“Three barrels, signed delivered oh cappy’tan. And next time, do tell me the tale of how you end up spending them.” With those words, Old Ben was gone, diving back into the abyssal portal that opened beneath the waters of the oasis.

Left on the shore were three barrels of dark, potent gunpowder.

They were less concentrated in power than Sunfire’s explosive crystals, but there was a lot more, and Nic could just manage to wedge all three together into his bag of holding.

But first he had a few augments to add. With hand-scrawled runes to concentrate and shape the explosive, he was able to far increase the strength of each barrel. Priming them with a delayed detonator rune, he added symbols for clinging fire, for percussive force, and finally, for raw potential- all a mix to bring out the strongest, biggest explosion he could. Even with Inkspur’s talismanic ink, he was pressing the limits of what he could do without risking an unstable spark of energy striking the blast early.

Tying the barrels together with rope, Nic spent the next few minutes rigging together several smaller grenades. These ones were formed from Sunfire’s crystalline spit, but empowered with runes for light and noise. The goal wasn’t to cause mass damage, but to create as much commotion and confusion as possible.

He spent the better part of the hour doing that, all the while practicing at his cultivation.

This time he didn’t open the map and let the System take over for him.

Instead, Nic slowly fed his Essence into the nodes for Physical Strength, using his own will to direct the flow instead of relying on the System; he had augmented his body enough times to know the location of the cluster involved, and now he had enough precise control over his Essence to slowly push towards a breakthrough on his own.

The inside of his body resembled a starmap- dozens of nodes made up the ‘stars’ in the constellations, while the meridians running through them made up the lines. Where his abilities had rooted themselves within him, the nodes were particularly bright and glowed with a specific purpose, linked together to form a complex symbol like a rune. There were eight in all.

Three of these symbols were his Shards.

Two were his Physical Strength and Mental Acuity.

Two more were the Eight-Eyed Mantle and the Internal-Sacrifice Cauldron Technique.

The remaining one belonged to his regeneration.

As for his Spiritual Clarity, it was composed of a single bright node atop his head, directly between his eyebrows. It seemed as if even among the world of cultivation, the soul was an anomaly.

The process of strengthening an ability was as simple as feeding in Essence at one particular node, then threading that power through each node in turn to complete a new symbol, layering it onto the old web of connections between the clusters.

It was somewhat less complicated than Nic had feared; while the symbol was different for each layer of the ability, the nodes themselves seemed to know how to connect together. As each one filled to its fullest, the next one would resonate, guiding his path.

What would have taken ten minutes to do with the System’s help took six hours to do without. Massive amounts of Essence were simply wasted, lost to clumsiness and mistakes. Cracks appeared in his meridians and had to be sealed.

But in those six hours Nic broke through twice, layering his Physical Strength over and over with new power until his muscles burned hot under his skin, growing more compact, more powerful. He felt incredibly light as he jumped to his feet- with the new strength and his weight still the same, it felt as if he was walking on the moon.

There was a reason for all this.

When Nic had been on the verge of breaking through to E-Class he had sensed hidden nodes, deep within. He’d even been able to track down the location of one, and had carefully memorized the dark point within the starmap of his cultivation. But the System hadn’t unlocked any new options, hadn’t offered a way to empower this hidden ability.

If Nic wanted to discover his hidden potentials, he would have to do so himself.

“Bravo Nicolas. Few people are able to make the jump from System-Cultivation to working on their own so easily. You’re a natural- and I imagine practicing the Bloodline Gate helped.”

“So… This is normal then?”

“The System wasn’t the beginning of cultivation, nor is it the end point. There are methods of cultivation so ancient they cannot be practiced within the System, and techniques so specific they can only be discovered by the individual. To rely on it totally is unwise- and yes, sooner or later, all cultivators learn to step beyond its limitations. That or they cease to grow.”

Nic nodded.

It was amazing how quickly he’d risen from someone who could barely scratch the surface of cultivation, subsisting on the tiny amount of Essence given to him by the monthly Universal Distribution. Now he could say he was truly capable of cultivating in his own right, of seizing the breath of the earth and sky and turning it into his own power.

It was something he’d wanted since he listened to Miss Winters read stories of Pathos and Logos in their days as human cultivators.

It was something he’d wanted for as long as he could remember being the underdog, always covered in bruises, too defiant and too proud to stop glaring down the bigger children of the orphanage until they beat his face in.

Another step forward.

Another fight to win.

Nic breathed in and dove into the waters of the oasis, letting them cool his skin. When morning came he’d be ready to meet the Sand Devil Monarch head on.

