Nia waved a hand to cut through the smoke, and even though she was still far away from us, I could see her perfectly. Like a reverse smokescreen where we could only see her. Her and the melting rock.

“Welcome, whoever you are. I am grand general Persephonia Persephonia, and if you are seeing this, it means that Okeria Perek managed to do something about the corruption at the head of our government. The gods know he’s not the person I’d put up to that task, but maybe he’ll manage to do something.”

She shook her head and sighed, as if there was a massive weight crushing her down. “I’ll cut that later. Don’t be so pessimistic; you can do this, and so can he.” She muttered to herself, then stretched and cleared her throat. “Welcome, new recruits, to your second lesson. In our first lesson, I outlined how you can greatly increase the stats your core grants you. This lesson will be a quick outline on how to find the secrets within most hazards, and then a longer instruction on creating stronger armor without massively increasing its core mastery requirement.”

Nia held out a gauntleted hand before her, then waited. Perfectly still. I cocked my head to the side in curiosity at what she was waiting for, and took the moment to get a better look at how her armor had changed.

It still wasn’t the sleek close-fitting plates that the Nia I’d known wore, but it was a little less bulky than the last suit she’d worn. Her armor was accented with orange ropes tied around her biceps, wrists, waist, and one from her hip to her opposite shoulder. It was a thick cord that seemed to bite into the metal of her armor, and the knots that tied it together were intricate and left long strands of rope dangling beneath them. Aesthetically pleasing, sure, but they would be nothing short of a hindrance in combat.

A glob of molten rock fell onto Nia’s outstretched forearm. She flinched back in surprise, stared straight up at the ceiling, then down at the floor. “Right, the X was where I was supposed to put my hand, not where I was supposed to stand. Reminder to self: cut straight from when I put out my hand to when the slag falls on it.”

She backed up a step and took her stance once again, and the glob of molten rock fell far quicker this time. She clenched her hand around the material and brought it close to her chest, then continued her lesson as if she hadn’t messed up her positioning. “When I first entered this hazard, there was a single oasis in it with pink-tinted waters that didn’t quite add up to everything else. It picked at the back of my mind for so long, and when I eventually found myself coming back three years later, I came with the express intention of unearthing whatever secrets it held.”

“It took close to three months of searching this blanched wasteland, but I finally found what I was looking for. And if you were patient enough to watch from the very beginning of this lesson, you will know what it was I found.” Nia said with a gesture from her free hand towards the fire. “Three stones with unnatural holes. Tinder that burned with the slightest touch, but only if it was made into a perfect ring. And a cavern hidden below the only source of water in this hazard with a ring etched into the ground. Once I had all the pieces of the puzzle, it was simple to put them together. The challenge is in finding those pieces.”

“No shit.” I chuckled. It had been hard enough to find the pieces of the puzzle back in my old life, and when we did, the system usually pointed us in the right direction right after. Sometimes it was as obscure as ‘the components are gathered’, up to as specific as ‘a hatch hisses open beneath a trick floor’. If Nia had a better way to find the pieces, I was all ears.

“Open your interfaces now and take a good look at the map subscreen.” Nia instructed, wiping her hand through the air as she assumedly did the same. “If any of you are not aware of how to do as I ask, please pause this lesson and… fix that. I will be continuing from now on as if everyone is capable of opening and manipulating their area map. Now, pinch your fingers together on the map to zoom in to your own location marker. Once it takes up at least half of your interface, you will notice something.”

I did as Nia asked and zoomed my map in almost all the way. I’d done this before, of course; I tinkered with my interface as much as I could in my old life, but there were quite a few differences between the one I currently held and the one I’d had in my old life. When my location marker, a simple blue dot contained within a circle of white, took up a little more than three-quarters of my map, nothing happened.

“That’s weird.” I mused, trying to zoom in further, but found myself unable to. “I could’ve sworn I could zoom in further the last time I tried this.”

