A long while passed in concentration as Sechen forced Issi through her pathways at a terribly sluggish pace. She needed to get them used to having Issi that they couldn’t use to make things easier. Her hands tingled with numbness, her pathways aching under the unfamiliar strain of not being able to devour the Issi she pushed through. She could feel her hands trembling, her fingers shaking like autumn leaves as she made a fist, opening her eyes to see her hands emitting a faint glow. When her hands couldn’t take it any more, Sechen moved on to her forearms. Then her upper arms, her shoulders, and her chest. Prisoner’s crystal somehow sped up the damage her Issi was doing to her pathways, but it would also speed up their recovery, and in a few hours she would do all of this again until it didn’t hurt to use her Issi.

Head swimming with Issi, Sechen tried her absolute hardest not to fall into idle thoughts. Because with idle thoughts came subconscious musings, and Sechen couldn’t take the musing of her subconscious. Her ears rang with Issi, eyes blurred, jaw clenching and then she was done. All she had left was her stomach down, and that was by far the simpler half of her daily routine. So simple, in fact, that she could move on to her upper body workout while she worked her Issi.

“Sechen?” Paui eventually spoke up as Sechen worked her back, turning her head to see the woman staring at her with a confused expression.

“Yeah?”

Paui gestured at Sechen. “How did you manage that?”

Sechen raised an eyebrow, setting the bar she’d been lifting on the ground. “Manage what?”

“Well, how’d you go from what you looked like when I met you to… this?” Paui gestured at Sechen. “You almost look like you’ve been healthy your whole life. There’s no way that should have happened so fast, even with Prisoner’s Issi helping you.”

Sechen looked down at her arms, and she couldn’t see bones through her flesh. Her muscles were covering them. She looked over at Paui, comparing herself to the athletic woman, and found she still didn’t compare. But she wouldn’t call herself malnourished, gaunt, or anything of the like anymore.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe my Issi doesn’t want me to be sickly anymore. Or Prisoner could be messing with me more than I know. I really don’t care, since I feel so much better than I used to.”

“You look better too.” Paui sighed. “You’re starting to look like you’ve been doing this your whole life. Not just three weeks.”

“Thanks?” Sechen laughed, putting a hand on her back and pressing down. “Good to know the work I’ve been putting in is starting to show through. It does feel like cheating, though. Like, people work at this for way longer than I have and don’t see anywhere near the success I have.”

“It is your Issi.” Gilt stated matter-of-factly, standing off a ways away. He was near formless, a whirlwind of golden ribbons and white symbols that spoke directly into Sechen’s mind. He’d explained his training multiple times, but Sechen couldn’t quite grasp how maintaining a formless, well, form helped his Issi. “You have strangely potent Issi, and your destroyed body reacts to it as a starving man would a grove of fresh fruit. Overindulgence. Prisoner’s Issi merely protects you from the horrible aftereffects, leaving your body a patchwork of Issi and flesh. It is quite fascinating.”

“That explains… well, nothing. If my body would greedily drink up my Issi, then why did I stay so sickly for so long? Shouldn’t I have huge muscles if that was the case?” Sechen pointed out, flexing her bicep in emphasis. It wasn’t huge by any stretch of the imagination, but it was there.

“Your body was in a comfortable state of disrepair. When you broke that state, you utterly destroyed your muscles, nerves, skeleton, and the remaining organs I did not list. But you did not give them enough time to do true damage to yourself, instead flooding them with Issi, giving your body something simple to repair itself with. How it worked I will never truly understand, but it has.”

Paui smiled over at Sechen, but there was a tinge of jealousy in her stare that made Sechen’s stomach clench up.

Text silently scrolled over Sechen’s eyes, and she didn’t react whatsoever. If Gilt was being quiet, there was a reason. “Sechen, these words are for your eyes alone. Listen and do not react until you have heard them in full, as they may be something you wish to hide from Prisoner and Paui. The parts of your body in which Issi resides remind me of what I used to be. A mindless mass of Issi that is known as a wisp. It has healed your internal injuries and filled the gaps and tears in your muscles seamlessly. I do not know what this means, but I have a single question for you later.”

“I didn’t devour my wisp.” Sechen said aloud, glaring over at Gilt’s unstable manifestation. “If that’s what you’re trying to say.”

“It was not.” Gilt’s words reached Sechen’s ears, their private conversation now known. “I would never accuse you of something so heinous. It is… quite obvious when a practitioner has betrayed their wisp. When you encounter such a practitioner, you will understand.”

