The cube hissed open along its edges. Five perfect pieces hovered away from its glowing center of Qi, one of which was pressing insistently into Noem’s hand. He raised it as his heartbeat hit its crescendo, feeling a rush of excitement and trepidation mixed together as one. He’d heard legends of perfect cuts, where the stone took on a different form all on its own after it was carved, but he’d just made a cube.

Now that the crater corundum was opening up next to him, though? He grinned wildly and sent all of his tools back to his inventory. This deserved his entire attention. Imagine and Ambidextrous went away with a thought, and he replaced them with Resilient. He left one active slot open just in case something went horribly wrong, but he had a feeling that wouldn’t be the case.

Little miss meteor didn’t feel dangerous. She felt strange, mystical, and mysterious most of all–but not dangerous. Noem shuffled down the couch and pressed his hands to the floating pieces of gemstone, cut along the edges of the cube to create six nearly perfect pyramids. Save for the very tops, which were all cut off at the exact same point. Because the mass of Qi in the center wasn’t just unbound energy; it was an untouched cube of brilliant gemstone-like copper.

Noem didn’t know how to react to the stone. It was missing the brown and green of the rest of the crater corundum, but it felt like a far more concentrated version of the stone itself. Like the molten core at the center of a planet. His hand strayed close to the strange thing, but instead of feeling like he needed to back away, the cube beckoned him. Dared him to come closer. Qi licked at his fingers like the radiant heat of a roaring fire, but Noem’s coating of Resilient fought them back to a standstill. His power tousled with the cube’s for a moment in what he could only describe as a playful manner, and then it was gone.

The cube’s Qi winked out. All of the hovering pieces snapped together like a puzzle that didn’t want to be solved, and Noem couldn’t feel the presence of the cube inside of the cube. He blinked in surprise with his finger less than a centimeter from having been caught inside the sudden retraction, then yanked it away with a gasp that came far too late.

Noem threw his head over the back of the cough and laughed. “What the fuck was that?!” He asked no one in particular as he stared at a blank wall. “Hey, pause that search for a second. Check for reports of anything like what just happened here, then start up the search again after you give me the results.”

He grabbed the slightly-smaller-than-a-fist sized cube and twisted it around to try and see the seams he now knew existed. They didn’t seem to exist. He ran his fingernails down the edges and pulled as hard as he could on the sides, then pressed even harder, but it felt like one continuous chunk of gemstone. He knew that wasn’t the truth, but it felt like it was.

{I have the results you are looking for. Automated warning: your power draw has increased by 11%. In the current state, all electronics will lose power in forty-eight hours. Act accordingly. Returning to the previous query.}

“Eleven percent.” Noem whistled in appreciation. “That’s a whole lotta power for a few searches. Alright, put the results onto my interface. I’ll read ‘em while I go find something to get power from.”

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Noem palmed his gemstone cube and sent it to his inventory. That act alone would’ve been blasphemy from some of the more secular nations, but the digital taint only applied to living things and things that were once alive. No matter how much Qi the cube had, it was still an inanimate mass of rock. And if it wasn’t, then he’d just murdered one of the world’s greatest treasures.

Nothing too serious.

----------------------------------------

Noem pulled up his interface and double-checked his map. The non-quarry parts of the great Quarry were all annoyingly similar-looking, and thanks to all the rapid growth and destruction, he couldn’t use anything to mark the right paths. But the conglomeration points for spirits didn’t change based on the terrain; they followed the masses of latent Qi that naturally existed, but were too thinly spread for humans to abuse.

For a spirit, being spread thin didn’t matter in the slightest. They were either connected to a natural bond anchor, an oasis-created anchor, or they floated around in a state of near-intangibility. All of which could draw more Qi from the world around them than a human’s piddly skills could manage.

Strangely brittle white branches with vibrant green leaves cracked out of the way as Noem pushed through an underbrush that had been an open field a few weeks ago. But his map had confirmed that the Qi concentration was still exactly where it had been the last time he needed power, so there had to be some reprieve from the constant leaves and shattering branches.

After a few minutes, Noem gave in and simply activated Resilient. His Qi moved to form a shell around his body that would soften or slow anything that tried to move through it, and would completely invalidate a weaker attack altogether. Such as the branches that now splintered and fell away without him having to worry about protecting his face.

Though he had Qi reserves far beyond most normal people, Noem didn’t like using any more than he had to. He’d been in one too many situations with his back against the wall and his Qi drained down to a single drop for his liking. And unlike most people who reveled in the sensations of skills like Sprint or one of the variations of Strike, Noem had grown used to feeling normal.

Skills were only one step away from a psychoactive drug. Some were less than a step away, but Noem didn’t trust himself to use those until he mastered the weaker ones he was so used to. He’d even heard that some skills could give a glimpse into the future, or pull an event that was nigh-impossible into reality.

Those skills were cut off from him. From the vast majority of the population, in fact. People could only learn skills that were compatible with their bodies–things they could already do, but turned up to a higher degree of intensity. If they wanted something more, they needed a bond. Then they could gain skills outside of the realm of feasibility.

“Not like anything’s ever going to bond me.” Noem grumbled. He bent down at a ray of light that shone through the underbrush and stuck his head into the small opening. A good kilometer of rugged terrain, made equally of thick white-brown roots that ripped through the ground and metallic green dirt that gave way to grass that looked like jagged scrap metal but blew softly in the breeze.

Spirits that looked like inky apparitions of miscellaneous combined deer-like herbivores mulled about the clearing. Their antlers constantly shifted in an ethereal flow of not-quite-reality, some bleeding into long streaks like paint in water while others crumbled into dust that blew away on the wind and everything in between.

Noem took them in, then moved on. Pure spirits were completely untouchable unless he had very illegal tech, and that was a can of rotten worms even he wasn’t desperate enough to open. But among the ethereal, there was one thing that was very much real.

Twisted vines wrapped around four thin white sticks that held up a main body that looked like the vines had picked up scraps of wood and used it for armor. A long ‘tail’ of drifting white fluff spread out from behind the boundless creature, leaving little drifting puffs of white that flew without a single care for which way the wind was blowing.

It had no head. Instead, at the base of its neck, was a carved chunk of white wood with brilliant green runes.

Or, as Noem preferred to call it, a new emergency power source.