“You’re done.”

  Taera’s voice was a sharp needle popping the bubble of my strange, waking dream. I hadn’t really been asleep.

  There was no darkness, no sense of time passing. It was more like… spacing out. Free-form imagining unmoored from the constant, grinding anchor of pain. A lot of it, embarrassingly, involved a certain blue-haired, green-skinned young woman whose newfound presence seemed to have rewired my brain. It was weird because I was seldom prone to such flights of fancy. My fantasies usually involved less romance and more successfully purging heretics.

  “Wait, what? Already? How long have I been out of it?” My voice sounded rough, unused.

  Taera was standing there, arms crossed, peering at me with an expression that was one part amusement and three parts clinical interest. “An hour and twenty minutes. We had to drag Kessler, the ship’s shaman, in here. Your spirit apparently decided to go on a little walkabout while the software was getting updated, and I wish you’d been conscious to see the circus. Braxis was in here stabilizing your other hardware, muttering curses in Goblin-tongue that would make a battle-brother blush. Reynard was cussing at the remote programmer like she’d caught it in bed with another woman. And Kessler just stood over you, burning incense and mumbling about it not being your time yet and how the ancestors were being stubborn. You were quite the spectacle.”

  I took a mental inventory. And then a physical one.

  I didn’t hurt.

  The thought was so foreign, so revolutionary, that it took a moment to fully process. Holy scrot, I didn’t hurt. The ever-present, grinding agony that had been my constant companion for years was… reduced to almost nothing. The familiar tension of trying to wrestle my own rebellious muscles into obedience was a ghost. They were simply… there. Responding. Not with the flawless, preternatural grace I’d had before my meridians were scorched, but they were mine again, not hostile entities I had to negotiate with for every movement.

  I lifted my arms from the chair I’d been sitting in. I moved them through the air, testing the range of motion. Then I carefully, almost fearfully, got to my feet. The sickbay was all sterile white ceramics, the medical machinery withdrawn seamlessly into the walls, making it look like a plain, calming room. The whole sensation felt… different.

  Lighter. Cleaner.

  I checked my proprioception, the sense of where my body was in space. I was still able to anticipate where my limbs would go, a soldier’s ingrained awareness, but it felt…. Hollow. Quiet. Less buzzy. Not bad, not the euphoric rush of my prime, but a profound, blessed neutrality.

  At least I wasn’t getting the ‘pre-echoes’—the ghostly, painful previews of every possible move my limb could make as it moved, a sure sign of the Caliban’s catastrophic malfunction. I opened my eyes again and checked the position I had extrapolated for my hand. Yeah. Spot on. I’d still be able to use my energy blade safely, precisely. There was still an ache in my channels, but it wasn't an all-consuming agony.

  But I did lack the stabilized pre-echoes I’d become weirdly accustomed to. Yes, it had been a unique kind of hell when a thousand neurological possibilities had been fighting for control of my motor cortex, but it had also given me a microsecond edge in combat, a flicker of foresight. Now that was gone. In its place was a simple, solid connection.

  I reached inward, checking my energy flows. Three of my primary meridians were still scorched, dead zones in my spiritual map. But I could feel the flow of divine essence from my core, moving along the other pathways. It seemed to… jump the gap. It would flow, hit the scorched section, and then… continue on the other side.

  It wasn’t as smooth, or natural, or even as powerful as it had been back when I had a full complement, but the flow, while it skipped across the ravaged pathway, was at least as strong at my extremities as it had been back when I’d been a Bronze-rank Paladin, before the incident that had wrecked me.

  "What the… scrot", I murmured, not realizing I’d said it out loud. I was looking at my hands, where I could see a gentle, steady flow of silver essence gathering at my fingertips, ready for a shaping. There were still angry, stagnant patches of black necrotic essence clinging to the burned meridians like spiritual rot, but there was also a new… tracery.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  A silver filigree of what looked like thousands of hair-thin threads of some kind of… advanced material? They ran along my nervous system in my arms and left leg, reminiscent of the thick, crude strands the Caliban had used, but infinitely more refined. They were humming with potential.

  My essence circulation was still non-standard, a patchwork job, but not even close to as wrong and cancerous as it had felt. Whatever these new strands were, they were actively picking up essence from my cycling and transmitting it down my limbs, entirely unlike the way the Caliban had forced essence through them like overpressurizing a hose.