“Sechen?” Paui asked.

“Nothing. Just had a private chat with Gilt.” Sechen said, running a hand from her forehead to the back of her head. The tingling was already going away, and now that Gilt had pointed it out, she felt the smallest amount of Issi running in to replace it. But as it cemented itself, it stopped feeling like Issi. It just felt like her. “I’m going to do a bunch of hand stretches and workouts until lunch. Tell me if you need the space.”

“Oh. Alright. I’ll just… go back to reading, then.” Paui looked down at her book, her shoulders sagging as she did.

Sechen forced her Issi out of her hands and forearms, the contrast between below her elbows and everything else making the effects of her Issi all the more obvious. She felt her fingers tremble without her Issi helping them, the muscles in her hands not quite as developed as the rest of her body. One by one she pressed her fingers towards the back of her hand, feeling the muscles strain as she did, then let them hang loose as she let out a long breath. Her wrists followed, the same sort of stretch as her fingers, but pushing a little too hard, just like Prisoner had told her. Push until it hurts, then push a little harder. She’d never questioned those words before, but now that Gilt had explained how she was healing so fast, they seemed like awful advice.

Advice he hadn’t given Paui.

Sechen snuck a peek at Paui out of the corner of her eye. Prisoner had told her to stop the moment it went from effort to pain, and Sechen had written that off as her not needing to catch up in the same way she had. Obviously that wasn’t true. But how in the hells had Prisoner known this was the right way? Her mind scoured all their past interactions, and settled on a memory from the very first time she turned off her Issi. The first time she’d looked inwards and saw that parts of her brain had been filled in with brickwork of her own Issi. Now, she looked inwards once more.

Her bones looked as if they’d been shattered to pieces and repaired with thin lines of tarnished gold, glowing with an inner light that she knew was her Issi. But she didn’t feel any sort of drain on her container from it; this was completely permanent. Just like Gilt had said. Her muscles were equal parts flesh and golden strings, intertwined in a helix that didn’t look at all like she knew muscles should. All of her organs had that same luminescent brickwork she had in her brain, patching holes and tears as if she was an old building and not a living, breathing being. And her nerves were spiraled with Issi, the touch signals travelling along them clarified by her Issi. There was so much Issi in her. So much Issi that felt, behaved, and broke down just like whatever it mimicked.

Her gaze wandered down to her Issi-less hands, and she noted a stark absence of the Issi that was shot through the rest of her body. Her bones felt brittle, her muscles weak, her nerves not sending the right signals. Other than her hands, Sechen felt the same lacking in her ears and eyes. And that was it. Everywhere else felt like it was… right. Like those few remaining patches weren’t even her. They were someone else. The weak girl Sechen used to be, not the practitioner she was becoming. Yet she still felt as if she hadn’t grown at all. Her Issi wasn’t going to keeping her alive anymore, but she still had the exact same amount as a few weeks ago.

A pulse of probing Issi slid through her pathways, tickling her hands as they twitched involuntarily at the stimulation. Her hands weren’t broken enough for her Issi to soak in and fix them up, but that was a problem she could easily solve. If she was insane. Instead, she sighed and went back to her stretches. Breaking her own fingers and shearing her muscles from bone wasn’t her idea of a good time, and she wasn’t even sure that she would build back right. If that was the only way, Prisoner would have already fielded the idea. She would get control of her hands the old fashioned way, even if it took a little longer.

Sechen’s hands stung as the call came for lunch, numbness spreading through them alerting her to the damage she’d done. She crossed her fingers one by one to make sure she still could, internally sighing in relief when she still had full control of her hands. The responses were sluggish, and a few of her fingers didn’t bend all the way down, but her Issi would sort that out like it had everything else. She let her Issi wash through her arms’ empty pathways, relief and pain coming together as one.

Watching her Issi come in and repair the damage she’d done was unsettling. It licked out of her pathways like tongues of flame off a campfire, lapping at the minuscule fractures in her bones and slowly filling them with liquid gold. Threads of gold wrapped themselves around her damaged muscle fibres, and Sechen knew she’d be just a little less shaky the next time she turned off her Issi. It wasn’t enough yet, but it would be in another few days. Her Issi calmed down after repairing her nerves, all feeling returning to her hands, settling back into her pathways where it radiated strength out to her entire body. She removed the spark of Issi from Prisoner’s necklace and shoved it back into her bag, following Paui and Gilt down the stairs in mutually exhausted silence.