It was as though a switch had been turned on. Elrhain felt a part of him go inside the Spire to connect with… another him.

This other him… lived inside the Gladys Spire’s virtual world, using the terminal as a window to gaze outside. And thus he saw the terminal’s prompt,

> [Administration Point (Provisional) Activated]

like a system message in a virtual reality game, even though he was no longer standing in front of it with his eyes on its screen.

By the time Elrhain looked past the strangeness of this all, it was over.

He removed his hands. Slowly.

A blue filament connected him with the Gladys spire. But as he concentrated, the filament disappeared. Yet Elrhain knew it was still there, immaterial but pervading. Similar to his tether with Agwyn.

It felt stronger though, unbreakable by mere distance.

“Yip!”

The fish gremlin bounced about with a happy jiggle. It scuttled back towards the tholus. After sniffing the ground connecting the tholus rocks, it expertly started digging with its back button paws.

“What do you think it’s doing?” Agwyn spoke up from beside him. She was clenching and opening her fists in front of her eyes. Elrhain felt her experience a gradually diminishing vertigo-like feeling through their link.

“Who knows.” He replied.

He too felt a similar disembodiment at the moment. Being in two places simultaneously was not something a human or dhionne brain could adapt to quickly.

But the feeling would fade, his instincts told him. Or maybe it was a newfound yet alien knowledge he gained as a provisional administrator to all this strangeness?

He did not know what functions the Gladys Spire had other than giving them the permanent horizontal woozy. Still, for now, it didn’t seem malicious.

Yip finished digging.

“A stash?” Agwyn’s interest was piqued.

In the hole the fish gremlin had dug lay a pile of perfectly hexagonal obsidian stones, almost as if they were 3D printed jewels.

Yip turned around and looked at them warily. It bit one of the hexagonal stones and threw it outside the hole, and it picked up another before hiding the stash behind it, blocking Elrhain’s view.

“I don’t want your rocks.”

“Yip?” The fish gremlin quickly paddled sand and dirt back into the hole to cover it, then bounced to the Gladys Spire in a wary sort of cheerfulness.

A strange thing happened.

As Yip came closer to the Spire, the floating structure seemed to resonate with the hexagonal stone in its mouth.

There was a cracking noise and a flash of neon light.

The stone dissolved into pixelated polygons, like a brittle jewel withering into sparks of light. These sparks travelled up in a stream of stars, imitating manna as it flowed like a milky galaxy in the aether.

“Yuuuuu!” Yip howled. It had a look of unwillingness in its teary eyes. It drooped down and rolled about, showing its fluffy tummy to Agwyn. Elrhain’s pipsqueak girlfriend picked up her pipsqueak fish gremlin pet and comforted it with snuggles. But her unmoving eyes were set upon the Spire.

When the last of the lights entered the structure, it pulsed like the heartbeat of a stone giant. Once, then again. And it stopped. Two times.

“Manna!”

Elrhain felt it in his very being. The Spire had syphoned manna from the stone, and it then fed it back to Elrhain and Agwyn!

Like a funnel for cultivation.

Were these stones a kind of gheist… core? Manna stone? Magic crystal?

Whatever they were, the Gladys Spire broke it apart into digestible energy, and it was pure. The manna was nigh unaspected other than some sparse motes of blue, brownish-green, and violet.

It was the type Elrhain had the best efficiency cultivating with. Water, earth, and mind, as he had come to know from his pestering of Auntie Lillian and Uncle Tudor.

Now, that efficiency seemed to have more than quintupled here. All Elrhain had to do was concentrate on the invisible tether connecting him to the Spire.

“Can you refine this?” Elrhain asked Agwyn, sitting down cross-legged to enter meditation. “To further condense this manna in your ignited nodes?”

Agwyn had already ignited all her nodes, as discovered by Lillian earlier. The little princess was none the wiser. After the fact was revealed, she was forced into double the cultivation intensity.

She worked to concentrate the manna in her totemic soul into a purer form before shit hit the fan. She put Yip down. The fish gremlin rolled away towards the other obsidian stone, licking it carefully.

Agwyn settled into a lotus asana beside Elrhain, replying with a scrunched nose. “I… can. But it feels weird.”

“Like, easier?” Elrhain read her senses, nodding. “I don’t have to concentrate on capturing the manna from the environment. It enters inside my lattice with no effort. I reckon you can condense the manna just as effectively.”

