Chapter 464: The Morning After

The walk back to the rooming house was the most contemplative walk Bruce had taken since arriving in the Soul Realm.

Three E-rank hunters in four days. Word would move. The eyes would come. He had a talent that could write reality and a small spatial ring and a quiet young man with a scythe whose talent might be a reaper of fundamental things and a demon with horns who was discovering the deeper theory of fire and an S-rank cook two hundred years in the city who had quietly chosen to teach them what decline meant.

He was very far from where he had started.

He was very far from where he was going.

He sent the thought along the thread.

I am all right. I am E-rank. I have friends who are also E-rank. I am being watched and I am being careful. I am all right. I miss you. I am building toward you.

In the labyrinth, somewhere, far away, his hand sat still on his unmoving chest. Sophie sat beside it. He did not know what she was doing in this moment. He hoped she was eating something good.

He kept walking.

The fourth day was done.

The climb had begun in earnest.

Bruce woke and knew something had changed.

It was not a thought. It was a physical knowledge. His soul-body, lying still on the pallet in the pale pre-dawn glow of the rooming house, felt different in the way a person feels different the day after a hard lesson, the body itself carrying the new shape of what had been learned. The E-rank settling had continued through the night while he slept. What had been an event yesterday had become a condition this morning. He was no longer a soul who had just advanced. He was now a soul who was at E-rank, baseline.

He lay still and took inventory.

The interior chamber of his soul, the small architectural space he had first noticed in the mist, was meaningfully bigger now. The walls of it had pushed outward, not dramatically, but real. The room inside him had grown the way a working person’s home grows after they have built up the means to add a wall. Inside that larger chamber, his reserves of soul energy sat fuller and deeper. He could feel the capacity he now had, for ink, for constructs, for the writing he was beginning to understand his talent as.

He shaped a small bullet in his hand to test.

It came easily. Easier than yesterday. The ink, which had once required some real effort to draw out, now answered his thought almost before he finished thinking it. He dispelled the bullet.

He shaped the word open in the air over his bed, lazily, the way a man stretches a muscle in the morning. The word committed cleanly, with significantly less cost than yesterday’s first writing. He dispelled it. He shaped quiet. The word committed. He dispelled it. He shaped a longer one, steady, and the word came out solid, hung in the air, did not slip from the shape he had given it.

He felt the cost. Steady was a six-letter word with a complex meaning, and the construct of it had pulled real energy from him. But the pull was not dangerous. He had room for many steadies before he ran out.

He filed all of this. Then he got up to wash.

Kael was already in the washing room when he got there.

The demon was standing under the soul-water spout in the small shared washing alcove, hands braced against the wall, letting the water run over his head with the slow patience of a man who had also woken up feeling the consolidation of the night before. He did not turn when Bruce came in. He simply said, with his head still bowed under the water: "E-rank feels different in the morning."

"It does."

"My fire is, I tried to make a small flame and it tried to make a bigger flame than I asked. I had to actively hold it back."

"That tracks. The talent’s natural output has scaled up overnight. You’ll need to recalibrate."

"I noticed. I’m recalibrating."

He stepped out from under the water and shook his head once, sharply, the way a man does with hair he has chosen not to grow long. He pulled on a shirt. He glanced at Bruce in the small polished soul-stone mirror.

"You have words coming out of your ears, I assume."

"Constructs are coming faster. I’m being careful. I wrote steady before I came in here and the cost was manageable."

"Don’t write big words for a few days. Let the new rank settle. I learned this last time."

"Last time?"

"In life. When I crossed certain thresholds. New strength comes in fast and a soul who doesn’t pace themselves can hurt themselves with their own freshly-expanded capacity. Spend small, spend often, spend a lot of times for a few days. Don’t try to find your new ceiling on the first morning."

"That’s good advice."

"It’s the only kind of advice I have. Tell Theron."

"I will."

Kael nodded and stepped past him and out toward the room.

Bruce washed in the same slow patient way Kael had, and when he stepped out he felt the soul-body’s interior consolidation again, the slow ongoing organization of the new essence into stable structure. He did not interfere with it. He simply let it happen.

In the room, Theron was sitting on his bed with his scythe across his knees.

It was bigger.

Not dramatically. Not enough that someone who had not seen the scythe a dozen times would notice. But the blade was a finger’s width longer than yesterday, the curve slightly deeper, the haft a hand’s-breadth longer. The faint luminescence along the cutting edge was a shade brighter. The whole weapon looked more complete than it had at F-rank, as if the F-rank scythe had been an early draft of an actual scythe, and this was the next draft.

Theron was looking at it with quiet attention.

"It changed overnight," he said, when Bruce came in.

"I noticed."

"And it doesn’t feel like my changes. It feels like the talent itself caught up to something it had been waiting for. The scythe was always supposed to look like this. F-rank was just the version it could afford to make."

"That’s a good way to put it."