Chapter 619: Crafting in a Volcano (2)

The four rings weren’t meant to replace his Neural Frames, they were there to take what each Frame already did best and drag that specialty several steps farther than Grey’s flesh could manage on its own. Once the chains were attached, those rings would also become the interfaces between Grey and the artificial Frames themselves, deciding how signals entered, exited, and were translated between the two.

But the fifth ring would be different. It had to be able to take inputs directly from Prometheus and coordinate everything happening in all the other rings at the same time.

Grey had spent a lot of time thinking about how he started his loops initially. Logically speaking, before he got Prometheus, his deaths should have just been deaths, and that would be the end of it, but there were several times Prometheus had broken the rules just for him.

Not just the fact he was able to revive before getting his hands on the ring in the first place, but also that time against Esmeralda when he had revived despite not having any more Energy Units to work with. Sometimes, Prometheus overextended itself just to help Grey out, even when it broke the rules of its own creation.

At first, Grey didn’t understand this. If Prometheus could break all these rules whenever it wanted, then what was the point of them in the first place, was it just to train him up and give him some pressure? Sure, that was possible, but it wasn’t the complete story, not by a long shot.

The more Grey learned about raw materials and crafting, though, the more he understood what was going on. This ring couldn’t seem to do much, but it was the lynchpin holding Prometheus together until Grey could give it a real Vessel, and in fact, it might even be the remnants of whatever the last holder of Prometheus had created. Every time Prometheus broke one of those rules on Grey’s behalf, the last thing capable of holding Prometheus’ existence to this world was chipped away at again, and again, and again.

Every time Prometheus gambled on Grey, it was gambling with its own livelihood at the same time, giving up its chances at survival to bet on him instead. Grey didn’t know how many of those bets Prometheus had left before this little ring finally stopped being enough, but fortunately, he didn’t plan on finding out.

He would make certain the bet paid off.

Below, Brad’s hammer crashed into another Fire Elemental while Amara slipped through a wall of stone without breaking stride, and Grey glanced at the spatial bottle beside him to find the glowing sap still steadily accumulating.

He flexed his fingers, dismissed the completed ring architectures to one side of the blueprint, and finally turned his attention toward the structures that would make the entire Vessel either revolutionary or an extremely expensive pile of jewelry.

Now came the chains.

The four ordinary chains were complicated in construction, but simple enough in purpose. Linear would reproduce the most efficient direct pathways Grey’s Frame developed, giving those signals an external route to run through while providing Silver Maw with an undamaged template to reference, while Branching would expand outward through countless controlled junctions capable of splitting, rerouting, and reconnecting as Grey changed what he was doing.

Recursive was more troublesome, since every link needed internal circuits capable of sending information backward through the chain without allowing those loops to interfere with one another. Resonant went in the opposite direction entirely, synchronizing signals across distant links and using the whole chain as one extended structure, which meant parts of the artificial Frame could operate in parallel instead of waiting for information to travel link by link.

In the crater below, Brad caught an enormous stone fist against the face of his hammer and was driven backward through the lava, his boots carving two trenches through its glowing surface before he finally stopped. He grinned, twisted his hips, and poured everything through the hammer in one cleaner Linear motion, causing the Earth Elemental’s arm to crack from the fist all the way to its shoulder before half of it exploded away.

Amara was having considerably less trouble with the other one. Every time it tried to crush her, some portion of her body simply ceased to exist as far as the attack was concerned, and when she countered, her hands passed beneath the Elemental’s hardened exterior before becoming solid somewhere inside.

Grey still couldn’t tell exactly what she was damaging, but judging by the way the thing kept convulsing whenever she withdrew her fingers, it clearly didn’t enjoy finding out either.

Unfortunately for both Brad and Amara, though, the Elementals might as well be undead. They just kept coming back again and again, grinding away at them until their Stamina started to be rapidly depleted.

Grey’s hands continued moving over the Cyber Mat as the first four chains gradually took shape within the blueprint, each link appearing simple from the outside while thousands of microscopic Curved Faces and pathways were packed beneath its surface. More importantly, all four were rigid by design, since Grey needed them to remain accurate enough that Silver Maw could eventually compare his damaged Neural Frame against them and work backward from a clean artificial copy.

Then the volcano shook hard enough that even Grey had to brace one hand against the tree.

Magma surged dozens of meters upward as the crater erupted again, and the Fire Elementals below immediately roared to one another through the flames. "Hold them! The Princes are almost here!"

Brad glanced upward. "Grey, anytime you want to finish your arts and crafts would be fucking fantastic!"

"Working on it!"

Grey’s attention had already moved to the fifth chain, and this was where everything became obnoxious.

Unlike the other four, Prometheus’ chain couldn’t be built in separate pieces and connected afterward. The tree sap would act as one continuous living substance throughout the entire structure, with each individual cell preserved and altered so that it could receive signals, communicate with the cells around it, then harden or soften into whatever temporary circuitry Prometheus demanded.

Organic nanobots, more or less, except Grey wasn’t manufacturing millions of machines individually. The tree had already done that part for him, and his job was to take the living system it had created, teach those cells a completely different language, then convince the whole mass that its new purpose in life was to become a Neural Frame for a suicidal little flame.

The problem was that he couldn’t stop halfway.

If one section of sap was processed independently from another, even a microscopic difference in their imprinted signalling patterns could turn the connection between them into a bottleneck or outright rejection point. Every bit of sap going into the fifth chain had to be treated as one continuous unit from beginning to end, which meant the moment Grey started this stage, he either finished it or wasted the entire batch.

Another explosion rocked the crater while the Earth Elementals pressed Brad and Amara harder, and Grey could already feel unfamiliar presences approaching from above the volcano. He gritted his teeth, spread both hands over the Cyber Mat, and let his Frames begin pulling the sap into the fifth chain.

"Hold on!" Grey shouted. "I can’t stop now!"

A moment later, two blazing figures appeared high above the crater, their pressure descending long before their bodies did.

The Infernal Temper Band trembled violently around Grey’s wrist.

Veyrath was elated.