Aetheria

Willowbank looked smaller in daylight.

Aaron had spent most of the previous three days fighting through streets that seemed to stretch endlessly whenever another pack came through them, yet the entire village could be crossed in minutes once the roads were clear. Morning exposed the distances more cruelly than darkness had, showing how close the treatment hall stood to the western barricade, how little separated the homes from the river, and how many people had died within sight of places where they had eaten breakfast or argued with neighbours only days earlier.

Bodies had already been moved from the main streets. Corrupted creatures were stacked outside the village for burning, while the dead from Willowbank lay beneath sheets inside the old grain store because the riverbank cemetery could not be approached safely until someone knew whether the contamination had reached the soil.

Aaron helped carry the last of them.

Silas Marr was among those brought in from the square. Most of his armour had been removed after the rubble was lifted from him, leaving Aaron with an uncomfortable view of how much damage the collapsed wall had done beneath the chest plate.

Grey Banner had sent twenty-seven fighters into the western settlements during the emergency.

Six had died.

Silas was the only one Aaron had known by name before the catastrophe began.

Lewis Grant survived.

The restoration specialists saved his hand, although the smallest finger was gone and the two beside it had been removed farther down after the damaged tissue began darkening. Aaron found him outside the treatment hall during the afternoon with his right hand wrapped thickly against his chest and his bow sitting beside him.

Maya sat nearby.

Neither had much to say.

Aaron brought them food from the village kitchen and remained there while Lewis tried to eat with his other hand. The boy managed half the bowl before his spoon began rattling against the wood strongly enough that he put it down.

"I keep feeling them," Lewis said eventually. "My fingers."

Maya looked toward the wrapped hand. "The healer said that can happen."

"I know what she said."

His breathing changed before anything else did.

Lewis pulled harder at the air, shoulders rising while his eyes fixed on the bandaged hand as though something underneath had started moving. Maya spoke to him, but the words did not seem to reach far enough.

Aaron moved the food aside when Lewis bent forward.

"I can't—"

His chest tightened around the next breath.

Maya reached for him.

Lewis flinched so violently that the bench scraped backward.

"I can't breathe."

Aaron had seen Priya treat people whose lungs were filling with blood.

This looked different.

Lewis was breathing.

Too quickly.

Maya called for a healer anyway, and one of the women from the treatment hall came outside within moments. She checked Lewis while talking him through slower breaths, staying beside him until the shaking eased enough for his shoulders to drop.

Lewis covered his face with his good hand.

"I'm sorry."

The healer continued checking his pulse. "You don't need to apologise."

Aaron remained until she was satisfied Lewis would not collapse.

He saw the same thing happen twice more before evening.

One villager began screaming while helping clear a house where his brother had died. Another Outsider walked away from the burning pits, made it halfway across the square and fainted hard enough to split his eyebrow against the road.

Others reacted more quietly.

Miles spent most of the day repairing barricades that nobody expected to use again.

He lifted timber, moved stone and helped bury damaged equipment beneath the workshop awning without speaking unless someone asked him something directly. His shield remained near the treatment hall even when he worked several streets away.

Jenna joined the scouts searching the western fields.

Priya barely left the healers.

Aaron moved between all three whenever there was something useful to do.

By evening, usefulness had become harder to find.

The dead were counted.

The injured were stable or beyond help.

The village kitchens had enough hands.

Highcrest's relief wagons continued arriving with water and supplies.

Aaron found himself sitting on the steps outside a ruined house with dried blood beneath his fingernails and nowhere he needed to be for the first time since Briar Glen's river had gone silent.

The quiet lasted less than a minute.

A wagon rolled through the square carrying three bodies from an outer farm.

One belonged to a woman Aaron recognised.

Her name was Clara.

She had worked the hostel kitchen in Highcrest before joining Hearthbound, mostly taking supply and evacuation contracts because she hated fighting. Aaron had spoken to her enough times to know she put too much pepper into stew and had a younger brother somewhere in another settlement.

Clara had driven one of the medical wagons during the evacuation.

