It hit him as the fortress city loomed ahead.

  Not gradually. Not like a thought building from smaller thoughts. It hit like ice water thrown in the face. Like someone had flipped a switch inside Jake's skull that suddenly made everything around him sharp and clear and WRONG in ways he couldn't immediately identify.

  The golden grasslands stretched behind him. The chosen marched in formation ahead along with the Champions. Hooves on packed earth. Steady rhythm. The mechanical efficiency of the grid's conscription system moving bodies from one town to the next like cargo on a conveyor belt.

  And Jake was just... walking along with it.

  Not fighting. Not planning. Not looking for angles or exits or ways to exploit the situation. Just walking. Keeping pace. Playing his role as quiet contemplative Priest while fourteen young taurs followed him like he was something worth following.

  Wait.

  The thought arrived with strange weight. Like it had been trying to surface for days and finally broke through something that had been holding it down.

  Why am I doing this?

  Not "why am I walking toward caves that will probably kill me." That question had an answer. Survival. Information. The parasitic hunger that had reasserted itself after the battle scene.

  No. The question was deeper. More uncomfortable.

  Why did I let this happen without fighting it? Why did I wake up one morning conscripted into service for the Snake Lords and my first reaction was to play along?

  Jake turned the question over. Examined it from the angles he'd spent a lifetime perfecting. The con artist's instinct to look behind curtains. To find the manipulation underneath the performance.

  And found it.

  Not in the world around him. In himself.

  Something was different. Something had been different for days, since the crystal finished integrating, but Jake hadn't noticed until this exact moment. Like a man who'd been wearing someone else's glasses for months suddenly taking them off and realizing everything he'd been seeing was slightly out of focus.

  The crystal hadn't just hardened his conceptual structures.

  It had cleared something. Burned through something. Dissolved layers of... residue that had been sitting on top of his thoughts like sediment on a riverbed. Layers he hadn't known were there because they'd become indistinguishable from his own mind.

  And now they were gone. Or going. And what was left underneath felt like coming back to a room he'd forgotten he owned.

  Jake stopped walking.

  The chosen ahead of him noticed. Adjusted. A few looked at him with concern that he ignored completely.

  He stood in the middle of the golden road and turned his attention inward. Not to the structures or the affinities or any of the magical architecture he'd been building for months.

  To his memories.

  He had perfect memory. Hope's curse had given him that along with everything else. Every moment since arriving in this world preserved with crystalline fidelity. Every sensation. Every emotion. Every decision.

  And Jake had never once, in all those perfectly preserved memories, questioned whether the decisions were actually his.

  Until now.

  The bat came first.

  Jake reached for the memory with the clinical precision of a surgeon opening a chest cavity. Not gently. Not with the reverent care he'd brought to it before. With fury that he was only beginning to understand.

  The memory surfaced with its usual vividness. Moldy air in tiny lungs. Wings of leather and bone. The colony around him. Brothers and sisters and lovers and companions flying through darkness together.

  Jake felt it all. Every sensation preserved perfectly by Hope's curse.

  And this time he could also see it for what it was.

  Foreign.

  The longing he felt when this memory surfaced. The warmth. The sense of belonging that had haunted him since the first night in this world. Jake had carried that feeling for months. Had let it inform decisions. Had chased versions of it in every host since.

  It wasn't his.

  It had never been his.

  The bat had been a simple creature. Colony animal. Social. Driven by pack bonds and shared warmth and the simple comfort of not being alone. And when Jake had possessed it, those drives had seeped into him like ink into water. Tinting everything. Coloring every subsequent interaction with the bat's desperate need for connection.

  I felt that. Carried it with me. Let it shape how I approached every single relationship since the first night in this world.

  And it wasn't me. It was a fucking bat.

  The rage was immediate. Hot and clean and clarifying in ways the contamination had never been.

