Mari:

  “This is almost disappointingly anticlimactic.” She groused with open fatigue as she lay face down on a bench. Their team of three were in the fourth sublevel chamber where Kris handled her mana experiments.

  “Stay still! You’re making this harder. Don’t speak if you can’t do so without your whole body shifting around. Yeesh.”

  Anise was there, standing over her and channeling qi into needles as she carefully used acupuncture healing on Mari’s ravaged meridians. While the girl had managed to mend a lot of the normal injuries that had been present, the unusual nature of meridians meant that they needed a healing technique to match.

  Karin had shown up not long after they’d finished sweeping the fourth sublevel for contamination, and she’d commanded them to take a proper break before sweeping the upper floors. The tension of the day had vanished, and Mari had happily assented to the demand.

  Her whole body still burned on the inside, and the acupuncture was helping relieve a bit of it. A few of the needles had caused minor pain and tightness in a few muscles, but those feelings vanished once Anise replaced the needles there.

  The real magic was happening, well, magically. After having Marielle tear her meridians apart with the abundance of energy, Mari was finally able to feel them clearly and fixate on them. By that method, she could feel the cool, soothing comfort wash through the most important parts of her body with each infusion of nature energy into herself. And she would probably still need another week of effort to fully repair all the damage.

  While she had the gut reaction to be angry with Marielle, she had already been faced with the wisdom in her actions. Yes, Kris had Relkur present to help her, and in the end, Anise needed her help. The issue of Marielle losing her composure and erasing a chunk of the hallway was excessive, but Mari was forced to empathize by way of sharing a body with the woman.

  “What am I going to do with you?” Kris sounded frustratingly amused, and Mari could practically feel the lascivious gaze bearing down on her unclothed form. It was hard to be surprised after seeing Kris licking her lips at the sight of her abs, but with others present, Mari felt conflicted by the obvious thirst.

  “Loosen up.” Anise demanded in annoyance. “Whatever is making you so uncomfortable is why I had to replace four needles already. Would you rather this take you all night instead of an hour?”

  Mari let out a long and slow breath.

  The next needle into her arm made her spasm suddenly, and Anise just sighed in exasperation.

  “She’s ticklish, it isn’t her fault!” Kris interjected with a barely restrained laugh.

  Anise traced along her arm and remained silent before applying another needle. “I don’t care. I just don’t want to abuse her meridians in the opposite direction. They need to flow properly to begin to heal quickly, and mistakes could cripple entire limbs for months.”

  Mari just barely restrained an involuntary shiver at the consequences, and Kris sat down on a chair next to her and laid a hand on the back of her head, stroking her fingers through her dirty, matted hair.

  “Will it be a problem if I start picking the chunks out of this mop she used to call hair?” It was obvious enough to catch the disgusted tone in Kris’ voice.

  “Please do.” Another needle in her wrist completely eased the tension in Mari’s right arm, and she finally felt the burning sensation fade away. “The smell is almost just as bad as her constant moving!”

  Then, the sliding wall panel opened with a gentle scrape, announcing the entrance of someone else.

  “What… are you doing?” Alynne sounded concerned.

  “This is an important form of healing for damaged muscles. It requires focus, and above all, it requires less interruptions.” Mari could actually hear Anise’s glare from where she laid, her face buried in the conjured cushion she had originally planned to take a nap on.

  Belatedly, Mari realized that despite her youthful appearance and voice, Anise sounded like a crabby old woman. “Please, don’t let her temper get to you, she must be hangry.”

  Kris choked on a laugh, and the air grew distinctly heavier around the miniature immortal as the glare she’d heard earlier fixated onto her back.

  “I… see. Well, I only came to let you all know that everything is settled, and we have quarantine measures in place to clean up the rest of the floors. Mari, your stay at the hospital has been extended. As for Kris, your joint home with Mari is ready, should you prefer not to return to your mothers’ residence. Anise… Apologies, but I am unsure of your circumstances.”

  Mari tried to raise a thumb in confirmation, but Anise pinned her arm in place with a grip like a vise. “Thank you, Miss Alynne. Your report is greatly appreciated.” Anise’s every word felt like the bite of winter for all the frost it held.

  Kris, on the other hand, was definitely failing to hide her amusement. “Right. Alynne, thank you. We’ll sort ourselves out when Mari’s not a pincushion anymore.”

  There was a rustle of cloth, and then the wall paneling slid back closed as Alynne left the room.

