A faint gray light draped over the horizon. Mist-sweat dripped from his body—thicker than air, more like oil that refused to fall.
> (⧼ Bio-Integrity: 92% ⧽)
Above, white-violet sparks chiseled themselves eastward like frozen arrows suspended in a breathless sky.
> (⧼ Chaos-Starfall will strike the Glass Valley in 5 h 47 m ⧽)
He secured the Grav-Seed α to the lower spine. In its embrace, his jumps lightened—0.6g felt like running underwater with wind beneath the skin.
---
He planted weight into the soil. The Grav-Core pulsed—once, twice.
A shock burst beneath his soles, launching him forward fifty meters with every leap. Each jump devoured 12 QP, leaving a ribbon of inverted dust fields behind—little clouds that hung for a breath, then collapsed once the anti-gravity field faded.
Dizziness bloomed. His eyes no longer saw motion—but heartbeats.
---
The descent curved like a bow drawn tight.
The ground was cloaked in milky crystals, refracting not the real sky, but a phantom blue heaven that shimmered sideways.
Each cracked pane acted like a lens, focusing stray lightning. Life-Sense activated—threadlines of pale green shimmered beneath, frozen memory conduits from a long-lost crystalline civilization.
The atmosphere held its breath, like a throat readying to scream.
---
A controlled spiritual shock was needed. He shaped three Memory-γ Crystals into a triangle atop a jagged glass mound:
Crystal of "Saving the Snail"
Crystal of "The Sprite's Laughter"
Crystal of "The Night of Crystal Fear"
Each was charged with 40 QP and linked by a fine Pulse-Thread of silver filament.
He knelt at the center. Closed his eyes.
> (⧼ Entering Soul-Ducting mode ⧽)
The system began drawing the remaining 0.8% chaos impurities from his Beacon toward the valley—to be cleansed in the storm's coming fire.
---
The first chaos meteor grazed the valley's edge.
The crystals flashed—and light broke apart into image-waves. They struck him like strobing memories from lives he never lived.
A hammer-wielding crystal cultivator.
A child with glass limbs laughing in rain.
A woman painting lightning across the surface of water.
His Soul-Seed leapt from 64% to 69%, then trembled on the edge of detonation.
The pain wasn't heat—it was texture. Each hybrid memory scraped across his mist-body like fingernails on frozen fog.
---
The system requested a choice.
One memory to anchor his soul-vision. One echo to become a lens.
He chose her—the woman painting on water. Her face reminded him of someone blurred in time—perhaps a mother, or merely her shadow.
> "Drawn Waterglint."
He named it silently.
The central crystal cracked.
Blue light poured from its wound, spiraling into his chest—wrapping his core like a scriptless tattoo.
---
A white flash detonated within his skull. For one second, gravity vanished—then returned at half strength.
He opened his eyes.
Now, atop every glass slab, a yellow smoke-thread hovered—recording what had once happened there:
A thunderbolt bent in two.
Dancing fog-creatures.
Footprints of long-dead cultivators.
> "It was as if the past evaporated like cold water—then froze again, directly onto my retinas."
Soul-Seed surged to 72%.
---
The Halo-Eye linked to the halo-threads. He traced the ancient lightning paths, then found it—a buried concave crystal dish that would attract 70% of the incoming chaos strikes.
Swiftly, he covered it with magnetic clay from his reserve pouch.
Then he planted a second Grav-Seed, a frozen-gray pebble. Its function: convert raw storm energy into vertical push pulses that would be absorbed by the Filter System underground.
---
Five chaos meteors descended at once—spikes of night carved from lightning.
But the lens was buried.
Their force split, funneled along the thread-web of Pulse-Thread he'd mapped, skimming across the crystal valley edges—into the Grav-Seed's core.
The flash should've blinded him. It almost did.
Instead, he switched to Halo-Eye, viewing the shadow of the blast rather than the light itself.
Vision preserved. Heart steady.
---
> (⧼ Energy Intake: +11,000 QP ⧽)
(⧼ Filter Output: 38 QP/min ⧽)
The valley held. No meltdown.
One fracture collapsed into a flowing stream of cooled crystal—solidified fast enough to be harvested later for construction.
In the distance, Echo-Wraiths let out a high harmonic cry—joy in their frequencies.
The system rewarded him: three Memory-β Crystals, saturated with violet-streaked meteor images.
---
The Halo-Eye left a circular afterglow. Even closed, it lingered—visible behind the eyelids.
> (⧼ Warning: Halo-Eye drains 5 QP/min while active ⧽)
He devised a solution:
Glint-Blink – open only during key stimuli.
He documented the technique in his system codex as a combat protocol.
---
From the freshly cooled crystal, he broke a shard.
Green sparks danced within.
He handed it to the stone-shelled snail that had followed him—now his companion, always trailing by a hill's length.
> "This will be your backshield," he whispered. "It'll drink the next lightning strike meant for me."
The lighthouse pinged:
> (⧼ Chaos Drain stabilized at 0.6%; lightning paths redirected ⧽)
---
> "I saw how lightning etched its old language onto glass.
And when I wiped away the dust…
I opened a book whose pages only turn
when your eyes stop looking at the present."
He stood on the valley's edge.
Tried Glint-Blink once more.
Far beneath the horizon, a single memory-thread shimmered—leading toward a southern cavern.
It pulsed with longing.
---