Rue removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes. The last few days had been rough. In a way, she was glad. All the illusions the fairy created, to prevent her from knowing where the Freedom counters were hidden, was a good thing. No memories tampered or secrets discovered.

For perhaps the hundredth time today, she ran her fingers across all her mind talismans. Yep, they were still intact.

As soon as she entered the station, she headed to the cafeteria to get a few tubes of Whiff.

At the entrance of her department were a few guards in front of the Screen.

“What’s wrong afraid someone will take the Screen?” she asked them and scanned her bracelet.

As she entered, glowing blow light radiated from her. She had sprung her body barrier almost immediately. There were crazies all over the station.

Only when she looked around did she realise they were cuffed with barrier cuffs (Devices that would spring a barrier around those who wore them) and were flanked by multiples guards.

The guards behind her were laughing their asses off. She lowered her body imbuement and smiled at them. She kinda deserved that.

As she walked to her cubicle, she began to study their Stat Screens. There were orcs, trolls, hobgoblins and even a vampire. Huh, they weren’t even usually that violent. Vampires were the one species of crazies that had managed to achieve nobility and they certainly liked reminding everyone about that.

“What did they even do?” she asked a guard flanking an orc.

“They kidnapped a girl and tried to steal her Freedom counters, ma’am. The idiots were way to close to an altar, so we just bombed them and surrounded the altar.”

She tried to work out the implications. These crazies were closer to the true perpetrator than WarCode.

“Who led the operation again?”

“The chief and your partner ma’am.”

Shit. Was this another cover up? No, it couldn’t be. There were hobgoblins in the mix. They featured in every report she could find. Still there was something very fishy going.

She nodded to the guard and walked over to her desk still in thought.

A human and a nymph was seated at her table. The nymph had forest green skin and was shirtless but wore glossy black nylon pants with a matching pair of boots. The glimmering jewellery, on her chest, was certainly mana made, maybe even a Device.

The man wore a sober, grey three piece suit. He towered over the nymph and his blue piercing eyes was framed perfectly by a striking face.

Rue grimaced inside. She had a talisman for the Heart so she knew this was surgery and not Charisma. And that meant wealth.

She checked their Stat Screens.

Name

PlaitPie

ID

#################

Species

Nymph

Age

23

Races

3: Assigned Race

Lives

4: Youth

Ranking

1: Purpose Slave

Unknown

Not Assigned

Owner

BlueEyes

Level

0

Stats

None

Name

BlueEyes

ID

#################

Species

Human

Age

54

Races

4: Birth Race

Lives

4: Youth

Ranking

3: Program

Growth

0: None

House

Cavern

Level

2

Stats

Vitality – 168

Intelligence - 20

“Mr. BlueEyes?” she asked.

The man removed his right hand, which was glowing pink, from the nymph’s thigh and shook Rue’s hand.

“So how can I help you?”

“I’m here to register a murder complaint.”

They were deep inside the tunnels.

Corn coughed. His breath whirred like a congested pipe. After he placed Moon on the floor, he slung the flamethrower on his belly and collapsed prone like a starfish.

She was still knocked cold. With his mana vision, he could tell that she had three projectiles inside her. Her body still hadn’t pushed the projectiles out and had knocked her cold instead, probably because that level of pain was still new to her.

If he was still immortal, the projectiles would have been ejected out immediately. But he wasn’t.

The wound on his left lung was a grim reminder. It wasn’t the pain that bothered him. No, it was that he didn’t have enough energy. He had to rest. The idea was preposterous! But here he was, lying prone on the floor, wheezing to stay alive.

The moment he entered the tunnels he stuffed circled mana ice into the wound. Thankfully, circled mana ice had lasted for hours. The normal stuff would have melted in seconds.

Now he only had two options: either he had to die or get it healed. Since the wound was on his torso, a resurrection would heal the wound completely. But if he did die, not only would lose the ring he had stolen off her, he would also lose his precious flamethrower and a Life counter.

Even if the tunnels were labyrinthine, hiding such expensive goods where criminals wandered was stupidity.

And all these points didn’t consider Moon.