“M~hmm.”

The two continued to cultivate. An hour in, and the feedback of manna from the Spire cut off as suddenly as it had appeared. The store of manna from the obsidian stone had depleted.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Elrhain stretched out his arms and legs. “That was amazing. That was the first time I cultivated properly without feeling starved for manna. Is this what it feels to be a genius? Maybe I was too harsh. Cultivation ain’t that boring after all when you are good at it. At this rate, I’ll catch up with you in less than a cycle.”

Agwyn threw him a sideways glance. “Uhuh, wait till you get used to this speed. Lazy bum.”

“Your pet fish gremlin can help your beloved boyfriend not be lazy.”

“I am not helping you steal from a child.” Agwyn snorted, despite suspecting the fish gremlin to be many uncountable cycles older than even her old grandpa Thundham.

The two compared their cultivating speed with the Spire’s help with their regular one. After some speculations and calculations, Elrhain concluded he could cultivate about two times faster. The rate of catching manna from the tether was actually fivefold. But despite the boon, his own manna refinement speed lacked, causing significant wastage.

Agwyn’s boost on the other hand was minimum. A less than ten per cent increase from her usual speed.

“Stingy!” Agwyn was grumpy. The Gladys spire was obviously patriarchal.

“Or maybe the faster you already cultivate, the less the gains? Or somehow, the manna funnelling speed depends on how full your totemic soul already is. I got way less ignited nodes, hence way less manna.”

“Sexist!”

“…. You’re weird..” Elrhain flicked Agwyn’s forehead, but she had the bigger heart and licked his finger.

‘She’s been too flirty since those… visions….’ Elrhain muttered inwardly with complicated feelings.

He turned his eyes towards Yip, then narrowed them. “Let me see if I can get another stone from it.” Better to torture the cat to forget the pain.

Yip shivered as though noticing a malicious gaze. The fluffball then whimpered, hiding the stone with its snuffly body as it bared its cute teeth at Elrhain.

“Now, now, widdle fella, no need to be nervous. You read the terminal, didn’t you? We need to be at the 4th circle to do what you want us to do.” Elrhain spoke with a cooing voice as he loomed over the fish gremlin.

“The terminal has no voice prompts.” Agwyn corrected.

Yip yip’ed as if to agree with her.

“Details!”

“Yippppppp! Piiiip!”

It deftly moved out of Elrhain’s threatening hug and rolled away towards its stash.

“It’s like a squirrel.”

“And also like a fox, a cat, a dog, a hedgehog… What are fish gremlins, really?” Agwyn asked, his face a mask of profoundness. She even failed to notice Yip’s new syllable.

“Not fish nor gremlins,” Elrhain replied. “But stingy as both.”

“Yup!”

“D-Did it just say yup?” Elrhain felt a chilly wind ruffle his hair. He shuddered.

“Don’t be silly.” Agwyn looked at him as though he was crazy. Either she didn’t notice this second new syllable or Elrhain actually was going crazy.

“It looks like it wants us to follow again. Another cut scene? Storyline mission? Bonus boss fight!” she beamed, running after the holographic creature with a bounce in her steps.

“Ah, hey! Wait. You think you two can outrun me with your short legs?”

“Rude!”

***

Against their better judgement, Elrhain and Agwyn followed Yip eastward without all their usual safety precautions. Only one-third of them.

Or maybe they had simply gotten used to the place in the last few weeks. But as they walked, the number of runic chains and glyphs in the air lessened, along with the blue crystal outcrops from the ground.

However electro-zappy they were, Elrhain was of the mind that they also served some sort of security function. Their decreased numbers were giving him second thoughts.

But they had been walking behind the bouncy fish gremlin for several hours already, and stopping now because of hunches would not be optimal.

“Maybe we should—“ Yet despite those logical thoughts, Elrhain was about to voice his worries, but Agwyn suddenly halted.

Elrhain crashed into her from behind, and his girlfriend threw him an annoyed glance. “It’s not bouncing.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Y-Yip… Yuuuuuuuuuuu!” In front of them, Yip’s ears drooped along with its buzzy cry. It pointed its front left paw in a particular direction.