  The Jake from Earth didn't need connection. Didn't crave belonging. People were tools. Relationships were transactions. And somewhere in the first night of being in this world, a swamp bat rewrote that fundamental truth and I didn't even notice.

  Jake pushed the memory away. Reached for the next one with the same surgical precision.

  Jonas.

  The necromancer hit differently now. Where before Jake had felt the residual rage and filed it as dangerous contamination he'd successfully purged, now he saw something else.

  He'd almost let Jonas consume him entirely. Had been so close to losing himself that destroying the man's personality had been the only option. Jake remembered that moment. Remembered the fight. Remembered choosing to erase Jonas rather than be erased.

  But what he hadn't examined. What he'd never bothered to look at closely.

  Was how CLOSE he'd come to not fighting at all.

  Jonas had offered something too. Understanding. Purpose. Mastery of a single concept pursued with obsessive dedication. The necromancer's identity had been simple and clean and absolute. No confusion. No competing drives. Just death, understood as completely as he was capable of understanding it.

  For a moment. A brief terrible moment. Jake had wanted to let Jonas win. Had wanted to surrender his own messy, complicated, painful identity in exchange for Jonas's clean singular focus.

  He'd fought back. But only barely. And only because Jonas's personality was aggressive enough to trigger survival instincts that the bat's gentle contamination had never activated.

  Jonas tried to eat me and I fought back because he was loud about it. The bat ate me quietly and I didn't fight at all because it felt good.

  The loud predator I noticed. The quiet one I welcomed.

  The panther next. And here the rage found something specific to sink its teeth into.

  Jake remembered the guilt. Had carried it for months. The memory of consuming the great cat's brain while the creature was still conscious. Still aware. Still feeling itself dissolve.

  That guilt had informed decisions. Had made Jake more careful about how he fed. Had created a moral framework around consumption that made him feel like he was being responsible rather than just hungry.

  But the guilt wasn't his.

  Jake from Earth had eaten things without guilt. Had consumed and discarded and moved on without a backward glance. Guilt was a luxury for people who had the emotional bandwidth to spare. Jake had never had that bandwidth. Had never needed it.

  All the guilt since? The loss of his “friends”. That guilt came from the Fallen.

  The man whose brain Jake had consumed purposefully. Whose empathy and moral framework had bled into Jake's consciousness and colored thoughts ever since.

  Fallen's personality didn't just affect how I treated people. It rewrote how I felt about everything that happened. I've been carrying guilt about an animal I ate for survival. And it wasn't even my guilt. It was a dead man's empathy wearing my face.

  And Fallen himself.

  This was the one that made Jake's stolen blood run cold.

  He remembered the choice. The deliberate, conscious decision to keep fragments of Fallen's personality integrated. To let the dead man's warmth and family-love and sense of belonging persist in Jake's consciousness rather than purging them.

  Jake had made that choice knowingly. Had looked at the contamination and said yes. Keep it. Because it brought me closer to the colony. Closer to a home.

  I chose it. I actively chose to let someone else's personality live inside my head. But that wasn’t even MY choice.

  That's not contamination fighting me. That's me INVITING contamination in because the alternative, being the real me, felt too… what? Alone?

  The bat had been accidental. Jonas had been violent. The panther had been indirect. But Fallen?

  Fallen had been a willing infection. Jake had opened the door and let the warmth in because the cold outside was too much to bear.

  And then he'd built a life around it. Had let Fallen's borrowed love for his mother become his own. Had let Fallen's moral compass guide decisions. Had let Fallen's need for purpose turn Jake into an investigator pursuing resistance movements and shadow conclaves.

  None of it was him.

  Three months. Three months of living as Thornback. Playing a son. Loving his mother. Pursuing a dead man’s moral crusade. And the whole time I thought I was growing. Thought the contamination was healing me.

  It wasn't healing. It was replacing. Slowly. Piece by piece. Until the thing walking around in Thornback's body wasn't Jake anymore. It was Fallen wearing Jake wearing Thornback.

