Blake woke up early the next morning. He was even earlier than most of his early mornings. He pushed a surge of Honour through his Brain Meridian, and the fog of sleep disappeared, then he climbed out of the cellar, up to the roof of the ruined longhouse he’d been sheltering in.

  Ethbin was still waiting for him. I was expecting you to wake up sooner.

  “Yeah, I was kinda hoping I would, too,” Blake said as he filled his syringe with the last of the fiendberry juice. “But hey, it’s still pretty dark out.” The sun was only just rising, making the mists turn a hazy shade of orange.

  Well, what are you waiting for? You know the process, and it’s been working out for you so far.

  Blake tapped the side of the syringe with his fingernails and swirled it around. “I’m ready.”

  Aim for your spine again, Ethbin said. But don’t use all of the poison.

  Blake laid down on the sloped roof, using gravity to his advantage, and injected another shot into his spine.

  He’d reforged much of his nervous system before during Physical Sense Enhancement, but he still needed to strengthen the spinal column and more importantly, strengthen the smaller nerve channels running throughout his body that connected to his muscles, not just his sensory nerves.

  He had no idea how the anatomy worked beyond that, and he wasn’t about to lose sleep over it. There were nerves, and the same process would work.

  As long as he started the fiendberry juice in the nerve, it would travel through them, eating them first.

  So he spent his morning in agonizing pain, gripping the thatched roof as tight as he could because all the nerves in his body had melted. It was only a marginally new experience, which he buffered with River’s healing ability to make it slightly more bearable—and to keep himself from frying his brain as a whole.

  It was over sooner than he realized, and so he moved on to Internal Efficiency. It was a matter of reforging blood vessels and glands and nothing that he could access directly or understand well.

  And it felt about the same as reflex and impulse enhancement, anyway, except his body wasn’t trying to seize every few minutes. He was only melting his blood vessels and some very important things connected to them.

  But when it was done, a veil lifted off his body. It was like he’d been suffering from the common cold this whole time, and was now just getting over it. Energy flooded into his limbs, and he hopped up, running to the peak of the roof, then climbed onto the rotting ornament overlooking the eave.

  There wasn’t much to see, except a faint breeze blew across his face. He was half expecting it to feel more vivid, but he’d already enhanced his senses. No, this change was inside him. His body was just working better.

  After a few seconds, he glanced down at his hands. Before, they’d been mostly human, but now, a faint pattern of scales appeared in the center, almost like a feral cat had clawed the back of his hand and it had scarred over with a fiend’s flesh. He winced, then stuffed his hands in his pockets, but the markings on his body had become slightly more pronounced, too. Instead of incohesive swirls, the scales formed rigid patterns of straight lines. Like a circuit board…or the etchings on the manaship’s hull.

  “Wonderful…” he muttered. “Just wonderful. Ethbin…”

  You are not becoming more of a fiend.

  “How do you know?”

  A fiend’s defining trait is that its soul becomes a void. It does not think. It cannot. But it hungers for destruction, trying to fill that emptiness. As long as you have a soul, you’ll remain mostly human.

  Blake sighed. “Will…I lose my soul?”

  That’s up to you. The soul is the realm and source of willpower. Whether it stays intact or not is up to you. You may feel the tempting call of the void as you get stronger, but the void is a tool, not your identity. It is a good sign that your soul has stayed intact this far into your life. Not many Fiend-blends can say that.

  Blake nodded. “So…has something like the Integration happened before? People from the outside galaxy seem to know that Blended exist, and it seems pretty normal to them. Even if they don’t know why it happens.”

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  Many times. Sometimes, it is a purposeful process. Other times, and I suspect this is what happened to your Earth, it is an accident.

  “Why? Why did it happen?”

  I could tell you, but it would put me to sleep for nearly three months. And you still need to finish Tempering.

  Blake sighed. “Alright, then. Sorry for pestering.”

  For these last two stages, you must lock in your echo. I highly recommend that you complete them before returning to the pavilion, because they will not take kindly to seeing a Tempering rank seal with nine stars on it.

  Blake winced. Already, his had seven. If he was a regular mana cultivator, he’d probably try to use a Harvesting technique to push himself over the edge. It’d be faster than using the old ways of Honour cultivation and locking in your echo.

  But Blake wanted to build himself stronger than that.

  “What do I have to do?” he asked.

