Anomis’s bag of holding contained nearly five times the number of heartstones that Caen had obtained himself.

  Each heartstone corresponded to a monster slain, and after redeeming all the heartstones, Caen left the haul hall with a large sack slung over his shoulder. It held a ton of monster carcasses but wasn’t too heavy, as it was a spatial storage device.

  Limping, Caen made his way to the warp gate, getting stared at by participants in the accommodations area. He warped to Vai’s basement, and as he climbed up to his room through the secret passage, he could feel two souls waiting in there for him. Connecting to them revealed their identities.

  He slid open the trapdoor and began moving his bed aside. A spirit tendril brushed his spirit, then two pairs of hands quickly joined him in dislodging the bed so he could step out into the room.

  Caen dropped the sack on the floor. “Hey, Dad. Hey, Grandpa.”

  Ergen crushed him in a tight hug. “You scared us sick!” his father exclaimed. “Hshnol told us you were okay, but… by the Eye!”

  “Gen, let the boy breathe for Tet’s sake,” said Niodt, Caen’s grandfather. His Blood-healing thread cluster was active; diagnostic spells, most likely. “Caen, sit down and give me a rundown of your condition.”

  Caen complied. They helped him get out of the fairly damaged armor after Chasma peeled away from it. Caen sent the fragment into the large sack on the floor.

  “Have fun,” he told Chasma. It was within the bag of holding, but he could still sense the fragment through their bond.

  He stripped out of his thick layers of clothing, then took off his helmet and the crumbling bandages on his face.

  Ergen paled at the state of his skin. The healers had given priority to extracting the necrotic clumps and reconstructing internal tissue, which meant that his exterior appeared terrible.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” Caen quickly assured him.

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” said Niodt, who was still running diagnostic spells.

  “How long have you both been here for?” Caen asked.

  “Nearly fourteen hours,” Ergen said.

  “Before the trials ended?”

  “We left in the middle of your fight with Anomis,” Niodt said.

  His grandfather had worked in the healing bay in the past. He’d know what effects Blight had on its victims.

  “I feared you’d come back here immediately,” Niodt continued, “so me and your dad rushed down here in as leisurely a pace as possible.” He nodded at a comically large basket of fruits and home-made bread on Caen's table. “Had it seem like a casual visit, even. Gren and Lem are at Oludlana’s, paying a visit to Zeris. Ven is back home with your mother, probably keeping her from dying of worry.”

  Ergen brought over the basket of food, and it was an easy thing to Mimic absorption from Chasma using their bond as a point of contact. The entire basket and its contents were consumed in a few moments, filling him with vitality. His hunger was satiated, and he felt considerably more energized.

  Ergen scanned Caen’s spirit, which was filled with far more slag than Caen had ever accumulated in his entire life. The integration of spirit particles was an involuntary process, and managing its efficiency required fairly complex spirit-healing techniques. Ergen alternated between cleansing and aiding Caen’s integration, while Niodt continued the work of reconstructing damaged tissue.

  Caen assisted them both by multicasting spirit-healing and Blood-healing spells. They talked and gossiped as they worked slowly through the night.

  At some point, Caen popped into the Deep Astral just so his mother could see that he was well.

  By the time day had broken, Caen’s spirit was completely cleansed of slag build-up, thanks to the efforts of his father and himself. This would undoubtedly change as his spirit continued to integrate the free particles it had drawn in, but in the meantime, his spirit felt lighter.

  Niodt and Caen had fully reversed the effects of necrosis within Caen’s body. The few necrotic clumps that remained had lost much of their potency and could easily be handled by absorption. They’d also managed to heal his skin of all the lesions on it, though, of course, Niodt had done most of the work. It hadn’t taken Caen much effort to mend the stab wound in his thigh.

  “Your Blood-healing passive augmentations,” Niodt said, shaking his head. “Are you sure your affinity’s a rating of 1? Your body takes to healing too well. I read those studies you used to parrot as a child, but this is… it’s far, far beyond expectation.”

  Ergen laughed softly. “I guess he’s had a lot of practice recovering from illness.”

  “No, this is more than that,” Niodt said, frowning. “Though I realize that I’m very much out of my depth here. A borrowed ability that can eat anything, was it?”

  “Absorb, grandpa.”

  “Absorb,” the elderly man repeated with unhidden incredulity. “Absorb anything within your body without harming you and…” He shook his head as if trying to pull away from the tangent he’d gone off on. “My point is… this is… well, it doesn’t make sense to me.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Caen nodded. “It’s one of the reasons why I need to go to the Citadel. It’s the best place I know of to get answers without subjecting myself to anyone’s mercy.”

  They all let out a collective sigh.

  ***

  Later that morning, Caen went down to the first stratum to run a few errands for Uncle Vai. Being a primary aide was his cover, but he still had to do the work.

  Despite how terribly exhausted he was, the sun on his skin was rather invigorating. After Hshnol had brought him a large serving of breakfast, Caen had stocked up on vitality. This had helped, but he was being held up by little more than sleep abeyance spells at this point.

  Vai had mentioned that Caen might be under surveillance, so he made a point of glancing at his pocket watch religiously to keep up the appearance of being on a strict schedule.