  Earlier memories of the swamp came next. And here Jake hit the gap.

  He reached for it carefully. The way you'd probe a mouth wound with your tongue to find where it hurt most.

  Nothing.

  Blur. Motion without context. Emotion without meaning. A hole in perfect memory so complete it felt like someone had reached into his consciousness and scooped out everything between two points in time.

  Jake had spent time there. Had possessed creatures. Had lived, in some sense, for an unknown duration. The blur suggested it could have been weeks. Could have been months. Could have been years for all he knew.

  And his memory, which preserved everything else with crystalline perfection, gave him absolutely nothing.

  Perfect memory. The best possible defense against losing myself. And the swamp punched right through it.

  Not just contamination. Complete erasure. Whatever happened in there, it didn't just change me. It took the evidence. Removed the recording. Left nothing but static where there should have been perfect clarity.

  Hope's curse gives me perfect memory. Something in that swamp overrode Hope's curse. What the FUCK has that kind of power?

  The creature of light sat at the edge of the gap. The thing that had pulled him back. Saved him from disappearing entirely into the swamp's collective consciousness.

  Jake reached for that memory too.

  Fog. A shape made of light. Movement that suggested grace. The feeling of being pulled back from dissolution.

  And nothing else. No details. No clarity. The same corrupted vagueness that had plagued this memory since the moment it formed.

  Two gaps in perfect memory. The swamp and the creature of light. Both connected. Both resistant to the clarity that everything else now provided.

  I should be able to see it. Should be able to remember. But something won't let me. The same thing that erased the swamp is keeping the rescue blurry.

  Filed away.

  Jake pulled himself back from the memory examination. Let the rage settle into something colder. More focused.

  The humiliation hit next. And it hit harder than anything else.

  Jake looked at his recent life. The last three months. The period since possessing Thornback and settling into Millstone Crossing.

  And saw what he'd actually been doing.

  Farming.

  He had been FARMING.

  Pulling stones from soil. Grinding wheat at the mill. Following the grid's routine with the same mindless compliance as every other Bovari in the town. Waking up. Working. Eating. Sleeping. Repeating.

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  And he had been CONTENT doing it.

  Jake from Earth would have rather died. Would have clawed at the walls of that existence until his fingers bled. Would have burned the entire system down on principle before submitting to collective labor under communist control.

  The Jake who had arrived in this world through Hope's curse. The predator. The opportunist. The creature who looked at every situation and calculated what could be taken from it.

  That Jake would have NEVER been content farming.

  But the contamination had rewritten contentment itself. Had made the cage feel like a home. Had made submission feel like peace. Had turned the most fundamental violation of Jake's nature into something that felt like healing.

  I was content. Actually content. On a communist farm. Under the rule of snake god tyrants. Surrounded by people I was lying to. And I didn't see a single thing wrong with it.

  That's not growth. That's not adaptation. That's the most complete kind of defeat there is. The kind where you don't even know you've lost.

  The priest thing made it worse.

  Jake had been playing PRIEST. Had been providing spiritual guidance to terrified conscripts. Had been blessing journeys and making up prayers and presenting himself as a holy figure worthy of reverence.

  Jake. Who had no use for religion. Who saw faith as the most exploitable weakness in any population. Who had manipulated belief systems on Earth with the casual efficiency of someone breathing.

  Had been PERFORMING faith. And somewhere in the performance, had started believing his own act.

  I was a priest. Me. The guy who looked at religion and saw a tool for controlling the weak. I was wearing the costume and filling the role and it felt RIGHT.

  Fallen did that. Fallen's conscience. Fallen's need for purpose and meaning. It turned me into exactly the kind of person I would have consumed on Earth without a second thought.

  And the mission. The Shadow Conclave. The resistance.

  Jake had been pursuing it with genuine investment. Had been frustrated when contact was interrupted. Had been angry that the Choosing separated him from the Priest. Had been thinking about how to reconnect, how to deliver intel, how to help overthrow the Pantathians.

