I had just enough potential to give my gauntlet a twin. The riverbloom version of it had the exact same effects as the other gauntlet I’d had the option to make, but the oilblossom version was slightly different. And looking at it made me wonder how strong another piece of armor would have to be to replace it.

//OILBLOSSOM-GRIP(//CORRUPTED,Professional): Core mastery requirement: 32

Current item mastery: 1.

//SLYKENED-ARSENAL: While powered with Slyk Oil, all equipped weapon’s functions are enhanced by 10+X%.

Oils from stronger Slyk grant larger X values and drain their energy slower.

Upgrades at mastery [1]/22/49/76/???

So when my gauntlets were worn together and powered with the signaleech oil, I was getting a 48% increase to all of my weapon functions and my other functions that affected my weapons. I put on my new armor and summoned my weapon as a dagger to see how it would affect the floodpetal-scales function. A single swipe of my dagger produced a slash that was the exact same size, but it drained far less battery and felt like it put less of a strain on my mind to control it.

I was trading two armor slots that could’ve had stats or functions of their own to boost my weapon’s performance by a fairly large amount. Thanks to the stat nodes I’d gained from killing carvurch and the chipspeck masses I really didn’t miss the stat boosts my old armor had given me, which was definitely how my core was supposed to work. Trade the stats from armor pieces for functions, and overflow my core with stat nodes from consuming cores. I felt so much stronger than when I left Walkalong now, which was a little concerning considering it had taken literal years to get this powerful in my old life.

After I finished slotting all the stat nodes I had left, the stats from my core alone were fairly substantial. It was also a little difficult to work around setting my nodes up around the spine of enmity while also making node ‘stars’ to burn in their stats. And speaking of the spine of enmity, it had undergone an evolution at some point. Considering what the evolution entailed, I could make an assumption on when that was.

//SPINE OF ENMITY: PASSIVE FLUID FUNCTION.

//NODE LENGTH: 8

//GROWTH: EVERY 5 CORE MASTERY INCREASES LENGTH BY 1 NODE.

//EFFECT: ALL ADJACENT STAT NODES GRANT TRIPLE THEIR VALUES.

//EVOLUTION: TRANSFORMS AN ADJACENT NODE INTO A //CHAOTIC NODE WHEN THE PARAMETERS ARE MET. CHAOTIC NODES INCREASE THE QUALITY OF THE BEARER’S UNIQUE PROPERTIES IN ADDITION TO GRANTING STATS.

//EVOLVES ONCE MORE WHEN ???? HAS BEEN ACHIEVED.

If I had to guess, I’d say my ‘unique quality’ was the strength of my oily blood. If I could get that high enough, I’d never have to worry about fueling my gauntlets. I’d be able to fuel them on my own. The only question was: what kind of parameters was I supposed to meet? I didn’t have any chaotic nodes on me, so it couldn’t trigger on anything I’d already done. Maybe it triggered when I cleared a hazard. Or when I leveled up a //CORRUPTED item to a certain point.

Whatever it was, I hadn’t done it yet. Or I hadn’t done it since the function had evolved. If this was going to be the only way I could increase the quality of my oil, then I’d have to find out how it worked eventually.

“Hey, Seb?”

I looked down to see Jun groggily rubbing her eyes. All four of them. Even though I’d seen her do it many times before, this time it was… cute. Unbearably cute.

She looked at me for a second before I remembered I had to answer her. “Yeah?” I said after clearing my throat.

“Can you take a look at my stats? I want to make sure I’m not doing anything wrong with them.” Jun said with a swipe of her hand that summoned her interface. She didn’t move to do anything else, though; she was waiting for my response.

“Of course. But I'm not really sure what you could be doing suboptimally. As long as you’ve made ‘stars’ out of all of your nodes, you’re good.”

Jun smiled slightly and swiped her hand once more, revealing her core screen to me. It was mostly the same as before, save for a few massive stat bumps thanks to her core’s insanely overpowered node-finding abilities and a single new inscription that she hadn’t told me about. I frowned at it, then down at Jun, who seemed to be enjoying my surprise. I tapped on the inscription’s name, then found myself staring down something that would’ve been innocuous for anyone but Jun.

Third Inscription: The Strangling Sprout

Anything inscribed with this symbol perceives time differently, to the bearer’s choice, at a factor of 1.25x

Twenty five percent wasn’t that huge of a change. One-hundred and twenty-five percent was a fucking massive change. The question was; did Jun’s core function add the extra 1 to make it a 2.25 multiplier, or did it make it a 1.26 multiplier. I looked down at Jun’s smile of elation and figured it was the better option of the two, or else she wouldn’t be this happy about it.

“That’s pretty damn huge.” I whistled. “How much battery does it take to use?”

“So much that I can only use it on a person for about ten seconds of real-time. But I can keep it on an inanimate object for almost a minute.” Jun said sheepishly. “I know it's not much right now, but I’ll eventually have so much battery and recovery that it won’t matter.”

I didn’t doubt it one bit. “Your stats are getting up there, that’s for sure. And your core mastery’s almost at the point that //MIMICRY won’t give you a battery penalty for using that function any more.”

“Mmhm.” Jun agreed with a nod. “Only six away now. I’m kind of surprised how fast my core mastery’s going up compared to my hazard tolerance. A little difference I could understand, but I’m almost at a twenty level gap between the two.”

I’d noticed that as well. In my old life I’d hit core mastery fifty about ten years before my hazard tolerance caught up, and that was with a whole lot less fighting than I’d been doing lately. If it kept going this way, then I’d hit core mastery ninety-nine or whatever the cap was long before I even hit hazard tolerance fifty.

