Delve

Pivoting at the ankles like a vampire, Rain rose from his cloud-soft bed. He took with him a cape made not from bat skin, but from his decadently poofy comforter, charged with the spiritual weight of Ameliah's arms. Soft, fluffy slippers formed around his feet as he floated down to the floor.

With a yawn so large he needed to enlist Snek's help, he wrapped the blanket tight about himself and shuffled toward his desk. Once the tiny avatar had rehinged its jaw, it slithered across the desk to greet him as he settled into the chair.

Good morning, me.

In response to a thought, a steaming mug of hot cocoa sprouted from the desk like it was being 3D printed in time-lapse. Poking a hand out from under the blanket to grab the handle was almost a physical pain, but the warm, rich liquid immediately soothed the discomfort away. Rain released a satisfied sigh and set the mug on a coaster as three wide-screen monitors flickered to life. Tethering his interface to the workstation, he opened a fresh document and began to type.

Rain smirked as he typed the last item, which had become traditional.

He reached for his mug, finding Snek curled around it for warmth. Unwilling to disturb even the smallest cozy part of himself, he simply summoned a fresh beverage. Taking a long pull—of black coffee this time—he surveyed the roughly prioritized list, decided it was good enough, then jumped straight in. After spending the requisite experience to unlock a tree, a new dialog obediently appeared on his rightmost monitor.

"Tch," Rain said, reading. When his interface gave up on presenting a formula, it typically meant one of the underlying variables wasn't quantifiable. Here, that would be the 'environmental factors'. From lightly grilling Glavin—the as-yet-missing-and-thus-probably-dead-though-possibly-chillaxing-in-a-tropical-paradise-somewhere Translocationist—Rain had already known as much, but he'd dared to hope.

Taking another sip of his coffee, he opened a new document and copied in the text, starting his report to the council. Jamus would be interested in the skill description, or at least the requirements, if nothing else. Getting Flight, Flash, and Elemental Refinement would be pretty easy for him, supposing they found him a decent blue sometime this century. And supposing he even wanted it. Jamus hadn't exactly been slacking recently, but his priorities had clearly shifted away from earning credits. If he was happy spending time with Meloni and reconnecting with his family, who was anyone to judge?

He's not the one with a ticking timebomb in his head.

Rain's eyes glazed over as he extended his senses and triggered an essence exchange.

Returning with a series of rapid blinks, Rain released a small sigh that had nothing to do with the dialog. As expected, the system had barely fed him a trickle of essence. The four or so minutes it had been in the real world since his last exchange—triggered before engaging in ten subjective hours of sleep—hadn't been enough for the environment of Threecore to meaningfully recover. Not that he'd expected any different. Like in the city above, the essence here was thinned thanks to all the awakened around.

Nevertheless, it was better down here, particularly in the tunnels. Over the course of his run, he'd more than kept even on his essence balance through repeated exchanges and the improving efficiency of his ramscoops. He was ahead of schedule on tree unlocks, able to justify liberal mana usage—and thus experience gain—thanks to his increased chaos intake. His refinement stack could keep up, so there was no need to mess with it for the moment.

Ramscoops before refinement cells. That's the bottleneck. Even if I figure out the next pattern, I'll need more essence before I can do anything with it.

Rain got to his feet and stretched. Feeling more awake, he split his mind a bit further, tasking Snek to start composing the report for the council. Keeping the blanket, he moved away, and keys began pressing themselves as Snek dragged the warm mug to the center of the desk.

Finishing his own drink, Rain disappeared the mug and walked to the elevator. He could have warped himself where he was going, but he wasn't in a rush. Exactly how not-much-of-a-rush he was in, he calculated as he walked.

With her latest accolade setup and all four rings, Ameliah has 693 in each stat. She can't do that all the time, no matter what she says, but she had all four on when she went to bed, so that's the number I'm using. That makes her time acceleration around 2.6x. Same as her Jack multiplier. Nice coincidence. She sounded dead, so assuming she sleeps at least as long as I did, I've got four real-time hours plus thirty-eight minutes for her to take Unity.

