Noem considered the offer for all of three seconds before he grabbed The Artisan’s hand. He’d exhausted pretty much every known avenue to get stronger, so what did he have to lose from venturing into the unknown?

“Not sure if this actually does anything, but I’ll gladly be your equal partner.” Noem chose his words very carefully. ‘Partner’ didn’t necessarily mean equality, but if The Artisan accepted it, then that’s what she’d meant from the beginning. “So how do we seal this?”

The Artisan smiled wide as Noem’s contacts displayed his interface. A flow of data the colour of The Artisan’s Qi cascaded down his screen, piling up at the bottom until it had filled the entirety of his vision in translucent Qi. No matter how he’d tried, he couldn’t get Qi and pure data to mix. But the Artisan had done it with the smallest amount of effort.

{There. I connected your interface directly to me, and now you can’t escape! Muahahaha!} The Artisan laughed excitedly through Noem’s earpiece. {Oh, and now you’ve got access to this place through your interface. So it all acts like an inventory if you register the things first. I don’t have to tell you to be careful, since it takes a lot of Qi to register things, but–h-hey, what are you doing?!}

Noem looked over his shoulder with his bag in his hands. Qi leaked out and saturated everything in a flow of inventory alerts, and Noem felt his reserves dip to almost half from the effort.

“I know it's a lot.” Noem said. He rolled his shoulder and dropped the pack back down on the bench, then registered his bow, arrows, and knife to the room-wide inventory as well. “Using my Qi feels strange now. What did you do to it?”

“You… that was enough Qi to kill someone in your realm twice over.” The Artisan shook her head in disbelief. “Wait, don’t tell me; you trained putting things into your inventory just like you’d train a skill.”

“Pretty much, yeah.” Noem confirmed. “I tried making a skill for it, but y’know, it’s not something my body can naturally do. So I just had to get better at it.”

The Artisan tapped her chin with one finger. “When you combine that with your absurd Qi control and monstrous Qi quality for your realm, you can do it better than someone who only treats it like a tool.” She grinned and glanced over at Noem’s bag of stuff. “That’s really interesting. Do you use that same mentality for everything you do?”

Noem shrugged. “I’ve never really thought about it that way. If I could make it into a skill, I did. If the skill was pointless, I sidelined it. And if I couldn’t make it into a skill, I did the best I could to make up for it.”

“What makes a skill pointless?” The Artisan asked with curiosity.

“A lot of different things. But the biggest one is if you can do exactly what the pointless skill does with another more versatile skill. Like… Poke and Punch.” Noem raised his hand and coated it in Poke. It coated one finger at first, then spread to the others and down his palm until his hand was coated. “Poke is basically just Punch, but only on one finger. So if I spread it to the others, I can do exactly what I would with Punch but with Poke instead. Or I could focus Punch down to a single finger and make it work just like Poke.”

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Noem flexed his fingers and dismissed Poke. He held his other hand up and held out his index fingers on both of them, then activated Heavy Blow and Punch on different fingers.

“Heavy Blow is my extremely modified version of Punch that pretty much doesn’t have an upper limit on how much Qi I can put into it. Well, except when I put so much in that it starts to unravel. But if I tried to put the same amount of Qi into Punch…”

He did exactly that, growing Punch until it glowed as brightly and as thickly as Heavy Blow. A few moments later, the two were absolutely indistinguishable from each other.

The Artisan pursed her lips. “Am I supposed to see a difference? Or is their similarity the point?”

Noem frowned slightly in disappointment. “The second one. Heavy Blow is the highest evolution of Punch that I’ve managed to make, so I put all my time into mastering it instead of working on other skills that can do exactly the same thing, but have to build up to its level of power.”

“Like if you have two cars with the same top speed, but one of them starts off at it, and the other has to accelerate to get there.” The Artisan surmised with a nod of understanding. “What happens if you don’t want to go full-throttle at something?”

“Then I don’t give it as much Qi.” Noem said simply. He dismissed his skills, then activated a Heavy Blow on both of his fingers. His Qi trickled into his left, and produced a skill about as powerful as Punch. In comparison, he let his Qi flood into his right, and the Heavy Blow it created was so thick and powerful that the Artisan had to look away. “That’s how I used to keep up with the monsters around me. But I’ve been out of the game for four years, so there’s no way I’m anywhere near their levels any more.”

“Probably not, yeah.” The Artisan easily agreed. “Good thing I’ve got more than enough power for the both of us. Wanna see?”

Noem snorted. “Of course I do. Where?”

The Artisan grinned and spread her hands. Her strange Qi rolled off her statue like a breaking wave, but it wasn’t alone. The room around him shone and murmured a silent breath of power–a quiet show of force that would have gone unnoticed if Noem hadn’t been looking for it. Qi danced and wove itself into intricate patterns, forcing different skills onto the stones around him, and shaped them with the precision of… well, an artisan.

Except Qi couldn’t do that. Not without the proper bond. Noem watched in awe as the room’s walls pushed further and further away, the metamorphosis growing in speed until it created far faster than Noem could make sense of. As it went, it created many things; glittering monuments as tall as skyscrapers of strange creatures that only existed in the realm of imagination, small towns sprawled out underneath the towering facades of strangely geometric temples, and entire cities of buildings that rose and fell like an audio waveform. All constructed of the stone belonging to the Great Quarry, and emitting such an absurd amount of Qi that Noem couldn’t make sense of it.

He reached out, as if he could prove the distant wonders real with his fingertips. One of the statues’ heads cracked at the neck as a glowing mane of plumes erupted forth, sheltering a smaller group of statues in its brilliant marigold Qi. It turned with a quiet scraping that echoed through Noem’s head like a barrage of gunshots, then slowly blinked square eyes with far too many pupils.

The Artisan’s voice followed the scraping with a soft but regal tone. “This is the extent of my power. Within my specific confines, I have no limits. My skills and Qi are tailor-made to shape, to give new form, and to coax what exists towards something new. This same power now lies within you, as I have granted your Qi the same properties as mine. However…”

A sharp crack like thunder, and all the walls shot back into place. Noem stumbled back at the sudden noise and reactively activated Steady, but by the time it coursed through him, everything was back in place. The Artisan giggled at his surprise from her statue right next to him, reminding Noem that her form was infinitely malleable.

“That was my power. Your power is about enough to create this room.” She said without any of the power from her previous voice. “I carved it out for you, but once you get the hang of your newly upgraded Qi, you might be able to replicate one-hundredth of what I just showed you.”