  “I’m sorry. It has been a long couple of hours. I killed a bunch of idiots, we fought a few monsters, I lost a leg… This art is complicated, and that’s fraying my nerves. Also, the System is running on low power, so I have to keep switching between visualizing your meridians and channeling energy to inject healing power into them.”

  Kris tugged gently at something stuck in Mari’s hair as she replied. “You’re honestly fine. I understand. Actually, I don’t, since I’ve never lost a limb before. If I may, though, what is the System you keep mentioning, exactly? I know a few stories of System Worlds, but I don’t know the details.”

  Anise heaved a deep sigh before moving to the other arm.

  “The System is the culmination of all of mom’s research. While studying mana as a method for immortality, she figured out compound mana algorithms. All I know about mana comes from her tests. My ‘System Core’ is the first method she found that could cure my illness.

  “As promising as the System was, the Overseer rejected it because of the low mana around the world. So I have the System’s Core, so I control the settings. It lets me turn mana into levels and stats and even my chosen paths to access power. I could even extend the permissions to others, but the mana density is too low even to run my own abilities properly.”

  Kris fell into silence, and Mari could imagine her doing the cute thinking face she loved so much. Mari spoke up instead, “Did she ever discover ways to make people immortal?”

  Anise huffed in annoyance, but the iron grip on her arm kept the needle from missing.

  “Yes. After many, many attempts to perfect the right combinations of genetic changes, even some resulting in outright monstrous deformities, she figured it out. It was a bad time, though. The Overseer promised mom rewards for successes. The reward for all her work? Wanna guess?”

  It was hard to get over the sheer bitterness in those words. The silent tension mounted, and with another needle, Anise finally finished her tale.

  “To be immortalized in memory.” There was a short, despondent bark of laughter. All of Anise’s cheer and amusement had turned to pure gravitas instead. “The Overseer named the whole world and their empire after her. Syl-something. It’s probably obvious now, but I’m not supposed to be outside. Mom used the intrusion of those people before to send me out. I’m sure they’ll punish her for it.”

  A heavy silence fell over them, and Mari could feel Kris’ hands trembling at the revelations.

  “How?”

  “How what, Kris?” Anise began working on Mari’s legs next.

  “How is that possible? I’ve read through physical historical records that predate the empire. I’ve never known the world to go by a different name.” Mari had never heard Kris sound so shaken.

  Anise stopped applying needles and just remained still for a long moment. “I! Have been living in a fancy box underground! For at least a few centuries! Exactly how did ya think I was ever going to know? I know a lot about the stuff mom researched and I’ve watched a few hundred movies and read ten times as many books. That doesn’t make me the handy exposition machine.”

  “Sorry. I just was shocked, that’s all.” Kris sounded defeated, and Mari wished dearly that she could comfort her. Sadly, doing that would probably make her immobile state last even longer.

  Kris:

  The treatment lasted for two hours.

  She tried to pry more information out of Anise a few times, but they didn’t make much headway. The girl was entirely unwilling to tell them more about her boring days locked up inside the fancy prison that were the Eternity Labs.

  At the end of their time resting, they’d traveled together towards the hospital via the underground passage while lugging all of Mari’s weapons in their cases.

  Their destination was not, in fact, Mari’s room. They stopped by to grab the few things she’d left there, but then they’d immediately headed into the city.

  The administrative district was entirely on a sort of heavily fortified lockdown. There was an examination before leaving the district to check for infection and ensure the safety of anyone traveling so late at night. Kris was happy to see her mother was bustling between different response teams that had set up outside the Citadel and along the wall between districts.

  It didn’t take long with the reputation of their family, so they were rapidly let out with an escort of three specialists from the Investigations Unit. Each of them had the best technology around, given the restrictions on non-Sylphariens using dangerous potential ‘weapons’ and armor. There was a sound frequency system built into their uniforms that could generate dangerous shredding fields around different parts of the body.

  Thankfully, they seemed content to give them enough space to not feel like they were eavesdropping.

  “They mean business. Their equipment is lethal, not for deescalation.” Kris voiced her observation with some trepidation.

  “I’m not sure you deescalate an invasion of the capital building of your main city.” Mari replied curtly.

  “Let alone with all the people that died. This is as close to a disaster as you get. People are going to be paranoid for a long time over this.” Anise had her eyes closed as she walked under the light of the largest moon.

  Then she stopped.

  “Everything okay?” Mari turned to the girl with some concern.

