The further we walked, the more I felt correct in my previous aquarium comparison. Everything around me felt slightly fake, or more accurately, too perfect. Each and every piece of coral was placed in the perfect place, nothing overlapping with each other or fighting for space, and I hadn’t seen a single thing that was dead or dying the entire time. As if the landscape had been designed instead of naturally formed.

Jun, though, was simply awestruck. She let out little gasps and laughed at the eel-things that flowed through the air, all the little bursts of colour that came with the coral’s shifting, and every rock formation that looked remotely interesting. It was like taking someone who was really into animals to their first zoo, and her joy at every little thing was so contagious I found myself smiling and chuckling along with her.

“I’ve never seen anything like this.” Jun said in awe as she brushed her hand against an urchin-like piece of coral, yelping in surprise as it let out a tiny burst of green ink that floated as if we were under water. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

I tilted my head to the side, then shook it. “I’ve never seen coral this big, no. Most of the stuff on Earth was either tiny or dead.”

“Coral.” Jun whispered, as if testing the word for the first time. “I’ve never seen coral before. Did you have forests of it back on Earth? Or were they, like, little garden plants?”

“Uh, no. Coral’s an underwater thing.” I said with confusion, then realized my mistake. Even with her helmet gone, I still hadn’t fully processed that Jun wasn’t human. And from the way she looked at me, she was more confused than I was. “It just sort of existed back on Earth, but it couldn’t survive out of the water. So this is something completely different.”

“Underwater life? Is that… possible?” Jun wondered. “With all the poisons we had to filter out, I don’t think anything could survive in lakes or oceans.”

Poisoned waters. Jun’s planet had poisoned, lifeless waters. I wasn’t sure what that would do for their atmosphere or their cleanliness, but it cemented in my mind that they were far more advanced than humanity was.

“All of your water is poison?” I asked incredulously. “How do you survive without water?”

“We don’t survive without–” Jun looked at me quizzically, then paused and nodded to herself. “Right, you wouldn’t know. Okay, so we have something that purifies all the water that goes into our clouds, but something on the seafloor leaks up and heavily poisons all the water that goes into everywhere else. So rainwater is safe, but nothing else is.”

“Huh. Interesting.”

Jun shrugged. “It’s not that interesting. What is interesting is that you don’t have dead waters like we do, and they’re apparently full of colourful life like this.” She slapped the urchin once more, and a massive puff of green ink engulfed her. “Ack. Ick. Salty.” She coughed, fanning herself to get the ink away from her mouth. “What else lived down there? Did those sky-snake things flying around us actually live underwater?”

“You mean eels?” I asked before my brain could stop me.

“Eel. Eeeel. Eel.” Jun laughed and smacked me on the shoulder. “You’re messing with me. Nobody would call a snake something that strange.”

Was ‘eel’ really such a strange word? I didn’t think so, but the more I repeated it in my mind, the less I agreed with myself. “It is kind of strange, isn’t it?” I admitted. “But that is actually what we call them. Called them?” I shook my head. “Point is, they’re eels, no matter how silly the word is.”

“Right.” Jun smirked. “Eel.”

I conceded that I wasn’t going to convince Jun on this one strange point, and that I’d have to find others to back up my claim eventually. She believed everything else, but ‘eel’ was somehow too much. We kept walking while admiring the coral decorations all around us, hoping that the ‘sky snakes’ as Jun called them wouldn’t decide they wanted to make a meal of us, and I opened my interface to check on whatever changes had happened in the transition from hazard to new world.

My sword had lost ‘floodwalker’, as I had expected, but what it had gained in return was a mass of question marks with the caveat that they would be revealed when I returned to the summer forest. I tried changing its form and found myself holding a spear, then a sickle, and finally a short sword. It hadn’t taken a ‘static form’ as I’d been warned, which was a nice surprise, and scanning my armor revealed that each and every piece was still as fluid as before we’d left the forest. I wouldn’t need a full arsenal of weapons any time soon, but it was nice to have the option.

Jun’s voice brought me out of my thoughts and into reality. “Do you have another function in your core? I’ve got one here that wasn’t there before we left, and I don’t really understand what it means.”

Unsure of if I had one or not, I swiped over to the core section of my interface and opened up my node view. And there it was, staring me in the face; a brand new static function that was four nodes long and… something else. There was a blank space above the new function and the listing of how many of each stat node I had, as if there was supposed to be something there. I pressed two fingers to it and a description popped up, and it wasn’t obvious who it had been written by until I remembered the last thing that had been said to me before I was sent once more to this world.

//SPINE OF ENMITY: PASSIVE FLUID FUNCTION.

//NODE LENGTH: 1

//GROWTH: EVERY 5 CORE MASTERY INCREASES LENGTH BY 1 NODE.

