Kelly leaned against a lab table, surrounded by the faint hum of growth tanks and the sharp, clean smell of chlorophyll. “So just to confirm,” she said, tapping a glittering crystal shard on the counter. “These crystals… there’s no way to make them alive? Like, give them a little spark? A will to live?”

  Rowena didn’t look up from her microscope. “No. Once they’re fully formed, they’re just solid structures. They don’t eat, grow on their own, react to their surroundings, They certainly don’t reproduce.”

  “But they come from plants,” Kelly pressed, picking up the crystal and holding it to the light. “Doesn’t that mean there’s, I dunno, a blueprint of life in there somewhere? We can’t… reboot it?”

  “The plants guide the crystals as they form—their properties, their behavior—but once the crystal is finished, it’s completely non-living.”

  “I thought so.” Kelly dropped the crystal back onto the table with a dull clink. “Dang it. So if we want a crystal that does something fun—like, say, explode on command or glow when I’m annoyed—the only way is to mess with the plants first? Twist their little green arms?”

  “Exactly. The crystals can’t change themselves. Any feature you want has to come from the plant that produces them.”

  Kelly let out a long, dramatic sigh that seemed to release all her frustrated speculation. Then she rolled up her sleeves and got to work.

  There were five main ways people made genetically modified things.

  Adding a gene trait from another species.

  Copying a gene trait so many times so it worked stronger.

  Turning off a gene trait.

  Tweaking a gene trait.

  Mixing gene traits.

  Like giving a tomato squirrel?level acrobatics, tweaking a carrot to taste like candy, mixing traits into a genetic smoothie, or copying a strength trait so much an ant could bench?press a human.

  The plants were from another dimension, built from materials that ignored every rule she’d ever learned, but the old ideas still worked—Kelly could still do all five. The world, or rather, the dimension, was different, but once you cracked the building blocks, the ways to push life in a new direction didn’t really change.

  Using the machines, Kelly twisted the living fibers with precise movements, guiding the shifting strands the way Rowena had shown her, and earned a short grunt of approval from the older woman.

  “Finally. We’ll need more material before this can take shape, so get the next section ready, Dr. Voss. And keep your head in it. Don’t make me remind you how smart you’re supposed to be.”

  “Whoa, hold up—I’ve been at this less than a day—to you, anyway.” It was Kelly’s fourth loop trying this. “By that standard, I’m making Oppenheimer look like he’s playing with Lego.”

  Despite her protest, the immortal-assistant followed her new teacher’s instructions and began preparing the next block of flora. What would have been simple with ordinary plants—just adjusting growth or small features—was far more complicated here. The material responded unpredictably, demanding precision in every motion.

  It was a brutal. People spent decades, sometimes centuries, learning how new things reacted when pressed, pulled, or coaxed. Kelly had Rowena’s instructions, and the medical AI translated the pieces that made no sense, but turning that knowledge into movement took everything she had.

  It felt like taking apart a machine that refused to stay open—bolts slipping back into place the moment she touched them. The wood fought her in the same way every time.

  First, she had to suppress one of the wood’s natural behaviors—its tendency to move along certain standard default shapes—so it would be ready to stick to any structure she intended.

  Next came forcing the grain to follow a path it didn’t accept, calming some sections while urging others awake, reshaping its natural urges with nothing but her hands and stubbornness. Every adjustment required patience and careful attention.

  And finally she had to hold everything steady, keeping the restless fibers from snapping back into the form they wanted, forcing the material to follow the design she intended. It worked, if barely. It wasn’t perfect. But it was as close as she could get it.

  [New Rare Title → Magic Tinkerer (Grade I)]

  The message came along after her thirtieth attempt over several days at coaxing the new crystal strain into stable plant growth.

  The crystals had two main effects; they amplified mana, increasing the strength and output. And the second and most important effect, was that they completely modified mana—altering its nature to create specific effects, like fire, lightning, freezing temperatures or whispering the name of a botanist’s wife’s new boyfriend when no one else in the lab was looking.

  Kelly had somehow, through what could only be described as a combination of sheer stubbornness and mild insanity, cobbled together an actual tool out of crystals. Not like some high-tech wizarding Swiss Army knife, nothing sleek, nothing that screamed “I belong in a museum of amazing things,” just… a thing. A thing that should, theoretically, if the stars aligned and a demon didn’t run across the lab at the wrong moment, produce two perfectly shaped constructions of ice and metal when it got injected with mana.

  But that was the problem; Mana

  It needed a power source—something that actually produced energy. Of course, no being in or visiting this dimension had an external one. None of the invaders carried batteries. The only crystals every invader carried were what they had taken to calling ‘Mana Amplifier Crystals.’

  What they needed was ‘Mana Power Crystals,’ like the giant crystal in the terraforming box—surely more, less house-sized power crystals were out there, like batteries waiting to be found. Kelly needed to find one herself. Of course, she could’ve just regrown a mana pulling axe’s crystal and just grabbed it, but then, that would completely ruin the day.

