I nodded and accepted the glass square. I tried to pick it up off the table, but it seemed to be stuck to the wood. I shrugged and leaned over the table, trying to make out the floating black text that mixed with the grain in strange ways.

“Why’d you use black and grey coral if the text is black?” I asked, receiving a shrug from Persephonia in return. She reached over and tapped the upper right corner of the square, a palette of bright colours making themselves seen for a brief moment before the text turned red.

“Once more; do you recognize the language displayed here?” Persephonia reiterated.

With the red text I could actually make out the writing. The words in Jun’s language were preceded by simple text right underneath them; the standard Latin alphabet. A quick glance told me that most of these cores weren’t written in English, even if they were all written in the alphabet I was used to. I paused when I hit a core I recognized in a language I recognized.

My finger pressed hard next to the core that used to be mine. “That one says ‘Obsidian Conundrum’.” I said, forcing my voice to stay monotone while I spoke. “I recognize the alphabet all of these are written in, but I don’t speak most of the languages.”

Persephonia’s eyes widened in surprise for the first time today. “Your species has more than one language? Do you not have a global standard for communication?”

“No, most countries had their own native languages.” I explained. “English was probably the closest we had to a global language, but that didn’t mean everyone spoke it. Not even close, really.”

“...Had?” Persephonia muttered, and I knew I’d royally fucked up. “Past-tense. As if your world no longer exists. That would explain why we were not informed of a new colliding world, and the sudden existence of far too many new Embodiments and the cores linked to them.”

She nodded to herself. “That makes perfect sense. I–” She stopped herself mid-sentence and turned to look at me with a grave expression. “Your people have no home. Which means they have nobody to guide them. Will they survive on their own? Is there anything we can do to attempt to aid them? No, that would bode extremely poorly in the eyes of the other species. We cannot be seen as trying to create new alliances in the face of chaos.”

Persephonia stood and began pacing around the room, her feet barely making a sound against the floor as she went. “The tutorial system; that must be because your people have no way of returning to their home. But that is insufficient to ensure an entire species’ survival. Even with your people’s Embodiment’s aid, they would not survive the harsh changes to their reality. Especially not a soft species such as yours.”

With the way Persephonia’s eyes glanced down at my midsection, I wasn’t sure if she was calling us soft-bodied or soft-hearted. If I had to guess; she meant both. Jun and I shared a look, hers full of concern and worry while mine was full of annoyance. It brought me screaming back to reality; was I really this unconcerned about the survival of humanity?

I vowed to talk to Jun about this once we were alone. If I could trust Persephonia not to kill or assimilate humanity, maybe I could drop some hints as to where we’d landed in this world. I remembered where I’d been placed, and from all the stories I’d heard, we’d all showed up in about a fifty mile radius. It was the spread afterwards that had made it all seem so separated.

“Well, you’ve convinced me that you are part of this new species and not one of our enemies masquerading under a new umbrella.” Persephonia said with a nod. I hadn’t thought I’d done enough, especially not if all the Embodiment chosen cores were public knowledge, but I wasn’t going to argue. “You and Miss Keratily can take the room off to the right. My own resting space is off to the left, and I would ask that you respect my privacy unless it is an emergency.”

Persephonia made for the door, and Jun jumped up from her chair with a yelp. “Wait!”

The older woman paused, then turned her head. “Yes, recruit Keratily?”

“Please. You can’t tell everyone about this.” Jun pleaded, stacking her closed fists on the table and resting her forehead on them. “They won’t trust Seb. I know they won’t.”

Persephonia considered for a moment, then nodded. “My report will not contain where I received the information, and I will ensure there are no questions. Is that sufficient for you, recruit?”

Jun seemed beyond surprised that Persephonia had agreed so easily, her mouth hanging open as she raised her head before quickly lowering it again. “Yes, it is. Thank you so much.”

The door swung open and shut blindingly fast, but didn’t make a single noise as it did. Whatever functions Persephonia had worked amazingly well together.

Jun blew out a long breath and let herself sprawl out on the table. “That went infinitely better than I thought it would.”

“That might be putting it lightly.” I agreed, removing all of my armor except my gauntlets and leaning over the table. “From how you and Okeria talked about Persephonia, I thought she’d be a little more of a hard-ass.”

“Oh, she’s a hard-ass alright.” Jun snorted. “But she’s a hard-ass that wants us to succeed, no matter what. And it seems like that ‘us’ now includes you.”

“And thank God for that.” I muttered. I gestured at the courtyard behind Jun, getting her to turn and look before I started talking again. “What do those markings on the ground say?”

She squinted then shook her head. “I can’t read them clearly from here, sorry. But if the description I see in my interface is anything to go off, they’re probably empowering runes so we don’t have to push ourselves as hard to get the same results.”

I’d expected as much and went to stand and make my way to check out the room Persephonia had granted us. But the glass square stared back at me, and I suddenly felt a gravitational pull towards it. This could tell me each and every chosen’s core, and would let me know if I’d come in contact with any of them before. All I had to do was get my interface’s automatic translation up and running.

