Vayra wedged the fingers of her mechanical hand into a crag in the root and hauled herself up an arm’s length. She scraped the tips of her boots along the rough bark surface until they found traction again. Then, with her flesh-and-blood hand, she reached up and jammed a wedge of sharp stone into the root like it was a climbing pick.

The root column running up the interior of the greenhouse had been exposed to the open air for so long it had gotten a rough outer coating like a tree’s bark, and only in her spiritual sight could she see the Arcara whirling beneath the surface.

She had been climbing from midday until evening. With the sun sinking below the horizon, it was marginally cooler inside the greenhouse and much more pleasant weather to climb in. She had already made it a quarter of the way up the greenhouse wall.

By the time she reached the first set of conks, a few of Harvest Sanctuary's moons had risen. The outer dome distorted their light into a colourful rainbow that hurt to stare at for too long.

The conks themselves trembled with accumulated spiritual power, but she doubted she’d be able to break them open without dropping a wedge of glass on them—and that would never happen on this side of the dome. There wasn’t even any scaffolding to hold sections in place.

As she climbed, Adair clung to the shoulder of her cloak. It was best if he got to see the outside world, instead of spending all his time growing up in her corespace. He might not turn out to be a very good mouser, but he’d be good at climbing and clinging onto people—and he might even learn a little bit about magic.

While she sat on the edge of the conk, catching her breath, she looked down. Larra could be behind her, still, and no doubt was. But even Vayra’s First Lieutenant eyes found no evidence of it.

‘She’ll be behind us,’ Phasoné assured her. ‘I can try to sense her, if I come out there and you feed me some mana.’

“I’d rather not make any bright light.” Vayra had only been using strength-based Bracing techniques during the day, but at night, they’d shine too bright and be a beacon to her exact location. “That is, until we know that Larra has locked onto us again.”

The Astral Shroud wasn’t very good for climbing; it didn’t boost her strength like the basic Bracing technique did. But Vayra had spent her entire life climbing up the rough wooden surfaces of Tavelle and scampering around the alleys. She didn’t doubt her climbing speed or endurance.

She just didn’t know if it’d be enough to keep outrunning Larra’s strength-based body.

‘The bigger and bulkier she is, the harder time she’ll have climbing,’ Phasoné pointed. ‘Her Bracing might help her to a certain extent, but don’t expect miracles from her.’

“No miracles from Larra sounds nice,” Vayra whispered. “But I’ll plan for the worst.”

After a few minutes to catch her breath, she kept climbing.

As she climbed, she continued to integrate more and more of the elixir. She’d gotten through one and a half of the barrels she still carried with her (along with feeding touches of it to Adair), but that alone wouldn’t be enough to push her to the peak of the stage.

She had to finish the corespace.

She split her attention, dropping in and out of the corespace as she climbed. When she was inside the corespace, she worked on setting up its interior. First, she laid out the essence of a small cabin at the top of the central hill, nestled among the silver pagwart.

The cabin had walls of stacked logs, each layer building something slightly better onto the foundation, and then she topped it with a thatched roof. She kept the cabin’s inside tight, using it to visualize how much area she had within the core to store other physical items—about seven barrels’ worth of floorspace.

Then she laid out trails through the night garden, setting round cobblestones into the ground and winding them around the pond.

When she started, she set them down aimlessly, but Phasoné instructed, “Concentrate, Vayra. Focus the trails on where your Arcara travels through the core. This is how you visualize it, so visualize it well. You are setting the structures of your core.”

In between bouts of climbing, she focussed on layering the trails in the most direct and fastest routes through the core.

Her nature was slippery and quick, and her Arcara had to be the same.

At that thought, the pathways turned a little shiny and a little slippery, as if a rain had just fallen onto the stones. The leaves of the pagwart glittered with dew.

With her consciousness flashing in and out of her core, she kept climbing. She kept drawing more and more elixir out of her corespace and purifying it using the technique Nathariel had taught her.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Once she finished laying the trails in her core, she willed the air within to turn pleasantly humid and pleasantly warm—a temperature she could wear a simple blouse and trousers and not be cold.

Nathariel’s final instruction had been to seal the last stage of additions—the cabin and the paths, the touches to the air, the dewy ground. She gathered up her Arcara and blasted a purifying wave through the core, locking everything as she had forged it. The core’s final adjustments had been made.

She kept climbing and purifying Arcara. Her mana was depleting with how fast she was consuming it to cycle, and she had to be nearing the peak of First Lieutenant.

By the time she reached the next set of conks and paused to take a break, it was midnight, and she had finished the barrels of elixir. Her core was full again, and Arcara flooded her channels. She felt ready to burst any moment, but not in a bad way—in an…ascending way.

