I met back up with Louise after leaving Kalamitus' meeting room, or whatever, and we spent a fair bit of time just talking. There was a lot there, and while I normally would have just... not really tried at all to put my feelings into words, or really think all that hard about what had just happened, she convinced me to try.

Now, I don't need to rehash all of that for you. Kalamitus was a giant dick, but also clearly knew his stuff. Herman was creepy as hell, still, but I was more than glad to have him on my side. Fairies in general were starting to look like... I dunno, scary. Merry didn't disagree with me on that, and I continued to think of her as a sister, because I cared more about her than almost anyone except Louise.

The fact that Louise probably shouldn't come along on this next journey was a blow to her, as it was to me.

"You always end up getting into the most dangerous situations," she said, sounding suddenly very tired. "I don't know, Jerry. I wanted to come along, to be with you..."

I looked down at her, as she leaned against me where we sat on the bed. "The other thing--well, two other things. They seemed to know of Muratama but didn't want to give me any information at all. Even Herman seemed to be keeping that a secret, which was weird."

She looked at me, a little nervously. Louise being the servant of a non-Dungeon Dungeon God, who wasn't one of the fourteen that were known to exist... what had before seemed a novelty was becoming weirder and weirder. She considered that thought for a long moment, but didn't have anything to say.

"The other was that I almost certainly can't save Bo, not the way I'd planned. Or, well, hoped. It wasn't much of a plan." I took the hand that I didn't have around Louise's shoulder and looked at it, feeling again the powerlessness that was there. "They said I'd have to overpower the Fairy Queen that originally captured him. That's just... not possible."

Louise just hummed at that. "I never thought that he was the one I was going to have to redeem," she said, as though trying to be optimistic. "And, Jerry... although I don't know what Muratama has to say about your redemption, or what he thinks you need, I believe that you're worthy."

What I needed to be redeemed? I studied my palm for a little while, not really understanding. The Devil had also claimed that I would be redeemed if I took his bargain--not that I'd ever trusted a Dungeon caricature called 'The Devil'. But what did the Dungeon Gods mean when they talked about something like that? Was it something moral, ethical, or mechanical? Did it simply mean some kind of religious ritual? "He didn't give you any hints?"

Louise sagged against me. "It's very hard to talk to him. We're supposed to have round-table discussions, and something like that happens, but... I can't hear him. Neither can the others. It's like he's not even there, except that there is something faint."

One more mystery to add to the pile; one more example of people who could tell us things just deliberately not. And what could we really do about it? Nothing. There were a lot of things here that we couldn't do anything about.

So, eventually, we stopped talking and I spend time meditating and trying to see if I could rebuild myself.

What Kalamitus said at the end there suggested that if I had followed his directions and put my whole hands into the breaker holes, I would have crippled myself until such time as I figured out how to fix myself--not only that I would have broken my hands, but that I could have fixed them. So, experimentally, I just went ahead and poked my mind's left little finger into the hole that had ripped a layer of ...mental skin off my mental hands? What even did they do to me? What the hell was any of this?

The pain that I felt was more than just a piece of my mental hands vanishing--now that I was prepared for it, that much was obvious. It felt like... like... as I pulled my hand out and Merry and I examined it, we both pretty quickly reached the same conclusion: there were a bunch of strings tying everything together, and those strings were what were being severed. It wasn't quite like my actual physical self, where there were, like, six different things tying my finger together: skin, nerves, blood vessels, tendons, bones, muscles, whatever. No--mentally, magically, there seemed to be just a couple pieces: big pieces of "just-is," and threads that let you change them.

It definitely took a little bit of the just-is part of you with it, Merry noted as she examined my hand. That has to be the point. Rebuild it, then rebuild slightly more next time, until you build it all from scratch.

Now, in the meantime of course, physically, I also couldn't move my left little finger--but then, like, when did you ever really use your little finger? Except typing, maybe? It had always been more of a "there" part of my body and not a part that I cared about. I looked at my right hand, and whenever I tried to flex my little finger, the ring finger next to it also twitched. As a useless finger, my nervous system had decided that was good enough so long ago I had no recollection of it ever being otherwise. Actually, most of my fingers were like that, except my thumbs and pointers.

Maybe that's why it was difficult as balls to fix.

Don't get me wrong, I got the basic jist of it pretty quickly. But because my mental concept of my pinky fingers were so poorly defined, when I tried to replicate what was missing, I ran into parts of my hand that weren't missing. Merry kept trying to put into words or pictures the difference between what I was thinking and the truth, but I ended up tuning her out, trying to understand my own limitations all on my own.

Because really, if my own understanding of myself was wrong... what even was I?

Seriously, though, it took me almost two hours before I had wrapped the threads just right around my mental copy of my hand so that I was satisfied. When I did, though, I had complete control over that finger--moving it around didn't tweak any other muscles in my hand or nearby fingers, and curling and uncurling the finger didn't feel... how even do I say it? I looked at my right hand in confusion. I could control that hand just fine, but as soon as I got picky about the specifics--tried to get my fingers to move just so--I ran into limitations that shouldn't, or didn't need, to exist.