  No one writes a cultivation manual for someone with broken pathways, after all. You either fix them or you die. Roisin had apparently written her own manual.

  Taera was smirking at me, enjoying my dumbfounded inspection.

  “What?” I asked her, as I picked myself up off the floor—I’d apparently sunk to my knees in my awe.

  “You now officially owe the ship’s stores seven hundred credits. Oh, and I am putting an official reprimand for ‘troubling fraternization’ in your permanent record.”

  “Troubling what?” I sputtered.

  “Fraternization. With a subordinate. Petty Officer Reynard tried to repair your actual Caliban unit for almost half an hour, and then finally threw her hands up in disgust and gave up on it entirely. She said it was a lost cause, more scar tissue than tech. So she asked the quartermaster for over four hundred miles of carbon nanotube spool, in thirty-yard increments, and a case of sealed axial proteins. You are well aware that those are vital repair parts for essence drive stabilization conduits, because they can safely transport raw essence away from the ship’s skin and are used in both cultivation chambers and FTL engine repairs.”

  “I uhh… no,” I admitted, feeling suddenly very much like the ‘jock’ she’d accused me of being. “I know what carbon nanotube is, generally. Flexible armor reinforcement, right? But axial… proteins? Nope. That’s way outside my paygrade. I’m enlisted, remember? Not a tech. I just break things. Sometimes I break the things that break other things.”

  Taera sighed melodramatically. “Right. Of course. Well, she couldn’t fix your Caliban. Something about the way you’d been using it was…. ‘So far outside of its design parameters it was basically performance art,’ I believe was her phrase. They are meant to stabilize tech and sorcery implants, not channel living essence as part of your primary spiritual circulation. You should be happy; she said you were possibly the dumbest man she’d ever met for trying to do that. Said it was like a water affinity trying to use fire cultivation methods—a great way to end up as steam.”

  I nodded. “I didn’t have any other choice. It was that or let the necrotic energy pool in my core and accelerate the deviation. Wait,” I said, the core of her statement finally hitting me. “She couldn’t fix my Caliban? Then why are my abilities working better than they were before? What is this?” I held up my hand, the silver energy glinting around my fingers.

  Taera shrugged, a gesture of elegant bafflement. “She cheated. She treated your heart dantian like a… power core? A reactor. I don’t know exactly what she did, it wasn’t particularly high-tech, which is the insane part. She’s using all that nanotube and protein weave like… a combination of spiritual hydraulics and power cables, I guess. I don’t understand the mechanics, but she said it was technically Tech Level 3 principle, but that you should be good for stabilization and essence flow up to Tier 8. She did say no going into Tier 2 or lower rifts, though. The background essence fields there might interfere with the… the clockwork, I suppose.”

  I felt along the back of my neck. The familiar, hated lump of the Caliban was gone. In its place was a smooth bandage over what felt like… nothing. Just skin. “But this… How did she know how to do this? This is… this is genius.” The energy in my limbs felt amazing. It felt right.

  “She’s a heavyworlder,” Taera said, as if that explained everything. Seeing my confusion, she elaborated. “Korse, her homeworld, was a security concern. The Fleet dropped a flare generator in their sun a century ago to keep them out of space, jamming all but the most basic tech. Apparently, they have to do something similar for automated prosthetics and medical implants there. At high gravities, standard Tech Level 3 mechanisms simply aren’t strong or responsive enough without integrated essence flow. The body’s own energy has to power them. Congratulations, Paladin. Part of your internal system is now officially magitech clockwork. It’s not even advanced enough to qualify as steampunk. It’s more… renaissance faire.”

  Taera snickered, the sound utterly evil. “And as for the fraternization reprimand… while you were having your little pornographic dreams—I couldn’t see them, thank the void, but I certainly felt the general theme—you reached out, grabbed the Petty Officer’s wrist, and wouldn’t let go. Pulled her right down to your eye level and then groped her."

  "According to Braxis, you looked her dead in the eye and said, clear as day, ‘The bridge with the lock. I’ll find a lock for you.’ Then you passed out again. So, yeah. Troubling fraternization. Paperwork must be filed. It’s the rules, and there were too many witnesses, although the fact that you were out of your mind at the time was noted.”

  I stared at her, my face heating with a blush I hadn’t been capable of in years. I had no memory of it. None. But I could feel the truth of it in her smug satisfaction.

  Well, scrot.