The better part of a month, relative...

No way I can wait that long. I'll finish what I need to, then sleep normally.

Hell yes, Unity, let's go!

Grinning, Rain paused, catching sight of his electric blue eyes reflected in the chrome elevator doors as they closed. He'd willed his irises brown before he'd gone to bed, but they'd already reverted.

"Reactor," he muttered, and the lift started moving.

The reversion was expected at this point—confirmation that his soul considered blue to be the correct color for his eyes, just as it considered absolutely shredded to be the correct state for his body. His Strength sync drove the latter, but there was nothing he could clearly point to when it came to his eyes.

I mean, I don't mind. They look cool, and Ameliah says she likes them. I just wish I knew WHY. My Focus and Clarity sync have been maxed for ages. Is it because I split them out of my core? Because my soul is basically pure now? Because of Reading? Did I earn some mana-spending achievement?

The doors opened with Rain no closer to an answer. He stepped out into a cavernous room, humming from the power coursing through the tangled network of conduits that connected the various machines. The remains of his original core were off to one side, the remnant of the gemstone plumbed in along with all the rest. There were still functions tangled up inside it that he'd yet to extract.

My cable management...needs work.

Feeling his slippers were inappropriate, he changed them to work boots, leaving his blanket alone as he ventured out into the mess.

In Vatreece's model, the heart represented the linkage between the soul and the body. In his model, the main reactor filled that role. He'd gone for a modular design, hundreds of tiny cores humming in parallel. As for what each core was doing, the answer was creating flow. The motion was important. Without moving potential nearby, higher-tier soul constructs would eventually break down. Further, the potential had to circulate through the link to his mind, where it could be charged with his will.

Physically, each reactor core was a cylindrical plug of machinery, a quarter-meter across and a full two meters long. They were slotted in banks into a monolithic block of metal that held them in place and connected them to his ever-growing plumbing network. At the moment, most of the sockets were dark—some because they were empty and others because the cores within had cracked, the tell-tale tang of chaos lingering in the air.

That was fine. Planned for.

The burned cores were all low rank—some of the first he'd made from lower grades of essence. Needing his hands, he shifted the blanket to hang from his shoulders like a heavy cape. One by one, he began pulling them out, effortlessly manipulating the massive cores by their handles and tossing them into the recycler. Once finished, he drew rank essence from a tap on the wall and began constructing a replacement. Just one, though, and only from tier-fifteen potential. That was all he could spare.

Naturally, he would upgrade everything to max eventually. This reactor would be his primary source of essence in rankless places, for in addition to driving circulation, each core also output a tiny trickle of essence according to its rank. Unfortunately, ex nihilo generation was orders of magnitude too inefficient to solve his current problem.

Working on the new core's decomposer—required to degrade its high-rank outflow to something his also-due-for-an-upgrade plumbing could handle—Rain found that despite Snek still typing away upstairs, he still had some spare mental bandwidth. With it, he turned his thoughts to the rest of the room.

When mining his original core, one of his discoveries had been shards charged with the flavor of each attribute. As a direct consequence, the largest bit of machinery in here besides the reactor itself was the housing for his Clarity. It was a converter, amongst other things. Essence went in, and mana came out. From there, his pipes carried it to the reactor and out to his body, where it hung out until he recalled it to fuel a skill.

Naturally, that was an oversimplification.

Like his paling, system-stuff was threaded all through the Clarity machine in ways he didn't understand and was afraid to modify. He had the feeling that once he had the time to really dig into it, sync and tolerance would become solved problems, but there were only so many hours in the accelerated day. For now, the machine was a literal black box. He'd added connections to his other constructs and pretty colored lights that lit up as he slid his stats around with the Malleable Ring, but that was it. The inside was solid preframulated amulite.

Buttoning up the new core's housing, Rain decided his spare thoughts would be better spent on something more immediately relevant.

Accolades. Inventory. Status. Resistances.