Die. Respawn. Repeat.

Coming out of the skill-induced trance of The Road Not Taken is a heady thing. Most of that, I think, is because I pushed myself to the limit and more. I hadn't really been planning to hold on to the skill for that long, but when I looked Miktik in the eyes—when she realized what was happening...

I hadn't expected or prepared for that. How could I?

I did the only thing I could. Not the smartest thing, perhaps. Not the most battle-efficient, certainly. I feel wrung out, like even trying to use more Firmament at the moment is going to burn out what's left of my core. Trying to stand up causes me to sway on my feet—lucky for me, Ahkelios and Guard are almost immediately at my side, helping me.

"Thanks," I say. "Pushed myself a bit hard there."

"You think?" Ahkelios grumbles. He-Who-Guards guides me to sit back down, and Ahkelios holds up a hand before I can say anything else. "We're taking a break," he says. "I'm going to make you a bed, and we'll make plans in the morning."

Before I can respond, Ahkelios disappears into the forest. I blink.

"We could've just borrowed a bed from the crows," I say, bemused. "He wants to make me one?"

"I believe Ahkelios wishes to feel as though he is doing more to help," He-Who-Guards says. He crouches in front of me. "How are you feeling?"

"You don't have to worry that much," I say, wincing. "I overdrew on Firmament. I'll be fine with a bit of rest. Probably."

"You make a habit of this," Guard says with a whirred sigh. There's a note of something in his voice—not disapproval, exactly. He hesitates for a moment, examining me. "You did more than you had to do. Was it... worth it?"

My answer is immediate. "It was."

The words are true. He-Who-Guards might not know exactly what happened, but he apparently knows me well enough to understand that I did something. I chuckle a little to myself at the thought—maybe I'm becoming predictable.

I don't mind it. What I did there was important. It didn't have to be efficient or practical.

It just had to be kind.

"Do you know where we are to go next?" Guard asks. I nod.

"Back to the Intermediary," I say. "We need to get a part for that AI inside you, apparently. Not sure what happens after that, but it should complete them. And..."

I hesitate, glancing into the distance where Ahkelios went. "While we're there," I say. "We might as well get Ahkelios through his third shift. I have a feeling we'll need it."

There's a message on the Interface, though I have yet to say anything about it. It's a notification from before Guard's attempted shift.

[Anomalies detected in dungeon: The Empty City. Attempting to resolve...]

[Attempt failed. Dungeon difficulty upgraded to reflect anomalous state.]

[New difficulty: Submerged (F)]

It worries me. There's that whole new tier of power showing up again. Submerged, as far as I know, is the way the Interface categorizes the quality of imbuement stones; if that's any indication of how many levels of power there are out there...

I shudder a little. It almost makes me feel small. There hasn't been any evidence yet that the Integrators or the other Trialgoers are capable of that level of power, and for now, that thought is what I'm clinging to: that this is an emergent level of power rather than an extant one. It'll give me another tool to use against the Integrators when the time comes.

As long as I'm right.

With nothing else to do, I begin feeling around within my soul. If I hadn't used up so much Firmament, now would be the perfect opportunity to test Soul Space and what it can do. There's something about it that rings a bell.

Specifically, it feels a little like there's something already there within my soul, waiting for me to pull it out.

I reach for it—

—and wince when an echoing response of pain blurs my vision. Guard gives me a stern look. "Ethan," he says reproachfully. "You need to let yourself recover."

I cough and look away.

Maybe I'll give it a few more minutes.

Walking around within his own corpse was, Gheraa reflected, not how he thought he'd spend his afterlife. Not that this was an afterlife, but calling it that seemed suitably dramatic and tickled him more than acknowledging the entirety of the situation.

The portal was still sitting there, ready for him to emerge and re-enter Hestia. He'd chosen not to go through it for the time being. The Heart had clearly wanted him to warn Ethan about something, and there had to be a reason he'd been chosen to do that. He didn't mind being given the task, but he needed more information.

And where else was he going to get information but from the remnant of his own corpse?

There was a little-known fact about Integrators: the Firmament they were made out of wasn't their own. Where that Firmament came from even they had no idea, but the soulrot that emerged from the very rare death of one of his kind often revealed secrets none of them consciously knew.

Secrets none of them liked, either, or there would probably be a lot more dead Integrators. Instead, there was something of a concerted effort to censor anything that was uncovered and make sure no new Integrators died. Even when the others decided his crime was worthy of death, they'd made sure to dump his body off-planet.

More fool them, really. Especially since Gheraa was pretty sure this made him the first and only Integrator to ever get to explore their own corpse.

Was it a little weird that he was excited about this? Probably! But he had to get his entertainment somewhere, and Ethan wasn't around for him to mess with.