“Maybe there’s a part of the system we don’t know about yet.” I offered. “Keratily and Okeria might know more about it. Or… maybe Nia did. I’ll go through some of her text logs later.”

“Good idea. There’s probably a lot in there that Nia left you.” Jun agreed. “There was another thing I wanted to ask you; you said that we’re building Mortician a body, right? Then why could you touch them wherever you were?”

“That’s… that’s a really good question.” I said after a short pause. How had I done anything I’d done in the oilsea? “Shit, was that place even real? Or was that… I don’t know… the manifestation of the slyk network in this hazard?”

Jun looked at me blankly. “You can just ask Mortician, you know. And maybe The End, if they don’t know.”

“Right, right. I think my head’s still a little fuzzy.” I chuckled, pulling up a text window to talk to Mortician. I pressed ‘send’ and waited a second for an answer, but it didn’t come up right away. Five minutes passed with both Jun and I growing restless as time crawled on. “That’s strange. If Mortician’s time is going faster than ours, they should’ve responded right away. Even if they were in the middle of something, it shouldn’t be taking this long.”

“Unless they’re in the middle of something huge. Like trying to convince one of those titans to work with them. ” Jun said worriedly. “But… five hours, Seb. They wouldn’t ignore you for that long.”

I raised an eyebrow at Jun’s knowledge of Mortician’s time difference. Before I opened my mouth, though, I checked to see how I’d messaged Mortician. And saw that I’d accidentally used the correspondence that included Jun, Mortician, The End, and me. That answered the least important question on my mind, and left me with only the worrisome ones.

Mortician could be in trouble. Or they could be in the process of assimilating the titans. Or they could be creating a physical core, and their interface was down during the process. There were too many possibilities, but the most likely answer was one I really didn’t want to entertain.

Whatever the stingprey had called ‘the creator’ had found Mortician. And I couldn’t do anything about it until we got to the nexus. The End was the only thing that might know more.

{Mortician isn’t responding. Can you contact them at all, with whatever connection you have to them? They are a part of the Ossuary now, right?} I typed to The End.

Jun’s eyes skimmed over my quick message, then she added a few words of her own. {And if you don’t mind me asking, where was Seb’s mind while his body was stuck in the oil? Are trawlers actually going through the oilsea, or is that something the people who came before us’ memories made for themselves?”

This time, The End put its answers in our correspondence instead of directly to me in error messages. It still talked in all-caps, though.

//TO SEBASTIAN’S QUESTION, I CAN ONLY SAY THAT MORTICIAN IS ALIVE.

//THEIR CONNECTION TO ME IS NOWHERE NEAR AS STRONG AS YOURS IS, AND AFTER ALTERING THE CHRONAL FLOW IN THE OILSEA, I HAVE NOT HAD ANY CONTACT WITH THEM WHATSOEVER.

//BEING A RESIDENT OF THE OSSUARY IS AKIN TO BEING AN ADOPTIVE CHILD OF MINE, WHEREAS YOU ARE AN EXTENSION OF ME ON THE ALL-WORLD.

It was good to know Mortician was alive, but if they weren’t responding to The End either, then they had to be in trouble.

//FOR YOUR QUESTION, JUNIPER, I MUST FIRST EXPLAIN A CONCEPT THAT IS… STRANGE TO SAY THE LEAST.

//THE RESONANCE OF DYING BREATHS IS THE NAME GIVEN TO A PHENOMENA THAT OCCURS WHEN A LARGE MASS OF CORE-BEARING PEOPLE ARE KILLED AT THE SAME EXACT INSTANT.

//THEIR FINAL THOUGHTS INTERTWINE AS SO MANY CONNECTIONS TO THE SYSTEM ARE SEVERED, AND IT CAN CREATE A RESONANCE HAZARD.

//A HAZARD THAT DOES NOT TRANSPORT THE BEARER, BUT CREATES EXTREME HALLUCINATIONS THAT CAN SOMEHOW BE MADE REAL.

//THE OILSEA IS AN ANCIENT RESONANCE HAZARD OVERLAID ON THE DREDGED SWITCHPORT, AND IS WHAT ALLOWS THE NEXUS TO CONNECT TO SO MANY HAZARDS.

//THOUGH I DO NOT KNOW HOW THE MEMORIES OF THE PEOPLE BEFORE THE STAURA BECAME TRAPPED WITHIN A RESONANCE HAZARD SUCH AS THE OILSEA.

//IN ALL ACTUALITY, THEY SHOULD NOT EXIST.

//THEY WERE UTTERLY FORGOTTEN.

//EXCEPT IN THE MINDS OF A SELECT… FEW… GODS.

//I… HAVE SOMETHING I MUST DO.

//WE WILL SPEAK NEXT WHEN YOU LEAVE THIS HAZARD.

//I WILL TELL YOU OF MY FINDINGS AT THAT TIME.

//INITIATING PERSPECTIVE SHIFT…

//SHIFT INCOMPLETE. TARGET NOT WITHIN PARAMETERS [STAURA].

//REINITIATING WITH PARAMETERS [MORTICIAN’S SPECIES].

//ERROR. [MORTICIAN’S SPECIES] NOT FOUND.

//REINITIATING WITH PARAMETERS [CELAURA].

//CHECKING… SPECIES [CELAURA] HAS NO DESIGNATION WITHIN ANY DATABASES AND FOUR LIVE REPRESENTATIVES.

//INITIATING PERSPECTIVE SHIFT…

Moricla, the god of innocence, stared in blind terror as The End of her people appeared in the sky.