---

The area surrounding the buried kingdom where the sand devils nested was full of small pits dug into the ground, disguised with a layer of incredibly fine, soft sand. The devils would carefully arrange them, creating pitsand traps built over hollows ceilings of dried spit.

When the vibrations of prey caught in the trap alerted them, they’d collapse the false ceiling and the bottom of the pit, dropping the disoriented prey into their lair.

But now Nic could sense them.

His Sandrider Blade felt their traps in the earth, and with a leap, an earth-shaking downwards kick, and battle cry-

Nic turned the tables.

He punched down through the base of the pit trap and collapsed it onto the surprised devil, swinging his axe with a furious shout to cleave off its head in a single quick swipe. Two more were lurking in the underground cavern, but before the second could turn, Nic flung his axe into its skull.

The third managed to blink before Nic had slammed into it with a leaping kick, shattering the carapace of its arrow-shaped head and leaving a sticky stain of grey twisting brain in yellow blood across the wall.

He went back and pulled his axe out of the dying second devil, giving it a quick, merciful downwards sweep to finish the job.

The sound of his battle echoed down through the caves, but these kinds of sound were common. In the distance he could hear some kind of desert animal screaming pitifully as it was torn apart.

Nic’s ring was still silver- he’d come before the sun had risen to preserve his advantage in stealth as he crept through the buried kingdom of the devils. By the time it turned gold, he’d be ready to attack.

But first he wanted to find the hidden fragments of lore. Getting three more would finish the quest and grant him the ability to read the dead world’s languages, letting him explore the Valley of Memories more deeply and learn the cultivation secrets within the bronze plates of the Sun God’s Dictate.

He spent the better part of two hours slinking from cave to cave, quickly ripping apart anything he found alive. The sand devils came in a half-dozen ugly varieties- there were heavily-armored ones with the lower bodies of scorpions, fast and deadly ones with enormous jaws like an antlion, quick flying ones, ones with scorpion stings and claws, ones with poison tongues, ones with six arms and massive strength…

They were all too weak to stop him now.

Compared to when he’d come here the first time, and a single sand devil had been able to nearly kill him- when his only chance had been to run and he’d barely survived- the ease of cleaving them apart was visceral and satisfying. His axe tore limbs in half at the joints, slammed into skulls, ripped heads from their shoulders.

Moving in stealth, no one fight lasted more than a breath.

In the distance he could hear the rumbling of the sand devil’s bloated queen, moving endlessly through the labyrinth of buried streets and roads. The walls were full of chunks of broken masonry, windows filled in with sands and doorways barely standing under the weight of earth piled atop them. A whole city had been dragged beneath the ground overnight.

As he crept forward, clearing his way with one kill after another, he came to an expansive chamber.

It was low and broad, with dozens of arched columns decorated with the fading faces of beautiful women. They were dryads, carved into the pillars by a master artisan, and fading green paint covered their hands and faces. Many of them carried jugs, and water poured out into dozens of circular pools in the floor.

It had been a public bathhouse.

Now, something worse than naked old men lurked in the stagnant waters. Each pool was full of thick, squirming grubs, their mucus-covered bodies turning the pools to cauldrons of sticky slime. Pale white eggs clustered in the unhatched pods.

Runes covered the floor. They were jagged, fiery symbols written in blood, and they made the ambient Essence twist in ways that made Nic’s stomach turn uneasily. Something was wrong here. The runes surrounded each spawning pool, drawing in Essence to feed the young grubs- and to incite a terrible, burning hunger that reminded him of the Demonsmoke Peach Seed.

Nic felt it the more he approached. The runes were sparking a feeding frenzy in the grubs, and there was nothing to eat but their brothers and sisters. Soft, squirming bodies were torn apart by chitinous mandibles. Yellow blood stained the waters.

This was the Heretic’s army being born.

Nic moved forward, stomping down on grubs, swinging his axe to crack open eggs. He tore a path of carnage through the underground hatchery, not letting any of the larvae survive to become new Ascended.

As he reached the center of the room he realized his fears were correct. He had left a trail of footprints in yellow blood behind him from the young he’d stomped, but there in the central pool, he saw what he was afraid of.

A chrysalis of amber light surrounded a curled shape. It was only a shadow, but Nic could see the spiky, black-armored features of an Ascended devil within.

He raised his axe-

But Sofia stopped him.

“Nicolas, wait. This is an opportunity. That devil is evolving at this very moment, and its body is being nourished by the Bloodline Sea as well as by the Heretic’s medicines and secret methods. If you kill it, all that would be wasted.”

“Why not take it for yourself instead?”