Natsuko breathed in a new dawn full of chemically-smelling freshness. Sleep really could fix everything. She even felt somewhat motivated to do the day’s XP farming. Today it was taking place in a dungeon called Planetview Cavern, whose gimmick was that the cave’s ceilings had craterous openings to view Po-Lin from. Boulanger was a whizz at crunching numbers—in some particular functions, maybe even better than Shuixing—and had figured out that while the monsters out in the open surface of Selenia gave more total experience, they were spaced further apart, which reduced the XP/hour rate and made the monsters in Planetview Cavern more efficient to farm.

The new monsters for Selenia were shimmering, translucent octopus-type things that came in various shapes, sizes, and levels called voidbornes. The cavern was mostly filled with these along with a few older monsters from other regions sprinkled in.

Koyon lifted a foot to avoid the carnage as Natsuko gleefully sprayed moon-goo from the voidbornes all over the floor like a human blender. Her sword, Taiyouken, white as porcelain, had a corona of white fire surrounding it that all but literally turned monsters into hot butter. She got a kick out of spraying the monster giblets towards Koyon who, rather like Sofiane, refused to get dirty if he could help it.

“Ugh! Careful where you swing,” Koyon said as he charged up a Spectral Keshik to mop up another wave of monsters.

She flashed him a mischievous grin.

“Natsu… Don’t you dare!”

Ignoring his protests, she kited an octopus over towards him. Koyon sprinted away, but Natsuko kept following with the aggroed voidborne in tow.

“Stop! I’m not joking!” he said.

“C’mon, get dirty!” she said.

Boulanger exhaled in annoyance. This was lowering experience-gain efficiency, which was the whole reason they were there in the first place. Natsuko blew a raspberry in his direction. Getting just enough of a lead, Koyon managed to turn around and blast the voidborne with a bolt from his rod, spraying goop on Natsuko instead.

“How do you like it?” Koyon said.

He immediately realized his mistake as Natsuko’s grin not only failed to disappear, but instead grew in size.

“I’m already dirty, kiddo. I love being dirty. Why don’t you join me and Boulanger?”

“Why me!? Go get Ailing or something,” Koyon said.

From the corner of the cavern room Ailing raised her eyebrows. “Darling, you had better not.”

Natsuko scoffed. “I would never. Ailing is a lady. She’s too refined for octopus goo.”

Koyon backed away. “Natsuko, really, this isn’t funny. Knock it off!”

“It wasn’t initially, but now you’re making it funny by increasing the stakes,” she said.

Boulanger curled his fists and huffed. “Just let her splash you already, Koyon. Get it over with so we can go back to doing our damn job.”

“No! This is my questing outfit! And if any of it gets in my ears I have to jump up and down for half an hour to get it out,” Koyon said, tucking his rabbit ears back with his hands.

Natsuko stroked her chin. He was definitely faster than she was, but she was a tactical genius. How could she beat him? Aha! She snapped her fingers and Koyon groaned. Turning towards a group of three shambling towards her, Natsuko ran at them and threw herself directly towards their sticky, slimy masses. Then, in the next instant, it was Koyon falling into them while she was laughing from twenty feet away.

“Get outplayed, bunnyboy!” Natsuko said.

Koyon got smacked around a few times with tentacles before he could flail his way out and destroy them with a Spectral Keshik charge. Thoroughly unamused, he glared at Natsuko while Ailing came over to pick some of the large globs and tentacles off him.

“Y’know, if you spent enough time playing with tentacles to affect your emanation, it might boost your Ero-Art number,” Ailing said.

“I’d rather not,” Koyon replied.

Her main mission completed, Natsuko returned to blowing up groups of enemies with Megaton. She was also their resident puzzle-solver as they made their way through the dungeon since she could always remember the solutions. Even with the monotony of running through the same dungeon four or five times before stopping for lunch, there was a kind of flow state Natsuko put herself in where she could block out all of her worries and just destroy octopi. By lunchtime she hadn’t even thought about drinking once.

“You’re really gonna eat that?” Ailing asked her as the two of them sat side-by-side on the lip of a large lunar crater.

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“That” referred to the anti-cooking Natsuko had done for breakfast that morning. Specifically, she’d packed a lunch of runny, undercooked eggs spilling over wet, raw vegetables. She was still getting a handle on what things you could—or should—cook that weren’t in the auto-make list the Yishang provided. As it turned out, she was not a naturally-gifted chef after all. But she was improving. She at least knew enough not to try and pan-fry ice cream to make a sundae. It straight up did not work.

“Yeah!” Natsuko said, holding a slimy, egg-covered radish slice up with her chopsticks. “Wanna try some?”

Ailing squinted. “Erm… no thank you, but I am curious to hear your appraisal.”

Natsuko shrugged and popped the radish in her mouth and chewed, making crunchy squelching noises.

“Pretty good,” she lied. “You sure you don’t wanna try?”

