Thorn thought it was over, but it wasn’t quite yet.
His eyes flickered behind his eyelids as knowledge of how to use the new skill took root in his mind and body.
This skill was seemingly a complete waste at first glance. His first skill, Meditate, was a skill to draw more quintessence into his body. It also had the added benefit of calming his mind, and while the quintessence gathered through the skill wasn’t enormous, it was something.
Concentrate seemed to take that quintessence and blow it back out into the nether.
Working the math backwards, he was still advancing his body’s score at a rate of close to 40% improvement per level up, his mind at ~20%, and his proprioception at less than a measly 2%. Same as his last level up. He clenched his hands into fists, trying to feel the difference in strength. He felt stronger, certainly, but it was difficult to tell directly.
He dropped off the bed and did a few push-ups, then some squats and isometrics that his sisters had taught him. He could definitely see the upgrade now in his performance. He was faster, stronger, and better balanced, and he polished off a set of burpees that normally left him gasping for air without so much as a deep breath.
And this was only level 2.
“I always got a kick out of training up the new Wardens,” Lief said from his spot on the bed. He was smiling wistfully. “It’s fun seeing young men and women come into their power.”
“I could get used to this,” Thorn said with a grin. “I got another skill too, but it just seems like a waste. It’s called Concentrate, and it lets me release free quintessence that I’ve gathered back into the air, I guess.”
Talking about the details of skills and Systems (especially across Systems) was something of a taboo, but Lief and Thorn were way past those societal norms at this point.
“No Skill will be a waste. Could be something similar to my Grow skill, or maybe Imbue,” Lief said. “Don’t knock it till you figure out what it’s good for. It might not be useful in our particular circumstance, but that doesn’t mean it’s useless.”
Thorn shrugged. “I suppose so. Some kind of offensive skill would be very helpful though.”
“We should talk about that,” Lief said. “But first, you gotta try it out. Let’s see what this new skill can do.”
Thorn grinned and held out a hand. He couldn’t see it, but he instinctively felt the flow of quintessence, like a cold trickle of water, as it dripped down from between his shoulders to his hand, and then out into the air around him.
The crow, which Thorn had momentarily forgotten, squawked and hopped over towards Thorn, angling its head underneath the hand emitting quintessence, like it was sunning itself on a cold day.
Thorn stopped the skill. The crow opened its eyes and looked up at Thorn in disapproval. When he didn’t start the skill again, it pecked him on the hand and hopped off.
Thorn sucked on the palm of his hand, glaring at the retreating bird. He’d thought that after leveling up, the pecks wouldn’t hurt as much, but nope. They still stung.
“Huh,” Lief said. “Interesting. How did that feel?”
“Like opening the faucet on my savings account and letting it drip out on the floor.”
“How many quints you lose from that?”
Thorn checked his System. “About one or two. I don’t have a lot left after leveling up.”
“Oh, that reminds me. We should have this talk, seeing as you’re leveling up,” Lief said. “Don’t ever drain yourself too low on the quints. Always, always keep a few days worth, if not a week or more, of your daily maintenance number.”
Thorn checked his System and saw that his daily maintenance had increased. His System now needed two quints per day to operate. It was still way fewer than the ten he passively absorbed every day.
“What happens if you don’t?” Thorn asked.
“Same thing as hitting a dead zone,” Lief replied. “Just much, much slower. Your System eats at the bound quintessence in your body and your attributes begin to waste away until you reach an equilibrium between what you can absorb versus what you can consume.
“The problem doesn’t ever go away; it only gets worse at higher levels. As you grow stronger, you’ll need more and more quints to support your growth. The last thing I tell kids is to know your number.
“It’s different for everyone, depending on what System you have, what your job is, how rich the quints are and how easy they come on your planet; a whole host of factors to consider. But at some point, you’ll reach a tipping point, where the gains start to be incremental compared to the costs.
“Sure, you’ll continue to grow more powerful, but you’ll also need more and more quints to support that growth. If you don’t know your number… if you don’t know when to stop, well, things don’t always end up pretty.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Thorn said. It made sense, at least in terms of managing costs. Thorn certainly hated spending his quints.
“Do you got enough to try that Concentrate skill again?” Lief asked.
Thorn was torn. He had a new fancy skill, but all it seemed to do was waste his money giving their pet beast a quintessence bath.
“Not really,” Thorn replied. “But let me Meditate for a bit, then I’ll use what I absorb.”
Thorn settled into his Meditate skill, sitting on the floor and half-closing his eyes. As his five senses fell away, he began to feel the quintessence flows as they swirled around him. Richer, perhaps, than he’d previously felt.
It was a strange sensation, as if he were observing his own body from the outside. He could still feel, hear, see, smell, and taste, but it was like they were the senses of a different person. The field of quintessence around him felt more real than his own body.
He didn’t really think or analyze in his meditative state, but he could feel and sense things. And the quintessence directly around his body was different than the other flows.
Thorn came out of the Meditate Skill, opening his eyes and querying his System. He’d absorbed a handful of quints in that short time, enough to try his new skill again.