A corrupted creature had reached it on the road north of Willowbank.

She survived the attack long enough to reach the relief camp.

She died that morning.

Aaron watched the wagon pass.

The last time he had spoken to her, she had complained that Northbound returned from contracts looking progressively worse and asked whether they had considered finding safer employment.

Aaron had told her Jenna would probably become ill if she stayed inside Highcrest for a full week.

Clara had laughed.

That memory remained annoyingly clear.

Miles sat beside Aaron sometime later, carrying two cups of something warm from the kitchen. He handed one over, and they watched workers cover the damaged roof opposite them with canvas while smoke from the creature pits drifted above the western fields.

"I thought Silas was going to be one of those people we kept running into," Miles said.

Aaron drank.

The liquid tasted mostly of boiled herbs.

"So did I."

Miles rubbed one hand across his face. "I watched that Stoneback hit the wall. I was maybe thirty metres away, and by the time we reached him there wasn't anything to do."

Aaron remembered Silas at Briar Glen, organising carts while people panicked around him.

They had known him for less than a week.

It still hurt.

Miles stared into his cup. "If I die here, my mum won't even know."

Aaron's throat tightened.

Earth had remained somewhere behind everything for so long that thinking about it felt different now.

His family would have seen him put on the glasses.

Maybe they had found his body.

Maybe there was no body to find.

Maybe time had passed differently.

Every theory Outsiders produced eventually ran into the same wall: nobody knew.

"I keep thinking someone's going to figure out how to log us out," Miles continued. "Then yesterday I was holding a man's stomach closed while Priya tried to stop him bleeding, and I realised I don't actually believe that anymore."

Aaron looked toward him.

Miles did not seem to expect an answer.

The admission sat between them while Willowbank continued around it.

Aaron had stopped believing too.

He could not identify the moment it happened.

Perhaps Briar Glen had done it.

Perhaps seeing Silas beneath the wall had.

Perhaps it had been happening gradually since Larkhaven and only became impossible to ignore once the dead started including people whose voices Aaron could remember.

Priya found them near sunset.

She sat on the step below without mentioning the cups or asking what they were discussing. Her sleeves had been changed, although a faint reddish stain remained near one cuff.

"Mrs. Halden died."

Miles closed his eyes.

Aaron remembered the name from the evacuation wagons.

She was the mother who had refused to let anyone take her dead daughter away.

"The contamination reached her heart this afternoon," Priya said. "Lena tried everything she had."

They remained together as the light faded.

Jenna returned after dark.

She had mud on her knees and carried a torn strip of grey cloth inside a folded piece of paper.

The scouts had reached the field boss again.

Highcrest wanted answers.

So did everyone else.

The Blight-Crowned Harrower had been killed far enough from Willowbank that almost nobody saw the fight clearly, yet word had spread across every defensive camp along the western river before noon. A Level 34 field boss and the elite creatures surrounding it had disappeared from the catastrophe without any known Highcrest party claiming responsibility.

Damon had been fighting almost thirty kilometres north.

Sera had witnesses placing her at Dunwall throughout the same period.

Ronan had been inside Willowbank.

Celia's location was recorded by enough scouts to remove her as well.

Stonegate's nearest relief parties were still days away.

That left three figures nobody could identify.

Jenna unfolded the grey cloth across her knee. "This caught on a thorn about half a kilometre west of the Harrower."

Aaron touched the edge.

The material felt rough.

Cheap.

A tear ran through one side where the thorn had pulled fibres loose.

"That's from them?"

"Probably." Jenna tucked it back into the paper. "We found three sets of tracks going west. One is heavier, one barely leaves much impression at all, and the third keeps disappearing anywhere the ground gets wet."

Miles looked toward her. "Disappearing?"

"Water covers it."

Aaron remembered the strange water around the Harrower's corpse.

Jenna continued before anyone could build much from it. "A farmer saw three travellers leave the western field after the fighting. Hooded robes, nothing distinctive. He thought they were villagers until they went the wrong way."

"Weapons?"

"He couldn't tell."