  Anise was quiet for a while. Her face had grown somber, carrying hints of what Kris could only think was loneliness. “I just was reaching out with my senses. I just realized I’m older than every person within a mile of here. I always thought that it would be more like Eternity Labs, only on a larger scale. But instead… It feels like there are no peers to me here. It’s probably stupid, but it’s a hollow sort of feeling.”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Kris put an arm around the girl’s shoulders and squeezed gently. “I’m sorry to disappoint. You’re very unique. Try to focus on the positives.”

  “Actually,” Mari cut in, hesitantly, “that isn’t quite accurate. I won’t say more until we’re entirely alone. I don’t want anyone else to hear this.”

  They finished the trip to the new house in a tense silence, ushered along by the severity of the announcement Mari had promised them.

  When they arrived, they were shocked to find the home being a rather refined three story home without a particularly large footprint on the limited above-ground real estate of the city. Kris had been expecting an excessively ornate home, but instead, it was a simple stone home with a wave pattern etched into the exterior. The greenhouse affixed to the rooftop was illuminated by some small fixtures, but it hardly would invade the privacy of anyone stargazing from inside in the evenings.

  When they entered, the home was already furnished with chairs, lounging couches and tables. The floorplan was simple, with a sitting room arranged with a large table that could be pulled out for indoor table games or larger group meals, a joint kitchen and dining space that suited a smaller family size, and the upper floor had three bedrooms. The master bedroom connected to a particularly large bathing area, while the other two bedrooms connected to a single bathroom with a small shower stall.

  Overall, with the kitchen fully stocked and a large amount of Kris’ belongings already moved in, the home was quite comfortable for living in right away.

  “So… about the sleeping arrangements?” Mari sounded hesitant.

  “I don’t sleep. I’ll be meditating in the garden on the roof if you ever can’t find me at night.” Anise sounded pleased by the new home, and settled in to stay without even asking.

  “Right. Mari, we’re obviously sharing the master bedroom. Don’t be silly.” Kris licked her lips suggestively, putting her foot down.

  “That seems fast, doesn’t it?”

  “How long have you two been dating?”

  “Like a single day, give or take a few hours?” Mari’s skeptical look wounded Kris, but the feeling in her gut struck her too hard to ignore it.

  “It doesn’t really matter to me if it’s fast. I already made my choice, so there’s no going back. I guess if it makes you uncomfortable, then…”

  “No, it’s fine.” Mari folded to Kris’ impossibly potent begging expression.

  Anise gave Kris an appraising look, and she felt there might even be some respect there. “You work fast.”

  “What about you, Anise? Any romance in your life?”

  “No, Kris. None. I don’t even wanna think of it. Imagine dating a person who thought I was attractive with a body like mine? Even if I’m old enough, I don’t want anyone who thinks romantic things about my grade-schooler appearance. I kinda went through all the changes before hitting puberty, so the hormones never reached me, either. No interest.”

  That struck Kris as being rather sad, really. She’d only experience love once, but what she had already felt was enough for her to cherish the feelings Mari drew out of her.

  “Would you grow up if you had the chance?” She might’ve regretted asking, but the words left her before she could stop them.

  “I had the chance already. I was able to make changes to myself along the way, but I just prefer my current style. I don’t care for grown-up troubles.” Anise turned towards Mari. “Enough with the side topics. What is your big secret you planned to share? Spill it.”

  Mari sat down on the large bed in the master bedroom and took a long, deep breath before speaking. Something clearly weighed on her, based on her mostly silent presence. Kris silently joined her, shoulder-to-shoulder.

  “Marielle was immortal. Is immortal. Anise was right about her being a cultivator. She possessed an immortal soul that could transfer from one body to the next when she died. Marielle was just the name of the most recent person in that long history. I may have her memories, but the real Marielle is out there somewhere, and based on what we’ve figured out, she’s an afflicted. A mindless husk of herself.”

  Mari steadied herself, then finished.

  “I need to find her and put her out of her misery, then absorb the immortal soul.”

  The statement was followed by utter silence. Kris couldn’t decide what to think about it. Based on what she had learned about mana from Anise and her own observations, she came up with a handful of concerns to voice right away.

  “I don’t like it. Too many risks and variables. We don’t have the right data to support jumping into that course of action without learning more. For example, under the explanation Anise gave of mana converted by thought into various powers, we don’t know how Marielle’s consumption of mana might merge with the mind-altering aspects of the bio weapon.

  “What if the bio weapon affected her mind and soul as much as the body, turning that soul into something horrifying? Granted, that’s assuming souls exist.”