“This time,” Lief said, speaking around the dehydrated rations he was munching on, “I’d like you to try something a bit more specific. I’ve had a few thoughts.”
“Those can be dangerous,” Thorn joked.
“Heh,” Lief snorted. “This time, hold a knife in your hand, and if you can, focus on the blade.”
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“Is that what you do with that Imbue skill? The one where your machete glows yellow?”
“It feels that way, yes. It’s much more complicated than that, but that’s part of it. While you were napping your way to riches, I was thinking of the differences between my Grow skill and my Imbue skill. Both use free quintessence, but in very different ways.
“Grow is a mixture of things, some of which aren’t relevant, but a large part of it is just free quintessence. Imbue, on the other hand…” Lief paused. “It feels like I’m weaving a pattern. The System takes care of the details, of course, but that’s what it feels like.”
Thorn thought about the idea of a pattern of quintessence. “I appreciate you sharing that,” he said.
He fished a knife out of his pack and sat on the bed. Holding the knife in one hand, he held his fingers over the edge of the blade with the other, and used Concentrate.
A thin trickle of quintessence began to flow, but he clamped down on the quantity until it was the tiniest bit leaking from his fingers. That was good to know; his skill let him increase or decrease the quantity of quintessence that he was Concentrating outside of his body.
He gradually drew his finger across the blade, feeling the quintessence leave his finger. After running his finger up and down the blade several times, he stopped the skill and held the blade up close to his eye.
If he wasn’t mistaken, there was a faint blue shine on the edge of the blade. He tested the edge with his thumb. The edge felt normal. Sharp, but nothing impressive.
He tested the blade on one of the wooden posts, scoring a thin mark. Tiny blue sparks flew from the blade, and the handle began to grow warm. He dropped it before it burned his hand; the edge of the blade was turning a cherry red.
“Well, ain’t that something,” Lief said, staring down at the red-hot knife lying on the stone floor.
“Not exactly what I expected,” Thorn said. “I was hoping that focusing some quintessence on the blade would make it sharper.”
“Can’t be that easy. But that is one of the effects when I Imbue my weapon. I wish I had enough quints to give you a demonstration, if that would help, but someone convinced me to use ‘em on my Regenerate instead.”
“We just need to get you a few more cores, and then you can have that rematch with the fincroc.”
“Gonna need a bit more than a few…” Lief grimaced. “We want to stay away from that monster.”
“True enough,” Thorn said. “But at some point, if the egg yolk keeps shrinking, then we might run into it.”
“That’s why I was trying to save up my quints to make something of a last stand, after fishing you out of that lake,” Lief said. “Least I could do after dragging you into this mess.”
Thorn wasn’t sure how to respond to that. That was why he hadn’t been using the skill that helped heal him and keep himself alive.
“I’ve got a few questions,” he said instead. “What is the place? And how did all of this happen? Isn’t it strange that so many beasts got caught on the inside of this dead zone?”
Lief nodded. “It might seem strange, but I think it’s a natural consequence of what’s happened. You familiar with the beast wave of ‘97 on the planet Kora? Made all the highlight reels?”
Thorn nodded.
“Most don’t know but that was caused by a dead zone. The beasts that came out of that pressure cooker were much more powerful than normal, and much hungrier. They surged across hundreds of miles and wiped out multiple towns and settlements before they called in the Crows Guild to take them out.
“They saved a lot of people… and of course made a lot of quints that day. After that incident, they got a contract from the Agrarian Guild to make sure it never happened again. Word at the time was that the contract extended to Agrotis as well.”
That must be the dead zone monitoring contract that Gammon had alluded to.
“So all life taps into the quintessence field. It’s one of the things that we use to differentiate life from non-life structures, such as viruses and machines.”
Thorn nodded.
“System users, beasts, some types of plants, all of these things pull on that fabric more heavily. Legend goes that when they first discovered the quintessence field, they thought it was some kind of endless energy field created out of the vacuum. Well, it’s not endless, and when too much pulls on it at one time…
“Rip.” Lief made a tearing gesture with his hands.
“That explains the dead zone then,” Thorn said. “Too much or too many things sucking up quints. Thank you, Professor Lief. But what about this place? This glitter farm? And the ridiculous number of beasts trapped in here with us?”
“I don’t know for sure what happened here,” Lief replied, “but the glitter farmers obviously screwed up somehow. They’re all dead or gone, I would imagine.
“Did you see all those creepy cages? Maybe they were raising beasts to harvest them for cores, or something even more dangerous. Then one of the beasts, maybe that fincroc, either broke loose or snuck in here, got past the defenses, and took them all out. After that, it was open feeding season on the imperial plums, which must have been close to harvest.
“As the animals and beasts fought and grew, the fabric already weakened by the intensive farming of imperial plums couldn’t take the density of so many and such large cores being formed. That’s my hypothesis anyways.”
Thorn mulled over that for a minute.
“I guess that makes sense. So how do we get out of this?”
“Survive until the end?” Lief said. “We could hole up here, although that’s no guarantee. The size of the safe area could change. It could even disappear entirely.”