  Watch your echo, Ethbin said. I will not tell you directly, because I just woke up, and I really don’t want to sleep again.

  Blake cast his perception inward and focussed on his siphon, and the view of his echo on the other side of it.

  But where before, it had nearly been blindingly bright, it had turned into a shadowy, misty form of writhing black lightning. Each bolt had snake-like jaws at its tip.

  “Jesus, Ethbin,” Blake said. “It’s changed.”

  Don’t worry, Ethbin replied. You have advanced. You’ve stripped away a layer. This is the usual sight when you reach Foundation. The Echo appears to take on the aspect you’ve been favouring. Technically, it’s not locked until Core Formation, but we won’t get into that. After a few seconds, he added, What’s Jesus?

  “I…” Blake scratched the back of his head. “I dunno. Mom cursed with that word a lot, and it’s kinda habit. I think there was something to do with a religion, but she never really subscribed to that. And I haven’t had time to even question it.”

  Ethbin had no response.

  “It was definitely something from the old world…but in all honesty, I just don’t remember much about it. Maybe they’ve driven us to forget things like that. I also didn’t know much in the first place.”

  The Nords aren’t especially tolerant of conquered cultures, no, Ethbin said. But don’t get distracted.

  “Right, sorry. So, the echo…” Blake pushed his attention inside his body again, opened his siphon, and let his perception travel through. The echo, although it had turned black, it still felt slightly removed from him. “Am I trying to pull it through the siphon?”

  No. Do you see those strands?

  There were faint strands of pure Honour reaching up off the echo, snaking up to the sky and disappearing.

  Try moving.

  Blake took a step forward, shifting himself along the peak of the longhouse’s roof while keeping his internal perception intact. The echo moved, but it was a sluggish puppet, and it didn’t feel like it was part of him, even though it technically tried to mimic his movements.

  As expected. Do you have any ideas of how you’ll progress through the next stage, now?

  “I think so. Yell at me if I screw up, yeah?”

  Of course.

  Blake shut his eyes. If the Honour echo truly worked like a puppet, and those strings were connecting to him, he had to tighten them. Closen the bond.

  The strings reached through his siphon, and though they were so thin and miniscule that he’d never really picked up on them before, he refused to lose his sense of them now. They connected to his channels, and it took a tug of Honour to tighten them. He manipulated his energy to grasp the end of each strand and pull it taut.

  He couldn’t feel a direct link of power, not until the two socketed echoes began glowing brighter. When he moved, the echo moved perfectly with him. When he put his foot down, it felt like his step was more confident, more self-assured, and like it had more impact on the world. He jumped down to the swamp, and the water seemed to pulse away from him.

  Stage eight, complete, Ethbin said. That was quick, but to be expected from someone catching up.

  “I’m still catching up?”

  You’ll advance incredibly quickly until you reach the stage that, given a proper upbringing, you would have reached. Say, if all the resources and knowledge had been there for you earlier in your life, you would’ve already made it to Tempering Eight. Most certainly higher.

  “Most people my age haven’t done that.”

  Yes, but not everyone is the same. You’ve known hunger your whole life—and not just the food kind. There was nothing destined about it, but not everyone has the same life. The same circumstances. And certainly not the same drive to change.

  Blake winced, then said, “Okay, then, stage nine. What do I do?”

  You’ll want to integrate more echo material into your own echo.

  “So I have to socket more? I thought that was a job for Foundation.”

  No, not socket. Consume. Use them to strengthen the nine sockets of your own echo. Blake, your echo is made of Honour. They all are. The Nords have allowed themselves to forget that, but Honour is still intrinsically a part of their world. They don’t understand their own echoes perfectly anymore, and they believe it is just a whisper of them that can give them nice bonuses if they socket other creatures’ echoes. But you and I both know it has the capacity for so much more than that.

  “Yeah,” Blake said. He reached for his mission slips. “I still have to complete these, then. I say we try to consume a few of their echoes. Assuming they all leave some behind.”

  The howlers, bog snakes, and shroomclaws should have their own three-piece echo set. You’re a ways off from completing a Galaxy Serpent set, so you should try to socket a temporary set while you’re at it. But you cannot socket duplicate echoes, so I highly suggest that you use the duplicates as echo material and consume them to advance.

  Blake nodded. “Wonderful. Let’s go terrorize the environment.”