Aaron thought of the pale movement he had seen through the smoke.

"Did he see faces?"

Jenna shook her head. "Hoods were up."

The search continued through the following morning.

Scouts followed the western tracks until the stone ground broke them apart near the old road. Two riders checked farms farther ahead, while another group searched abandoned buildings for signs that the strangers had camped nearby.

They found nothing.

A child from an outer homestead remembered seeing three people walking south sometime before sunset.

An old shepherd insisted there had been four.

Another villager claimed one of them was carrying a spear.

His wife told the scouts he had been hiding in their cellar during the entire attack.

The only detail repeated consistently was the clothing.

Three hooded figures.

Simple robes.

Worn enough that one farmer described them as beginner equipment.

That produced more confusion than it solved.

Highcrest's strongest Outsiders wore armour assembled over of dangerous contracts. Damon had destroyed enough expensive swords for merchants to gossip about his equipment budget, while Sera's robes had been woven with several layers of treated monster fibre.

Whoever killed the Harrower apparently walked away dressed like they had arrived in Aetheria last week.

Nobody found them.

The regional emergency did not care.

Death reports continued arriving.

The contamination spread down two tributaries before Highcrest's engineers isolated the affected reservoirs, while settlements farther west abandoned wells until mages could test them. Smaller outbreaks of blighted creatures kept defenders moving between villages even after the Harrower's death reduced the largest concentrations.

By the end of the week, the confirmed dead passed three hundred.

Highcrest held a memorial in the central square.

Aaron attended with Northbound.

Names were read for almost two hours.

Silas Marr.

Clara Venn.

Merek Halden.

The list continued through people Aaron knew, people he had seen once and people whose existence he learned only because somebody stood in the square crying when their name was called.

Lewis stood beside Maya with his bandaged hand tucked against his chest.

He made it through most of the memorial.

Near the end, somebody read the name of another Grey Banner Ranger who had fought beside them at Willowbank.

Lewis walked out of the square.

Maya followed.

Aaron watched them leave and stayed where he was.

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The next morning, he returned to the guild.

Contracts still covered the boards.

Merchants still needed escorts.

Scouts still needed routes checked.

The names of the dead remained on a separate wall nearby until their belongings could be returned to friends or family.

Aaron took a western patrol contract.

Northbound accepted with him.

Life did not return to what it had been before Willowbank.

It simply continued.

Three days south of Willowbank, the village of Alderwick had one tailor, two blacksmiths, an inn with eight rooms and a bakery that sold everything before noon because the owner refused to make more.

Mira liked it immediately.

The tailor had less enthusiasm about her.

A skeleton wearing a cheap grey robe and asking for work created several reasonable concerns, particularly when the skeleton was thirteen and accompanied by a boy carrying an oversized bundle of broken sword parts, along with another hooded girl whose clothing remained wet despite the warm afternoon.

Mira solved the first problem by repairing the tailor's torn sleeve while he was still deciding whether to refuse.

Master Ellin stopped speaking halfway through the repair.

Mira had borrowed his needle because hers was currently unsuitable for delicate cloth, and the simple iron tool felt almost comically light after months using the Hollowsteel Needle. Her fingers moved through the torn seam while Adaptive Cognition separated fabric tension, thread direction and the original stitch pattern into details she had already practised often enough that very little conscious effort was required.

She finished the sleeve.

Ellin turned his arm several times.

"You said you've apprenticed?"

"Not exactly."

"You've worked under a tailor?"

"Also not exactly."

The old man studied her empty eye sockets.

Mira remembered that expressions were harder without a face.

"I can sew."

Ellin looked at the sleeve again.

"Apparently."

He gave her work.

Kael found the blacksmith two streets away.

His introduction involved less negotiation because Master Bronn looked at the broken greatsword guard, the damaged pieces of metal Kael had carried from Bellhaven and the calluses across the boy's hands before asking whether he knew how to swing a hammer.

Kael said yes.

Bronn handed him one.

They began that afternoon.

The third traveller disappeared toward the river.