They now stood right behind a dwarfish boulder over-arching an area with craters dotting the landscape. The boulder seemed to be some sort of map marker, as on its other side, Elrhain could see no more runic chains. Only a few last blue crystals jutted out from the ground just outside the nearest craters, drawing a line of crystals from the boulder’s base to the crater’s drop.

But that’s not what got Yip spooked… or excited.

“Are those…”

“Gheistrum?!”

As if reacting to their observation, one of the beasts in the crater snapped its… head? In their direction.

Elrhain covered Agwyn’s mouth and hid behind the cover.

「Mmmm!」

「.... Why are you groaning telepathically?」

「They might hear if I do it outside!」

「I don’t get it… But you already jinxed us by mentioning boss fights. So don’t do anything stupid or it might see… wait, that thing had no eyes!」

「So, they. Uh. Can’t see us?」

「Don’t say anything stupid either. And stop licking my fingers.」

Just before his line of sight cut off, Elrhain saved a clear image of this strange beast and sent it to Agwyn.

It was as though Xenomorph had a bastard child with an inky, fossilized squid. It floated there, mid-air, in a trio with two others, with icky black tentacles swirling in strangely creepy yet mechanical patterns. The tentacles grew laterally from the base of the long Xenomorphic head. And the head…

The top of their squid-like heads were split into gaping maws. Their whole body, from the bulbous head to the chain-like tentacles, were covered in matte and metallic… scales? Plates? Armour?

「Or plated scaley armour. Chain mail wearing A-Aliens!」 Agwyn said with certainty. Elrhain had to agree.

Black, these scales reflected the albedo glow of this space dimension like soft mirrors.

The beasts also had no eyes, as Elrhain had noticed earlier, and half their biology gave them a robotic visage. But that was no doubt saliva which dripped from their maws.

And under the gaps of their fleshy squid-skin, black scales and the exoskeletal cover of the creatures’ Xenomorphic heads, Elrhain noticed a network of… piping? Wiring? Circuitry?

「Piped wired circuitry!」

Red light of multiple shades flowed through one of the creatures' visible innards like liquid biochemical fuel, giving off an ocular glow.

「They even got that clockwork tick every time they move a limb. Clockwork alien cyborg squids?!」

「We are not calling them that.」

“Grrrrrrrrr.”

Agwyn and Elrhain both went telepathically mute. They could debate names later after they had retreated, certain that alien eldritch horrors could not spy on their tether speak. Which they were gonna do right now.

“Y-Yip! Don’t make a sound; we don’t have any weapons.” Agwyn risked letting out a whispered quip to get her pet’s attention. She didn’t want it doing anything stupid because collective law stated a pet’s stupidity could be blamed on the owner.

But the fish gremlin was legally illiterate and quite high at the moment.

Its eyes narrowed into adorable lines as it growled, baring holographic eldritch teeth. Very different from the ones it bared at Elrhain earlier.

Then, before the two responsible adults had a chance to stop it, Yip leapt out.

“Wha—“

Elrhain’s eyes went wide and he involuntarily whisper-screamed as he helplessly saw the fluffball arc up like it was launched by a catapult.

Yip yip’ed, swallowing the obsidian core between its teeth in one smooth motion. As it reached the midpoint of its trajectory, just outside the edge of the nearest crater, its holographic skin split apart with spikes of blue crystals jutting out like porcupine thorns.

「Blue Hedgehog!」 Agwyn could not help but exclaim inside in wonder.

No sooner than she did, the three aliens in the crater noticed their unexpected guest. In unison, they turned to Yip, their tentacles whistling into whips behind them.

The top of their Xenomorphic heads aimed in Yip’s direction with multicoloured maws wide open, revealing lines and lines of square incisors. The liquid lights in their internal wiring flared into overdrive.

Red, blue, orange.

Three strange beasts of three different colours.

Yet it was too late.

Yip, carried by the momentum of its jump and the torque of its rapid spin, slammed into the leftmost alien squid, the one flaring orange. The cute ball of shining violence hit like a cannonball!

And the beast dissolved into mist, black and orange clouds exploding outwards like a hurricane.

“Yiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip!!!!!!!!!!!!!” The fish gremlin let out what could only be the sweetest war cry in history, bouncing off the opposite edge of the crater with almost no loss of momentum.

The strangest fight Elrhain had ever seen in his life thus ensued.