He still remembered Ethan's expression when he shoved the All-Seeing Eye into his... well, eye. Good times. He wasn't particularly picky about what body part he was shoving into which orifice, as long as the result was entertaining.

Where was he?

Right! Information.

Gheraa stared ahead at the vastness of his own dungeon. It looked... well, unexplored and abandoned. Ethan hadn't been here in a while, clearly; maybe he hadn't been here at all. The thought of that sent a pang of hurt through him.

But no, that was silly. The Heart had literally told him that Ethan would be here to bring him back from the dead. That whole paradox was the reason he was even alive right now.

So! Time to help.

He just had to figure out where to start.

It took a few hours of searching, but Gheraa was eventually able to make some sense of his soulrot. The shape of it, what it was doing, how it was growing. The most interesting part was the way tendrils of it reached up through the Intermediary, intertwining themselves with the core pillar of Firmament meant to connect Hestia to the wider network and to his home world.

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To any outside observer, it might've looked like Gheraa's soul was trying to climb back up into his home. Gheraa knew better. Those tendrils weren't trying to climb.

They were trying to suffocate. Cut off all vestiges of the connection between the Hestia and the Integrators. They weren't going to succeed with it—even now, the Intermediary was repairing itself, drawing from the immense stores of Firmament contained within the network to heal the damage—but Gheraa noted with no small amount of satisfaction that it was still slowing it down.

Buying Ethan time, in other words. The more he could grow without the supervision of the Integrators, the better. The more he surprised them when he emerged, the better the chance he had.

The better the chance for all of Earth, really.

Ethan's Interface may have been restricted, but Gheraa had seen the numbers.

The human Trialgoers were surprisingly resilient. They fought and stayed alive longer than any of the other planets he could remember Integrating. They weren't the strongest nor the fastest, but they kept getting up, over and over again. It was impressive. It was one of the reasons Gheraa had decided to take more and more risks with Ethan as time passed.

It wasn't enough.

Earth had the lowest death-count of Trials by far, but they were also taking the longest to prove themselves. At the time of his death, not a single human had managed to pass their appointed Trial. Gheraa thought it was bizarre. That ratio of still-living participants usually indicated a particularly successful crop of Trialgoers; there should have been a record number of Trial completions, and yet...

There was a theory among the Integrators, though it wasn't a popular one. The idea was that the process of Integration and the Trials themselves was not a process that was ever meant to be complete. Their purpose lay in the enactment of it, and they were never meant to see the end of that path. The more Trials were completed and the more planets Integrated, the harder the remaining Trials would become, until it became an all but impossible task.

Gheraa had never put much stock into the idea, but he was starting to wonder if it was true.

He sighed to himself. Thinking about Ethan was more fun than all this theorizing. It felt like he was thinking himself into a corner. The point was, maybe Ethan could break the deadlock. He was growing faster than anyone Gheraa had seen by far.

All this thinking did give him an idea, though. Maybe somewhere within this dungeon there were answers about the purpose of the Integrators. A way to learn about who put the Integrators here and why. That seemed like the sort of thing his people would try to censor.

There was one obvious place to start. Gheraa glanced at the tendrils climbing into the sky. A dark-purple storm of Firmament seemed to roil beneath it, threatening death and calamity.

"Of course," Gheraa muttered to himself. "Of course the deadly storm is where I have to go. I should've just started by looking for the deadly storm."

He conjured a walking stick out of Firmament and gave it a twirl.

"Well?" he called out into his own soul. He knew what dungeons were like. There was no way there wouldn't be some kind of challenge he had to face. "We know what we like. Give me a show!"

Right on cue, the walls began to rumble.

Gheraa grinned. He took off his coat and folded it neatly, tucking it into a corner by the portal; he could come back for it later.

And then he began to run.

Zhaohu Ong missed the sun.

That was the one thing he didn't have compared to all the other Trialgoers he'd been in contact with—any kind of sky. It almost made him jealous of Adeya, whose Trial was nothing but sky. Granted, she'd spent several weeks falling before managing to safely land and survival was difficult in constant freefall, so he wasn't actually that jealous.

He just missed it all. The sun, the wind, being out in the open.

As far as he could tell, his Trial was entirely underground. It didn't matter how far "up" he tried to go—there would always be another room and another challenge. He'd tried breaking through the ceiling once and all that had accomplished was a particularly unique near-death experience involving nearly drowning in goblins. It wasn't something he wanted to repeat anytime soon, so he hadn't bothered trying again.

He'd never considered himself claustrophobic, but he was pretty sure if he ever made it back to Earth it'd be a good few weeks before he walked into a building again, let alone a room. He'd sleep under the stars for a while. That sounded nice.

Zhao sighed, leaned back against the wall, and stared up at the ceiling. This room was the closest he could get to being outside—it was brightly lit and painted blue.

Which felt kind of sad and pathetic when he put it into words, but whatever.