Nobody asked her what she intended to do.

Mira suspected that was safer.

Alderwick had heard about the western catastrophe, although most villagers knew only that several settlements had been attacked and Highcrest had begun restricting river water. The blight had not reached this far south, and the village remained busy with harvest work rather than defensive preparations.

Mira spent the first day shortening trousers.

The work was almost aggressively ordinary.

Ellin's shop smelled of cloth, wax and old wood. Bundles of wool occupied one wall, linen another, while finished garments hung from ceiling beams because the room had run out of sensible storage years ago.

Mira liked the organisation despite the fact that there was none.

She worked beside the front window while Ellin handled customers and occasionally inspected what she had finished. Her robe sleeves remained rolled back, exposing thin skeletal wrists and the tiny patch of living skin on one fingertip that had grown slightly since Bellhaven.

The fingertip still looked strange.

Warm.

Soft.

Alive.

Mira avoided poking it while customers were present.

Her level had reached 17 during the blight outbreak.

Kael reached 17 as well.

The girl travelling with them had never volunteered hers, although Mira had seen enough to stop assuming level would explain very much about her anyway.

Mira had accumulated attribute points without spending all of them.

Mira was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside several scraps of cloth, sorting the pieces Ellin allowed her to keep. Kael leaned against the doorframe with soot covering his forearms and a dark mark across one cheek where he had apparently forgotten his face existed while working.

"I haven't decided yet," Mira said.

"You've had three levels."

"I was busy."

"You nearly got stepped on by a field boss."

Mira placed one strip of wool with the others. "That was part of being busy."

Kael came inside.

Ellin had already left for the evening, trusting Mira to lock the shop once she finished.

Kael sat across from her.

His status opened shortly afterward.

Mira opened hers as well.

Mira

Level: 17

Class: Monk — Common

Species: Human

Her attributes had shifted significantly since the advancement.

The restoration of her body complicated direct comparison with the skeletal form she had occupied before Level 10, but the points available remained simple enough.

Kael had spent nearly everything.

Mira noticed immediately.

"You put six into Strength."

"Over three levels."

"You already gain Strength quickly."

"I use a greatsword."

"You don't currently have a greatsword."

Kael's eyes narrowed.

Mira stopped herself from smiling because she could not.

"Temporary problem," he said.

The broken weapon components he carried around made his opinion clear enough.

Mira pulled her knees closer. "I've been thinking about whether manual allocation should reinforce what we already develop naturally or cover what daily activity doesn't develop enough."

Kael dragged a scrap of chalk from the tailor's worktable and drew several rough columns onto a spare piece of wood. Strength, Agility, Endurance, Spirit and the other attributes appeared in a line while he talked through the last few weeks of training.

Sword work pushed his Strength and Agility naturally.

Blacksmithing added more Strength and Endurance than he expected.

Cultivation seemed to influence Spirit and Essence-related development, although neither of them had enough information to decide how directly.

His daily movement, especially after losing the sword, had changed the balance again.

"If natural growth keeps responding to what we're doing, putting everything into my strongest attributes might be inefficient," Kael said. "Strength is already getting pressure from training, fighting and smithing."

Mira picked up the chalk. "But a manual point is immediate. Natural growth isn't."

"That matters when the attribute has a threshold."

"Or when you need the result now."

Kael nodded.

Mira added another mark beneath Spirit.

Her own situation was stranger.

Tailoring barely demanded Strength.

Fine hand work challenged Dexterity and perception more consistently, while cultivation pushed against Spirit and Essence control. Monk training distributed physical demand more evenly across her body, especially now that living tissue had begun returning and Structural Flow needed constant adjustment to compensate.

The tiny patch of skin on her fingertip had already changed how pressure felt there.

Another patch had appeared beneath her right heel two days earlier.

Mira disliked the second one.

She had spent months learning how a skeletal foot behaved and had only recently recovered the original left one from the slime that stole it. Growing soft tissue under one heel altered contact with the ground enough that part of her movement had to be recalibrated again.