  Help.

  Jake didn't HELP people. Had never helped anyone in his life without calculating the return on investment first. The concept of altruism was foreign to him. Had always been foreign to him.

  But here he was. Pursuing a resistance movement with the earnest dedication of someone who actually gave a shit about other people's freedom.

  The mission isn't mine. It never was. It's Fallen's moral crusade running on Jake's legs. Fallen's conscience directing Jake's actions. And I followed it without questioning because the contamination made it feel like MY purpose.

  I would have defended it. If someone had grabbed me a week ago and said 'Jake, none of this is really you, the contamination has been rewriting your priorities for months,' I would have called them wrong. Would have said I'd changed. Grown. Evolved into something better than the monster I used to be.

  And I would have believed it. Completely. Without hesitation.

  Because that's what the contamination does. It doesn't just change you. It makes you DEFEND the change. Makes you mistake borrowed personality for personal growth. Makes the cage feel like home and the chains feel like freedom.

  Jake stood in the middle of the golden road while the wagon pulled past him with confused glances. He didn't notice them. Didn't notice anything external at all.

  Because the fury was building to something that felt like the first genuinely clean emotion he'd experienced since arriving in this world.

  I do this. This is what I AM. I slide into a brain and rewrite the owner from the inside. My victims don't know it's happening. Can't fight what they can't perceive.

  And it happened to me. The apex predator got consumed by something it couldn't see. The thing that eats minds had its mind eaten. And I didn't fight it. Didn't even notice it. Welcomed it in with open arms because it felt so fucking good to stop being Jake.

  Hope's curse made me a parasite. And then it made me vulnerable to the exact same thing I inflict on others. Made the predator into prey.

  And I LIKED it! Fuck!

  That last thought sat in Jake's chest like a stone. Cold. Heavy. Immovable.

  He hadn't just been contaminated. He had participated. Had opened doors. Had chosen comfort over identity because the real Jake, the original Jake, was supplanted.

  The curse hadn't just stolen his humanity. It had stolen his self. Slowly. Methodically. Using Jake's own desires against him. Offering warmth and purpose and belonging as the price of surrender.

  And Jake had paid it willingly.

  That's what makes me sick. Not that it happened. That I enjoyed it. That the contamination felt like healing. Like I was finally becoming a real person instead of the monster I actually am.

  But I'm not a real person. I never was. I'm Jake. And Jake doesn't farm. Doesn't pray. Doesn't care about resistance movements or fallen priests or mother figures who sing lullabies.

  Jake survives. Jake takes. Jake wins.

  And I almost forgot that entirely.

  - - -

  Jake resumed walking. Fell back into formation without conscious decision. But something had shifted behind his eyes that the chosen couldn't see and wouldn't have understood if they could.

  He turned his attention inward. Past thought. Past emotion. Past the biological processes that kept Thornback's body moving.

  Into the structures.

  Not with curiosity this time. Not with the fascinated detachment he'd brought to previous examinations.

  With the cold precision of someone performing an autopsy on their own corpse.

  Trillions of them.

  Structures duplicated in every synapse within the cellular architecture of his brain. Covering biology in circular scaffold that reinforced the underlying meat like a broken Chinese finger cuff. Tighter the more you pulled. More integrated the more you used them.

  Before the crystal, they had been delicate. Fragile. Houses built from cards. The crystal had turned them into iron rebar.

  The crystal fragment had hardened everything. Turned paper strands into solid steel. Made structures that had been tentative and experimental into permanent fixtures of Jake's internal landscape. Every affinity he possessed was now physically real in ways that went beyond metaphor.

  Jake could see them clearly for the first time. Could examine each one with the kind of precision that months of incremental understanding had never provided.

  And what he saw made the gaps painfully obvious.