“Is it changing because something is drawing on the quintessence inside here?”
“I think so, yes. This many beasts, plus us too, of course.”
“So…” Thorn said, “If we killed more beasts, and reduced the number of them that were ‘weighing’ on the quintessence field, you think we could slow down the shrinking of this safe zone?”
Lief nodded. “Beasts pull on the quintessence field, but a dead beast's core is inert, so that makes sense to me. But they’re also out there killing and hunting each other too.”
It was dangerous to hunt the beasts, but it was also an opportunity.
“Seems to me like we need more weapons,” Thorn said.
“What we need, young grasshopper, is more information,” Lief replied.
“You’re not wrong… So you got that drone up and running yet?” The drone flew up off Lief’s bed and hovered for a moment before setting down.
“Don’t have a lot of quints to waste on operating it, but yes,” Lief said. “We have the cavern to check on, but we also haven’t fully explored this base. The blast doors leading out of this area were closed and sealed, but now, we have a way past them.”
“We do?” Thorn was puzzled. The drone wasn’t going to help with that.
“March up there, and use your new party trick to melt a hole in the lock,” Lief said. “Be careful though; there might still be people on the other side. I doubt it, but it’s still a risk.”
Of course. It was obvious after Lief had said it. Of course it begged the question, what was the actual intended use of Concentrate? But there wasn’t any reason why he couldn’t use the skill in a different way than it was designed for.
Thorn stood up, grabbed his still-warm knife off the floor and sheathed it before picking up a flashlight. The crow looked up at him with a beady eye and gave a soft croak.
“I’ll watch your pet while you’re gone,” Lief drawled, “and keep tabs on you with the drone.”
Thorn shook his head and headed out the door. He walked through the eerie wreckage of the common area and up the hall to the closed doors, Lief’s drone hovering over his shoulder and shining a light ahead of him. He approached the doors and pressed his ear against them. He didn’t hear anything, but he knew he had to be cautious. After several minutes, there was still nothing. The other side of that door was as quiet as a tomb.
Satisfied that he wouldn’t be ambushed if he was successful, Thorn took a closer look at the doors themselves.
Thick steel, similar style construction to the broken doors at the tunnel entrance in the cavern below. So likely quite thick. There was no obvious lock or entry method, just two solid doors that wouldn’t budge. A security camera hung from the upper right corner of the doorway. An unlit, powerless keypad was attached to the wall on the left. The walls themselves were made of stone.
Contrary to Lief’s glib comment, it did not appear as if Thorn could simply dump enough quintessence on a lock to melt his way through.
He could try to heat up the door itself, but a door this solid was designed to take serious punishment, including explosions, laser fire, and even imbued weapons.
He might have been able to melt the hinges, but they were on the other side of the doors and inaccessible. He could try to melt the keypad, maybe, and see if that did anything. It was a simple pad of nine keys, no symbols on them, recessed into the wall. Several of the keys were rubbed down more than the others: a sign of frequent use.
He took out his knife to heat it up and stab it into the keypad, then stopped himself. Destroying it would be more likely to keep the doors shut than open them; that was a terrible idea. Then he had another thought: the whole thing had probably been tied into a security specialist’s System. Similar to drones, the cameras and doors in the facility would have been controlled by that person.
If it ran on a System, then it ran on quints. And if it ran on quints, couldn’t Thorn power it up as well?
Sheathing his knife, he held out his hand and activated Concentrate. A trickle of power flowed out of his hand and onto the keypad and the surrounding stone. The buttons flickered.
He was careful not to get too close to the keypad. When he’d tried this skill on his knife, it had grown red hot where he had directly touched it with his finger, focusing all of the quintessence into a single point. At this distance, it was more diffuse.
Thorn checked his reserves, then increased the flow. He could always gain this level of expenditure back with a few targeted Meditate sessions. The keypad lit up fully. The door did not open, however. There were four buttons on the keypad that were heavily worn, and Thorn pressed them in order. The keypad flashed red.
That was the wrong order. Thorn ran through the other possible combinations, his free quintessence slowly dropping, quint by quint. Thorn did the math; with four buttons, there were twenty-four possible combinations. That was doable. On his tenth try, there was a soft click and a green light flashed on the keypad. He cancelled Concentrate and walked over to the doors. He pushed.
They didn’t budge.
Was there something on the other side holding them back? He had heard a click, but the sound had been near the keypad, not the door. Maybe the door needed to be powered as well?
Going back to the keypad, he activated Concentrate again, and the keypad powered up. He held out his other hand, this time towards the door. He’d not tried this yet, but intuitively, he knew that he could operate the skill with both hands simultaneously. The only problem was that he didn’t have much free quintessence left, so he would likely only have a single attempt.
He pushed quintessence out through both hands, then input the combination into the keypad. A few of the buttons grew warm under his quick touch, but the keypad flashed green again. There were a series of clicks, and the sound of a large tumbler moving inside of the steel doors.
Thorn gave a push, and the doors swung open silently.