  "Give me a sec." Kelly slapped the dead tool on the bench. "Gonna pop outside. Grab a goblin. Maybe tie up a troll."

  Rowena's head snapped up. "What?"

  "Power source. It needs mana. They've got mana. Simple exchange."

  "Are you crazy? You can't bring one of those things in here!"

  "Relax. I'll find a cooperative one."

  "And risk every tool in here? What if they have actual magic? You bring one of those things in here, you're off the project. I don't care who loaned you out. I don't care how fast you pick things up."

  "Jeez, really, relax. They're harmless once you get to know them. Fine. Fine. No monsters in the lab. Today." Kelly raised both hands in assent, a wide, reckless motion. "I'll bring them tomorrow."

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

  Even so, the breakthrough meant she could, in theory, upgrade her monomolecular blade—fold crystal traits into its edge, add magical effects to any form it took, and create magic bullets with unlimited ammo. Every shape of the weapon could take on new, dangerous properties, giving it the same terrifying adaptability as the alien Tuins weapons she had barely survived, like the multiple-armed Ithili.

  With the right strain, if she wanted, she could make it so every shape the weapon took could also spit acid or sing offensive songs.

  Kelly had done it.

  Rowena watched her in disbelief. Her stare had that specific, laser-focused intensity people reserve for unexpected super-weapons or sudden, unaccounted-for mountains of cash. Like she’d stumbled upon a billion credit lottery ticket.

  The whole process of merging the crystal into a usable tool—the part that was supposed to take a team of experts months of screaming and coffee—took Kelly less time than it took to tie a boot. Thanks to her Titles and those loops she’d burned practicing, a nightmare procedure had turned into a single, smooth motion. Making this weird, reactive dimensional rock into a stable tool would have a real lab filing for extensions. Kelly’s reset-powered experience made it a blink-and-you-miss-it thing. That skill threw her in with the corporate golden kids who got their first lab at twelve. Her only real edge was the loop-blessed ability to detonate a dimensions worth of reality and just call it a ‘practice run’.

  Stopping the crystal from trying to eat its own structure? Making it grow in a straight line instead of a violent spiral? Stuff that would have a normal crew sweating bullets and filling out incident reports just… didn’t happen. The material didn’t give her trouble. It just did what she told it. Kelly handled the problems of controlling crystal growth by grabbing it and forcing it to behave.

  The final product wasn’t pretty. But getting any product at all from this gear with this crew was a miracle for war-laden lab and its scrapped-together team. They were crisis-mode cast-offs, working without cloud backup, holographic assists, or any support structure. These people were here because their skills weren’t valuable enough anywhere else—buried in debt, out of leverage and personal power, or just trapped. Like Rowena. Or Kelly. They had the obsessive drive but not the power, the clout, or the freedom to get a spot in a proper off-world facility. Seeing a working tool get slapped together in a few hours left them looking like they’d witnessed a magic trick.

  “Well damn,” Rowena said, her voice a mix of shock and naked hunger. She stared at Kelly the way a prospector stares at a motherlode of uncut rare minerals . “I mean… look at that. Just look at it. Do you have any idea what you just did? With skills like that, you could walk into any major xenobotany firm off-planet and name your price. They’d hand you a Helix Award just to get you to sign the contract. You’d make someone’s entire fiscal year before lunch.”

  “Sure,” Kelly said. The casual reply was a transparent lie. Kelly was awesome. The several loops of practice were just the cost of doing business. She had a passing familiarity with off-world agri-tech industry and assumed this was probably baby stuff for people with the right lab and fresh samples. Someone else would crack this soon enough—she remembered that idiot corporate heir already using brain-jacked creatures as mana-channeling loopholes.Today, though, this loop, was a tactical break. An armory upgrade session before the real monsters showed up, with some free time to plan her next move.

  “And working at your speed,” Rowena continued, her eyes already doing the mental math, “you’d turn a department’s profit line vertical. I’m being completely serious. I’d hire you on the spot as a pure investment. Your development curve is ridiculous. It’s disgusting. It’s a Shame you’re already with Vaughn.”

  “What if I wanted to stick around? train under you?” Kelly asked. “An apprenticeship.”

  “Don’t. Don’t even joke.” Rowena’s face shut down. It became a masterpiece of professional dread. “I know the rules of this particular game. Trying to steal an asset from a Big Four subsidiary, or worse, from the Upper Echelon’s direct pool, gets you penalized. Permanently. If I seriously considered pulling a prospect with your work rate into my dirt-and-weeds operation, they’d make an example out of me and retroactively void my birth certificate.”

  Well, that answered why a job offer wasn’t exactly forthcoming this loop. Not that Kelly wanted it—but it would’ve been nice.

  “Fine, fine,” Kelly said. “Can you set me up with a recommendation for where I can learn more?” She paused, scanning her memory… “Can’t I test for the… what’s it called, the ‘Orion GMO Flora Society’?”