  “They do, but it’s not quite the definition you’re thinking of. A soul is just the emotion that fuels a living creature. You could say it’s the combination of everything in the body that creates an emotional response, but it’s separate from the calculating and information processing portion that is the mind. Mana takes everything about living creatures and does weird things with it, hence that intangible concept behind soul cultivators. It’s complicated, but that’s my best explanation.”

  Kris gave a subtle shrug, but nodded in acceptance. “I really wish I had a notebook. Or a big board to cover in notes. That aside, sure, souls. What’s to say that absorbing the soul from someone afflicted by the bio weapon wouldn’t just corrupt your own ‘soul’ in that circumstance?”

  Kris watched as Mari chewed her lip in thought for a few long seconds. “It’s hard to get into without Marielle awake. The best I’ve got… Ah. When you absorb raw mana and give it direction, it stops being so chaotic. It becomes what it was coaxed into, and it doesn’t easily leave that form. I have a hard time believing that the bio weapon managed to change the immortality of the Medjay’s soul.”

  “An Egyptian theme, then? That’s not entirely unique, but it’s not a common term to see.” Anise hummed thoughtfully, going off on a tangent.

  “Kinda? Not really. Each of the Dynast Souls I’ve got any memory of are named after certain famous people they once were, or after certain influential things they did. Like Mouseion, for one. I think he turned himself into pure thought, becoming the greatest mortal lexicon of the time.”

  “Neat. Library of Alexandria, huh?” Anise briskly swept into the adjacent master bathroom and switched on the hot water, clearly preparing for a proper bath.

  “Off topic. Again.” Kris rolled her eyes as she finally slid her robe off, leaving her in just the athletics outfit she wore for the game earlier. “At best, your theory about the state of her soul is just enough to put one fear to rest. What if something so old and powerful eclipses you and just takes over?”

  Mari was already shaking her head. “That was already a risk. Just when I took on Marielle’s surface level of memories, I could’ve been consumed by her. I already mentioned how I was willing to do that. She’s the one who stopped that. Something about the nature of the Medjay, maybe, but she always offers herself up to an inheritor to carry on the torch, so-to-speak.”

  “Ya know, that’s super interesting. I always wondered about singular paths to immortality. How do the paths work when independent of one another?”

  Kris nodded emphatically, enthused about the concept, even despite her reservations.

  “Alright, sure. I’ll be your teacher for a minute. Body, Mind, and Soul. First, the body. A person who devotes their efforts to cultivating their body steadily stops aging and becomes stronger, faster, more durable, and even becomes untouchable by disease. When you achieve it, you just stop the clock for yourself.”

  “That sounds like a double edged sword. Eventually, someone’s gotta notice you aren’t getting any older while they age and die. Could see that ending as being seen like a god, or being burned at the stake as a devil.”

  Kris remained silent, but Anise wasn’t wrong. Sylphariens didn’t age, and they believed they were gods. The revolution members had torn them down like devils.

  History is full of people tearing down others over jealousy. A person hardly needs to be a tyrant to make enemies.

  “Another drawback.” Mari sounded a bit sad about what came next. “You don’t have an endless memory for all the things you experienced in life. That’s why pursuing multiple paths is good, but you can’t attain immortality with all three at once. Or, I guess you can, if you have enough mana. Regardless, an immortal body will forget things.”

  Mari carried on, “An immortal mind steadily becomes a powerful repository for thought and memory. You stop forgetting things, and then stop overlooking small details. Your mind begins to process everything around you with supernatural clarity. Emotions can become muted, if you aren’t careful about balancing yourself. Normally, an immortal mind is bound to an object with more longevity than your mortal vessel. Mouseion became the entirety of his academy, and later encompassed the whole world to be accessed by mortals as the internet.”

  Anise gaped. “No fucking way. So he’s kind of stored inside every piece of technology that’s been connected?”

  “No, the internet was a method to tap into his power as an immortal mind. It stored everything, and mortals just coded the entire lexicon of humanity into a language they could understand. Once you leave the Earth, Mouseion can’t speak to you anymore.”

  “A ghost in the wires. That’s pretty neat!”

  Kris just felt shivers from the revelation. “That’s what the emperor tried to do. Allegedly he tried and failed because Constance killed him first.”

  Something clattered across the floor in the bathroom, but Kris didn’t risk peeking inside while Anise was bathing. The poor kid has survived worse than dropping something in the bath. Relax.

