Chapter 8: Ember Seed
Air tore past Rei's ears.
For a heartbeat he saw the hoard above him—gold and glass catching the carved-line glow, the drake's grin hanging in the air like a hook—and then the world dropped away.
Stone rushed up. Rei twisted on instinct, reaching for anything solid. His hands found only cold wind. The basin's broken lip flashed by beneath him, a jagged ring of rock and ruin.
The glow below swelled into view.
It wasn't flame. It carried the same kind of brightness the carved lines carried, except this was packed tight, concentrated until it felt heavy. Rei's energy sense grazed it and recoiled. Clean, sharp, ready to cut.
He hit.
Light swallowed him.
It struck like a weightless hammer—impact without a surface, pressure without water. It punched through his clothes, through skin, through the places in him that still assumed the world respected borders.
Rei's lungs seized. His body tried to inhale on reflex and found nothing it understood. The force drove past that reflex anyway, cold-bright and violent, scraping every nerve raw.
Air meant nothing down here. Breath still mattered.
Ember Circulation lurched.
He forced the loop to catch, to turn, to move—something, anything—before panic tore it apart. The technique had been warmth before, a steady ember-thread inside his chest. Now it had to become structure.
Rei's thoughts fragmented into sharp pieces.
Up. Surface. Climb.
His hands clawed at empty light. His legs kicked and met no floor. The pool held him suspended in its own pressure, grinding at him from every direction.
Pain flared in his ribs. His vision sparked white.
A flicker of the HUD cut through the glare.
[End of Beta: 29d 6h 11m]
It stuttered, then steadied.
[Level Up!]
Rei choked on a sound that wasn't a gasp. The update slid across his sight like it belonged here more than he did.
[Level: 2 → 3]
[Unspent Tail Points: 3]
Three.
He'd been starving in a dungeon, bleeding for every inch, and he'd been carrying three points like loose change.
His throat tightened, anger and disbelief mixing with the burn in his lungs.
"System," he rasped—voice torn thin by the pressure. "Now."
The HUD snapped open with the kind of crisp obedience that felt like a joke.
[Progression — Selectable Paths]
A ring of names hovered at the edge of his sight, each one too big to process while his body screamed. Dream. Elements. Light. Dark. Nature. Luck. Chaos. Peace. Karma. Ascendance—locked, dim, far away.
The pool surged again, relentless and indifferent. Rei's spine arched as the force chewed at him.
"Condense it," he spat. "Give me what matters."
A pause. Then the System answered with a tone that landed like a smirk.
Notification: You've been sitting on points.
Suggestion: Consider using them before attempting to fistfight higher lifeforms.
Rei bared his teeth in the light.
"Helpful. Shut up."
Acknowledged.
Luxury vanished while the pool worked to erase him. Rei made his choice the only way he could: fast, instinctive, anchored in what he wanted to become.
Dream called to him first. Not as a trick. As a shape. A way to make something out of nothing.
He slammed a point into it.
[Dream Path — Tier 1: Unlocked]
Skill Gained: Dreamweave (Tier 1)
Form a brief oneiric construct: shield, tether, or summoned shape. Duration scales with focus.
A second point followed before he could second-guess.
[Dream Path — Tier 1: Deepened]
Dreamweave: Stability Increased
Construct holds form longer under pressure.
Two points down. One left.
The drake upstairs had beaten him with raw presence and crushing force. Rei needed something that let his claws matter against something that big.
Elements.
He drove the last point home.
[Elements Path — Tier 1: Unlocked]
Skill Gained: Aetherclaw (Toggle)
Condense elemental charge along claws. Increased cut and grip. Energy cost sustained.
The pool crushed in again. Rei's body bucked, joints screaming.
He had tools.
Tools meant nothing if he died in the light.
Rei's mind hit the edge of itself and found a single, brutal truth: fighting the pool meant losing. The force had too much. He had too little.
So he chose endurance.
He let it reach everything.
He stopped trying to keep the light out. He stopped trying to win. He accepted the only bargain that made sense: he might die here, and he would still run Ember Circulation until his last breath.
The admission landed with a quiet weight. The scrambling stopped.
Ember Circulation tightened.
The loop sank deeper, not as heat, but as a rhythm that refused to break—ember after ember, life threaded into motion. It caught the force as it tore through him and gave it a route, a circuit, a path that turned "destroy" into "move."
Rei's body trembled on the edge of collapse. His mind narrowed to the loop.
Inhale—pain.
Exhale—turn it.
Inhale—burn.
Exhale—turn it.
The white glare thinned for half a second.
And in that thinning, Rei saw it.
A fox face—laughing.
Not a hallucination this time. Not the soft flash from a nightmare weeks ago. This was sharp and present, carved into his sight with the same clean certainty as the pool itself. Gold flecks in blue eyes. A grin too old to be kind.
Rei's breath hitched.
The grin widened, and then the world snapped.
The HUD flashed.
[Legacy Thread: Detected]
[Bloodline Awakening — Tier 1]
Rei's heart slammed once, hard.
Warmth sparked deep in his core, different from the pool's violence. It organized him against the force.
[Legacy Thread (Tier 1): Ember Seed]
Ember Circulation: Reinforced
Passive Recovery: Improved
A final line appeared, short and sharp.
Threshold Reward: Survive the edge. Gain the seed.
Time stayed tight.
He felt the change.
The loop of Ember Circulation deepened, catching more of the energy that tried to shred him and turning it into something his body could endure. Pain stayed real. It stopped owning the entire world.
Rei found purchase on a carved notch in the wall and pulled.
His shoulders cleared the pool's surface first. Light streamed off him in sheets. He dragged the rest of himself up with shaking arms and collapsed onto stone that looked almost black under the glow.
He lay there heaving, every breath ragged, every muscle trembling.
The pool churned behind him, bright and relentless.
Rei rolled onto his side and forced Ember Circulation to keep going, to keep sealing the cracks the pool had found. His hands shook as he flexed his fingers inside the gloves.
Aetherclaw answered in a faint pressure.
Dreamweave sat behind his eyes like a half-formed shape waiting to be called.
He stared up at the fractured ceiling.
The two foxes still clung to the rim above, silhouettes tearing and re-forming with each pulse of the carved lines. Jinx's shadow flickered like a living smear. Vesper's pale outline wavered like moonlight on disturbed water. Both held position, watching him drag himself back from something that should have ended him.
Rei swallowed, throat raw.
"Still here," he whispered, more to himself than anyone else.
A distant sound rolled down through the rock—stone shifting, the hoard's glow stuttering.
The drake.
Rei pushed himself up onto an elbow. His whole body protested. He moved through it.
He sat.
He breathed.
The loop held.
Rei lifted his chin toward the hole above, toward the fight waiting on the other side.
"Round two," he rasped.
Then he forced his legs under him and stood.