My hands tightened around my spear, memories flowing by like scraps of trash down a polluted river. I couldn’t draw any emotions from them, but I could draw from watching them. It felt like the difference between watching someone you loved being murdered before your very eyes, and reading an article about a random person’s murder that happened to look like someone you loved.

Something was very wrong with me. “It took me over twenty years to fully upgrade my health stat. Thirty years to reach the core mastery cap, which was fifty instead of one-hundred for some reason, and I was whisked away before I could see what clearing that final hazard would give me. I had over three hundred filled nodes, a set of equipment that pushed me all the way to hazard tolerance fifty, and a few good friends that were with me until the very end.”

I sighed and recalled my spear. I just couldn’t get angry enough to bring the point home. Hell, even looking back at what my life was like before the world ended didn’t spur any kind of real emotion in me. It was like my pasts were just pictures in an album that I’d never really lived through.

“I’m truly sorry for what you’ve lost. But if what you say is true, then you have the opportunity to relive that life with those people.” Persephonia said in a gentler tone than I’d heard her use so far. As if she was talking to someone who was on the edge of suicide. “You can use the chance you’ve been given and the knowledge you’ve won to make a better life for yourself and your old friends.”

“Except for the single fact that there’s an Embodiment who would murder me if he knew I still had my memories.” I retorted. “Actually, no, there’s more than one fact. The razing didn’t happen at the exact same time both times. So I’m not even sure which of my friends and family were killed, and who managed to make it to the new world. For all I know, none of them did.”

Persephonia was suddenly in front of me, her hands like iron on my shoulders. “You cannot begin to think that way. It puts you down a path where all you’ll find is exactly what you’re looking for. I’ve seen far too many good people resign themselves to death far, far before they shrug off their mortal coils. Do not let despair fester where hope could shine.”

I didn’t have any despair to fester, nor any hope to shine. But I understood what Persephonia was trying to say, and the message was one that I’d leaned on many times in my previous life. The thing I didn’t want to tell her, though, was that I’d already partly moved on. I didn’t want Jun to get hurt. I wanted to make sure humanity was safe in this new world. And now that I was staring into the glowing orange eyes of the Matria, I truly trusted that she wanted those exact same things.

“Why haven’t you maxed your health?” I carefully asked, trying to make it as obvious as possible that I wasn’t going anywhere. “In just over two decades, I went from fifty-one to a full one-hundred. Why haven’t you in eighty years?”

Persephone breathed an almost unnoticeable sigh of relief. Maybe she had seen a few too many of her friends go down that path.

She smiled a very thin smile. “For thirty of those years I fought. For another thirty I struggled with the mental and physical wounds I’d received. And now, for twenty years, I’ve ensured that none would suffer as I did.” Persephonia appeared back in her chair, crossed her legs, and summoned a sphere of scales to perfectly cover the still air she’d created. “The necessary resources to attain high levels of health are not available to me. They are reserved for the most powerful, their families, and the markets of the main cities that are closed to all but the richest denizens.”

I smiled under my helmet. Each and every trusting relationship I’d had had begun with someone offering something. Blind trust was terrifying, but knowing that trust was built on a physical foundation strengthened it in my experience. And now I knew I had something tangible to offer Persephonia in exchange for her protection and silence.

“I can push your health into the nineties.”

Persephonia stared at me in silence for a few seconds, as if waiting for the reveal that I was messing around with her. Instead, I continued staring at her and even let my helmet dissipate to show my sincerity on my face. Eventually she let out a disbelieving laugh and shook her head, summoned a chair under me and used a scale to presse me down on it.

“I hadn’t let myself hope when you said you’d gotten your own health to one-hundred, but you seem to be serious. So maybe letting myself hope wouldn’t be the worst thing possible.” She chuckled, let her own helmet dissipate, and smiled at me. “Now that we know where we stand, I think it’s high time we shared some of our secrets of the trade. And this time, I shall begin.”

I hadn’t forgotten that Persephonia had promised to tell me more of her past, but when I went to bring it up, she shook her head and offered me a sad smile. “Next time, Sebastian. Let this old woman sort through her memories before she crushes you under their weight.”

“I… yeah.” I said with a nod. Even if I couldn’t exactly sympathize, I knew the old me would’ve. And that would have to be enough. “I understand. So; secrets of the trade?”

The Matria nodded and clasped her hands together. “I’ll begin with something that you shouldn’t know, even if you have as much experience as you say you do. It is possible to force an empty node to gain the properties of a stat node, which it will retain even if it is later filled by a function or another stat node.”

