Chapter 435: Inquiry
Chapter 435: Inquiry
A small murmur ran through the group.
The guard let it pass.
"You can earn the ten points many ways," she went on. "The simplest is to take a low-tier hunting contract at the registry office and bring back the proof of a kill. There are work postings inside, cleaning, hauling, guard runners, kitchen labor. There are arenas, if you are eager and reckless. There are exchanges where information itself has value. Ten F-rank points in twenty-four hours is not a high bar. It is a low bar. It is the city’s way of telling you that if you cannot meet it, you will not survive here at all, and you may as well be told now."
She lowered her hand.
"Those who pay their first day’s keep within twenty-four hours are full city residents from that moment forward. You will still need to earn soul points every day to live, but the immediate threat of exile is gone. After that, your time here is your own."
The other guard, the man on the right, spoke up for the first time. His voice was younger, a little dryer.
"Most of you will make it," he said. "Most do. The carriages don’t bring us many who can’t survive their first day. The harvesters wouldn’t bother saving you if they didn’t think you’d make it that far." He shrugged. "But some don’t. So now you know."
The broad-shouldered woman nodded once.
"Welcome to Xiltra. Pass through."
She stepped aside. The guard on the right did the same. The gate stood open in front of the fifteen of them, and the warm gold light from inside fell over their faces, and the city of Xiltra waited beyond.
Bruce glanced at Kael.
Kael was already grinning.
"Ten points in twenty-four hours," the demon said, low. "I can do that before lunch."
"You don’t even know what lunch is here yet."
"Details."
Theron, on Bruce’s other side, was very quietly counting on his fingers as if trying to figure out how to budget money he did not yet have. Iret and Halen had stepped slightly closer to each other, their hands joined again, the small gesture of two people who had survived too much together to walk through one more strange gate apart. The others were a loose murmuring cluster behind them.
Bruce drew a slow breath.
He had not lived in cities for a long time. He had not been a man without resources for a long time either. He stood at the gate of Xiltra with zero soul points to his name, an unknown soul rank, a hidden talent he had used exactly once, no place to sleep, no idea where the registry office was, and twenty-four hours to prove he could survive in a place that he barely understood the rules of.
He smiled, slightly. The small dry smile.
It was, in a strange way, a familiar feeling. He had been a man with nothing before, very long ago, in another life on another world. He had built up from nothing before too. He remembered how it was done.
He stepped through the gate.
The others followed.
The light of Xiltra closed around them.
---
"So what do we do now?" one of the men from the group asked.
He was the nervous thin one, the one who could throw heavy weights. He stood just inside the gate, turning his head this way and that, looking at the wide gold-lit street ahead of them with the slightly panicked expression of a man who had survived the worst part only to find the next part waiting.
Nobody answered right away. The fifteen of them clustered loosely just past the gate, and for a moment they all simply stood there, a small knot of newly awakened souls in a city that did not stop for them. Souls moved past on every side, hurrying, carrying things, talking to each other, paying the newcomers no more attention than a busy crowd pays anyone. The city did not care that they had nearly died in the mist. The city had its own day to get on with.
"I’m hungry," Theron said.
He said it quietly, almost embarrassed, as if it were a strange thing to admit so soon after everything. But the moment he said it, Bruce felt his own hunger answer.
He was hungry too.
It surprised him a little. He had eaten in the carriage, good food, rich food, more than one bowl of it. He had felt the warmth of it go down and felt the hollow ache in his core ease. He had thought, at the time, that the meal had taken care of the problem. But now, standing here, he could feel the hunger creeping back. Not as sharp as it had been at the worst of the fight. But present. Growing.
He glanced at Kael. Kael had one hand resting on his own stomach with a slight frown, and Bruce did not need to ask. The demon was hungry too.
Bruce thought about it.
The food on the carriage had done two things at once. It had eased the hunger, yes, but more importantly, it had healed them. He remembered the cracks. When the harvesters found them, all three had been laced with fractures, their glow guttering, perhaps a minute or two from coming apart entirely. The food had closed most of those cracks. It had pulled them back from the edge.
But it had not finished the job.
Bruce looked down at his own arm, at the soft glow of his soul-body, and turned it slightly toward the light of the gate. There, faint, almost gone, but there, a thin pale line ran across the back of his hand. A crack. Not the wide dangerous fracture from the fight, but a hairline remnant of it, not yet fully sealed.
He understood, then, what had happened.
The food healed the soul. Rich soul-energy meat, eaten by a damaged soul, knit the cracks back together. But he and Kael and Theron had been so badly damaged when the harvesters found them, so close to dissolving, that the meal on the carriage had been spent almost entirely on repair. It had patched them up enough to live. It had not had anything left over to truly satisfy them. In fact, the healing had taken so much out of the food that they had ended up hungrier than before they ate, because their souls, now mending, were demanding more energy to finish the work.
They were not fully healed. And they were starving for the rest.
"It’s the food," Bruce said. "The meat heals the soul. We were so cracked that everything we ate went into healing us. None of it was left to fill us up. We need to eat more, properly this time, to finish closing the cracks and to actually feel full."
Theron looked down at his own arm and found the faint line on it, the same as Bruce’s. His eyes widened slightly.
"So we have to eat to heal," he said.
"And to live," Kael added. He had stopped frowning and started thinking, Bruce could see it on his face, the quick practical calculation. "Which means we need food, which means we need soul points, which means we need work. And we need it fast, because the longer we go hungry, the worse those cracks get instead of better."
He cracked his knuckles.
"Right. No more standing around. Let’s go figure out how this city makes money."
---
The three of them, Bruce, Kael, and Theron, broke away from the larger group.
There was no ceremony to it. The fifteen of them had been thrown together by the carriage, not by choice, and now that they were inside the walls each of them had their own hunger and their own twenty-four-hour clock to beat. Iret and Halen had already turned to each other to make their own plan. The two friends with the different fires were heads-together over something. The group was dissolving the way travelers’ groups always dissolve once the shared danger is past.
Bruce, Kael, and Theron stayed together by simple unspoken agreement. They had fought side by side in the mist. They had nearly died in the same patch of grey. That counted for something. None of them said so, but all three of them stuck close as they moved into the city.
They did the obvious thing first. They asked.
The streets of Xiltra were full of souls, and most of them were too busy to stop, but Bruce had a knack for catching the right person at the right moment, a skill from his surgeon years, the ability to read who would give you a straight answer and who would waste your time.
He flagged down a soul carrying an empty basket who looked like she had finished her work for the moment and was in no hurry. He asked her, plainly, how a newly arrived awakened soul earned soul points.