Along the way, my Dungeoneer's system recognized my achievement as a slight improvement to my dexterity, which... great, thanks. I didn't honestly care what it had to say about it, really.

I went through both hands doing the same sort of thing over the course of the next six hours or so, and it definitely got easier, but mostly it was easier where I already had good control. The outer three fingers on each hand were hard as shit to rework, while my pointers and thumbs were relatively easy.

And then, satisfied with that, I plunged both hands into the destroyer up to the wrist.

Of course I had to rebuild my fingers, and the one good thing about this stupid Cultivation bullshit was that what I fixed once seemed to be trivial to fix again. Like, I'm smart, but I could imagine a universe where I had to personally memorize exactly how I'd fixed my pinky fingers and do it all over again, and this wasn't that. Of course, there were similar problems between my hand muscles and finger muscles, and just a touch of confusion between my wrist and hand muscles, but those a lot less severe--or maybe I was just less picky about making my hand muscles somehow more "perfect".

Louise watched me with an odd look on her face the whole time--well, not the whole time. It was kind of a marathon, and she found other things to do. But several times I caught her watching me as I experimented with getting my fingers to do exactly what I wanted them to do.

And we would exchange grins, and I would try not to get distracted thinking about the future.

The system re-evaluated my Dexterity each time I successfully fixed everything, and by the end of that, it was much, much higher. While doubtless I had a lot of improvement left if I really went in on it, as it stood right now every task I could find to test my fingers on went perfectly. Not that I had a lot of finesse-y tools like lockpicks, sewing needles, woodworking stuff, whatever, but twirling things around or manipulating small things was suddenly and aggressively more satisfying, as my hands themselves seemed genuinely happy that they could do things right the first time. A weird thought.

Merry, of course, watched the whole thing, with an extra emphasis on trying to understand how the destroyer holes worked. As she did, she studied the Caesarian armor that had bonded to her, the ones that had almost killed her when she attacked someone in my defense. Unlike the gloves Herman had given her, that body seemed to be a substantial addition to her--maybe as substantial as the spider part of Herman was. Did Fairies need some kind of monster body as a template to be part of the real world? That certainly made a kind of sense.

She and I talked a lot mentally, and it was obvious both what she was thinking, and that she was nervous as hell about it. If it was possible for her to deconstruct and reconstruct Julius' armor... still, there had to be safer things to try next, starting with some junk items or even my Soulforged copies.

Tossing an item whole into the holes (straight from my inventory, and with Merry doing the bulk of the work, since it wasn't exactly clear how to do that without her) apparently made the other hole spit out a bunch of malformed conceptual pieces of it that made the fairy's eyes light up, but which seemed very confused to me. I'd thrown in a pitchfork that I'd gotten as a weapon drop from one of the berserk snow rebels--nothing useful, really, and no loss if it vanished--and Merry collected the shattered remnants and tried to explain what they were, but they were anything but physical objects.

This one, and she held up a cylinder containing something like one of the pitchfork tines, is a mix of the concept of sharpness and strength. So, like, the point and edge, but also the ability to HOLD that edge without bending. It, obviously, connects to the metal, and there is this actual metal shape which is different from the concept of the shape, because the concept was used to create it, while the actual shape is a remnant... the points also have a shape and edge that's separate from the concept of the point itself...

The two of us spent an hour and a half--unnecessarily long, but it was interesting--rebuilding, debuilding, and rebuilding again that one pitchfork. The first time we finished rebuilding it, the stats of the item went mostly down, suggesting we'd gotten something completely wrong; we didn't even bother pulling it out of my inventory, instead immediately scrapping it and trying again. Merry's prevailing theory was that we had put things in the right place but not connected them with enough magic threads, or whatever I'd used to rebuild my fingers.

The second time, the pitchfork that came out resembled what went in closely enough that we pulled it out and send a message to Susie to see if she had another copy to compare it with. I met up with her in the Inn lobby and briefly explained, and she held both items in her hands and compared them with the talented eye of someone who rebuilt items using her Class, and the kind of look on her face that suggested that--successful or not--I'd done a shitty job of it.

"I mean, it's mostly functional," she said after a minute. "And these items have a little randomness, so if you told someone you picked this up off the ground, they'd think it was just a shitty roll. Some of what you're talking about doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but..." she shrugged and handed me back my shitty rebuilt pitchfork. "It could be that you just don't know how to explain it. If you ever do, I'd be interested in hearing about it. Considering how much my class does to customize things, though, I'm not gonna play with this stuff unless you find something amazing to do with it."

"Especially right now." Susie grinned, looking a little tired, and I realized she'd probably been busy in her own rooms. "Enhancement Sage is its own new and complex toy to play with, and I'm gonna keep grinding on that to see what it takes to get that skill up."

Which, of course, was another thing that I ought to be doing, but it probably wouldn't help me in the Fairy Dungeon, so... well, not now at least.

After taking apart another couple junk items, I felt confident enough to take one of the junk item templates from my Class--a wand Harry had told me to dissect, which I had zero use for--and picked that apart. Not terribly surprisingly, that was very similar, internally, though there were some extra pieces that seemed to have something to do with summoning and dispelling the item.

