arm was severed in one smooth, clean cut, and he closed his eyes to clear away the pain as blood drifted into the water.

As he watched, the remnant of his flesh continued to transform. A snarling skull emerged, its teeth becoming bridges of molten metal that stretched and extended, then it sank back down. The bone and the flesh parted, dripping away like candle wax.

In the end all that remained was drifting cords of metal like a spiderweb, extending feather-thin green crystals.

Nic groaned as he felt his flesh slowly begin to regrow. Losing an arm made him dizzy and light-headed, the pain like a phantom fire spreading through his body.

“Any clue what I did wrong?”

“Faint errors of control. Slight fluctuations in your will. The Aleph seems to have its own mind, and it hasn’t harmonized with your own. Whenever your concentration slips you give it free reign to work its own designs.”

Nic nodded, and began to stretch. He wasn’t eager to try this one anytime soon; rather, he’d give it another go once he’d raised his Mental Acuity.

The pain began to ebb away as he gave himself something else to concentrate on, twisting his body from spine to neck, body from neck until his bones cracked and slipping into a martial stance. While his left arm was regrowing, he could still practice with his right.

For a moment, Nic paused. That wasn’t a normal thought, was it?

No. That was the thought of a complete maniac.

He grinned and moved back to work.

---

Nic struck outwards, and the water shifted around his open palm, rushing into torrents and quick-dying whirlpools under the sheer force his strikes exerted. Again and again, he returned to form before striking out again.

The water added a weight pressing against him to make every motion deliberate. The runes on the walls created a second kind of pressure, constantly refining and concentrating the natural essence of the world. This wasn’t just to increase the speed of cultivation, but to create a spiritual weight, one that would press down on his aura and condense it until it was easier to mold. He felt a sense of restriction, as if every movement was breaking through heavy chains.

He struck again, aura flowing into muscle and muscle flowing into pure kinetic force as his palm jabbed forward. His feet rooted him, connecting to the solid earth below. The strike started with a single forward step, powerful enough to shake the heavens, and that motion twisted upwards along the gyre of his spine, flowing into his shoulder as the arm extended out-

His aura billowed through his body to match, cycling as his breath left his mouth in a mute roar. The water trembled and shook as his palm struck against nothing.

Sofia had restrained what she called the High Narrative to only give him a view of his own cultivation. As the blow ended and he stepped back into neutral posture, the world was flooded with small notes on what he’d done wrong.

Slight imperfections in stance, in timing, a hiccup in his breathing, insufficient control of the aura, uneven distribution…

Looked at through this lens, it was hard to tell what he was doing right.

But Nic focused with his full body and soul on chasing a concept. It had started as despair, infusing each blow with a sense of inescapable dread, of weakness and insignificance in the face of godly might. With each blow, he had drifted farther from that first image…

Chasing…

Something. Something he had seen in the detonation of the nuclear fire. In the voices of ancient statues telling the tales of their lost world. In the city of d23 and the leviathan bones that towered towards a forgotten sky…