“So, uh, what the hell is it?” Sofiane asked.

“It is the Eye of the Cursed Demon,” Pechorin said.

“Uh-huh. So… what the hell is it?”

“An artifact of unimaginable power, whose cursed energy comes at a steep price.”

“What’s the power? Does it have double experience gain? Really good stats? Unlocks cheat skills?”

Pechorin folded his arms and leaned back in the chair, sunlight shining on his smooth leather trench coat. “More powerful still.”

“Yeah, that doesn’t clarify things. How do we know this is even worth it?” Sofiane said.

“And I would like to know about this steep price,” Shuixing added.

“The price… is your soul,” Pechorin said.

Sofiane snorted. “Oh big deal. That’s small potatoes compared to being at the top of the Use-Ranking charts. I’d sell my soul in a heartbeat. So would any Hero.”

Pechorin smirked and gave a nod of his head. “Good to know I’m working with someone who isn’t afraid of dark forces. Not many are prepared to walk the the line between light and d—”

“Yeah, yeah, edgy archetype. I get it. But let’s talk about where this thing is, non?”

Pechorin laid out his cryptic knowledge which, stripped of poetic allusions to greed and man’s inhumanity to man and his own cursed past and the fate of his clan and the abyss of his soul, amounted to the Cursed Demon’s Eye—or Eye of the Cursed Demon, depending on one’s mood—being located in a dungeon on the border between the Vermögenburgh region and Tianzhou.

“You could’ve said that in about a thousand fewer words, but you mean Mephistopheles’s Tomb, right? When can we go get it?”

“We must wait for the full moon,” he said.

“Um… Wh—”

“It’s a thing,” Shuixing said.

Sofiane raised an eyebrow. “A thing?”

“Don’t ask. It’s two days away, the wait isn’t that long.”

“Every day we don’t get this uber-mega-powerful artifact is another day that the top Heroes get ahead of us! I don’t know why we don’t just—”

“It began with the massacre of my clan…” Pechorin began. Shuixing put her head in her hands. It did not take long for Sofiane to realize why she had been avoiding the subject of the full moon. Ten, fifteen, thirty minutes passed with both of them unable to halt the momentum of Pechorin’s dark backstory.

Sofiane looked up from his mug. “Listen man, I—”

“—My own brother, the blood streaking his face illuminated in the moonlight, our parents’ corpses at his feet…”

“Yeah, sure, but we—”

“The rage I felt in that moment fills my trembling arteries when I stand in the full moonlight. I take on the strength of a beast, let alone a man,” Pechorin said, slamming the table.

“He gets a stat boost during the full moon,” Shuixing explained. “One of his Passives. Or so he says. I've never noticed any appreciable difference.”

“Ah, I see,” Sofiane said. He stood up and stuck out a frilly, sleeved hand towards Pechorin. “Well, monsieur, it was a pleasure to meet you, but I must be going. Let us meet up outside Vermögenburgh the morning after next and go find this Cursed Eye, what say you?”

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Pechorin glanced at Sofiane’s hand. “A pleasure indeed, but I cannot shake your hand. I don’t want the curse in my blood to infect another. This misfortune is mine alone to bear.”

“Uh-huh, sounds good.” Sofiane said, clapping Pechorin on the back as he left. “I will see you around, Madame Shuixing.”

She nodded to Sofiane before turning back to Pechorin who was sweating slightly from wearing a heavy trench coat in moderate, early autumn weather. Mind turning to the season, Shuixing took a deep breath and exhaled as a chilly breeze cut through the smoke rising from the flue of Alva’s bread oven. There were moments now and again when Shuixing felt at peace despite her stagnancy. Did she even really want to be an adventurer, or save the universe? What would she do with more money? She was far happier working on her private research into dimension-jumping and physics. But still, she couldn’t shake the feeling of things being not quite right. And there was still the possibility of her Use-Number dropping so low she couldn’t even buy food. Would the Non-Heroes in the Mage’s College still want to take care of a charity case like her?

“So, what have you been up to these past few years, Pech?” Shuixing asked, taking her mind off her thought-circles.