But nothing happened.

She hadn’t expected to advance to Captain—there was still an insight to reach before she could trigger the advancement—but she had expected to feel something. Anything to tell her she had done it right.

‘When you get the insight—the Path revelation—right, you’ll know,’ Phasoné told her.

“What would the insight be?” Vayra asked, dangling her legs off the edge of a giant conk, catching her breath and letting her arms rest.

‘This is one of my earliest vivid memories of advancement,’ Phasoné said. ‘My insight was relatively simple: “I am not the wind. I am not the void. I guide the way. I am the in-between.” ’

“And that triggered the advancement?”

‘It did. I spoke it aloud, and it was enough to push me onwards. It consumed all the Arcara in my system, and in a matter of seconds, my body was remade as a Captain.’

“Remade? Will I get my limbs back?”

‘I doubt that. They are gone for good. But your connection to your artificial limbs will likely improve.’

They kept climbing after that. Vayra kept her head down, watching below for any sign of Larra. She still saw nothing.

By morning, she figured she was about two-thirds of the way up the center wall of the dome, but it was hard to tell. The ground blurred into a single field, splattered with different patches of colours.

She paused at a single smaller conk. It would be the last break she got before she’d have to climb the final stretch to the upper dome—there were no more conks above her—so she took an extended rest to let her limbs recover.

“What is my Path, Phasoné?” Vayra asked.

‘Well, you certainly don’t have any techniques laid out for you,’ Phasoné said. ‘You have a grand smattering of all sorts of techniques. You have the Starlight Palm, from my Path of the Astral Hammer. You have the basic shield, a common Ward technique that almost any Path would have. You have the Shroud, a Bracing technique of your own creation, and then you can funnel a Starlight Palm through the pistol? Well, that’s something that fire-Path God-heirs do all the time.’

Vayra stood up and marched to the center of the conk. “Right, so it’s not an easy answer.”

‘Were you expecting an easy revelation?’

She sighed. “I suppose not.” With a gentle nudge, she helped Adair up to her shoulder, letting him perch. “I was supposed to make my own Path, after all.” She patted her haversack, feeling for the Godscourge book that Old Uckoe had given her all those months ago in Tavelle. Back then, there hadn’t been much in it that she understood, but it had described the process of forging her individual enhanced body.

‘Let’s run through all your techniques,’ Phasoné said. ‘See if anything clicks for you. It’s daylight, now, so we won’t make a big sight.’

Vayra started off with the Starlight Palm. A basic Reach technique, it manipulated the element under the reign of her Path. But it was just a basic offensive technique.

Her shield didn’t even have a name, aside from being a Ward technique—it was the same, basic and uninsightful.

Next, she mustered her scythe. It was a Mould technique, and though it didn’t have a name, the scythe did: Herephōs. It had once belonged to Phasoné’s brother, but he’d been killed by a different God. It was entirely theirs now.

A tool for cutting wheat? Yeah, that had so much to do with starlight and killing Gods.

‘It’s a tool for cutting down old growth that’s stayed well beyond its time,’ Phasoné said.

Vayra swung it a few times, letting it whistle through the air—and working in tandem with Phasoné to control it. Then, she threw it a few feet through the air ahead of her. It spun for a few seconds, whizzing and popping with the starlight-Arcara, then flew back to her hand. This time, she caught it.

Then she dispelled the technique altogether and activated the Astral Shroud. As the first technique she’d come up with entirely on her own, it was best suited for her. Her new core, with its defined pathways for Arcara, supported the Shroud even better than before. It took less mana to maintain the Shroud, and the white fire parted the air for her. She took a single step and crossed the conk in a blink. Adair clung to her shoulder still, mewling excitedly.

Finally, she drew her pistol, and used it to fire a beam of starlight far off into the distance. She concentrated the beam around the pistol, and with her new core, the technique stayed as a tight bar of light for a few hundred yards before dispersing.

She tucked the unloaded pistol back into her belt. “Between them all? Well, they’re mostly offensive or speed-based. Except for the shield.”

‘For bringing down enemies thrice your size, and enemies with a much higher power ceiling.’

Vayra nodded slowly. It was definitely an arsenal, not a bulwark…

She just needed to tie it into herself somehow to reach the revelation.

‘How about you check the book, now that you’ve gotten a little more advanced?’ Phasoné suggested. ‘Maybe there’ll be something about finding a Path insight. You still need to give your limbs a break from climbing, but we don’t have forever—and you’ll need to reach Captain before we go board-to-board with Larra.’