Kael tapped Endurance on the board. "You should probably put something there."

Mira looked at him. "Why?"

"Because being alive seems exhausting."

It was difficult to argue with.

Kael continued before she answered. "Your body is rebuilding itself while you're training, cultivating and fighting. If Endurance affects how well you tolerate sustained physical stress, you're creating more of that stress every day."

"Probably."

"You hate putting points into things when you're only probably sure."

"I hate wasting limited resources."

"They aren't limited forever."

"They are at the moment I spend them."

Kael accepted that with a slight tilt of his head.

The discussion moved to Spirit.

Mira had initially considered investing heavily there because almost everything magical she did depended on Essence. Healing, cultivation, the Lumen Moths, Structural Flow and several developing applications all competed for the same resource.

Then the field boss fight changed her thinking.

Her Essence had lasted.

Kael's had not.

Neither result came entirely from their attributes.

Mira's efficiency had improved drastically through repeated healing practice, cultivation and the control she had learned while wearing the Hollowglass coat. Kael still used Essence more explosively, especially when combining internal elemental manipulation with sword techniques.

"Your reserve isn't the main problem," Mira said.

Kael did not like the direction immediately. "I know."

"You waste too much."

"I know."

"You wasted a lot against the Harrower."

Kael picked up the chalk.

Mira watched him break it.

He stared at the two pieces in his hand.

"That wasn't deliberate."

"It demonstrates my point."

Kael put the chalk down more carefully.

Mira sorted another strip of cloth while continuing. "If you increase Spirit without changing how you use Essence, you'll have more Essence to waste."

"I am changing how I use it."

"Then maybe Spirit later."

Kael rubbed soot from one wrist.

His expression remained unhappy, but not because Mira was wrong.

"What are you doing with yours?"

Mira opened the attribute page again.

She had five points.

After several minutes, she placed one into Endurance.

Two into Spirit.

One into Agility.

The final point remained.

Kael watched it.

Mira returned to sorting cloth.

He eventually leaned back against the worktable. "Parallel Thought is unfair."

Mira's hands stopped.

"What?"

"You've been cultivating this entire time."

Mira glanced inward.

One portion of her awareness remained on the thread of Essence circulating through her body.

The pattern had started nearly forty minutes earlier.

She had almost forgotten Kael could not do the same thing.

Adaptive Cognition had changed during the Jester fight, but Parallel Thought had taken longer to understand afterward. It did not create another Mira inside her head and it did not double what she knew.

Attention simply stopped behaving as one indivisible thing.

While Mira sorted cloth and discussed attributes with Kael, another organised process maintained the circulation pattern she had been practising since Bellhaven. It monitored a small number of familiar conditions, corrected deviations she had repeated enough times to recognise and returned anything unfamiliar to her full attention.

The process could not invent solutions.

It could not learn a new cultivation route without Mira actively working through it first.

Maintaining something known was different.

Mira checked the circulation.

The route had slipped slightly near her left shoulder when she reached above herself for cloth earlier.

The parallel process had corrected it.

"I am," she said.

Kael looked genuinely offended.

"I've been trying to figure out how to fit cultivation around smithing because Bronn gets angry when I stop hammering."

"You probably shouldn't cultivate while hitting hot metal."

"Exactly. You can."

"I don't think I should."

"You could."

Mira considered the forge.

Heat.

Heavy metal.

Molten fragments.

A hammer.

"I would prefer not to test it."

Kael's expression worsened because this still left the fundamental problem untouched.

Mira returned to the cloth.

The cultivation process continued.

"I have limits," she said. "I can't learn two complicated things at once."

"You're sewing and cultivating."

"I already know this circulation pattern."

"You're also talking to me."

"That isn't complicated."

Kael stared at her.

Mira realised the problem after the words left her.

She tilted her skull slightly. "I meant the process of conversation."

"That did not help."

Mira's shoulders moved with the silent equivalent of a laugh.

Kael remained bitter for another minute.

Then he asked how much concentration the circulation actually required.

The question brought them back to something useful.

Mira explained what she had noticed so far.

