Shining crystals polished to a mirror-like sheen stared back at Noem from his worktable. A string of rings and vertebrae-like cylinders of varying sizes, with one single carved head that he’d done his best to make look like the apex. Fourteen rings. Twenty-six vertebrae. Eight hours’ worth of on and off work, yet it still wasn’t finished. An anchor made of nothing but a gemstone would be far weaker than a composite piece, and then there was still the matter of making a body for the spirit to inhabit.
The crater corundum was valuable and a wonderful conduit for Qi, but it didn’t have anything else. Unless the apex was willing to provide enough smoke to constantly create a body for itself, Noem had to find something to make the majority of a serpentine body from. Then he had to engrave every piece with the right runes, infuse it with the right kinds of Qi, connect all of them together to form one single piece…
He leaned back in his folding chair and stared at the stone ceiling. “Still got at least a day’s worth of work, and that’s being hopeful and generous. Maybe I can carve this stone into a body for the apex, but would it actually hold something that powerful…”
Noem shook his head. “Who am I kidding, of course it won’t. People put apexes in works of wonder, not shoddy rock-snakes. What the hell was I thinking, trying to make this work?”
Nevertheless, Noem summoned a coil of brilliant blue wire from his inventory. Sapphires and cobalt spun together by someone with a skill he couldn’t even fathom to grant the materials the softness of silk and the strength of diamonds. From all of his other projects, Noem only had a single coil left, and he’d been saving it for… memory’s sake. They were spoils from his first heist, from before Ajiana and her clients started sending decoy cars.
But memories wouldn’t matter to a dead man. Noem uncoiled the entire spool and began to wrap the rings in it, gently following all of the runic carvings to create something he hoped would be wonderful. The blue contrasted with the crater corundum’s palette while also enhancing it, and when he successfully wrapped and tied off the first ring, a pulse of Qi from the world around him lit the ring.
Noem nodded to himself. That wasn’t quite the reaction he’d expected, but since it was better than what he’d imagined in every conceivable way, he wasn’t too mad. He grabbed two vertebrae and threaded the wire through them, only wrapping it around the edges of each piece for a little bit of colour, and left their etchings unfilled. Something else would go in there once he finished with the wire.
Another ring. Two more vertebrae. Coil the wire, call the world’s Qi, and repeat. Noem got halfway through the process before he felt his own Qi reach its limit, and he gently set his work down on the table before his skills bled away to normalcy. He shook his hands and let out a tired breath, then opened his interface to call the materials he’d need once he finished with the wire.
Eighteen small twenty-sided dull blue gemstones called Zeshi’s tears. Dull little things that looked like faded paint until Qi coursed through them–then they took on a mostly transparent hue like the midsummer sky on a beautiful day. When cut into facets in multiples of ten, they could somehow hold ten times as much Qi as any other number of facets. But they could only hold air Qi. Any other Qi quite simply couldn’t get in, so no matter how Noem tried to activate them, they remained dull and dark.
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“Perfect for that thing’s eyes.” Noem held down the skull between two fingers and summoned tweezers with the other. He pinched a gemstone and gently set it into the indent he’d carefully made to be just a tiny bit too small for the tear, then pressed down as hard as he could.
“Squeeze.”
The skill ate the little Qi Noem had regenerated and coursed down his hand, down the tweezers, and settled on the tear. For the shortest of split seconds, it shrunk ever so slightly. Just enough to fall into the indent. Noem lifted the tweezers to sever the skill, and when the tear grew once again, it was utterly stuck.
Noem pulled up his interface and pointed the holographic window at the skull. “Integrity check.”
A few seconds later, noem received his answer as a percentage: 100%. He blew out a small sigh of relief and activated both Collect and Filter, then sat back as Qi slowly poured into his reserves. Regrets bubbled just under his thoughts, but he brushed them away with a mental wave of his hand. He’d chosen this path, even if he hadn’t had many options to choose from, and he paid the price for it every single day.
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Noem shook his head and frowned as sleep threatened to overwhelm his mind. Only his skills kept him sharp and confident enough to keep working, but luckily, there wasn’t much work left to be done. The head had been attached to a wire-wrapped body, all of its eyes were inlaid while the thing kept perfect integrity, and Noem had attached one last piece of Zeshi’s tears he’d carved to serve as the tip of the filigree serpent’s tail. He couldn’t carve anything but facets into the stone at all, lest it lose the properties he’d chosen it for, so it had been a good half-hour of annoyance to get it properly cradled inside the last of the wire.
But the hard part was done. A serpent made from crater corundum, Zeshi’s tears, and the nameless wire. Noem smiled down at it in a state of mental exhaustion as he gently set it down in all of its unfinished glory. All he had to do was create the right Qi mixtures to fill all the vertebrae’s etchings, which he could do after a good night’s sleep.
“Done, done, and done. For now.” He chuckled to himself and tried to send the serpent back to his inventory. Except it didn’t. “Huh. That’s new.”
Noem opened his interface and checked his inventory’s status. After a moment of loading, it sent back the exact list he had memorized. And since it sent something back, that meant the power wasn’t dead back home. He summoned a migraine grenade just to make sure, which landed in his palm without a sound, and he sent it right back with a click of his tongue and a shake of his head.
“I guess the system doesn’t recognize it as the sum of its parts, but a brand new thing.” Noem laced his fingers together behind his head and leaned on his chair’s two back legs. “First time that’s happened. Not sure if I should be proud of making something so good, or pissed that nothing else I’ve ever made was good enough.”
Both were the answers that Noem came to. With a yawn he sent all the leftover materials and his tools back to his inventory, and in their place, he summoned materials to get the Qi etchings filled. He glanced down at Mona, who was asleep in the middle of scattered papers and a few half-used pens.
She still wasn’t used to using her interface for things like that, which was something she’d have to work on if she wanted to keep her secret. Even if he hadn’t known who she really was, Noem was fairly confident he would’ve pieced it together sooner rather than later. He wouldn’t have guessed that she was another person’s mind in his sister’s body, that was for sure, but he would’ve known something was terribly wrong from the get-go.
Noem shook his head and spilled a little pigment into a bowl, then added water that was perpetually freezing cold and a dash of crushed sky-shroom. As he ground the ingredients he watched Mona shift slightly and silently with every breath, cradled in comfortable sleep. He could almost convince himself that it was actually his sister.
Almost, but not quite.