I’d never thought of my core as anything but a mass of power that somehow existed yet didn’t exist at the same time, just as my interface did, but that didn’t survive further examination. I’d consumed my fair share of cores, which very much existed, so they couldn’t have come out of nowhere. Then again, plenty of things did come out of nowhere, so I didn’t kick myself too much for having missed out on that piece of information.

“But why seven nodes?” I asked, prodding Persephonia for an explanation. “Shouldn’t it work with just one if I’m overworking it?”

“Concentration of power.” The Matria stated. “Each node exerts a near undetectable trace of energy, which is nowhere near enough to distort the fabric of an interface. Concentrating that power becomes just enough to influence the very makeup of a node–whatever that might be. Each stat emits its own type of energy which has a negating effect on all other types, so each node in a cluster must be of a single stat to burn in an empty node.”

I shook my head and laughed. “How’d you ever stumble on this?”

Persephonia shrugged. “The same way I assume anyone would; I have a function that grows in power for each and every ‘star’ I create out of similar nodes. Combined with the mental and physical strain I was constantly subjected to? A simple recipe for discovery. And that is the knowledge which I offer you. I hope it serves you and Juniper well.”

It certainly would, especially with my seeming excess of empty nodes and Juniper’s core function. I wondered if a burnt-in empty node would be worth more or less potential than a completely empty one, but from the way the Matria discovered this particular quirk of the system, it would probably be substantially difficult to burn in even one node. And that didn’t include the fact that I’d need seven of the same stat nodes to even attempt it.

A lot more eels would need to die before that ever happened. And far before that, I’d offered an exchange of knowledge to the Matria. It was my turn to pay up; hopefully our biology was similar enough that my methods would work for her.

“Ninety to ninety-one took me three weeks of eating only core-bearing monster meat and vegetables stewed in a broth from that same meat.” I began, but Persephonia waved for me to stop. She summoned a black scale between her hands and a piece of bone-white chalk, then nodded for me to continue. “It took a lot of trial and error to see which vegetables and which meats worked well together, especially since taste didn’t factor into the effects at all. Before those three weeks, I spent four months with the help of eight other people trying almost every combination we could. When we finally found it, we almost tossed the mixture out because it gave such tiny gains. But they compounded instead of replacing themselves.”

I quickly sifted through my memories to ensure I wasn’t about to lead the Matria astray, then continued with confidence. “First, you have to ensure that the vegetables don’t have anything but a healing effect. Anything else will pollute the meal, and it simply won’t work. Even if it’s a flat out health stat increasing effect, like blood-soil rhubarb, it won’t work. It has to heal and nothing else.”

I waited for Persephonia to stop scribbling, then continued when she looked up at me with eager eyes. “The meats we found that worked were from monsters that could keep infinitely growing larger. Any sort of magical regeneration overwrote everything else, but that boundless growth factor was what did the trick for us. Diamondshell crabster gave us the best results, since the only aspects we could distill out of it were endurance and growth, even if it wasn’t overly powerful. If you could find anything more powerful with aspects that didn’t pollute the meal, you might take less time to increase your health.”

As I watched Pesephonia scratch down my words, I wondered just how inefficient the Staura’s methods for upping their health percent truly were if I was actually teaching the Matria something new. This was something I’d worked out in my last life in months. Maybe the conservation efforts Okeria had spoken about were what had led to this. Almost everything I’d done to get to one-hundred percent health involved killing core-bearing monsters for one reason or another, and centuries of overhunting for that exact reason could have led to greatly decreased numbers.

But the hazards always seemed to replenish themselves, so why was anything under conservation watch? There had to be something else at work.

“Does this method work for elevating myself beyond ninety-one percent?” Persephonia asked, looking up from her slate once more.

It certainly did, but the real answer was slightly more complicated than that. “Yes, but it will be unbelievably slow. You’ve probably already noticed just how much harder it is to go from ninety-one to ninety-two than it was to go from ninety to ninety one, right? Well, it only gets harder after that. Of the twenty-ish years it took me to max my health, it took two to get to ninety. And six to go from ninety-nine to one-hundred.”

The Matria nodded with a grim scowl. “I’ve heard stories, but to hear it first hand is slightly demoralizing.”

“Well, the good news is that a large percent of that time was trial and error along with getting strong enough to actually kill the monsters we needed ingredients from. But for now, all you need is step two, which is just step one but with a heavy dose of radiation.”