There was a positive side to all this. His Trial let him take a break pretty much whenever he wanted. It only progressed when he made his way into the next rooms, and with everything he'd found—food, water, a room that was pretty much just a kitchen and another one that had an actual bed in it—he was more or less set. The only reason he ventured out was to earn credits so he could bank them for skills and work on his Firmament base.

He could leave pretty much whenever he wanted. He'd found the exit. He'd uncovered the so-called hidden condition required to pass his Trial. There was a room that resembled a throbbing, beating heart rearranged like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. All he had to do was rearrange those pieces until it formed a complete heart and walk through the exit.

Instead, he opened the Interface.

[Initiating voice call with Adeya...]

"Hey," Zhao greeted without preamble the moment the other Trialgoer picked up. Voice calls were convenient—far better than the chat function he'd unlocked earlier in his Trial. At least with voice calls he didn't need to worry about the still-embarrassing username he'd accidentally locked in. His Integrator still refused to let him change it.

"What do you want?" Adeya's response was short and brusque, as always.

"Any luck contacting Ethan?" Zhao asked. He was getting antsy.

He could hear the irritation in Adeya's response, though. "He's still disconnected. You can see this yourself, no?"

"You are the one delving Interface dungeons," Zhao argued. "I would not see this in the Interface. You have not encountered him? He must have access to one by now."

Zhao was kind of stressed about it, in all honesty. He'd spoken to Ethan exactly once before the other Trialgoer disappeared from the chats again. Part of him felt responsible.

"He's not in any dungeon I have access to," Adeya replied. Her voice softened a little—Zhao realized he was letting a bit more of his stress bleed through than he'd intended. "I have some suspicions. Have you checked the rankings?"

"No..." Zhao hesitated. He hadn't checked them for a while, in fact.

He flicked through the Interface. Some time ago, there'd been an incident that knocked all their Interfaces temporarily offline; when they rebooted, there was an odd message about the Intermediaries being disrupted. That disruption appeared to have caused glitches within the Interface, unlocking features he was pretty sure they weren't intended to have.

First among them was what brought Ethan to their attention in the first place: a ranking of human Trialgoers across all number of categories. The second was a list of all active dungeons, also termed as "soulrot infestations" in that particular section of the Interface.

Ethan was the only one listed as having achieved his third phase shift. A third-layer practitioner. The closest behind him was Adeya, who was at her second layer and on the cusp of the third. Zhao himself was still on the cusp of the second—none of the rooms he found so far had enough Firmament to push him into his second shift.

There was something going on with Ethan and his Trial. They needed to get into contact with him. With his help, it was possible they had a chance—

Zhao paused, staring at the rankings.

[1. Ethan Hill]

[Practitioner Level: Third-Layer, Perfected. Cusp of Fourth.]

[Practitioner Title: Heir of Anchors]

"Cusp of fourth?" Zhao said, his jaw slack. Fourth wasn't supposed to be possible. They suspected their Integrators were lying to them about it, of course, but— "Wait, what does perfected mean? Is that a thing?"

"We'll have to ask him ourselves," Adeya said. "When we find him. Check the dungeon list."

Zhao's face paled when he did.

[The Empty City] [Special] [Rank: Submerged (F)]

"Submerged," Zhao said. "That is the term the Interface uses for imbuement... Have we encountered the Interface ranking things in such a way?"

"Not even the Disconnected have heard of it," Adeya said. "I checked."

"And you are sure he is in that dungeon?"

"He's the only one of us that would survive a dungeon of that difficulty at the moment," Adeya said. "And it was ranked S just a few days ago."

"It went up," Zhao said numbly. It felt like his face was pale, not that he had a way to check. "Then... then we must talk to him as soon as we can. A blowback from a dungeon of that strength would wipe out hundreds of us. He cannot fail. He should not even try! But if he is in that dungeon..."

"Then none of us can reach him," Adeya completed grimly. "No one we're in contact with has unlocked the Empty City."

"What do we even do?" Zhao fretted. "He can't die. He's our best chance against the Sunken King."

"We'll keep doing what we've been doing," Adeya told him. "Don't complete your Trial. Try not to let anyone complete theirs. Keep getting stronger. The longer we hold the Sunken King back, the better."

"So we wait," Zhao said. "That's it?"n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

"We grow," Adeya told him. "We make allies. We get stronger. We keep up. That's how our Firmament grows, remember?"

"Right." Zhao forced himself to calm down. "And... we have a chance. You're sure?"

Adeya smiled at him. He couldn't see it, but he could feel the smile through the Interface. It was warm and beautiful. Or maybe he was imagining things. "I'm sure."

"Because of your Skill?" he asked hopefully.

"What else would it be?"

Adeya disconnected before he could respond, but he could practically see her laughing at him.

Zhao sighed.

More waiting. He really hated waiting.

He missed the sun.