//EFFECTS: ALL ADJACENT STAT NODES GRANT TRIPLE THEIR VALUES.

//EVOLVES ONCE ???? HAS BEEN ACHIEVED.

A new message popped up as I finished reading the short description.

//A GIFT FROM THE OVERSEER, MADE REAL BY YOURS TRULY. HE WISHES TO SEE YOU AGAIN, IN BETTER TIMES.

{I’ll have to take… him up on that offer.} I replied. I barely remembered my encounter with the thing that was the overseer, and I had a feeling he would help me understand all of this a little more. {But this seems more than slightly overpowered.}

//RATHER THAN TOO STRONG, YOU WILL SOON SEE THAT IT IS CLOSER TO A PREREQUISITE FOR FUNCTIONING WITH YOUR NEW CORE. FOR SOMEONE OTHER THAN YOU, LIKE YOUR NEWFOUND FRIEND, IT WOULD BE BLATANT OVERKILL.

{Well, tell the overseer I said thanks.} I wrote, waited for another message, then shifted to the other function when no more came.

(Static,Active) Floodforest’s Gift: Spring

Node Length: 5. Shape: L.

Consume (5) Battery to call forth copper tendrils from a Copperbound armor piece or weapon. Duration of effect is based on Resilience, strength is based on Power, and active drain is based on Recovery. No limit to how many Copperbound equipment pieces can be under Floodforest’s Gift at one time.

Cooldown: N/A.

I sucked in air through my teeth as I read the second function. My mind was already swimming at all the possible ways I could use it, but a 5-node investment was asking me to take a heavy hit to all of my stats. If I hadn’t looked at the Spine of Enmity first, I would have been infinitely more excited for this one, but now I’d have to give up ten stat points just to use the tendrils. And that was a difficult choice to make at such a low level.

Hell, I didn’t even know if my battery could keep the tendrils active for more than a few seconds. I could just swap the function in and see how it worked, but I didn’t want to risk the function locking itself into my core for a few days. Not like the time I’d slotted in a fifteen-node quick-rest function that I’d had to wait two and a half months to remove, effectively locking me out of exploring any hazards for said two and a half months.

But I didn’t have to be the guinea pig this time, as there was a woman right next to me with more than enough free nodes to shoulder the burden of testing. “Did you get the Floodforest’s Gift function too?”

“I did, yeah.” Jun said with a nod. “Is there any reason I shouldn’t slot it in right now?”

“Multiple reasons, but they all come with the caveat of ‘if you don’t have a lot of free nodes’.” I chuckled. “So you don’t have to worry at all, miss node hoarder.”

“I’m not letting that become my nickname.” Jun laughed, then swiped her hand. “Okay, I need to move a few of these around… and set that one there… and here we go. It’s filling the five nodes now. Do I need to wait for it to work or–”

Jun’s armor began emitting a very low buzz, like the working of a machine four rooms over that barely made it through thin walls. The copper tendrils barely split to show small pockets of deep black moss and yellow glowing spots, not quite the eyes of a lichenthrope but closer than I was comfortable with.

Her mouthing of empty words told me that her sudden transformation must have come with notifications, and quite a few of them at that. She flexed her fingers and the tendrils on her right hand closed up once more, then her right arm, then her chest, then both her legs and feet. Her left arm and left gauntlet were all that remained lichenthrope-ized, and she looked down at her blinking hand with a wide grin.

“Skies above, this is crazy.” She said and admired her transformed gauntlet, and I could have sworn the yellow spots admired her in return. “Stand back. I’m going to try this out.”

Jun held her hand with her palm facing towards the sky and concentrated. Her four eyes narrowed as she muttered something inaudible to herself, then clenched her fingers into a fist. At first nothing happened, but after a moment her gauntlet burst apart into three distinct tendrils that came together and spiraled into the open air.

Yellow dots glared at me from inside the pitch-black moss that covered Jun’s hand, and she wiped her hand across the sky, dragging the tendrils along with her on slight delay. It was like watching her fly a very strange kite, and when the tendrils slammed into a large chunk of spiny mottled blue and green coral, I sighed and shook my head.

“You need to be a little more careful.” I chastised her, reaching over and pressing her hand down. “Recall the tendrils and we’ll go make sure we didn’t stir anything up.”

“It’s not as easy to control these things as you’d think.” Jun grimaced. “It feels like I’m pulling my arm through thick sludge, not the open sky. And what do you mean ‘stir anything up’?”

I gestured at one orange and black eel who had begun circling in the distance. “There’s a non-zero chance you just drew that thing’s attention to us. If you just damaged its home, we could be in serious trouble.”

While Jun muttered an apology and struggled to get her tendrils back into gauntlet-shape I couldn’t take my eyes off the eel that looked to be one step from eating its own tail. There was no doubt that it had begun circling for a reason, but was Jun that reason?