I reached for the stones in my inventory that I’d enchanted with the help of my friends. Ones that I didn’t have any more. I scowled and shook my head, trying to remember exactly what we’d done to the gems and which gems we’d used, but the list of instructions and ingredients was a lot longer than the cooking.

“I might have to get back to you on the specifics, since I have a lot of memories to go through, but step two involves enchanting a set of stones to radiate a very specific buff that slowly breaks down and reforms your entire body.” I eventually said. I wrung out my hands at the discomfort of not upholding my portion of the deal, but Persephonia didn’t seem perturbed in the slightest. “I’ll get the info to you as soon as I’m sure the blueprint isn’t going to blow up on you, but I wasn’t fully involved in making the stones. The one thing I do remember, though, is that all of them were infilled fossils we found.”

For the first time since she began, Persephonia halted her recording out of surprise. Surprise and suspicion. “Infilled fossils? Could you elaborate?”

I couldn’t really, but I remembered Ali’s words as well as I could and tried to explain.

“Well, I’m not an expert in the slightest like Ali was, but apparently fossils can be made of gems. Back home it was only really quartz and rarely something like opal, but we found a whole plethora of them here.” I explained. “They were a lot rarer than a normal gemstone of the same type, but they were always stronger and more valuable for some reason.”

“That part I was aware of.” Persephonia muttered, then scratched a very short sentence onto her slate before dismissing it. “We must return. When you recall how to create these enchanted stones, contact me through the interface. Otherwise, not a single word about increasing health to anyone. The methods for surmounting the nineties are… secret to most, so your knowledge would put an unnecessary target on your head.”

“Uh-huh.” I nodded. Persephonia’s explanation was falling just a little short. Especially considering her reaction to the ‘infilled fossil’ part of the recipe. Yet again, there was more going on behind the scenes. “Yeah, you don’t have to worry about that.”

“Good… good.” Persephonia said distractedly, her armor appearing around her once more as the scale shield disappeared. “Ah, there was one more thing I wanted to confide in you. My core is the Icon of Excess, and my core function is ‘Overgorged’. It allows me to instill massive amounts of battery into functions to bloat them with power, even if the function does not normally allow fluid levels of battery input.”

That… well, that explained how Persephonia had come by the knowledge on how to burn in nodes. I let out an amused noise and shook my head as I stood up, and the chair under me disappeared as I did.

“There’s one more thing I wanted to ask too; especially now that I know almost all of your nodes are probably tainted with one stat or another.” I said as Persephonia’s function blanketed me once more. She looked between me and the distant settlement twice, then crossed her arms and nodded at me to continue.

“If you’ve been here for so long, and fought for almost as long as you’ve been here, then why were your power and resilience stats so low?” I asked. “Especially now that I know what I know, why do you only have nineteen and twenty-five?”

Persephonia let out a short, barking laugh. “Because I wasted some of my earlier burn ins on stats that mean next to nothing to me.”

I frowned at that explanation, but the Matria took off immediately after saying it. I sprinted after her while I tried to puzzle together what she meant by ‘wasted stats’, but as my boots crunched against the gravel underfoot and Walkalong grew ever closer, I couldn’t fully grasp the meaning of her words. It only hit me as I followed Persephonia over the wire fence and she swung open the gym doors to see Jun and the two recruits running their assess off around that little track.

Persephonia was fucking fast. Her core had nothing to do with speed. It also had nothing to do with resilience, power, or recovery. But it had everything to do with battery. I glanced over at the Matria, who I assumed was slightly more advanced than I’d been at my strongest, and imagined how many nodes were in her core. I’d had seven-hundred and nineteen at my apex, most of which hadn’t been filled, so there was a good chance she was nearing eight hundred. If I factored in the burn-in and the fact that she barely had twenty in two stats…

Jesus christ, that woman had a metric fuckton of battery. Maybe a fuckton of recovery, since she had to regain that battery somehow, but definitely battery. I resolved to try and keep the Matria on my side for as long as humanly possible, but couldn’t keep my mind from wandering to the possibilities of who the hell was stronger than her. She had to have close to fifteen hundred battery, or maybe even more if she’d min-maxed her armor and trinkets. With her core, that should have made her near unkillable.

But she was still out here in an outer settlement, away from the main arteries of her people’s society. I’d eventually have to find out if that was by assignment, by choice, or a punishment, though that ‘eventually’ didn’t seem to be anywhere in the near future. So I was left to wallow in my own imagination as Persephonia began barking instructions at Jun and the recruits.