Nic sat in meditation.

The Demon Essence within him was hard to isolate. It writhed and tangled like serpents, a living parasite within his veins. He felt naturally uneasy about letting such an unsettling energy live inside him- but the benefits were hard to overlook.

Nic was used to fighting to survive. This would just be a way to profit by it.

But more than that, it was a way to find allies. The fact that joining the demonic ranks might bring individual troublemakers, other demons hunting for his blood, was a distant threat in comparison to the two Settlements on either side of him. If it meant earning allies-

Did he have any choice but to walk the demonic path?

It felt like a compromise.

But he wasn't left alone with his thoughts for long.

“It seems wonderful, cultivation. I’ve watched you for days now. It seems as if you only truly come to life when you’re in forward motion. When there’s some new horizon to seize.” Nylea stepped out of the side chambers of the temple, smiling faintly. She carried an ornate wooden box in her hands.

Nic was surprised for a moment- but it was true. He’d fallen into cultivation, the way he’d once fallen into the way of the sword, or his fruitless attempts to study runecraft. Nic was someone who only had eyes for one goal, who would pursue one thing relentlessly.

The System probably loved fools like him.

“I guess I need a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Feeling stronger when I go back to sleep, that’s a pretty good one.” He grinned.

“Except you hardly ever sleep.” She pointed out. Setting the box on the edge of the Saturnalia - Nic couldn’t help but snort with laughter to see an entire world used as a table - she drew out a long, thin needle of bone and a small bowl of red dust.

A skin inscription kit.

“There are three inscriptions given to our honor guards, each with its own meaning. The first is the Flower of Loyalty.” She gestured for him to kneel, as she mixed water into the dried ink and stirred it with the tip of the inscribing needle. “It offers a small boost to cultivation rate. Sadly, it’s the only one of the three I have the materials to offer you. The other two require things that could only be found on my world… and frankly, someone with more talent than I...”

“Sofia?” Nic whispered under his breath. “Uh, make sure this inscription only does what she says it does.” It wasn’t lost on him the kind of damage an inscription could do. He thought of the way he’d ambushed the monkey tribe by rigging their weapons against them and shuddered.

“Noted, Nicolas. And I’m glad you’re showing caution around her. She may not be a cultivator, but she has been part of their world in a way you have not. In some ways, surviving in such an environment without her own power… it breeds a certain kind of ruthlessness…”

Nic could imagine. He knelt, and Nylea began to press the needle into his back, one prickling point of ink after the next. “Where will you go next?” She asked.

“Back to the Dungeon.” The answer was instant. Nic had etched his goal to begin a Settlement and save Tarquin into his heart. But more than that, he had unfinished business there. Sula’s quest for the nuclear fire. Azmin Hale’s vendetta. His grudge against Baby Boots.

Oh, and more than a few quests to tie up.

“I have a friend I need to save, and every moment I’m not fighting, I’m slipping behind everyone who’s out there risking their lives.” He was resisting the urge to check his rankings. He assumed he’d been raised a few places by his evolution, but-

If he allowed himself to start worrying about that he’d never stop.

“So when will you stop?” The question cut through him like a cold knife, although Nylea had only meant it casually.

“I guess I don’t really plan to. Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll reach the top of the mountain someday and go ‘that’s enough for me’. But-” But that didn’t sound like him at all. “Knowing me? I’ll just want to see what the next mountain looks like. I dunno. It’s like breathing now. Like enjoying good food. A big enough part of me that stopping would be like dying a little death.”

“Then you really were born under a strange star.” She sighed, needle stinging into his back for the thousandth time. “Almost done…”

“She’s been honest. It really is just an enhancement, with a way to message you built in.” Sofia noted. She seemed almost disappointed.

He could feel Nylea’s energy and will within the tattoo, suspended inside the ink. He was carefully restraining his cultivation to avoid overwhelming the design until it was ready.

“And-” She bit her tongue. “There!”

The final drop of ink was pressed into place by the needle’s point, anchored beneath his skin. The resonating will that infused each droplet formed a complete circuit and started to circulate, drawing in his own Essence, assimilating it.

Skin inscriptions were almost like artificial Shards or techniques, in a sense. They bound together different nodes to form an inner network of Essence that was refined towards a single purpose. This one was simple- it was meant to absorb Essence from the outer world, in the same way his breath did. It formed a tiny whirlwind within the ambient Essence of the world, cycling sparks into his body.

He flexed his hand and snapped open his cultivation map. It was a small increase. Half a mote per minute.

Only once all his modifiers stacked up, it became a huge leap.

