I was soaked by the time I returned to the medical facility. The storm had only gotten worse as the midnight hours approached, but even so, I’d barely noticed. My mind was still back at the bastaurant, wondering if things had gone far better than expected, or if I’d made a terrible mistake.

It really seemed I wouldn’t be going to the Academy anytime soon. Instead, I’d be following a charlatan merchant and his bodyguard on a mad chase for breadcrumbs at the edge of civilized space.

Sliding off my soaked shoes, I made my way over to the lab/treatment/living room where I’d woken up earlier that day. With Celian and Myla nowhere to be seen, the computers in there were mine to claim.

Although the crackling storm outside wasn’t likely to help, I was still hoping they held some connection to the System at least. Most modern medicine relied on it to some extent, and I was currently locked out of my own UI.

There were too many questions swarming my mind, not least of all the smooth, spindly contraption I now pulled out of the sports bag I’d been given.

It was an inconspicuous thing, and starting at it in the dim light, I wondered if I’d been mistaken earlier. I never saw any Artifact up close in my previous life. All I knew was that those who wanted them had wanted them really badly.

This thing, however, merely seemed like some glorified decoration without any real purpose.

Water still dripped from my hair by the time I reached those computer screens, and although the old machines didn’t look much to the world, my mere presence was enough for them to turn on, bathing my surroundings in a pale blue light.

There were seven screens in total. Some were for monitoring patient vitals, others for uploading gene-treatments, while most were merely for accessing various parts of the System.

I focused on the latter ones.

The Triumvirate’s Three-Starred logo shone across them as the machines booted up. Before I could be prompted for a password, however, a laughing skull had taken their place.

It spun around for a few seconds, cackling madly in silence, and then I was through.

I need to figure out how that thing works at some point.

For now, I just pulled the wireless keyboard closer. While the tactile feel of the keys was nostalgic, it did make me miss my old setup. Especially as I was forced to fill out over a dozen search engines by hand.

Although the heavy storm hadn’t completely knocked out the connection, I didn’t trust it to be particularly fast. It might take hours before I found what I wanted.

So, as a precaution, I put in every iteration of ‘tomb, alien, Artifact, Great Expansion, discovery, disease, uprising, rebellion,’ I could think of upfront.

While those were firing away, filling the room with the sound of struggling cooling agents and high-speed fans — these computers really are old machines — I opened another few tabs to begin sorting through whatever local markets I could access. With a particular focus on mods and splices.

With some credits of my own, it was getting time to shed the weaker aspects of my humanity. I couldn’t continue like this for much longer.

Soon, millions upon millions of ads, active auctions, offers, and requests flashed by on the screens. I began sorting through them.

Despite my extensive negotiations with Mikayes, I only held 225 credits to my name. It was more than nothing, but less than a lot, and it wasn’t long before my first filters left low grade body modifications to float to the top.

My eyes passed across Strength Enhancements, Cognitive Abilities on sale, Lesser Sense Boosts, and a bunch of Speedy-Z’s Fast Life Strains that were sold in bulk. Anything that caught my attention, however, was bound to soon shoot past 500 credits as anonymous traders began bidding on them.

There were also several unlisted sales going around, but I wasn’t that desperate yet. Most modification you made to your genome were permanent, and those that weren’t would be extraordinarily expensive and painful to have reversed. I’d learned that in my past life all too well.

I narrowed down the search even further, prioritizing any mods with potential growth modifier or unusual strands. It was a safer form of gambling for those in the know, and after a few minutes of tinkering with the filters, I felt satisfied that I hadn’t missed anything. I’d even taken a moment to briefly look over different blueprints, weapons, tech, ships, crews, and special services for sale.

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Nothing worthwhile, however. Nothing that I could afford, at least, and that which I could I wasn’t desperate enough to bid for. Not yet, at least, though that may swiftly change.

My eyes fell back to the sports bag.

I hadn’t bargained for just credits and scraps with Mikayes. Three mods were in my possession as well: two Fs, and one D.

The common way for storing mods was to decode them onto specialized hard-drives, allowing them to later be synthesized back into their natural forms when the need arose. There are, of course, cases where the genetic code is too complex or fragile, requiring them to be contained in specialized vials or prisms.

