Edge began by reviewing everything that he knew about cores.

He had been following the Prison World broadcasts for decades, with each tourist’s puppet serving as a channel for the feed. As a result, he knew a lot about how basic cores functioned, and many of the common variants too.

Power cores are a type of magtech known as living artifacts. Machines capable of refining themselves over time. Cores grant incredible power as they evolve, doled out at key milestones known as cycles and stages. Whenever a core acquires enough experience, it creates potentia, allowing its bearer to grow stronger in the aspect of their choosing.

Each release of transformative power completes a cycle, commonly referred to as cycling-up one’s core. The explosive growth provided by attribute points lets a core wielder perform at increasingly superhuman levels over time. This is the first of three reasons that cored individuals are so dangerous compared to ordinary people.

Another reason why the cored are so feared is due to the second change that binding a core brings about, core evolution. Each time that a core goes through a number of cycles determined by its type, it gains the ability to mutate into something stronger.

After reaching the final cycle and meeting conditions unique to each variant, cores can evolve and reach a higher stage. This process isn’t well understood, despite a staggering amount of time and money spent analyzing it from the outside.

While the details are murky, there are some rules that apply to all known cores. Uncored individuals are limited to two skill slots. When a person binds a stage-zero core they gain one more, and that is only the beginning. Evolving to the next stage increases the skill slots on the core by a number equal to its new stage plus one, allowing for complex and synergistic skillsets. Additionally, every time that a core reaches the next stage, it grants more attribute points per cycle and its ultimate becomes more powerful.

Ultimate abilities are the third and final power granted by cores. They come in two broad categories, active and passive abilities. Active ultimates are more powerful in any given moment but have limitations on their use. Passives are always on, and thus utterly reliable under any circumstances.

The exception to this dichotomy is the variant known as basic cores. Basic cores have no ultimate abilities unless they evolve into another type at later stages. But that doesn’t mean they are worse than rarer cores. Basic cores grant an extra attribute point per cycle and have less restrictions for completing each stage.

As any fan of the feed knows well, some of the most dangerous people on Ord started off with a basic core.

Taking all of that into account, Edge needed to find a way to make his skillset seem normal, starting with which powers he would choose to reveal. Since how he obtained skills and ranked them up was completely unique, he had to come up with a plausible way to conceal the truth.

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He needed to decide what to show and what to hide right from the start, so that his deception wouldn’t fall apart within days. I’ll figure out the details before I get to town. It’s time to start moving again.

By this point, the herd was retreating into the distance, leaving manure and chewed grass in their wake. It’s too bad I don’t have the equipment to store their shit. I’d be able to make some easy money.

But there wasn’t any point in worrying about his credits right now. He’d work on generating an income during the next stage of his plans. By now, he had figured out where he was. Edge needed to cross two final sub-biomes and the river running between them, and he would make it back to town.

The first was a stretch of swampy soil that ran along the south side of the river. The water wasn’t deep, and the earth was covered in thorny bushes instead of grass. But there was lots of mud and shallow ponds. The soft ground would slow him down, and he would have to watch out for attacks from beasts living in the pools as well as the river. On the bright side, it wasn’t a large area to cross. Edge should make it through within a half day’s travel, if he could find one of the bridges spanning the waterway.

The second sub-biome was the Sea of Grass. It was a place where the stalks grew to nearly twice their usual height, topping off well above his head. The only way to penetrate the dense foliage was to walk along the paths that had been carved into the verdant growth.

It was a dangerous region, where predators could ambush him with ease. But it would take days to go around the long way. Time that he didn’t have under the circumstances. Edge needed to fill his belly with something more substantial than an occasional root or berry.

On that note, he started walking, keeping the fingers behind him to guide his path. His priorities were speed and stealth. He would eat more skills along the way if the opportunity presented itself, but he couldn’t [Extract] more until the sun was ready to set.

Edge wasn’t ready to take on another stage-one opponent yet regardless, or anything with a good skill for that matter. Not until he had a full tank of mana and something better than his shredded clothing for armor and a sword that would cut him almost as deeply as his opponent.

He also needed to think about what kind of skills he wanted to acquire. Although he could obtain them far easier than anyone else on the planet, he only had so many slots on his core.

Right now, he only had one empty socket and he needed to make it count. Unless he came across a skill that he already had, it made sense to acquire something better than the starter skills that most low-stage beasts developed.

Going forward, he needed power that packed a punch and that synergized with each other. A comprehensive, well-rounded package that would maximize his odds of surviving in the short-term and lead him to steady growth in the long.

After he made it back to town and was fully prepared, Edge needed to cycle-up two more times and evolve his core to stage-one, the minimum required to survive in the wild without being part of a team. When he did, he would gain five more skill slots, which meant that he had six more skills to pick out over the near-term.

The miles passed beneath his boots while his mind was hard at work.

By now, Edge had reached the border of the wetlands. Although he had to pick out a winding path that would take him past the countless pools, visibility was good, and food was easy to find.

While he planned out the next stage of his growth, he stopped to pick any berries or mushrooms that he recognized along the way. Unfortunately, they were just the normal kind and not mana-seeds, but it was still far better than being hungry.

He kept one eye out for ambush predators as he continued walking northeast. But so far, he hadn’t run into anything more menacing than mosquitos and songbirds.

Edge hoped that the rest of his trip back to town would remain blessedly uneventful, although he had a sinking feeling that it wasn’t going to be that easy.