  The Champions had wielded power that made Jake's abilities look like toys. Had manipulated concepts with depth and fluidity that suggested understanding so complete it had become instinctive. Like breathing. Like walking.

  Jake had the structures. Had the affinities. Had stolen them from hosts and integrated them into his scaffold with parasitic efficiency.

  But the understanding to use them at that level? The deep, bone-level comprehension that turned raw affinity into mythological power?

  That was almost entirely missing.

  I'm nothing more than a collector. I have pieces. But I don't know how to build anything real with most of them.

  The frustration burned. Hot and immediate. Months of practice. Months of experimentation. And he was still fumbling with concepts that Champions wielded like extensions of their own bodies.

  Jake pushed the frustration aside. Examined the structures with detached detail instead. Cataloged. Compared. Mapped what he had against what he'd seen.

  Life came first.

  Jake's internal vision settled on the largest structure in his scaffold. Complex. Layered. The foundation upon which everything else built.

  He remembered how it had first appeared to him. Through the gremlin's simplistic consciousness. Blood. Bone. Claw. Three separate concepts that the swamp creature had perceived as distinct and unrelated.

  But they weren't separate. Jake could see that now that they were puzzle pieces. Individual structures that, when manipulated in precisely the right way, slid together to form a whole. Blood provided the flow. The circulation of energy through biological systems. Bone gave structure. The framework that everything else attached to. Claw represented force. The biological capacity to act upon the world.

  Together they created something greater than their sum. Life itself. The fundamental concept that everything living shared.

  Jake's understanding of Life was deep. Deeper than most of his other affinities. Months of healing. Of Syphon feeding. Of biological manipulation had given him genuine comprehension of how the pieces fit together.

  His structures here were solid. Well-formed. Close to what the Champions might possess.

  This one I actually understand. This one feels real.

  Light sat atop Life in a separate small loop. Smaller than Jake expected. Almost delicate compared to the massive architecture of Life beneath it.

  He'd used Light in fusion applications. Simple shifts in reflection that he had gleaned from an annoying lizard in the swamp. But examining the structure directly, Jake realized how little he actually understood about Light as a standalone concept.

  It was there. Present. Part of his scaffold. But thin. Underexplored. A loop of potential he'd never bothered to examine on its own.

  Another gap. Filed away for later.

  Below Life, Jake's vision settled on the foundations.

  Four primary elements. Stone. Air. Fire. Water. The base upon which the entire scaffold rested.

  He touched them.

  Actually touched them. Not with mental imagery or conceptual understanding. With something that felt like physical sensation transmitted through parasitic biology that had no business perceiving internal structures as tangible objects.

  Stone was hardness. Density. Weight that pressed against Jake's awareness with geological patience. His Stone affinity was strong here. Thornback's racial biology had given him deep connection to earth and rock. The structure was solid. Well-formed.

  But the UNDERSTANDING was shallow. Jake could pull rocks from soil. Could condense loose dirt into usable material. Could feel the ground beneath his hooves.

  Nothing compared to the Champion who had reshaped tons of earth like clay. Had created stone hands that crushed apex predators. Had manipulated geological forces with casual authority that made Jake's rock-pulling look like children's games.

  Same structure. Completely different depth. Like having a matchstick and calling it fire.

  Fire burned. Jake felt actual heat radiating from the structure when he touched it. Warm against his internal awareness in ways that should have been impossible.

  But warm was the problem. Warm, not hot. His Fire affinity was functional. He could light candles. Could burn a wing membrane in desperate combat. Could create controlled bursts when necessary.

  Champions turned stone into lava. Fused Fire with other concepts at scales that made Jake's candle-lighting feel like an embarrassing confession.

  I have fire. I have a match. They have furnaces.

  Water was slick. Cool. The structure felt like touching something perpetually wet, like rain on skin in summer. Jake's Water affinity was the weakest of his four foundations. Barely present. A structure so underdeveloped it barely registered compared to the others.