Parallel Thought was strongest when one task contained familiar, bounded steps. Maintaining a known cultivation loop worked because the process only needed to monitor whether Essence remained inside limits Mira had already established.

Tailoring simple seams worked similarly.

Designing something new did not.

Combat was harder because too many variables changed unpredictably.

Healing serious injuries was worse.

Kael listened while Mira picked up Ellin's needle and started repairing the hem of an old cloak.

Her hands handled the familiar stitch pattern.

The second process maintained cultivation.

Mira kept enough attention on both to recognise if either changed beyond expectation.

Kael watched for several minutes.

His irritation returned.

"That's terrible."

"For you?"

"For everyone who isn't you."

Mira pulled the thread through the final stitch. "Probably."

Kael stood.

"I'm going back to the forge."

"It's closed."

"Bronn lets me practise after hours."

Mira gathered the scraps into separate piles. "Cultivate first."

Kael stopped at the door.

His back remained toward her.

Mira waited.

Kael sighed and sat down again.

They cultivated together for nearly an hour.

Master Bronn discovered Kael asleep against the forge wall the next morning.

He woke him by dropping an empty bucket nearby.

Kael arrived at the anvil several minutes later with his hair flattened on one side and his cultivation session still sitting heavily behind his eyes. Bronn assigned him a box of damaged farm tools and told him to make himself useful before touching anything intended to kill a monster.

Kael repaired hoes.

Then hinges.

Then a shovel.

The work irritated him less than it had the first day.

Blacksmithing had begun showing him details he had ignored while using weapons.

A blade was not simply sharp metal.

The distribution of thickness changed how it flexed.

The tang mattered when force travelled into the grip.

Repeated impacts accumulated damage long before a visible fracture appeared.

Kael had learned the last lesson by destroying enough swords to qualify as evidence.

He examined a cracked axe head under Bronn's supervision and reheated it.

The hammer came down.

Again.

Again.

Kael adjusted the angle as the metal moved beneath each impact.

He had once thought forging a greatsword would mostly involve producing enough high-quality metal and shaping it correctly.

Bronn had removed that belief within two days.

Kael's old sword had been oversized enough that every weakness became more dangerous. Increasing the length changed leverage. Increasing width increased weight. Thickening everything solved one problem while creating another.

The sword Kael wanted to build eventually needed to survive him.

That requirement had become worse after Primordial Sword Disciple.

His Strength was growing.

Weapon Savant made him increasingly comfortable exploiting the full momentum of whatever he held.

Frost, lightning and heat added stresses the metal needed to tolerate.

Kael hammered the axe.

The irony bothered him.

Becoming better at using swords made it harder to build a sword capable of surviving being used by him.

Bronn approached while Kael was finishing the edge.

"Too thin."

Kael checked.

He agreed.

Bronn pointed to the shoulder behind the blade. "Farmer hits stone with that and it'll chip through here."

Kael reheated the metal.

They fixed it.

The correction stayed with him.

Later, when Bronn allowed Kael to work on a practice blade, he left more material near the sections that experienced repeated shock. The weapon became slightly heavier than he intended, forcing another adjustment farther down the profile.

Each change affected another.

Kael liked that.

Smithing felt surprisingly similar to swordsmanship when stripped down far enough.

Structure determined what movement could survive.

Kael spent the afternoon on the practice blade and ruined it near closing.

A small crack appeared while quenching.

Bronn broke the blade at the flaw, handed both pieces back and told Kael to study the grain.

Kael did.

He learned more from the broken metal than he wanted to admit.

When he left the forge, the aquamarine-haired girl was standing in the village fountain.

Both feet rested on the water.

Nobody in Alderwick seemed willing to address this.

Several children had gathered around the fountain while she manipulated thin streams between her fingers, guiding the water through looping shapes before returning it to the basin without spilling anything over the rim.

Her hood had fallen back.

Hair flowed almost to the water beneath her, far too long to remain practical and apparently unconcerned with practicality.

Kael stopped.

The children were trying to throw pebbles through the moving loops.

