“Per protocol I’m reporting that entity morphology in recent Gray shards is increasingly aberrant. The last one had no mouth until it suddenly had five layers of them. Recommend reevaluating classification.”

  — Diver complaint to Scavantis HR (replied with automated survey request)

  The button clicked under my finger.

  [A new plugin detected! Scavantis Gray Dive Tools v1.6.1]

  [A new plugin detected! Palistra Free Gray Catalogue? v2.0.19]

  [Install?]

  I blinked at the floating window that had materialized in my vision, finger still pressed against the red button. Behind me, I could hear the Syntavelli girls whispering something. “Hey, smartie!” one of them called. “Wait for me after you’re done!”

  Instead of dealing with that, I mentally pressed [Yes].

  [Scavantis Gray Dive Tool v1.6.1]

  Current level: 1

  Max level: 1

  Function: Allows entry to Scavantis Gray Chaos-modulated shards.

  Note: The author set the price at 0pp.

  System note: Price confirmed. Training tool.

  [Palistra Free Gray Catalogue v2.0.19]

  Current level: 1

  Max level: 1

  Function: Information on common Gray resources.

  Note: The author set the price at 0pp.

  System note: Price confirmed. Entry level information tool.

  Before I could process what “0pp” meant, or why someone would create a—

  The world blinked.

  No sensation of falling or spinning, no dramatic flash of light or pull of gravity. One second I was standing in the reinforced lecture hall, finger on a button, instructor watching me with barely concealed impatience.

  The next second I was... somewhere else.

  The disorientation hit me like a physical blow. My brain struggled to catch up, vision swimming as it tried to reconcile the fact that I’d just teleported without moving. Without warning or transition. Just a hard cut from one reality to another.

  I staggered, boots scraping against—

  Rock.

  I was standing on a rock.

  My vision cleared slowly, and I looked down.

  The ground beneath my feet was wrong. Not broken-wrong or cracked-wrong, but fundamentally, cosmically wrong. Dark gray stone that looked like it had been flash-frozen mid-flow, surface rippling with patterns that suggested movement but were completely still. Veins of something darker than black threaded through it like frozen lightning, pulsing faintly with a rhythm I could feel more than see.

  The texture shifted when I moved my foot. Not physically, the stone didn’t crack or crumble, but visually, as if my presence was affecting how reality rendered it.

  I lifted my gaze.

  Void.

  Absolute total void stretched in every direction. Not the darkness of a cave or a tunnel, but the absence of light itself. No stars, nor distant glow as holo movies suggested. Just black so complete it felt like staring into the concept of nothing.

  Except for the ground.

  The asteroid, because what else could I call this lifeless hunk of alien rock floating in the middle of nowhere, extended maybe fifty meters in every direction before disappearing into the void. Its edges weren’t clean. They fractured at impossible angles, surfaces that folded in on themselves like reality had given up halfway through rendering them.

  I stood there, breathing hard, heart hammering against my ribs. No sound, not even my breath. “Hello?” I tried.

  Nothing.

  The silence was so complete it felt like a physical pressure, like the void was pressing in from all sides, swallowing everything that dared make noise. But I could breathe, the air was there, just... muffled. Wrong.

  My legs gave out.

  I sat down hard, armor plates scraping against the stone. My hands pressed flat against the ground, fingers splayed across the rippling surface.

  It was warm.

  Not hot or cold, just... wrong-temperature. Like touching something that existed outside normal thermodynamics.

  One of the courses in system prep was a breathing exercise. I laughed along with Omar, that I won’t ever need it.

  Well, I forced myself to breathe slowly. In. Out. In. Out. Panic wouldn’t help. Panic would just get me killed in whatever this place was.

  Focus or distraction.

  Distraction! People created plugins for the system.

  The thought hit me like a revelation. Someone, somewhere in Scavantis, had written code, or whatever the system equivalent was, that let people dive into chaos shards. They’d built a training tool, set the price to zero, and distributed it.

  That was insane.

  That was incredible.