  Mari’s hand rested on Kris’ own. When she looked up, she saw the concern there. Kris smiled, giving her partner a gentle squeeze of appreciation before they moved on.

  “Soul cultivators are complex. The best interpretation I have using Anise’s information is that we channel mana to empower our personality. For Marielle, it feels like empowering the emotional bonds she shares with the people she’s met. The fixation on the personality that makes you who you are eventually makes that personality a permanent, incorporeal existence that can move from one body to another. When the Medjay dies, she can move to a new body.”

  “That’s scary. Like being possessed by a ghost. Isn’t that kinda evil?” Anise sounded slightly shaken, which was odd for her, but maybe it was just the distance or something.

  “The Medjay is different. She offers herself up, letting her experience be consumed by the next person in the dynasty. Not to say there aren’t more hostile soul cultivators on Earth, though. Artemisia was particularly spiteful.”

  That sounded bitter. Bad blood there, no doubt. Maybe time for a distraction.

  Kris stood from the bed and pulled Mari to her feet, then removed the inertial dampener with practiced ease. After that, she decided to start prying off dirty clothes, much to the blushing embarrassment shared mutually between them.

  Kris ran her fingers along Mari’s abs as she stalked around her partner like a predator. Then, she embraced her from behind and pressed herself into Mari’s back, reaching down to unclasp the hook that held her pants around her waist.

  She could feel Mari’s pulse pick up slightly, and smiled a wolfish grin. There was barely a moment of resistance as the raven-haired woman smiled wryly over her shoulder, then leaned slightly to unbuckle the holster for her handgun.

  The gun ended up hanging from a hook on the wall, and then Mari kicked away the loose pants.

  Kris snickered impishly, raising her hands higher, aiming for the crop top next.

  “Oh!” Kris gasped a little as she was rounded on and lifted off the ground, feeling her back hit the wall. Mari had a look of dry humor on her lips as she rolled her eyes while shaking her head. And then emotions exploded into color as their lips met.

  The contact might’ve lasted for a century for all she knew. Then, a thought hit her and she pulled back slightly. “With all this talk of immortality, I think I’d like to live forever if it was with you.” She breathed the words heavily, her body quivering in anticipation.

  “Oh yeah?” Mari sounded amused. “I can try to teach you. We’ll think of that later.”

  Kris melted into another kiss as soft lips met her own, and she sucked gently on Mari’s lower lip, coiling her hands around her lover to prevent any form of escape.

  “It’s gotten awfully quiet out there. Am I about to leave this bath to find an empty room, or something I’d rather not see?” Anise called out, evidently both suspicious and annoyed.

  Mari hefted Kris a step to the right, and they vanished into the walk-in closet.

  “The first one!” Kris called to the girl in response.

  Mari just chuckled. “There’s a special irony to being with another woman while inside a literal closet.”

  Kris frowned at her in confusion.

  “You can just ignore me.”

  “Huh. The obviously not-closeted perverts are going at it in the closet. I’d laugh if it wasn’t so unoriginal.” And that was the last they heard from Anise for the evening.

  For clarity, nobody ‘went at it’ without first taking a bath. Even if said bath turned a little spicy.

  Alynne:

  Analysis.

  That was the only thing she felt confident in. And perhaps, on rare occasions, a little too confident.

  Still, what she was seeing beggared belief. Rather, what she wasn’t seeing.

  There was a part of the third sublevel that just seemed to coerce her into overlooking it. She only realized it when she was doing an in-depth sweep and happened to be personally checking every dead end corridor.

  Alynne never did things by halves. When she set herself to a task, she finished it, even if she had to delegate some parts along the way. That’s how she hadn’t noticed the issue in the past. She hadn’t personally swept the floor when they’d conquered Elitheen.

  But when she walked straight past a particular dead-end without a second glance—with some mental assumption that she wouldn’t find anything, no less—she realized something was wrong.

  “Every time I think to look there, it’s like something just urges me to look elsewhere. It’s deeply unsettling.”

  Karin gave the map a hard look, narrowing her eyes. “I can imagine,” was all the response she offered.

  “When I moved away from the area and reviewed my notes, I realized the error. It’s horrifyingly subliminal.” Alynne had circled the area in question on the digital map and submitted her report in person to be certain. If she’d written it, she wasn’t so sure the suggestion that had affected her mind wouldn’t cause the report to be lost or misrepresented later.

  Then, text appeared over the screen they were looking at.

  [PLEASE HELP ME.]

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