What I now held in my hand was a single memory stick.

I didn’t hold a lot of hope for what it contained as I plugged it into the corresponding port on one of the computers. Mikayes had already given me their data, grade, and brief summary, but I still wanted to check for myself.

I’d seen too many horror stories come true over the years. Here, I wasn’t dealing with the clean, cookie cutter mods of the Stratos Apolytos, or the standardized treatments of major planets’ gene-facilities. Too few realized the difference.

It's easy getting overly ambitious in your selection of strength mods, and suddenly you’re left with a physique that can’t support itself, constantly breaking down your joints or squishing your heart until no blood gets around. And while slapping on a couple of fortification mods to alleviate those problems might seem good on paper, it's rarely that simple in practice.

For while a fortification mod might leave you with tougher skin, harder bones, or resistance against a hundred different things – ranging from bad food poisoning to freezing temperatures – carelessly splice your genome with the heating glands of a Skip Diver, and while you’ll be able to make a life for yourself on a sunless planet, stumble upon a single living flame, and you’ll melt like wax from the inside out.

Not to mention hardened guts that prevent you from gaining nutrients from anything but the most vile toxins, skin that can deflect knives but is about as pliable as dried leather, or just an overzealous combination of too many things which your natural metabolism can’t support, forcing you to eat thousands of calories every waking hour of the day to stay alive. Every. Single. One.

As things would have it, a living being is fairly well optimized by nature. Even slight shifts to the genome can have dire consequences, and integrating with a mod was usually not a ‘slight’ procedure. Especially not with swiftly auctioned strands that are rarely that well mapped.

I’d need a gene scan as well. My hope was that the equipment in here could help me with that. Celian had offered me free access to these things as long as I didn’t break them. I wasn’t about to let that opportunity slip me by.

With my scans and searches running in the background, I began hooking up my UI to the network. It was far easier than connecting to that tablet had been. These machines were made for it: to scan and transfer data between different nodes in the System.

I’d barely seen that one screen be blurred across by static – one of the blanks I’d put in place – before my familiar interface came into view. And then, it overrun by notifications.

Even before I’d lost my tablet — ever since I saw the Nebulae Serpent, really — there’d been no way for me to get access to any of the System prompts I got. Now, they came at me all at ones.

The one blaring the brightest red, however, was the latest one.

¤&/”…

Lj╫ᶚ@...

̕ȁ÷Ǧ…

Presence Of Key, Detected

Activate (y/n)?

y/n…?

y/n…?

y/n…?

At first, I’d tried shifting it out of the way, but that same prompt kept repeating itself over and over again. Annoyance and bad habits made me type in that y and press enter before I could think it through. But really, who reads the TOS?

I should have.

What followed happened too quickly for me to react. A golden light burned through the strange contraption that lay there on the table beside me, each of its arcane markings suddenly illuminated with the force of stars.

It bathed the room in light, blinding me until nothing else existed but endless glowing numbers shooting by at my periphery. And then I saw it move. For a few seconds, the Artifact honestly moved like a severed limb.

Its fingers spread out, a sharp spike shot out of its palm, and it turned to face straight towards me.

Even if I’d seen it coming, there would’ve been no way for me to deflect it out of the way. I couldn’t even have dodged it.

By the time I realized what would happen, it’d already buried itself into my chest, and everything else dissipated into that burning light.

Manual Override,

In Progress…

Higher Access, Granting…

Error…

Error…

Administrator ID, Not Recognized

¤&/”…

Lj╫ᶚ@...

̕ȁ÷Ǧ…

Overriding…

Authority: Codebreaker (Unique)

Iteration: #000

Welcome, Administrator

Data Uploading…

The Last Reality, Checking…

Checking…

Confirmed

First Tier Administrator Abilities, Unlocking…

…

Please, Choose Carefully:

Domain, Codebreaker

Listing…

(+)[Elite Harvester]

(++)[Bio Engineer]

(+)[The Deep Seed]

(+)[Library]

(++)[System Override]

…

…

Notice:

Latent Ability Detected

(*)[Eyes of the L’Ithari]

Per System Ordinance:

Automatic Awakening, Commencing…

Take Any Action To Cancel, Codebreaker

59…

58…

57…