“Now…” Nylea grinned down at him, and lifted the needle, tapping it across each shoulder like a monarch knighting their vassal. “Do you swear to my defense, and the name of Lady Nylea, in times of great need?”

“Mhm. I swear I’ll defend you and anyone else who’s willing to stand with me as part of my Settlement.” Nic agreed, while subtly shifting the terms.

“Then rise.”

Nic grinned as he popped up, and waved a cheery hand.

“And with that that, I think it’s time I be on my way.” He dug into his bag and took out the second of the lotus blossoms seeds. Leaning over the Saturnalia, he pressed the seed into the ground beneath the tree of Esper Fruit.

It was time to go. Nic grabbed the Esper Fruit off the tree, leaving behind the unripe blossoms but taking everything he could harvest. Ten in all, with many more growing since he implanted it as part of the Saturnalia.

As he did Nic looked down. He’d planted a scattering of Shard dust within an unremarkable part of the world, hoping to harvest something wonderful, or at least see the people below leap up in cultivation. Instead, he saw nothing.

Mist had closed over that portion of the map.

He shook his head, turning away. The little world in a cauldron would enchant him for weeks if he let it, but he had a real world to tend to, real problems to look after.

And it was time to solve them with terrible, terrible violence.

---

When Nic arrived at the human camp outside the gates of the Dungeon, there was death. Total and complete. The tents were crumpled, trampled down into the mud. Ash and blood infected the air with their scents.

A glowing dome surrounded the statue of Pathos. It was small, only a few feet across, but a dozen or more people huddled inside in a miserable crush of bodies.

As he approached something hissed in the dark. His danger sense could pick up more than a dozen moving points of threat in the tangle of forest beyond the camp.

Sitting at the core of the wreckage, chewing on a human corpse, was a sand devil. It had yellow chitin striped with black and serrated hooks on its back of its powerful legs, with a pair of brutal crushing claws like a scorpion. As it saw him its vestigial wings flicked out, forming a blue-white halo behind its back.

“Why don’t your friends come out? I know you’re just bait…” Nic wasn’t worried. His Warform wasn’t fully recharged, but he had a few breaths to kill these pests in.

The sand devil screamed and flung itself at him.

Nic reached for the Sandrider Blade on his back. The curved, heavy blade of green malachite was far too big for him to use in his axolotl form. But as he swung it off his shoulders his body expanded, rising into the air as the Sarradur snake-kin.

And one of his six arms shot out to catch the incoming sand devil around the throat. The curved blade flicked through the air and he broke through the beast’s hard shell in a heartbeat, ripping the devil in half at the waist with a single swordblow. Dying, it continued to bite at his fingers, trying to sink its teeth in past his thick scales.

He flung it aside.

There was a mass howl and more came pouring out of the forest. Two flying devils shot towards Nic, stolen weapons clutched in their hands. A speartip broke against his chest and staggered him as the first rushed by, escaping his grasp, but he managed to backhand the second as it tried to swing a broken axe toward his head.

He snapped its limbs with the impact of the blow, and caught the miserable creature as it dropped to the ground. Seizing its left leg, Nic whirled around and swung it like a club, smashing it into the first of the landbound sand devils as they came rushing out of the forest-

There were nearly twenty of them. They were hunched, crude, carrying stolen weapons from the camp like they hardly understood how to use them. They hissed and screamed as they loped towards him, a swarm of half-human insects.

Before, they had so thoroughly outclassed Nic in raw strength that even fighting one had taken his wits, taken his most desperate tricks.

Now? Now he dominated on raw strength alone.

He flung the broken winged devil into the first enemy he saw, sending three tumbling back under the weight of their wounded companion. The next to lunge for him was caught mid-air by one of his enormous arms, holding it back so its chipped sword couldn’t reach his face. He met the third with a hacking downwards stroke from the curved khopesh-sword of the Sandrider Blade, the descending blur of green splitting its head in two and biting deep into its torso with a spurt of yellow blood.

A fourth flung itself forward, reaching for his eyes with taloned fingers. He surged forward, trifold jaws snapping open, and clamped down across its head with his powerful muscle and poison fangs. A flick of his neck swung the luckless devil about like a ragdoll in the grasp of his teeth, decapitating it and sending the body flying away.

There was a piercing scream, bringing the whole battle to a halt. The sand devils retreated, squirming along the ground with broken limbs from Nic’s savagery.

Out of the forest stepped a jet black Ascended devil, standing fully tall, its body covered in red handprints of blood like warpaint. Six whip-thin tendrils extended from its open mouth, electric blue tongues that writhed at the air and gave Nic a queasy sense of hostile strength.

The leader had come out to play.