The fuckers who wanted steal her Freedom counters also had agents at the Guard. He couldn’t just drop her there. In a way, the safest place for her right now was in the tunnels. Except she wouldn’t be able to receive her Freedom counters down here. So they had no choice but to go above.

And that left healing. Before he would’ve considered it impossible. But now, he knew there were ways to heal without Vitality. If only he could find one of those places.

Should he try using a Green Screen? His paranoia had kept him safe until now, but was preventing another Base Slave from being born really more important than preventing him from becoming a Base Slave.

Because that was his future, if he was caught.

Wait, he couldn’t use the Green Screen but that didn’t mean she couldn’t.

He stood up and carried her over to a Screen, half a mile away. He placed her bracelet on the Screen and ambient mana leaked out to form words.

Welcome!

Would you like to create a profile?

He tried selecting Yes but the Screen didn’t respond. Of course, the Screen would only operate for the person using it. He used her hands to select it and it worked fine. Huh, a person didn’t have to be awake to use a Screen booth.

It was an interesting loop hole. Maybe he could use someone else’s profile to trawl for information. He wouldn’t even have to knock them out, just bribe them. But damn! A lot of his problems would be solved, if he had his own Screen.

He managed to find the nearest mercenary clinic and the corresponding exit. He memorised the map and left.

It took hours of plodding and five breaks before he managed to walk over to the exit. When he had entered the tunnels, he no choice but to break down the entrance with multiple circled ice blades. This time all he had to do was scan Moon’s bracelet, leave her away from the entrance and block the entrance.

He replaced his clown mask for a pair of googles. As soon as the sewers were empty, he ran across the nearest tunnel and climbed up to the manhole.

The streets above were always busy, so he waited for a lull in the pedestrians stampeding above him and screwed open the man hole. He placed the cover back onto the hole and bolted into the alleyway before too many people noticed.

Corn rested to recover his breath and then slipped through the alleyways to reach the clinic.

The reception was empty except for a woman behind the desk. Unlike normal receptionists, she was dressed in light leather armour. Her chest and neck were covered only in cloth and Corn had a feeling the armour was more to beautify than to protect.

“I’d like a healing,” he said, placing a small sack of core crystals on the desk.

The woman looked up from her Screen, “We don’t take core.”

“Wait, what?!” Corn panicked. That was all his savings. In normal shops he’d have to use credit, but surely a mercenary shop would deal with core. He knew that ordinary Strength and Speed users could replenish their Stats using core, even if they didn’t literally eat the crystals like orcs or hobs might.

“Sorry, we can sell you core but we can’t buy it from you. There wouldn’t be a guarantee of quality.”

“You can check them, these crystals are full.”

“Sorry,” she grinned in a way that indicated she was anything but sorry.

When he was kicked out of the System, he’d hoped he could at least interact with the mercenary shops and Border Reserves using core. But it looked like the Underworld was the only place he could go.

“But we do pawn items here.”

It was a scheme. They wanted his precious. No way!

There weren’t a lot of things worth more than his lives, but discovering the secrets of Magic was definitely one of them.

He turned to walk out but then remembered that he still had a few daggers on him. He placed three on the desk.

She grimaced and wore a pair of gloves, “These won’t do.”

He dropped to the ground and vomited blood. He gasped sharply and then kept vomiting. All that sneaking about was taking a toll. It was the first time since losing his immortality that he felt so vulnerable.

She peeked from above the desk, “You look pretty pale.”

They both understood the threat. He was going to die soon. And if he died soon, his treasures were free game.

There was a reason why mercenaries and the kind preferred cheap but efficient equipment. Don’t use anything you aren’t prepared to lose. And Corn didn’t want to lose his flamethrower.

After the two negotiated she said, “I’ll issue a number token, instead of using the System.”

Corn unslung the flamethrower and placed it on the desk.

Maybe it was his wounds or his paranoia but he wasn’t thinking straight. He worked in a gang. His primary job, so far, seemed to be intimidating others and stealing things. There was no reason he had to pay back the tab when he could simply steal it back.

The woman smiled and grabbed the Device.