  How much work did that take? How much understanding of the system’s underlying structure? I could barely get my armor’s network chip to stay in the right housing, and someone out there was programming reality-warping tools like it was a weekend hobby.

  I glanced around at the asteroid, at the void, at the impossible geometry of the edges.

  Chaos. Order.

  The instructor’s words echoed in my head. “System is order, fighting entropy.”

  The ground beneath me shifted.

  Not physically. It didn’t crack or move, but I felt it, a subtle wrongness in the texture, like the stone was trying to decide whether it wanted to be solid… and then it stopped.

  Stabilized because I was here.

  I didn’t know how I knew that. There was no system message, no popup explaining the mechanics. Just... intuition. The certainty that my presence, my system, even my broken minor system, was actively holding this chunk of reality together.

  The moment I’d appeared, the chaos had stopped spreading. The edges had frozen mid-fracture. The stone had locked into this specific wrong-texture and refused to change further.

  I was stabilizing it.

  Holy shit.

  I pulled up the system interface, fingers trembling slightly as I navigated to the Plugins tab.

  [Plugins]

  Weekly pp allotment: 0

  Weekly pp used: 0

  Saved pp: 0

  ? Scavantis Gray Dive Tools v1.6.1

  Status: ACTIVE | Level: 1/1 | pp weekly: 0

  ? Palistra Free Gray Catalogue? v2.0.19

  Status: ACTIVE | Level: 1/1 | pp weekly: 0

  I could keep this.

  The plugin was mine now. Installed. Permanent, probably, unless I manually removed it. Which meant...

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  Which meant I could dive Scavantis gray shards whenever I wanted. Not just for the exam. I could enter any gray shard from Scavantis and hunt for materials, loot, whatever the hell was supposed to be in here.

  Incursions weren’t the only way forward anymore.

  I could be a diver.

  The realization settled over me slowly, heavy and strange. Two paths. Two ways to prove I wasn’t just a failure who couldn’t manifest a system. I could hunt incursions with the predictor plugin, or I could dive shards with this tool. Probably both, if I could skirt the school somehow. Most classes were online anyway. Fuck homework! Meh… math can wait once.

  I sat there for another long moment, letting it sink in.

  Then I forced myself to stand.

  My boots found purchase on the alien stone, and I straightened slowly, testing my balance. The ground felt stable enough, even if it looked like it was made of frozen nightmares.

  I glanced around, really looking this time.

  The asteroid was small, totally barren and lifeless, but somewhere in this void, there had to be something worth ￠250. Loot. Materials. Whatever Scavantis considered valuable enough to base an exam around.

  The ground kept manifesting around me.

  Each step forward pulled reality into existence like I was walking through a half-rendered simulation that only bothered loading the textures when I got close enough. Stone rippled outward from my boots, solidifying into rough walls that curved upward and inward, forming the beginnings of a cave.

  I stopped and glanced back.

  The path I’d walked was still there. The impossible, alien stone had... settled. Transformed. What had been wrong-textured, reality-defying rock was now just... stone. Normal gray stone. Boring, unremarkable, completely mundane.

  Stalagmites were forming along the edges, growing upward in slow motion like time-lapse footage playing at half speed. Calcification that should’ve taken thousands of years was happening in seconds.

  “Weird,” I muttered.

  I kept walking, watching the cave tunnel extend ahead of me with each step. The walls looked more stable now, less like frozen chaos and more like actual geology. Even the temperature was normalizing, shifting from wrong-warmth to the cool dampness of underground.

  Then I noticed something on the floor.

  A darker patch. Roughly circular, maybe the size of my fist, embedded in the stone that was still in the process of solidifying. The edges were blurry, indistinct, like reality hadn’t decided what it wanted to be yet.

  I blinked and moved closer, crouching down.

  As I focused on it, the system flickered to life.

  [Using the Palistra Free Gray Catalogue? to analyze…]

  A loading bar appeared. It crawled across my vision with all the speed of a dying slug.

  [Match found!]

  A new window popped up, clean and corporate.