“I’ll wait until you’ve perfected your method, darling,” Ailing replied.

As she ate the rest of the eggdrop veggie platter, Natsuko tried not to make her shuddering too obvious. It was pretty dreadful, but it was real. Ish. As real as could be in a fake world. Comforting, even, in the way that only unassailable truth could be. Natsuko’s side-project, such as it was, was to claw back a handful of real-ish things out of the desert that surrounded her. In the absence of Shui’s ability to pick apart reality, it felt like the only useful thing she could do besides keep herself on top of the Use-Rankings.

Ailing hummed for a second. “You know, you told us a little about the forced dimension-jumping business from a couple years ago, but did you tell us all of it?”

Natsuko nearly choked on an uncooked chunk of zucchini. She spat it out into the crater.

“Pretty sure. Why?”

With her hands resting behind her, Ailing leaned back and craned her neck up to look up towards Po-Lin hanging like an enormous blue-green chandelier above them. Somewhere up—down?—there were the other Heroes. The ones that couldn’t make it to Selenia.

“It’s just that… it seemed like the Yishang had a hand in it and—”

“They gave me the bottle hoping Shui would make copies of it and Heroes would start killing each other,” Natsuko said. “They’re evil. I definitely remember saying that.”

“Right, of course,” Ailing said, sliding herself closer to Natsuko. Closer, she rested her soft hand on Natsuko’s knee. “But was that all? If there’s more… I promise my lips don’t open for just anyway. Least of all Boulanger and Koyon.”

Natsuko took a couple of seconds to realize her own lips were slightly agape. Ailing didn’t make her heart flutter—at least not the way Frederick had at one time—but out of her three teammates, she was the only one who soothed Natsuko. Even Shuixing hadn’t been able to do that as consistently as Ailing. She just had a way about her that could pull Natsuko back into herself. And to lie to Ailing about something as big as this…

“I uh…” Natsuko paused, overly-aware of the soft, warm palm and its pressure on her knee. “Th-there’s maybe a little more that I might not have mentioned...”

“Oh?” Ailing said, gently raising her eyes as though this was an item of mild amusement.

“You have to promise this stays between us, okay? I don’t— I don’t think the Yishang want us to know this. So do not, I repeat, do not tell Boulanger or Koyon or anyone else, understand?” Natsuko said.

“My lips are, shh…” Ailing raised the hand not laying on Natsuko’s leg to her lips and made the universal sign of a shush. “Sealed.”

Natsuko took a deep breath to steady herself. “There is no Entropic Axis. The Yishang created the artificial world we call Po-Lin and created us to live in it, because every time the Celestials summon one of us, they make money. I know it sounds silly, what could demi-gods possibly do with money, right? But it’s the truth. I swear on my life, that’s what Hemiola said.”

Ailing hummed to herself again, almost a purr now. “I see. It does sound a little silly. Are you sure all of that is true?”

Natsuko nodded.

“And what if Hemiola was simply telling you a fake story to confuse you? Is that possible?” Ailing asked.

“I doubt it. He was a Xian… um… like, a helper for the Yishang, the way Pengwu are. So he would know.”

“And he himself said he was a Xian?”

“Well… yeah. But he also had crazy stats and a whole new moveset after dying from a bad dimension jump, so clearly the Yishang did something to him.”

Ailing shrugged. “I wonder if that’s the whole truth? Or maybe he left some things out. Or twisted them in a way that suited him.”

Natsuko confessed the rest to her teammate, including Hemiola’s prophecy about declining Use-Numbers and the other worlds that the Yishang had created to sell Heroes to Celestials, all the way down to the special technology they employed to give Heroes in Po-Lin an independent will. Throughout, Ailing remained at a steady baseline of mild interest. Her lack of reaction was almost a little disheartening after the existential dread that had afflicted Natsuko when she first learned the truth. After Natsuko finished the full confession of everything she could recall about the events of two years ago, Ailing took a moment to consider things, tapping her long fingernails against her lips.

“I’m not sure I believe everything Hemiola said. After all, the numbers may have gone down across the board, but we’re still sitting in the millions, aren’t we? And who’s to say the numbers don’t bounce back? Who knows how many Celestials there actually are. This is the cause of your drinking and your bad moods and your sleepless nights, right? I’m not saying we shouldn’t ever worry, but I think you’ve gone and let it bother you more than you need to. We’re on top of things and we will be for a long time. Why not take it easy and trust that the Yishang are doing what they need to do?”

“What they need to do?” Natsuko asked, feeling the seeds of a kind of pleasant reassurance sprouting in her mind.

“Mhm. We and the Yishang both want the numbers to keep rising, so why don’t we focus on doing our part and entertaining the Celestials with those rising numbers? And then the Yishang can focus on doing what they need to do on their end. It only makes sense, right? We all have a part to play.”

Ailing smiled at her.

Natsuko blinked and then nodded. “Huh. I uh… I guess that makes sense.”