Painful.

It was painful.

It was piercing hot like a bullet, but spread out like a grenade.

His mind detached to evade the worst brunt. His defensive mechanism sprung up to keep himself sane. He could almost hear someone calling his name beyond the haze. Was it his captain? Was the mission compromised? Did he fail to escape the building? How many died this time?

No... No, he was past it. He was beyond that fear bottle already, wasn't he? Remember, Andrew. Pain is proof you are alive.

When the pain subsided, Andrew almost could feel that there were countless extra orifices opened up all over his body. From some of them, the night was flowing, filling in the empty veins he didn't know he had. He knew how weird that sentence sounded, but there really wasn't a better way to express it. It was like the core aspects of night were being absorbed by him. Another way to say it was he was eating the night with his skin. Though, admittedly, that sounded weirder.

Andrew followed the flow of the night in his body. Many of the veins passed through his organs, while some simply were a straight line from his limbs, but all of them headed to one direction; his stomach... or something that was sitting in his stomach, slightly above his navel. It was an organ he didn't know about, though calling it an organ felt inappropriate, as it was largely incorporeal. Andrew tapped on it with his consciousness, and instantly realized that it was everything that he ever was and everything he would ever be; it was the concept of Andrew Lu being compressed into the size of a fist; it was - his core.

The moment he realized that, like a piece of parched dry sponge exposed to a bucket of water, his core began to absorb the night at an absurd rate and produced something else in return. Something that was him - the entire aspect of him. Andrew had no idea how to call it. The Andrew Particles? If only there was a name for this stuff.

But what if there was? Andrew recalled Ghetto's words. Something existed within the darkness of the night, something that wasn't energy. Siso. It was siso. Andrew had been absorbing siso of the night, which his core then converted into his very own siso, and that siso was now flowing through the still empty, newly opened veins, circulating throughout his body in places where the night siso hadn't touched. With every ounce of siso, he could clearly feel his body reinvigorated. His limbs felt more powerful, his breathing was more sure, his senses grew sharper, and his hunger was abated. Andrew felt more alive than he ever was in his entire life... until he wasn't.

Suddenly, something waned inside of him. His very being felt faint and obscured and transparent. He looked back inside and promptly understood why. His core was pumping in too much night siso into itself but the conversion to Andrew siso couldn't keep it up, it was basically flooding itself with a foreign substance. Andrew felt so full and yet so empty.

Actually, he literally was getting transparent. The overabundant night siso was changing his core and not the otherwise, and every change occurred to his core was reflected to his body. He was slowly assimilating with the night, and he would lose his identity in the process.

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And that thought scared him the most.

Andrew tried to stop his core from taking in more siso, but honestly, he had no idea how to operate a core. Should he just wish for it? Would it stop if he wished for it really, really hard? His core kept pumping in more and more siso, forcing the intake flow of the night siso to be much faster than before, and the force of the traffic actually damaged his newly opened veins. And when his body recognized it was injured, it deployed some of Andrew siso to the injury to mend it. The more he was injured, the more his body demanded siso. The more his body demanded siso, the more his core pumped in night siso to fulfill the quota. And the more the night siso was pumped in, the more his veins were injured. It was a vicious cycle, and Andrew had no means to stop it.

His own strength was beyond his control.

It was dreading.

He felt powerless.

There was nothing he could do to help himself, not then, not now.

...

But... he didn't have to. Andrew wasn't necessarily by himself. He wasn't alone.

A trickle of yet another siso. This one was of a serpent. It penetrated him through the veins, taking the shortest path to his core. When it arrived, his core greedily tried to devour it too, but this siso had a stronger will of the two. It engulfed the core wholly and began to take the form of two revolving rings the shape of a snake chasing after its own tail. It was Nyx. She hadn't abandoned him.

With the rings in place, the core stopped pumping in more night siso than necessary. Andrew overlooked the conversion to his siso that would be delivered to the injured veins, healing him slowly but surely. He looked again at his core. Now that there was less risk of it going berserk, Andrew decided to tap on it again to see how it worked.

Much to his surprise, it worked like a heart and a lung at once, but with siso instead of blood and air. Another thing he learned is that he couldn't stop it from pumping, but he could, somehow, redirect the flow of the input and output. He could make the command where he would focus his own siso to. Weirdly, and very inappropriately enough, out of anything, he could liken the act with a certain plumbing game his little niece would play on his smartphone.

Then, an idea struck him. Could he perhaps loop back the output into the input? He didn't know if there would be any repercussions, but he had Nyx with him. The wise not-Goddess would know when to save him from himself.

At first Andrew tried to loop a small circle, a connection between his core and his stomach. He let the Andrew siso flow from his core to his stomach then back to his core. He looked if there was any damage both to the veins and to his core, and when he found there wasn't, he tried a bigger loop. Until, finally, he closed all the veins in his body, not letting any new night siso to enter.

As Andrew watched his own siso circulating within his body, he noticed that the overabundant night siso in his core was slowly being shaved away and changed with his own. He could feel his body gradually regaining its gradient. Looping the veins had been the correct choice.

Unfortunately, not all damage could be undone. Some patches of his core that had been transformed into night-attuned were permanent. The change had rooted deep into his core, becoming part of him. What does this entail, Andrew didn't know. But let it be a reminder that overabundance of power was never a good thing. It literally corrupted him.

There were too many things Andrew needed to learn about cultivation. Mainly, how to control his core from pumping in too much siso. As of now, the only thing that kept him from going nuclear meltdown was the pair of rings that Nyx put on him, and Andrew wasn't delusional enough to believe that the snake would take care of him forever.

Andrew extended his senses outside for the first time in what felt like an eternity. After a bone-deep tired sigh, what escaped his lips next were his honest words; "I'd kill for a cup of coffee."