“The same as always,” he said, staring into the sky. “Revenge.”

“Your brother?”

“And all those who have wronged me. I have nothing left in my cold heart, nothing else that moves this corpse of mine on its borrowed time but vengeance, coursing through my veins like electricity through the reanimated corpse of a mad scientist. A freak of nature.”

“Nothing new, huh?”

Pechorin shook his head, chin still turned with quiet dignity towards the sky. Out of all the Heroes Shuixing knew, most broke archetype to talk frankly with other Heroes. It didn’t make much difference in the emanation that was summoned by the Celestials so long as you mostly followed along and didn’t just ignore it entirely like Natsuko did. But Pechorin was never off. His backstory, which every Hero knew was more of their “suggested character direction” than a real past, was tragic in the extreme, and subsequent heroes summoned by the Yishang-ren had been toned down a touch.

Shuixing’s own “backstory” was as a clutzy, cheerful, soft-spoken researcher at the mage’s college who was supposed to be interested in cute animals and wanted to impress her older brother. She ditched the clutziness as being legitimately dangerous in a laboratory setting and found animals thoroughly uninteresting. She’d also lost her cheerfulness in favor of the hardcore focus befitting a proper researcher. Nor did she have a “real” older brother, only a Non-Hero that was supposed to function as one for her backstory. She was relatively certain he had been summoned into Po-Lin at the same time she had.

“Does she mention me?” Pechorin asked.

“You mean Natsu?” Shuixing said.

He made a face. “The besmircher, yes.”

Not really, but she felt bad telling Pechorin that.

“Sometimes,” Shuixing said, “when we’re reminiscing about the good old days. Like when you and the Rakshasa Lord got into a monologue-off and we couldn’t start the Battle for Tianzhou for half an hour as you and him traded tragic backstories.”

“Hmm, yes, ‘twas truly a battle for the ages,” Pechorin said, stroking his chin.

“And when you and Hemiola got into a shouting match over who ate your slice of cake, and Natsu was giggling because she saw Zhidao carry it off into the other room.”

He nodded. “Those were times when even the cold chambers of my steely heart felt some small stirring.”

“And when you wrote a love poem with your own blood to Natsu—”

Pechorin cleared his throat. “I can feel the demon in my muscles calling me. They demand blood. I must hunt.”

“Ah! I see. Natsu and I are staying up at the Mage’s College, so you’re welcome to come visit any time. Otherwise I’ll see you in a couple of days,” Shuixing said.

“If my cursed demonic blood permits,” he replied, fiddling with the barrel of his pepperbox.

Pechorin tossed a few coins down on the table to pay for the meal and headed for the woods outside Vermögenburgh to do whatever it was he did when he suddenly felt like leaving. Shuixing wondered how he was really doing. You could only get real answers from Pechorin after they were heavily-filtered through his persona, which didn’t leave much.

With nothing much else to do, Shui retired to her apartment at the Mage’s College for the afternoon. She assumed Natsu wanted to be left alone. Awaiting her was the usual pile of accumulated research strewn across her table. The more she tried to understand their strange world, the more her brain got muddled. It felt as though whenever her thoughts roamed too close to her summoning five years ago, or the nature of why she had a “backstory,” or who the Yishang were and what their goals were, her brain became all fuzzy.

Physics was the only way she could exercise her mind in a way that made her feel clear and sharp. Even too much thought about the flora and fauna of the world, and about what environmental factors over time could cause certain morphological characteristics in animals, made her thoughts confused and hazy. Maybe it was because anything that could be known in those areas was already known.

But not physics. Physics, as Natsuko liked to violently demonstrate, still held a plethora of mysteries. If anything, she was more afraid of reaching the end of that line of knowledge than a dropping Use-Number. It was why she wasn’t in a rush to uncover every truth just yet. Even the ones she suspected were right in front of her nose.

Shuixing found herself in front of her bathroom mirror, staring back at her round, bespectacled face and wavy teal hair. She slapped her cheeks a few times. “Oh, Shuixing. What are you so afraid of?”