  Rowena let out a tired breath. “You’d have to submit your work through their portal for peer validation. The whole thing’s a bureaucratic mess. Everyone in the chain will try to attach their name to it—or just claim you stole it. It’s a total waste of your time, but people will still try to block you on principle.

  “What’s gotten into you, Kelly?” Rowena suddenly asked, serious. “You show up a dozen times stronger than you were the last time I saw you, but you’re still an intern? And even worse, they’ve got you on life-duty?” Ah. Kelly had forgotten about that—well, not forgotten, exactly—not with her implants. But she had placed it so low on her list of priorities she’d subconsciously treated it as normal. But her ‘normal’ was everyone else’s ‘end of the world.’

  This loop, in her rush to get to the lab, she’d taken a risk and been remotely sanctioned through life duty. Life-duty—the corporate clause that claimed your labor until a debt was paid, using crisis exemptions to lock you in. They would need an interview later in the day, but of course, Kelly would spend the entire day in the lab avoiding it, then reset just as the explosion hit. “Did you upgrade yourself using the crisis clause? Are you crazy? Don’t you know that’s basically slavery? Vaughn will claim anything you do until it’s paid!”

  “Which is why I usually get Genecorp to sanction me,” Kelly shrugged. “Their penalties are clear. No life-debt or icing covered slavery. Just a bill.”

  Rowena paused for a second before speaking. “Look I’ll help in anyway I can, but thats… I mean. Kelly, seriously.” Rowena pinched the bridge of her nose and gave Kelly a tired, sympathetic look. “My door’s always open for you. I still remember you—the stubborn one who showed up to every event that had even the tiniest connection to the big projects, always asking ‘how,’ ‘why,’ or ‘what if we push it too far.’ You never quit. Always trying to understand. Guess you’ve always wanted to fix this messed-up world, right?”

  Pfft. Kelly thought. It was sweet, and heartwarming. But Rowena couldn’t be more wrong. Kelly almost laughed when she heard the last part. Fix it? Changing the world was just a side effect. She was just cataloging the best ways to break it properly.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to change the world,” Kelly said. “I am a… I pioneer, maybe?” She paused, searching for the word. “No… I’m an explorer. And a fighter—I think I’ve always been fighting, and I’m just starting to realize it. I’ll always be both of those things, at the front of it all, but I need a moment to figure things out, to work on my mind in different ways before what’s coming hits. Will you help me, Rowe?”

  “How did you—?” Rowena paused, then a real smile broke through. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing. You’re weaponizing familiarity. I don’t know how you found out, but using the nickname is a low blow.” She sighed. “I’m not unwilling to teach you. This is not an apprenticeship. You get no credits, and definitely no contract pay. If anyone asks, you’re an eccentric hobbyist with a disturbing fixation on carnivorous plants, and I’m humoring you for my own amusement.”

  Kelly’s smile was all teeth.

  “Perfect. Let’s start with something that can cut through a standard bulkhead. For horticultural reasons.”

  The last few hours became a satisfying cycle of experimenting and discovering different effects of crystals and volatile mana into functional tools, infusing them with pure, distilled randomly selected insanity to see what happened, and couldn’t wait to test. She pushed her Mana-Focused Student title, nagged her Tinkerer title for better insights, and the Status finally coughed up a promotion to [Magic Tinkerer ? Grade II]. A participation trophy, but she’d take it.

  Kelly had tried to convince the staff to leave, but all but the synthetics and Rowena simply refused, stating her work was too important, not just for those being poisoned by bad air on the outskirts, but for the world.

  The day came to its inevitable close, and for the first time, Kelly decided to stay behind and keep at it.

  Then the ground started arguing with the foundations. Distant gunfire, the wet-thump of explosions, and the distinct sound of things that were once buildings becoming not-buildings filtered through the reinforced walls. Kelly adjusted her grip on a crystal controller and kept working. The remaining flesh-and-blood staff saw the literal war outside and finally bolted, fleeing to bunker rooms underground or to perform heroics that would look good on their posthumous reviews.

  She eventually saw the military east grid dome rise above them, heard the clashes. Felt the earthquakes that were clearly some catastrophe-level individuals throwing tantrums because the magical wasn’t theirs yet, and nobody wanted to share. Then, of course, came the main event: the idiot tampered with the mana terraforming cube and the thousands of runes it held. And of course, this culminated in the massive supernova explosion as a result of the idiot’s tampering, causing the world to briefly resemble a fiery disco ball.

  But this time, as the chromatic wave of annihilation swept in, as the world around her decided to stop being solid and start being light and memory and dust, Kelly’s body took a vote and against the all encompassing death…

  Decided to keep living.

  [Title Equipped: Endurance Engine V]

  [The propensity that you will break has been reduced by 20%]

  “Wow,” Kelly said to the dissolving air, looking at the notification. “So that’s what the full blast feels like from the inside. And they say you can't buy good life insurance.” She took a step forward on floor that was mostly philosophy and ash and coughed out a plume of something that definitely wasn’t air.