That… that changed everything. If it was true, I could effectively double my stats. And if Jun could do it too, then she’d be even more of a stat monster than she was now. I leaned forward with interest shining in my eyes, and Persephonia smiled at my readiness.

“That is the reaction I was hoping for.” She said. “I ask that you tell no one aside from Juniper of this knowledge, as I am fairly sure that it is mine alone. It was earned from many sleepless nights and exhausted days, and I wasn’t even fully sure that anything had changed when I saw the fruits of my labor.”

She raised one gloved finger, then drew a complex diagram into the air. A notification popped up in the corner of my vision, and I shot Persephonia a glance to ensure that it was from her. She nodded, so I opened the window and stared at a diagram that looked like a raindrop created out of interlocking scales with a keyhole of empty space in the middle.

“That is my signature. If you receive a message that has that attached, it means the knowledge contained within is not to leave the safety of your mind. I will inform Juniper of this as well once we have time alone, so please do not speak of this to her. From this point on, speaking freely will be dangerous.” Persephonia said ominously, but didn’t elaborate. Instead, I received a message that was plainly labeled ‘read once you return’.

“Once I return?” I muttered, and Persephonia simply nodded.

“We don’t have infinite time, Sebastian, and I would rather spend what we have remaining on an exchange of knowledge.” She clarified. “To circle back on the topic at hand; changing the very nature of the nodes within your core. I’ve given the process the nickname ‘burning in’, as it involves overuse of your facilities bordering on dangerous while simultaneously never crossing that line or stepping back from it.”

She tapped her foot, and the ground between us exploded into motion. Small black shards whipped around and cut into the ground like tiny knives, a blur of motion until suddenly everything was still. Where they’d been just a moment before, there was now a picture of a specific arrangement of nodes. One where a single node was surrounded on all six sides by additional nodes.

I marveled at how she’d managed to create such a vivid three-dimensional drawing so quickly, then shook my head and raised an eyebrow at the Matria. “Should I take a guess?”

Her smile was small but interested. “I would like to see the mind that kept you alive for three decades after starting from nothing.”

“Okay, then.” I breathed, staring at the picture for a second while I wondered why we had time for this but not time for me to read the message she’d sent. The most obvious answer was that the arrangement somehow concentrated the effect of the nodes, but I’d had a huge block of nodes like this in my old life, and I’d never had a node suddenly give me an extra stat point.

There had to be a hint in what she’d called it; burning in. My first thought was screen burn, where having something on a screen in the same place for too long would start showing a ghost of that image, but did Jun’s people have electronics like that? I’d only seen the glass squares, and they didn’t seem to have any electronics in them at all. Then again, this could also be a quirk of the translation function, and it was taking an expression Persephonia was saying in her native language and translating it to an English equivalent. Even if I’d heard Jun say things that seemed like they were direct translations from her own language.

I shook my head; I was overthinking this. All I had to do was ask. “Do you know what screen burn is?”

Persephonia nodded and her smile spread. “It is when video glass gets too hot from the power coursing through it, melting ever so slightly so that the visuals become distorted.”

So we both used the same expression for slightly different phenomena. How interesting. It solidified my thoughts on just how Persephonia ‘burnt in’ the stats of nodes, but that didn’t explain why it needed to be in that exact formation.

“You overuse a function that draws from that one specific node type, and by constantly using it, that empty node starts to take on the attribute of that stat.” I theorized, but as my words came out, I felt that there was something missing. “But why would the system start doing that? It’s not like there’s any physical part of it to start overheating, and why do you need seven of the same nodes to do it? Wouldn’t just one work fine?”

“One of those thoughts was a question I also asked myself when I came upon the permanent scarring of my core.” Persephonia said, tapping her fingers on the exact middle of her chest. “There is a physical portion to our system; the cores. And if you have experienced the same horrors as I have, you are aware that cores do not exist until the moment of a bearer’s death.”

I grimaced and nodded. I’d first learned that gruesome fact by killing monsters, but a few severely fucked up individuals tested if it worked the same on humans. They all paid the ultimate price eventually, but I had to wonder if they were going to repeat their twisted research now that their memories had been reverted.

The Matria clapped her hands to draw my attention back to her. I shot her an apologetic look and gestured for her to continue.

“That assumption is only partially true. A core exists from the time it is assigned, and is kept safe in the exact same place as everything else your interface stores away. It is simply impossible to remove, so we do not end our own lives accidentally.” Persephonia explained, then summoned enough black scales to fill our little space up to both of our necks for emphasis. They disappeared a moment later. “It is just as privy to malfunction due to overuse as any other body part is.”