Every pebble missed.

Kael watched one curve toward an opening.

The water shifted.

The pebble changed direction and dropped harmlessly into the basin.

The girl looked pleased.

Kael continued walking.

He had spent enough time around her to understand that asking why she was doing something rarely improved the situation.

She joined him without leaving the fountain normally.

Water lifted beneath her feet and carried her over the stone edge before lowering her onto the road.

Kael looked down.

Her feet remained dry.

His boots were still damp from yesterday.

He disliked that too.

They found Mira at the tailor shop after sunset.

She had changed robes.

Ellin had allowed her to use discarded cloth, and Mira had somehow converted several pieces of grey, cream and faded orange fabric into something that still looked simple enough for travelling but fit her skeletal frame properly.

Kael inspected it.

"Already?"

"I had scraps."

"You were supposed to be working."

"I was."

Kael looked at the stitching.

Then at Mira.

Then at the aquamarine-haired girl.

The girl had acquired a pastry somewhere between the fountain and the tailor shop.

Kael decided not to ask.

Mira finished locking Ellin's door and joined them on the street.

They had been in Alderwick four days.

Long enough to recover.

Long enough for the catastrophe to become rumours carried by travellers rather than something immediately around them.

Mira had asked about the other affected villages each morning.

Some survived.

Some did not.

Nobody in Alderwick knew anything about Willowbank beyond a field boss dying somewhere near it.

That suited Kael.

He had not wanted congratulations.

The Harrower had nearly killed all three of them.

The creature's level had been high enough that their first attempts barely penetrated the armour, and the elite monsters surrounding it forced them to spend most of the opening exchange separating threats rather than attacking the boss directly.

They survived because the Harrower had already been focused on Willowbank.

Because terrain helped.

Because the three of them complemented one another better than they had before.

Because luck remained involved whether Kael liked admitting it or not.

The experience pushed all three of them through several levels.

Mira and Kael reached 17 before the final blow.

Kael had not asked the girl whether she had levelled.

He suspected she would answer with a question about fish.

They walked toward the inn.

Alderwick's evening streets were narrow enough that carts forced pedestrians against the building fronts, while lamps hung from ropes between upper floors and filled the road with warm patches of light.

Mira carried a bundle of cloth beneath one arm.

Kael carried the two broken pieces of his practice blade.

The girl carried three pastries now.

Kael finally looked at her.

"Where are you getting those?"

She pointed behind them.

The bakery had closed two hours ago.

Kael looked at Mira.

Mira continued walking.

"I don't want to know."

The girl ate another bite.

They reached the inn.

Their room occupied most of the upper floor and contained three beds, although the girl had slept in hers only once. She preferred the roof, the riverbank or apparently anywhere else with open air.

Mira spread cloth across the small table.

Kael placed the broken practice blade beside it.

Their conversation from the previous evening resumed almost immediately.

Kael had reconsidered his attribute allocation.

Mira had reconsidered hers too.

The field boss changed the scale of the discussion because both had experienced what happened when an enemy exceeded them badly enough that technique stopped covering every gap.

Kael drew the attribute columns again.

This time Mira added another category beside them.

Natural growth.

Under Strength, they listed sword training and smithing for Kael.

Under Agility, sword work, footwork and unarmed training.

Endurance collected almost everything physical.

Spirit included cultivation and repeated elemental control.

Mira's side looked different.

Tailoring influenced dexterity-related development.

Monk training spread pressure across Strength, Agility and Endurance.

Healing and cultivation contributed heavily to Spirit.

Structural Flow complicated several categories because improving how efficiently her body transferred force sometimes produced the same practical result as becoming physically stronger.

Kael circled that.

"If better coordination makes you hit harder without Strength increasing, then judging only by what an attribute lets you do becomes messy."

Mira nodded. "And if Strength rises naturally because I keep training, I need to know whether adding a point now accelerates something I already gain or compensates for something training isn't giving me."

The aquamarine-haired girl sat on the windowsill.

She had stopped eating.

Kael noticed her listening.