  While waiting his turn at the Records Office, he sat watching a projection display of some highlights from the third trial yesterday. Most of the people here seemed uninterested. Herb Mask’s fight with Anomis was one of several high points in the trial, and Caen noted that he’d risen in the scoreboards to third place. Soza was now in first place, Yeishi in second, and Anomis had dropped to fifth place.

  Caen had earned eighty points in the last trial, bringing his total up to three hundred and seventy-five. That was unofficially higher than the current record. Caen felt a small measure of pride from this. If he somehow managed to make it to the end of the trials, he might set a new record. It was a baffling realization. He’d been so weak for so long, and sometimes it felt like a dream how much different things were now. Maybe he’d hit his head very hard in that dance rehearsal back in Drenlin and hadn’t woken up ever since. He’d—

  “Ar’Caen Ereshta’al?” a clerk announced.

  The errands took up most of the morning, then he spent the rest of his afternoon in the restricted section of the general library. His understanding of Klakalk was coming along nicely. Dream-guarding was unfairly helpful in learning new languages. While he did this, another portion of his mind practiced Contract magic, carefully going over some exercises he’d gotten from the restricted section of the library.

  In the evening, he rushed back to Vai’s after pretending to glance at his pocketwatch. Chasma was nowhere near done feeding. After a quick dinner, Caen crawled into bed and slept the sleep of the dead.

  ***

  Caen jolly ol' chap sat at a round table with a few distinguished participants of the 167th Patronage trials. They were all decked in finely enchanted armor, especially Rlarlarla, who had recently earned a patronage slot for distinguishing itself so thoroughly in the trials.

  “Your performance was utterly beyond reproach,” a faceless participant praised.

  “Well, yes, of course it was,” Rlarlarla said mildly, as it brushed off a speck of dust on its pauldron. “I bring my utmost best to every activity I involve myself in.”

  “Indeed, you do,” Caen said, nodding as he reached for another biscuit. They were just so delightful, and—

  He reached for another biscuit.

  He reached for another biscuit.

  He reached for another—

  Caen blinked. He was awake.

  Wait…

  He glanced around the round table. He was alone. There were only empty chairs here. The thick fog of the Seam whirled all about, coaxing him to lose himself to its haze.

  Caen felt as though he were missing something. He cast a spell to locate nearby mental signatures. It picked up on one mind, just as he sensed a presence approaching from the left. He turned to see Uncle Vai walking out of the fog and chuckling. It was rare to see him off his rocking chair. He was dressed in a suit as purple as the Deep Astral.

  “Hello, Uncle Vai.”

  “Tea party again?” Vai asked with a knowing smile.

  “What?”

  Vai laughed. “You’ll get the hang of this soon, runt. Don’t worry.”

  Another presence approached. Sh’leinu. Despite having already confirmed her identity with Soul-sense, Caen used a simple bimodal scan to verify her signature just to put her at ease.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  “Hello, my dear. Did you…”

  He nodded, smiling.

  “Uncle Vai,” Sh’leinu greeted. “Have you suddenly taken an interest in spectral banishment?”

  “Eh. Just wanted to see what the specters looked like this year.”

  “Well, feel free to assist us if you like,” she said not unkindly. “Caen? Do the honors, please.”

  Caen began casting an involved Dream-guarding spell chain to rearrange the scene around them. Specters, his mother had always said, were drawn to active and bizarre dream sequences. And the more a dream sequence resembled a real instance of spectral affliction, the more likely it was to lure out the specters responsible.

  It was nighttime. Two impossibly large moons hung in the sky. Giant huts and shacks surrounded them, and a terrifyingly ghoulish song haunted the scene. Faceless participants were running around in terror as they were chased by sprite-possessed boulders or other oversized pieces of debris. It was a heavily embellished adaptation of the actual memory.

  “Good use of exaggeration,” Sh’leinu said. “I have concealed our presence. Now, scan for specters.”

  Caen had only managed to locate a few specters in past attempts. Still, he began casting. The spell imprint identified only six foreign mental signatures. Pinning down their locations was another matter entirely. “Six?”

  “Fifteen,” Sh’leinu said. “It gets easier with practice. They’re all recent latcher-ons, anyway. It won’t take you too long to ferret them out.”

  A faceless man in ice armor was screaming as he ran away from a group of human-sized dust sprites. “Him,” Caen said.

  Sh’leinu stretched out a hand, and the man morphed into a squirming monstrosity that puffed into smoke. “Good.”

  Caen examined the spell imprint in his mind, tracking another specter. Caen pointed at one of the large huts. “That one.”

  When Sh’leinu reached out a hand towards it, the hut exploded into a confusing mass of impossible shapes. It began moving towards them.

  “Hmm,” Sh’leinu said. “That’s a tough one.”

  An icosahedron of orange light appeared in front of Uncle Vai and began contorting itself into impossible shapes as well. Looking at it sent a spike of pain through Caen’s mind.

  Particles began breaking off the large specter and flowing into the icosahedron until the entire specter was gone. “Alright. I think I’ll take my leave now,” Vai said just before vanishing.

  “Old people are so strange,” Sh’leinu muttered. “Well, let’s get rid of the rest.”