“That should be plenty of time.” Nia said with a clap of her hands to get our attention. “Depending on if you are in a hazard or not, you will notice that you become unable to zoom past a certain point. If you are in a safe place, you will be able to zoom in so far that your entire map becomes taken up by the location marker. If you are in a hazard, you will find that there is always a margin of map that cannot be removed. That is the key to finding the puzzle pieces.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Nia gestured at the room around her. “When you find a piece of the puzzle, it ever-so-slightly pushes your location marker off to the side. So slight that you might not know it changed, even if you had it as a third of your screen, but when it’s fully zoomed in as I have had you do, you will be able to notice that change. It is not a massive improvement, and it may not serve a single purpose for those of you with searching functions, but it has proved infinitely helpful to me. Of course, I would recommend everyone who wishes to fully explore a hazard acquire a searching function, trinket, or device one way or another. Though many of those only work when they have an object to work from, so this method can serve as a way to acquire that first piece.”

I swiped back over to my inventory and summoned one of Mortician’s shards to my hand, then swiped back to my map. And just as Nia had said, my location marker was shaking ever so slightly. Something I never would have noticed if I wasn’t zoomed in this far, and would be an excellent checker to see if something I’d picked up was actually important to the hazard or not.

The smoke cleared ever so slightly as Nia caught another few blobs of molten rock. I turned to check if I could see Jun again, and found her staring back at me. “That was strange.” She laughed, but didn’t push away from me. “Now we have a way to find whatever the treasure of the floodforest is when we go back. And I still have my vial of moss, so we can check if it’s important anymore too.”

“Good point.” I agreed with a nod. The twenty-year old in me was slightly uncomfortable and confused at the fact that Jun was fine with her leg touching mine, but the much older part of my brain assured me that I was reading too much into it. That was the first old-new life conflict in a while, which spoke wonders of how I’d sort of melded both of my lives into whatever the hell I was now. “Hopefully it’ll help me find everything I need to rebuild Mortician.”

Jun blinked slowly, then turned to look at me with confusion. “Uh, am I allowed to know who Mortician is? Or is that only between you and The End?”

{Oh, do tell her about us! We can sense that she is blessed by the one who didn’t abandon us, and in more ways than one!. -Mortician}

//I GIVE MY PERMISSION AS WELL, FOR WHAT LITTLE IT MEANS.

//BUT DO BE CAREFUL AROUND THAT OKERIA FELLOW.

//HE REMINDS ME A TAD TOO MUCH OF FLUX FOR HIS OWN GOOD.

I chuckled and shrugged helplessly. “Well, considering that both of them just said it’s fine for me to tell you, I don’t see a reason not to. Mortician’s locked up in the slyk pods on this trawler, and maybe more out in the hazard somewhere, and I think they’re the equivalent of this hazard’s hidden treasure.”

“Is Mortician a person? Is that even possible?” Jun asked skeptically. “How could we rebuild anything alive from a bunch of… those?”

She pointed at the shard in my hand, and I didn’t really have a good answer for her. So I told her what I’d been assuming until that point. “Mortician's consciousness is trapped inside a network of the slyk electricity somehow, and they need a body made of that same stuff to live outside of the network. And for some reason, the only thing that’ll work are all the shards trapped in all the pods in this hazard.”

{If we may interject; it is not all of the pods you need to find. It is the pods on this trawler, and those that we designate as important during the layover and at your final destination. It is an impossibility to find all of the pods, since the hazard continuously creates new trawlers and slyk to populate itself with!

-Mortician}

“Well, then, it’s a good thing we looked at this lesson.” Jun said with a smile. “Let’s see what else Nia has to show us.”

I nodded and leaned back while Nia fiddled with the blob in her hand. She eventually worked it free of her fingers and molded it into a ball which she placed in her palm.

“The rest of this lesson will be dedicated to showing you how to make the absolute most of every piece of gear you obtain. Covering yourself in metal can only get you so far, and relying on the system and your stats to protect you the rest of the way is unbelievably inefficient. It is very serendipitous that this hazard’s treasure is what it is, as this material is extremely useful as an impact-absorbing underlayer.”

Nia flattened the sphere of molten rock between her hands and rolled it into as thin a sheet as she could. She then summoned a gauntlet that was a near perfect twin of the one she had on, save for the orange rope. She stuffed the sheet into her gauntlet, then swapped it with the one she already had on. As marked by the orange rope.

She grunted in pain and flexed her fingers, then let out a rickety sigh. “Some materials, such as this one, can be transferred into existing armor simply by forcing it onto your body and enduring the pain it brings. Most will not, however, and will have to be made into specific underclothes or put into the armor during its creation process. Everyone is so obsessed with what they have equipped that they completely forget what they’re wearing, as it doesn’t show up on their inventory. But that doesn’t mean it is completely ineffectual.”