  Catalogue number: #641 Fluxstone

  Note: Mineral that shifts resonance frequencies.

  I squinted at the dark patch. It looked like an ordinary rock with flecks of something else mixed in. Tiny crystalline fragments caught what little light existed down here, winking faintly like distant stars.

  “Welp,” I said to the void. “They said resources.”

  Not that different from the school mines, really. Sometimes the Traninum was a clean drop from bug corpses. Sometimes it was wedged into the rock like the universe’s worst treasure hunt, and you had to spend an hour chipping it out with a pick while your knees ached and your back screamed.

  I pulled the pick from my belt, the one I’d brought out of habit more than planning, and started working at the stone.

  The fluxstone came free more easily than I expected. The surrounding rock was still soft, not-quite-solid, yielding under the pick like clay instead of proper stone. With a few solid hits and the chunk popped loose, tumbling into my palm.

  It was small. Maybe the size of a chicken egg. Heavy, though. Dense. The surface was mottled gray-black, shot through with tiny crystalline veins that refracted light at strange angles.

  I turned it over in my hand, examining it.

  The system blinked again.

  [Using the Palistra Free Gray Catalogue? to analyze purity and price…]

  Another loading bar. Another wait.

  [Weight a purity calculated price: ￠19]

  I let out a groan.

  Nineteen credits. I needed two hundred and fifty. That meant finding... I did the math in my head. Fourteen more of these. Minimum. Assuming they were all the same value.

  “Well,” I said, dropping the fluxstone into the enchanted bag. It landed with a soundless thunk, the bag’s interior glowing faintly as it registered the deposit. “That’s easy—”

  Something shifted behind me.

  The sound of falling pebbles echoed through the cave.

  Pebbles.

  I whipped around, pistols already halfway out of their holsters.

  It stood maybe ten meters back, right at the edge where the cave tunnel faded into unformed void. It was small. Dog-sized, maybe a bit smaller, but everything about it screamed wrong.

  The body was vaguely insectoid, segmented carapace that looked like it had been assembled from mismatched parts. Four legs, too long and jointed in places that didn’t make anatomical sense. The front pair ended in something between claws and pincers, serrated edges that clicked together with a wet, grinding sound.

  Its head was the worst part.

  Almost mammalian. Almost. A flattened skull with too many eye sockets, some empty, some filled with clusters of smaller eyes that blinked out of sync. No mouth that I could see. Just a smooth surface where a mouth should be, occasionally splitting open to reveal rows of needle-thin teeth arranged in concentric circles.

  It tilted its head, studying me.

  Then it screeched.

  High-pitched, metallic, like nails on glass mixed with a dying turbine. The sound echoed through the cave, bouncing off walls that were still half-formed, amplifying into something that made my teeth hurt.

  “I had to jinx it,” I muttered, raising both pistols.

  The thing lunged.

  The pistols whined to life, coils charging with that familiar high-pitched hum. I fired the moment the right one chimed ready.

  The bolt punched into the thing’s thorax, plasma burning a hole in the segmented carapace, and the creature staggered. Stumbled sideways. One leg buckled.

  But it didn’t die.

  Not like the bugs. Those would’ve exploded into gore and Traninum shards. This thing just... kept coming. Slow, injured, but still moving with that horrible clicking gait.

  “Shit—”

  I backpedaled, boots scraping against the half-formed stone, and fired the left pistol.

  The second shot caught it in what might’ve been a shoulder joint. It slowed, legs jerking erratically, like something in its nervous system had misfired.

  But still. Not. Dead.

  The pistols were doing some damage. I could see the wounds, see faint blue streaks of fluid leaking from the holes I’d punched through its carapace, but it was like shooting something with a pellet gun when I needed a cannon. Surface damage. Annoying, painful, but not fatal.

  “Damn,” I muttered, holstering the pistols with shaking hands. “Way tougher than the bugs.”

  I forced myself to breathe.

  This is just like a bug.

  Just like a bug.