The moment she left Corn asked, “Wall, you awake?”

He got no answer. Thankfully, the locker was right behind the desk. He saw her scan her bracelet and even the number token issued by the System. The locker was spell circled with tightly looped mana threads.

Corn smiled, it was not a Device.

She shortly came back and told him the number.

Fifteen minutes later, Corn was in a white room, his clothes and belongings in a plastic bag on his lap, when a balding, tallish dwarf barged in. A High Dwarf. Corn had seen a few of them before. Even if they were close to a human’s height, they still retained their bulky build and beard.

You needed to have a full set of five Race counters to choose that race.

“Holy shit!” he exclaimed, “How are you still alive?”

Five others entered the room coolly.

“We need to start now,” he said and pulled out a pair of large needles from a plastic bag. Attached to each needle was a long thick woolen thread.

Both the threads and the needles were Devices. Specifically, they were Mauled. The core that flowed through them was so thick that it overlapped the tight mana threads in the Device.

The high dwarf passed on the threads to four of the others so that all of them were holding each pair. He plucked the ice lodged in the wounds with a pair of tweezers.

Before he could throw it away, Corn grabbed it back. No point in wasting food right? The high dwarf shrugged and pushed both needles inside the wound. Then, he did something that Corn wouldn’t have believed unless he saw it himself.

He reversed time.

At the tip of the needles, blossomed two spherical orbs of core. The energy swirled in a way Corn did not understand, but wherever they passed through time reversed.

Lung tissue swished and swayed. Whatever blood was there flowed back into the vessels, as torn vessels re-formed. Structures, too tiny to be seen, knit back to their existing configurations.

He slowly pulled back the needles as the tissue returned to its state before the wound. Once the lung was healed he pushed the needles toward the ribs and finally the skin.

Unfortunately bits of his outer skin was missing.

The high dwarf placed the needles in the hands of a women and took her place.

She used Strength. Initially it was hard to parse out the difference because core looked the same to his mana vision and both Strength and Speed used the same energy. But the energies moved differently: Speed flowed in bursts of sharp waves while Strength moved like slotting bricks on a wall.

In some sense, he was glad he didn’t have eyes. It greatly developed his mana vision.

She placed the core between one of his open wounds like a band aid. Then she peeled it out. The two open edges of skin were touching each other and the wound was closed.

Corn titled his head, “What did you do?”

“Just selected the space between your wounds and squeezed it out.”

“Wow! You can do that?” If he had any eyebrows, they would have gone up.

She smiled, “If you have five other users to produce core and an expensive Device, sure!”

She continued to heal the wounds on his chest and then moved on to his head. She offered to use an anaesthetic but he declined. She, then proceeded to take longer for the hairline fractures.

Corn felt anxious as she kept getting closer to the base of his neck and closer and closer to the source of his mana vision. It felt like someone was moving a blade towards his eyes.

But the needles never reached because the fractures didn’t go down there.

As soon as the healing was done, she handed the needles back to the high dwarf.

As he packed them he casually remarked, “If you don’t mind me asking, what race are you?”

Corn’s pulse quickened, they had already seen everything. There was no reasonable lie, “I have no idea.”

“Huh. That actually happened to one of my cousins. She ended up as an Assigned Race and she got an unknown race. She was a dwarf with glowing skin.”

Corn perked up, “And?”

“Well, she saved up a fortune and went to the Library. Turns out she was a Sunshine Dwarf. Who knew, huh?”

“How is that even possible for the System to not know?”

The high dwarf shrugged, “I have no idea. Never did understand why she never changed races.”

“Desire,” said Corn, they all looked powerful enough to know.

The dwarf waved a hand, “Say no more. Boy was I glad when I hit twenty five. No more growth on my Stats thank you very much. No more extra Desire, I’ll manage with what I have.”

Corn swallowed that information grimly. It was still unsettling to know he only had roughly seven years of growth.

He quickly dressed up and left.

He calmly walked down the manhole, only two pedestrians turned to look at him, and soon reached the Underworld entrance. Taking the circled ice blade he had jammed the door with, he walked in.

Moon was gone.