Mira continued. "There might not be one best distribution. It depends on what you're doing between levels."

Kael tapped Spirit. "And what you can improve without points."

"Essence efficiency."

"Technique."

"Cultivation."

"Equipment."

Mira looked toward his broken practice sword.

Kael moved it farther from her.

She returned to the board.

"If I can halve the Essence cost of something through control, putting several points into Spirit purely for a larger reserve might be worse than improving an attribute I can't compensate for as easily."

Kael nodded. "But only if the efficiency improvement actually happens."

"Yes."

"And if something kills you before then, the theoretical future improvement doesn't matter."

"Also yes."

They continued for almost an hour.

Neither found a formula.

That pleased Mira more than Kael.

Mira disliked conclusions built on missing information.

Kael disliked having information without being able to optimise it.

Eventually they agreed on a temporary approach.

Manual points would support immediate weaknesses, important thresholds and areas that daily training did not already pressure enough.

Natural growth would be encouraged deliberately through how they trained.

They would compare changes over several levels rather than committing everything to one theory.

Kael placed his next available point into Spirit.

Mira finally spent the point she had been holding.

Endurance.

The aquamarine-haired girl climbed down from the windowsill and looked at their board.

She pointed toward the water stain spreading beneath the cup beside Kael's elbow.

Kael moved the cup.

She wiped the table with one sleeve.

Mira watched the water vanish into the fabric and emerge cleanly into the cup again.

Kael stared.

The girl returned the cup to him.

Neither asked.

Mira gathered her cloth.

A familiar cultivation loop began beneath her awareness as she threaded Ellin's needle.

Kael saw the slight pause.

His face tightened.

"You're doing it again."

Mira's hands continued working.

"Yes."

"I hate that ability."

"You said that yesterday."

"I've had another day to hate it."

Mira began stitching a reinforced seam into the inside of her new sleeve while Essence circulated through the route she had been refining since Bellhaven. One process handled the familiar sewing pattern, maintaining thread tension and spacing because Mira had repeated the stitch hundreds of times.

Another maintained cultivation.

Mira's full attention remained free enough to inspect how the cloth reacted when the seam curved around the elbow.

The first alteration failed.

The fabric bunched slightly.

Mira stopped.

Parallel Thought returned the cultivation process to her main awareness because the sudden interruption changed the rhythm enough to require attention.

Mira corrected the seam manually.

Once the unfamiliar section became stable, she separated the tasks again.

Kael watched the transition.

"So when something changes, you have to take it back."

"Usually."

Kael frowned.

Mira continued sewing.

"If I practise the changed version enough, it becomes familiar too."

Kael stood.

"I am going to train."

Mira examined the next stitch.

Kael took his wooden training sword from beside the bed and left before she could say anything else.

The girl on the windowsill watched him go.

Mira continued working.

Several seconds later, the girl followed Kael outside.

Mira was alone.

One process cultivated.

Another handled the familiar sections of the garment.

Her main attention turned toward the interior structure of the sleeve.

The Hollowglass coat was gone.

Its branching channels were not.

Mira remembered how the material had distributed Essence through different sections without forcing all of it through one route. She had spent enough time wearing, repairing and eventually rebuilding parts of that structure that its logic remained clearer in memory than many things she had deliberately studied.

Her own body could do something similar.

The crude circulation route she currently used travelled too linearly.

Essence moved.

Returned.

Repeated.

Mira began considering branches.

She did not change them yet.

The last time she redesigned a circulation path too quickly, one arm went numb for nearly an hour.

Instead, she took a scrap of cloth and drew the idea onto it with charcoal.

Outside, something heavy struck the training post.

Kael.

Another impact followed.

Then another.

Water splashed somewhere near him.

Kael shouted something Mira could not make out.

The girl laughed.

Mira's cultivation continued.

Her needle moved.

The charcoal diagram slowly became more complicated.

Far north, people were searching ruined fields for three strangers in worn robes.

In Alderwick, those robes were being repaired because Mira had decided the stitching was embarrassing.

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