  Bigger, sure. Tougher, obviously. But still just another alien trying to kill me in a dark hole. I’d done this before. Six months of crawling through mines, fighting things that wanted me dead.

  As the saying went, ‘only the bugs tell the truth, and the truth is they want you dead.’

  This was no different.

  I reached back and drew the sword, the blade hissing softly as it left the scabbard. The familiar weight settled into my grip, and I adjusted my stance, knees bent, center of gravity low.

  The creature circled, slower now, favoring its injured side. Those clustered eyes tracked me with unnerving precision, blinking independently as if they were trying to calculate the best angle of attack.

  I didn’t know what it planned to use. The claws? Those serrated pincers? The nightmare mouth full of concentric teeth?

  But I was ready when it lunged again.

  Faster than something injured should move, closing the distance in a blur of chitinous legs and snapping claws. I sidestepped, swinging the sword in a tight arc aimed at its exposed flank.

  The blade bit deep, carving through carapace with a grinding crunch. More ichor sprayed, coating my gauntlet in sticky blue fluid.

  The thing shrieked and twisted mid-air, one of its too-long legs whipping around like a club. I raised my arm instinctively. The impact slammed into my forearm guard hard enough to dent the metal; the force reverberating up to my shoulder.

  I stumbled back, pain shooting through my arm.

  It landed and immediately sprang again, with no hesitation, no recovery time. Just pure aggression.

  I brought the sword up in a desperate parry. One of its claws caught the blade, serrated edge grinding against steel with a sound like tearing metal. We locked for a half-second, its weight pressing down, those empty eye sockets inches from my visor.

  Then its mouth opened.

  All those needle teeth extended outward like a blooming flower made of knives, lunging for my throat.

  I twisted hard, shoving the sword sideways and throwing the creature off-balance. It tumbled past me, claws gouging trenches in the stone as it scrambled for purchase.

  I didn’t give it time to recover.

  I lunged forward, sword raised high, and brought it down in a brutal overhead strike aimed at the thing’s spine. The blade punched through the weakened carapace, splitting segments with a wet crack.

  It spasmed, legs kicking wildly.

  One claw caught my shin guard, hooking under the edge and yanking hard. My leg went out from under me. I hit the ground hard, armor clanking, the impact driving the air from my lungs.

  The creature dragged itself toward me, back half ruined, front claws still snapping.

  I kicked at its head with my free leg. My boot connected with its flattened skull, crunching something important. It reeled back, shrieking, that horrible metallic sound echoing off the cave walls.

  I scrambled to my feet, breathing hard, sword still gripped tight.

  It tried to lunge again. Slower this time. Weaker. Ichor pooled beneath it in spreading blue puddles.

  I sidestepped and swung.

  The blade caught it across what passed for a neck, carving clean through. The head tumbled away, those clustered eyes still blinking as it rolled across the stone.

  The body collapsed.

  And then... it vanished.

  Not exploded, or dissolved like sometimes in the mines. Just blinked out of existence like someone had hit delete. Where it had been, a single pebble sat on the stone floor. Glowing faintly.

  [You earned experience!]

  [ERROR: SYSTEM DISABLED]

  I stared at it, chest heaving, sword still raised.

  The system flickered.

  [Using the Palistra Free Gray Catalogue? to analyze purity and price…]

  The loading bar appeared. Crawled across my vision.

  [Weight and purity calculated price: ￠36]

  I lowered the sword slowly, wiping blue ichor off the blade with the edge of my cloak. My arm ached where the creature had hit me. My shin throbbed and lungs burned.

  Thirty-six sols.

  For a fight that nearly killed me.

  “Great,” I muttered, bending down to pick up the pebble. It was warm to the touch, pulsing faintly like a tiny heartbeat. I dropped it into the enchanted bag. Nineteen plus thirty-six; two hundred to go.

  I glanced down the tunnel, at the endless cave stretching ahead into the void.

  This was going to be a long exam.

  TODAY’S CHAPTER IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY Scavantis HR

  Join me on or

  On Patreon you can read 2 months ahead (~200 pages)