  The Arieti Champion had used Water as one component of a four-way fusion that scalded twenty-three wyrms to death simultaneously. Had condensed moisture from air, superheated it, and weaponized steam with precision that required understanding Jake couldn't begin to approach.

  I barely know Water exists. They swim in it.

  Air was pressure. Movement. The structure felt like wind against skin, constant and gentle. Jake's Air affinity was slightly better than Water but still shallow. He could create breezes. Could enhance William's flight. Could feel atmospheric currents with enhanced senses.

  The female Centaur had exhaled death. Had woven Air with Life into fusion that withered scales and turned creatures to dust. Had made atmospheric manipulation into biological warfare with one breath.

  Breezes. I make breezes. She makes death wind.

  Jake cataloged each gap with growing frustration. The foundations were present but incomplete. Like having the frame of a house without walls or roof.

  Between and through the foundations, three other structures wove themselves into the scaffold's architecture.

  Void was first. Jake understood Void better than most of his affinities. Had used it constantly since the swamp. The structure felt like tangible nothing. Like touching absence itself. Cool without temperature. Present without substance.

  It was between every seem of the scaffold. Not a part of anything, but still belonging. He could force Void to seep outward at will. Could cover structures with it. Could use it for stealth, for suppression, for opposing effects, for the shadow vines that had become his secret signature weapon.

  This one felt closer to competent. Not Champion-level. But functional. Genuinely useful.

  Fusion sat ready as the part of each foundations like some 1950’s telephone operator console. Jake could feel it as connection. The ability to link one structure to another and create effects that neither could produce alone. Shadowed Step combined Light and Void. Cold combined Fire and Void in reverse.

  But two-way fusion was the limit of Jake's practical application. The Champions demonstrated multi-way fusion casually. The Arieti had woven FOUR concepts simultaneously into precision destruction. Jake couldn't even imagine the understanding required for that.

  I can connect two things. They connect four. Like the difference between holding two puzzle pieces together and assembling an entire picture.

  Amplification was the newest addition to Jake's scaffold. Absorbed much earlier, but not understood until the plague thorns in the temple. The ability to take any effect and spread it outward. To fill structures with more mental energy than they would normally hold.

  Jake understood Amplification conceptually. Could apply it to Fear, creating aura. Could use it to expand his Life sense range. But the practical applications he'd explored were limited.

  The Arieti's steam ignition had used Amplification as the fourth component. Had spread superheated water across an entire group of wyrms simultaneously. That was Amplification at scale Jake hadn't approached.

  Another gap. Another "I have the piece but can't play it properly."

  Jake cataloged each structure. Each gap. Each comparison between what he possessed and what he'd witnessed. The frustration built with every assessment.

  Months of work. Months of feeding and practicing and stealing abilities from everything I touch. And I'm still operating at maybe a tenth of what Champions demonstrate.

  He forced himself to step back from the frustration. To look at the scaffold as a whole rather than fixating on individual gaps. There was progress here. Real progress. The crystal had hardened everything. Made structures permanent that had been fragile. Given him foundation to build upon.

  Every structure that required me to actually sit down and PRACTICE. To dedicate time and attention to understanding something beyond immediate survival. All of them underdeveloped. All of them neglected.

  Because the contamination made me content. Made me feel like I had enough. Like the simple life was sufficient.

  The real Jake would have been screaming at himself to push harder. To learn more. To become something that couldn't be stopped.

  Instead I was pulling stones from dirt and feeling grateful for the opportunity.

  - - -

  Jake's attention drifted upward through the scaffold.

  Past Life. Past the loop of Light. Past the foundations and the three structures that wove between them.

  To the top.

  The unknown.

  Every other structure was legible now. The crystal had made them clear. Made them readable like mental hieroglyphics, their meanings obvious through direct perception. Fire meant heat and combustion. Stone meant density and geological patience. Life meant circulation and biological force.

