When he woke up, Jay immediately threw himself into another [Astral Projection]. He had meant his resolution about diving headlong into whatever this was, to the point that he had been disappointed he hadn’t received a stat boost for making the pledge. His golden body zipped back to the pillar along the straightest path it could.

  Along the way, he took stock of himself. His Health was still empty, seemingly refusing to refill, but his mana had refilled while he slept like normal. He hadn’t tossed and turned all that much the night before, unlike what he’d expected after resting for so long in the days before. Maybe he really wasn’t healed yet. It was either that or the tumors were draining his energy somehow.

  That was a disturbingly real possibility. The energy they put into growing had to come from somewhere; maybe the curse was siphoning it off directly into the nodules of corrupted flesh. He shuddered.

  Regardless of that, he had an idea that he wanted to test out with the Tower today. What happened if he put Divinity into it? Or, if it wouldn’t take the stuff directly, into the spell he was flooding it with? If he’d been thinking, he’d have tried it the last time, but it hadn’t occurred to him. Even now, he wasn’t sure if it was possible, but it didn’t seem too far out of the realm of possibility.

  [Astral Projection] let go of him within arm’s reach of the Tower, directly where he’d been picturing. Determined not to waste time, Jay immediately put his glowing golden hands on the pillar and began casting [Resurrection]. Every time the fog stopped flowing, he cast it again. And again. And again.

  It ate mana with each repeated cast, of course, and he eventually emptied his entire supply. The supply in the pillar had risen to about three-quarters of the way full by now and all he had to do was wait for it to recharge normally.

  That meant it was time for him to try his other plan. He concentrated on the pool of golden magic he could almost see and tried to make it form in his hand. It resisted until he stopped, changing tack from force to simple visualization. He tried to picture it vividly enough that it became real and though it flickered a few times, it worked eventually.

  A single nugget of Divinity hovered just above his palm for a short time, filling in to reveal itself taking on the form of an oblong oval with mazelike patterns inscribed on it. When it was as solid as the ground itself, the nugget settled into his grasp fully. A window appeared in front of him with text in the same golden color as the resource itself.

  Jay hadn’t known he could do that. He’d been planning on putting his entire supply into the pillar but if he kept some back to exchange for mana, it would cut down on the amount of time he had to spend waiting to add the last portion to whatever was containing it within the structure. He dismissed the message, instead shoving the pendant-like nugget at his target.

  When it touched the bones, the nugget dissolved into grains that were quickly sucked through the layers. A line of gold appeared at the top of the green. Clearly it would work, now he just had to figure out what the exchange rate – for lack of a better term – was between the Divinity and mana.

  He kept feeding the golden nuggets into the pillar until he had only five of the golden marks left and moved on to swapping the resources between pools. It turned out to be twenty-five points of mana gained from each point of Divinity. Not a bad amount, but after a few seconds of quick calculation, Jay realized it wouldn’t be enough to entirely refill his mana. He’d get close, but not all the way there.

  He eyeballed the height of the glowing portion of the tower, trying to judge if it would be enough, and ultimately decided it should be. There wouldn’t be much left over, so he had to hope it didn’t have some form of second stage tank to fill, but it should get him there. Probably.

  Jay placed his golden hands back on the pillar and started casting [Resurrection] again, debating in the meantime whether he’d always been able to convert Divinity into mana or if it was something he’d unlocked recently. Maybe it was one of the changes that had happened with [Gilt]. The System didn’t seem fond of notifying him when things like that happened, so it was very possible

  *

  Right before his mana ran dry again, the reservoir reached its maximum. The last few clouds of green magic that emerged from his cast of [Resurrection] didn’t sink into the pillar, hanging around in the water instead. Jay didn’t think much of it in the brief time before the System window unfurled to elaborate on just what he’d actually done.

  Gateway network, huh? Portal travel, clearly, but that only raised more questions. Was the dark portal several streets over connected to it?

  He did note that there were options for all but one of the continents, though they were disappointingly nonfunctional at the moment. Were they also drained of power, or was it something deeper than that? He didn’t have a way to know that; he’d have to find them first and hadn’t seen anything like some powerless travel center mentioned on any of the maps. Maybe they were broken fully, or hidden in whatever chaos had resulted from the onset of the Curse.

  The idea of hopping directly through the portal was very tempting. A magic armory conjured up thoughts of more things like the Crystalband, maybe even something that could boost his stats. That seemed like the kind of thing that would be so fundamental it wouldn’t have gotten mentioned to him in any sort of explicit way. Like referencing a car and not bothering to talk about each individual part.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  Come to think of it, maybe that was why Warinot carried around that giant shield all the time. He clearly took his own effectiveness very seriously, so if it helped, that would explain a lot. That only made choosing it and heading through more tempting. What he wouldn’t do for a bit of a bonus to his Power or Agility to bring up those stats.

  But regardless of the temptation, going through as just a soul sounded like a bad idea. Even if the gateway could handle transferring this golden form – and there was no reason to assume it couldn’t – he didn’t know if there was a range limitation to [Astral Projection]. He might even be risking another fragment coming off his soul, and he didn’t want to see that issue evolve at all.

  Jay cancelled the spell and expected to get pulled back to his body, but after a brief while that he guessed to be roughly twenty minutes, he was still right where he’d started. A little bit of a delay might have made sense; it had happened the day before, after all, but this was definitely unusual.

