The city leaders dismissed me to discuss other matters that needed their attention.
The woman who had led me to the conference room stepped forward and walked me to the guest room allotted to me.
So, I was back in the room, waiting for the Grimlocks from the City's Grimmyth Research Institute to come collect me.
Got to say, I didn't think things would resolve so easily because I didn't think they had already uncovered the mystery behind my miracle. Turns out F.O.E.'s research into Grimmyth was far more sophisticated than anything I had assumed.
While waiting to move into Grimmyth Research Institute, I wasn't idle. I edited my G-book, 'My Contract Ceremony.' I made use of both the emotion hypothesis and the meter and sensor readings provided by Chief Research Director Hawthorne to make my case with two conclusions for both the dreamer and realist readers. It was up to them what they believed.
As for permission to use the meter and sensor readings for my G-book, I didn't get a chance to seek it. Sometimes you do what you have to do and apologize later. If it were confidential in nature or not for civilian eyes, I'm sure they would have never brought it up before me or stopped and warned me when I used my grim web card to record the readings. I wasn't subtle or anything.
Once the G-book was ready, I decided to post it on the Grim Web using the strategy the physically challenged Asian girl used to sell her G-book. In a short time, she had already sold enough copies to buy a Gionship ticket to Grimmyth, moving out of the slum outside the walls of the Grimway station.
The citizens around the globe were so impressed by her hustle that she had managed to suppress me and my miraculous contract ceremony on the trending list.
Her strategy of using the news outlets interviewing her to launch and spread awareness about her book worked brilliantly. Most importantly, she priced her G-book dirt cheap, focusing on sales quantity over huge profit margins. In this way, she also dealt with the content leeches—those who churn out review reports and reaction videos on trending topics just to cash in on stolen traffic, cleverly circumventing copyright laws.
I, too, planned to do the same, but being surrounded by city guards and moving to the Skyox Grimmyth Research Institute, I don't think the media could reach me anytime soon. If I wanted to cash-in on the hype. Maybe I should think of another, more suitable PR method for my G-book.
Whatever I decided, I had to be thorough. I was staking everything on this G-book. It needed to generate enough seed money for me to condense my gioncore and gion patterns, then craft the gioncore card and the gion circuit card, two of the four basic grim cards in a grim deck.
I still hadn't decided which grimmon stem I would use, but that didn't stop me from preparing the necessary funds. Meanwhile, I eagerly went through the Grim Cyphers I collected in my fate index:
[— Fate Index —
1. Dendron's Descendant
2. Muse Vision
3. Word Will
4. White-Arms Mastery
5. Glass Eyes
6. Vibro Domain
7. Dream Engine
Note:
i) Fractured Fate can use any of these Grim Cyphers to create false fate.
ii) Fateless can mirror any of these Grim Cyphers temporarily, one at a time.]
I wanted to give one of them a spin but didn't, knowing that though Grimmyth had granted us our unique grim decks and acknowledged us as its grimlocks, what it gave was merely the tool, not the fuel to run it.
At the initial stage, we were powering the deck with our own biological energy, not gion. That was barely enough to browse the grim web or activate our grim cypher once or at most twice at our own risk, one at a time, before we were completely drained and had to replenish through food, which took a long time.
Just these small uses alone could kill us from exhaustion. As for fighting and sealing grimmons into our cards—forget it. Newborn grimlocks didn't have nearly enough energy to attempt something like that. Despite such limitations, the early grimlocks survived Grimmyth and paved the way for the modern grimlocks. This was why the early grimlocks were hailed as the Greatest Generation.
Our generation didn't have this dilemma as the great minds of humankind turned their attention to the grimmons, the creatures of Grimmyth, to find a solution. Through years of study, they uncovered the secret of the grimcores and gionworms.
Gioncores were the crystalline inner organs that allowed grimmons to survive in Grimmyth by storing Gion and using Gion as their own energy. But how did they store gions? It was using gionworms, a strain of Gion microbes. They exist everywhere: in the air we breathe, in the water we drink, and on our skin. Gion microbes were first introduced into this Earth's atmosphere when the initial grimgates linked this Earth to Grimmyth.
In most people, they do nothing. They settle, drift, die off. But if enough of them enter the bloodstream at once, they begin to reproduce unchecked. The body responds with inflammation. We call that Gion Fever. It was not the microbe that would kill you at that stage, but the immune storm your body unleashes in response.
However, if the colony was not suppressed, it continued metabolizing. Grim Worms convert trace bioelectric activity into gion as part of their life cycle. In a body without containment, that gion accumulates, intensifying host's immune response, accelerating cellular degradation, and causing localized necrosis. As the gionworm concentration increases beyond a viable threshold, the gionworm colony clusters and condenses into a gioncore within the host.
The gioncore is compatible with the gionworms, but not with the host's biological systems. The host's immune response intensifies, but rejection only prolongs tissue decay. As necrosis spreads and native cellular control collapses, gion becomes the dominant animating force, slowly transforming the host into a grimmon known as a Gion Zombie.
This outcome appears in the host that lacks an engineered gioncore synthesized specifically for them. Gioncores were not a power source. They were both a gion reservoir and regulatory organ. A structured habitat engineered and synthesized to host a stabilized gion microbe colony. Instead of dispersing through tissue, Grim Worms are drawn toward the gioncore's lattice, where they anchor and organize. While doing so, they create gion channels in the host's body, known as gion circuits, that help gioncore regulate gion throughout the host's body efficiently.
Think of the gioncore as a hive structure. The microbes maintain it just as hive insects reinforce wax walls. They metabolize, secrete, reinforce the lattice. In turn, the gioncore provides structural stability, resource distribution, and gion storage. Each sustains the other.
If one does not have gioncore, their relationship with gion microbes becomes parasitic, leading to a mutation that turns them into gion zombie. However, with a gioncore, this relationship becomes symbiotic, allowing them to store and regulate gion flow in and out of their body.