Really, though, I was mostly thinking about Skills. More than anything else, I was curious about taking my Telekinesis and really truly making it mine--whatever that meant, and whatever the consequences. If I could do that, if I could just have the skill without it stressing me out or making me be in pain, and have access to all the power that I knew the skill held... well, that would be a heck of a thing.

By the same token, though, I didn't dare break it until I had enough practice to know I'd put it back together right. If... if what Kalamitus suggested, that the skill hurt because I'd broken it in the first place, and put it back together wrong... if that was true, then I definitely couldn't do that before a serious challenge.

It did get me thinking, though, about that fight. About the Rebirth Contract and the experience loss. About that moment when I decided, in my hubris, to try the boss again despite that. Believing that with this new minion, against that stupid witch, I would have no trouble at all.

And well, I'd been right as far as that went, but no further.

The Voodoo Woman was an attractive black woman dressed in shabby clothing, with an air that back then I'd recognized as being spiritual, and full of hatred. My first fight against her, I'd been cautious, but on the heels of being a player killer and fighting my way through a cannibal biome that I had accidentally caused to go massively aggro on me, drawing every creature on the floor to my location, I was already at a peak of focus and nervous energy. She was a powerful witch, but slow and easy to read.

When she was just shy of half health, I set her up for a massive critical hit, and ate up more than half her health in a burst. To my surprise, instead of dropping an item, she left behind a corpse.

I sat there, considering leaving the boss room and moving forward, but having just gotten the Devil's Rebirth Contract, and being in possession of a powerful corpse item... it just felt like fate. Right, in the way that so many wrong things were right; I'd felt terrible about trading corpses for power basically immediately, but this wasn't human. Really, genuinely, who cared what happened to a stupid human-looking puppet that would kill people just for walking in the door? So I tried the skill, prepared to find that it wouldn't work or that something would fall apart.

But it did work. Half of her level in experience points drained from me, but she was reborn, as mine. My pet Voodoo Woman. The lost level hurt, but... but I knew exactly where to get more. An hour of waiting for her to respawn, and I grinned at the Voodoo woman that spawned in front of me, who looked surprised to see a copy of herself looking back at her.

But this time, I couldn't do enough damage to eat up that second half of her health bar, and at half health, after too long of a moment, she became invincible, and started to sneer at me.

"The devil knows your sins." I could hear her voice in my memory, plain as day--I'd heard it again not long ago, on my last trip to Pearland, when I beat her several times. "You believe you can turn your back on him, but he has already taken your soul. You are his, and there is nothing you can do to prevent that."

And the final boss was there, when I was under-level for the fight I'd been expecting.

"Protect me!" I screamed at the Voodoo Woman. "Just keep me alive!"

The devil released a wave of black flame, and the Voodoo woman put a barrier around me. Death aura met a resistance to death auras; I was horrified to think that I had almost died, but it was only starting.

He moved so fast, and I didn't even need to be told that any slight hit would kill me.

I had telekinesis--there had been a skillbook in a backpack on a corpse--and I'd gotten used to using it, but it was so weak, too weak. I knew it could do more. I kept reaching for the skill over and over, trying to draw out power that I knew was there. As a person who had only just become a Dungeoneer, all I knew was what magic was capable of, in concept, but I knew.

Over and over, I spent my last point of MP throwing myself out the way of an attack, slamming my mind against the fact that the skill refused to work because of a number on a screen, that I was going to die because of a number on a screen. I tried magic tricks that I'd read about, from both before and after the world changed--exorcism things, willpower things, anything.

At the time, I thought what changed me was being on the edge. I'd put my hand on the edge of the skill, knowing I'd need it on a moment's notice, but that I didn't dare activate it too soon or I'd have no power left. But I was also trying to reach for the power within me, beneath me. And there was a moment where I'd been trying to do that, trying to reach for something within, and it felt like something broke.

And I spent a couple minutes having to dodge every attack without telekinesis, which involved a lot of running and screaming and very little planning or looking even remotely cool.

Until today, I thought I'd overused my MP. At the time, I convinced myself it didn't matter--that when the skill came back, I'd use it. I was anticipating using the skill, trying to stay in the mindset by imagining what the skill felt like beneath my mental hands, so that as soon as it came back, I'd be ready. Now, thinking back on it... suddenly it was all too familiar. I'd rebuilt the skill in the middle of combat, when my mind was a thousand lasers focused on a single point through a pane of shattered glass.

The skill changed after that. I changed after that. I beat the Devil by the skin of my teeth, and only because it was suddenly more MP efficient, more powerful, more flexible. I could empower attacks with it, sense with it, damn near fly with it. At my level, that should have been impossible. Hell, at my current level, it should probably be impossible.

But I'd also made the skill work best when I was in that broken, desperate mindset. And people like Susie, people like Mel and Jenna, people whose skills never reached that peak but also just worked... they didn't understand.

I mean, they wouldn't understand once I fixed the skill, either, but fuck me I was looking forward to that shit not hurting at least.