  A chill stabbed through him like someone had jabbed him with an icicle. Jay flailed, trying to grab at the shoulder blade the feeling was coming, but he couldn’t find a source. The coldness began to spread over his body, or at least the golden form that was in that place right now.

  After it had expanded to cover his back, it wrapped around to the front and he got a look at what was actually happening. There were lines of blue tracing their way around his chest like ropes, even beginning to spread down his arms. The more of them that grew, the more they filled in, melding with one another as the strands interwove.

  They stopped his elbows, forming a ring right at the joint, and he could feel that the frigid bands were forming around his knees as well. The final threads melded in the center of his chest with a noise that was almost physical, an echo of metal on metal like a manacle being locked into place.

  Jay had never gotten around to dismissing the teleportation menu box since he was still trying to convince himself not to go through when the effect hit. The System window that rolled into being shoved it out of the way, though, and he learned just how apropos his thoughts about the noise had been.

  Well shit. If even trying to dismiss [Astral Projection] again was enough to count as an attempt to escape, that was brutal. If the growth was the same amount each time, one more would be enough for it to spread over the rest of his body.

  What would happen then, he had no idea, but given that it was something someone had put on him deliberately, it couldn’t be good.

  Could he speak like this? He wasn’t impeded by the water at all, so hopefully it wouldn’t stop him that way, but there could have been any other number of reasons it wouldn’t work. Jay wasn’t even sure he had vocal cords right now technically.

  No time like the present to try.

  “Are you waiting for me to try something else?” he asked. He was really banking on the idea that whoever had used the ability would have stuck around.

  He was in luck.

  “You have some form of sensory enhancement tucked away in there somewhere?” A familiar – and unpleasantly sneering – voice asked. “Aren’t you just full of surprises for a supposed tamer class? Is that how you convinced the Seps to enter into a bond with you?”

  It was the drakekin from the ship, now wearing one of the diving suits. It didn’t seem to keep him from speaking at all. Jay had to scan back through his memories to pick out his name: Mirdun Ghose Rathi.

  “Where did you even come from?”

  “No, no,” Mirdun said, wagging a finger. “You answer my questions first. It’s only polite, and someone like you should be polite to his betters.”

  “Are we doing this again? Why are you so obsessed with this?” Jay asked.

  The magical chains tightened around his chest, forcing his breath – or whatever passed for it in this case – out in a ragged exhalation.

  “I told you. You are going to answer my questions first. Or I am going to keep squeezing and squeezing and squeezing until your chest caves in.” The drakekin was hissing by the end of it and Jay was reasonably sure that if he had been closer he’d have seen spit flecking the faceplate of the diving suit.

  “Fine,” Jay wheezed.

  “Good,” Mirdun crooned. “Good. Let’s start with the one that you should have already answered. How did you convince one of the Seps to engage in something as barbaric as a familiar bond with you?”

  “I didn’t. It was his idea.”

  The magic around Jay’s chest pressed inwards again and he wheezed raggedly. It really didn’t feel fair that he was in neither a suit nor an actual body, but still had to listen to this guy talk and could have the breath knocked out of him.

  “I don’t like that answer,” the drakekin said. “Let’s try again.”

  Jay just shook his head for a second. “I’m telling the truth. It really was his idea.”

  “You cannot seriously expect me to believe that one of the few remaining varieties of Great Serpent would deign to even offer any sort of compromise to a human. Or that you could even find one to interact with,” the other man scoffed. “But perhaps we will move on and let your lies collapse in on themselves. What are you doing with this pillar, then?”

  “Investigating,” Jay said. “Trying to figure out what it is and why it’s here.”

  “And that is why you came down here in whatever form that is, without a diving suit, in defiance of the fact that this entire area is off limits until they have cleared it of all threats again? Something that is, mind you, your fault for provoking the goblins.” The drakekin man sounded absolutely convinced about that sequence of events, like nothing could possibly convince him otherwise about what happened.

  “They attacked us,” he defended. “Not the other way around. But if you want to talk about this palace being forbidden, you’re down here too.”

  Mirdun waved a hand to dismiss that. “I am here to ensure no one else comes here. You do not experience the same luxury. I am not inclined to believe you about the goblins either; I may not have spent much time around my lesser cousins, but they tend only to strike out from their warrens to protect what is theirs. What were you doing when they supposedly attacked you?”

  Jay tried to move again and winced as the spell tightened. He was hoping it would have lost some potency, but no, the pain was exactly the same as before. “We were trying to adjust to the pressure and darkness.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. That was it.”

  Mirdun tutted. “This will go a lot better for you if you learn to tell the truth, you know.”

  “I am telling the truth,” Jay insisted. “I haven’t lied to you once.”

  “All you and yours do is lie,” the other man said. “Everything you have said here can only be taken with the tiniest pinch of sand.”

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “With me? With me? You want to say that there are things wrong with me when you waltz around claiming to be a [Snake Tamer] with an archaic form of bond to a far more powerful being that you cannot even keep track of! Where is the Seps now?”

  Jay started to answer but Mirdun cut him off before even the beginnings of the word could get out.

  “You do not even know. You could not even be bothered to do the barest bit of research to know that tamer classes can always sense their creatures. So let me ask the real question, liar. What Class are you really?”