  Jake could read each one like words on a page.

  But this one. The structure at the very top. The one that sat above everything else.

  Jake couldn't read it.

  Couldn't parse its meaning. Couldn't categorize it. Couldn't fit it into any framework he'd built for understanding how affinities worked in this world.

  It had changed since the crystal integration. Everything else had hardened. Become solid and permanent and clear.

  This one had become more translucent. More ethereal. Like it was dissolving into something Jake's perception couldn't quite grasp while everything around it sharpened into focus.

  Jake reached toward it. Touched it the way he'd touched the foundations. Expecting sensation. Expecting heat or pressure or coolness.

  What he got stopped him cold.

  Familiarity.

  The feeling of walking into a room you lived in as a child. Of touching a doorknob your hand had worn smooth over years of use. Of finding something you'd lost so long ago you'd forgotten it was missing.

  Not scary. Not ancient in an abstract, incomprehensible way.

  Known.

  The ghost of something came back when Jake touched that structure. Not a memory. Not an emotion borrowed from any host. Something underneath all of it. Something that had been there before the bat. Before Jonas. Before the swamp and Fallen and every personality that had tried to rewrite him.

  Something that was just Jake.

  Not Earth Jake. Not the predator or the opportunist or the survivor. Deeper than that. More fundamental. The thing underneath all the personas Jake had worn throughout his life on Earth and in this world.

  The real foundation. The thing everything else had been built on top of. Worn like a crown on top of all the other structures.

  And it had been fighting.

  Jake could feel it now with the clarity the crystal had provided. Could see the evidence in the structure itself. The way it had flickered. Faded. Gone translucent as contamination piled on top of it layer after layer.

  It had been trying to maintain itself the entire time. Pushing back against the bat's longing and Jonas's rage and Fallen's warmth and every other personality that had tried to overwrite what was underneath.

  Losing ground. Slowly. Consistently. But never disappearing entirely.

  The crystal hadn't created this clarity. It had just cleared the path back to something that had always been there. Something that had never stopped being Jake even when everything else about him had been rewritten.

  Jake held his awareness against that structure for as long as he could bear it. Felt the familiarity wash through him like warmth after months of cold.

  There you are.

  Not words. Not exactly. Just recognition. The predator finding the one thing in this nightmare world that was genuinely, authentically his own.

  He pulled away reluctantly. Let the contact fade. Let the structures settle back into their quiet existence beneath conscious awareness.

  The scaffold hummed. Iron rebar where paper had been. Structures clear and readable and understood.

  All of them.

  Except one.

  The one at the top that Jake couldn't read but could recognize. That felt like home in a way nothing else in this world ever had. That had been fighting for him while he'd been too contaminated to fight for himself.

  Jake didn't understand what it was. Couldn't name it or categorize it or explain how it fit into the architecture of affinities that governed this world.

  But he knew what it meant.

  It meant he was still in here. Underneath everything that had tried to bury him.

  Still Jake.

  - - -

  The old Jake was gaining momentum with each step. His original life memories coming more into focus than those that were stolen.

  Earth sharpening while this world's borrowed emotions faded like watercolors left in the sun.

  He remembered what it felt like to look at a person and see nothing but what they could give him. To calculate value without guilt. To discard sentiment like expired food because carrying it only slowed you down.

  The bat's belonging. Fallen's warmth. Dawngraze's lullaby.

  Fading.

  And in their place, something colder was settling in. Something that had always been there underneath the borrowed feelings and stolen conscience. Something that Hope's curse had buried but never actually killed.

  Jake watched the Champions ahead of him. Watched their casual power. Their mythological abilities wielded like extensions of their own limbs.

  And didn't feel awe.

  He felt hunger.

  The same hunger he'd in this world and the last. Because they were the same.

  But bigger now. Sharper. More focused.

  You have what I want. All of you.

  And I'm very, very good at taking things.

  - - -

  END CHAPTER 62