A swipe through my interface’s windows left me over my options menu. It had far more lock icons than I remembered, especially since I didn’t remember seeing any at all. Whatever text there was behind the locks was blacked out by thick bars, preventing me from even knowing what was locked behind them. I sighed and tried to remember just what I’d seen there before, letting muscle memory take over as my finger drifted over a lock four down from the top that I sort of remembered being the translation function.

//LOCKED INTERFACE FUNCTION: UNKNOWN.

//UNLOCK COST: LEARN 5 LANGUAGES OR 200 POTENTIAL.

Two hundred potential. The damned tutorial system I’d dismantled had only given me eighty-five, and this wanted two hundred just to translate stuff? The gem and flower I’d taken back from the hazard were worth very little–even though I knew they should be worth more–so was there a system in place that prevented me from turning everything I found into potential? To keep me from stealing a pile of diamonds and getting myself a huge hoard by barely lifting a finger?

I swiped over to my core sunscreen and stared at the mass of empty nodes I still had. They were all completely useless for me as of now, and easily reclaimable when I found another core-bearing creature to kill. Hell, if I took both the regular core and the one //CREATION made for me, I’d be utterly swimming in useless nodes.

Useless nodes that had once given me twenty-five potential each.

Suddenly, everything made sense. I had an avenue to get potential, and a sink to spend it. The reason everything else gave me so little potential was because it wasn’t meant to be made into potential, and was just another way for me to get rid of things I didn’t need. //CREATION and //CONSUMPTION worked alongside each other, and that was my advantage.

I selected four unused nodes and tried to push them into the swirling vortex of my core. There wasn’t a notification before they were destroyed, and the stored potential indicator next to my core jumped by 100. Four more nodes were sacrificed to make way for the translation function, and as the lock on my interface shattered the text on the tablet under me became clear.

But only the text I already recognized. Everything was in English now, while Jun’s language was still completely indecipherable. A new lock appeared under the now visible translation function, and when I pressed on it, there were no hints or notifications. Just one number that I couldn’t reach if I emptied out my entire core twice over: 15,000.

“Good lord, that's a steep increase.” I groaned, finally noticing that Jun had been staring at me. “What?”

Jun smirked, then shook her head. “It’s nothing. You just move your mouth a lot while you’re thinking, and I can’t read your lips at all. It’s so strange that we can understand each other.”

There hadn’t been a level below what I’d just unlocked for the translation function, so whatever was letting Jun and I talk had to be a base function of the system. Hopefully that meant it was trying to instill unity, not make everyone hate each other in the same language.

“So what did you just do?” Jun asked. “You glowed blue for a second there.”

“I just bought one of the system functions that had been free last time around. It translates all human languages into English so I can read them.” I explained, then gestured at the glass square under my arm. “So I can see if I recognize any of the other cores on here.”

“Just human languages?”

I nodded. “There’s another upgrade for a whole lot of potential, and I’m assuming that’s what’ll let me read your language.”

Jun frowned, swiped a hand through the air, then leaned forward. “I can’t see any potential in my interface. Where do you see that?”

“It’s something my core uses to make things like the sword and the ribbons.” I gestured at my shoulder for emphasis, even if the ribbons weren’t there at the moment. “So I don’t think you have any of it. But if you swipe over to the options menu, you should see other ways to unlock them.”

“Huh. Okay.” Jun said, then fell silent as she fiddled with her interface. With an undistracted moment for myself, I looked down at the glass square and scanned the cores as quickly as I could.

Aside from the one that had belonged to me, I recognized three of them. One had belonged to an old friend of mine that I’d parted ways with two decades ago, and unless I was remembering completely wrong, there hadn’t been any bad blood between us. Maybe I could use that. Her core was the Bloodstained Dance, a combat focused core that massively increased her stats as she dealt and took damage. She wasn’t exactly sane from all those near-death encounters, but that insanity never once devolved into hurting anyone that didn’t deserve it.

What it did devolve into was brutal overkill against those that did. I shivered at the memory of a ruined building painted with blood and viscera, the corpses of three thieves no longer identifiable as having been human. Yes, they’d deserved death for what they’d done. But Giada had delivered it with sadistic glee.

The other two hadn’t ended on such a pleasant note. Eight Bees in a Suitcase belonged to an asshole who’d had a bad reputation before coming to the new world, and he’d done all he could to keep being that same fucker no matter how the world tried to change him. His life ended with my sword between his shoulder blades as Dee peeled the armor from the bastard, vitriol spilling from his mouth that could have gotten him killed back on Earth.

And finally there was the one that really hurt. Glow-Moss Buckshot was a core that let the wielder do some extremely strange things with light, creating illusions and fucking with vision so much that we weren’t even sure if it belonged to a human or not. We’d had so many nightly campfire debates on if ghosts could get cores or not, only to find out the hard way that they couldn’t.

Poe died. Our group split in two. It was never the same. And the worst part was that I’d never learned the fucker’s name.