Chapter 132

  “What is that?”

  The writhing mass of flesh was warm on the sterile table deep inside the biolab. The room had been secured for the autopsy of the monstrous aberration, the result of a catastrophic test run of doctor Kavin’s new vitality tonic that had promised to do so much good before it all turned to shit.

  The depths of the biolab were alien even to him, who could claim to be among the people who spent the most time in there, hidden as if in a vault beneath a large hill. The reason why not even he knew of the existence of this place was that it was newly built, and when he asked they explained to him that construction work could proceed rather quickly when there was an urgent need, thanks to copious amounts of money and magic. They had operators within Unity who were specializing in using their Elemental control for construction, studying engineering and magic at the same time under the supervision of the ubiquitous Johanne.

  This room had not been built by them, however. Michael had carved it out of the bedrock of the hill with nothing but Aura control, fueled by no less than a Gold coin worth of mana—a hundred full Silver coins, a humbling thought when the doctor’s whole mana pool did not even reach one single silver unit, he reminded himself. The difference in sheer power was astounding.

  The flesh parted as he maneuvered the scalpel. He felt eerily calm, and the strange lack of a sense of danger was a small mystery in and of itself. On the other side of the steel table where they had set the large corpse, David loomed like a crouching giant, his face shadowed by the tight beam of the surgical headlight. Then, next to the doctor himself, Michael was like a non-presence, while magic that even the low Copper-tier doctor could feel was wrapped around the man like a cocoon of impenetrable power.

  “It looks like… pieces of plastic, fused to the brain stem here and here,” the doctor said.

  Michael hummed, and the cocoon of magic unfurled, sweeping outwards and enveloping the room. The sensation of being watched accompanied the very same strange calmness that had been so difficult to pinpoint moments before, and Dr Kavins realized that it had come from Michael’s presence. With him in the room, there was nothing that could threaten him, not even if the monster they were dissecting suddenly managed to come back to life, animated by whatever rogue magic had twisted its existence in the first place.

  “Microplastics,” said Michael pensively, “most of them have aggregated into large clumps, but I still detect a lot of them in most of the monster’s organs. Or what passes for organs anyway.”

  “Don’t we all have, like, plastic in our bodies nowadays?” said David.

  The doctor nodded, “some people say we eat a credit card’s worth of plastic a week. Billions and billions of particles pass through us, some of them get absorbed into the organs. They have been found in the kidneys, in the liver… in the brain.” He turned to Michael, “do you think that the plastic had something to do with the transformation?”

  “You said the patients were expelling it in the first phases of the trial,” he said, and the doctor nodded, “it might be connected.”

  “Michael,” said David, “do you see plastic when you look at people?”

  Michael scoffed, “you think I have some sort of x-ray vision?”

  David shrugged.

  “I don’t see inside, but when I heal people I sometimes sense some strange things there. Things that don’t belong. Things that slowly but surely build up until they start to do some nasty damage. I’m no expert, but it’s a problem I did tell Icarus to begin to analyze.”

  “So the monster…”

  Michael’s eyes narrowed as he suddenly turned his back to the doctor and bent over the writhing carcass, the flesh still pulsing and oozing a foul-smelling liquid. He plunged a hand into the warm mass, the meat parting around his body as if moved by an invisible forcefield.

  Then he started rummaging, and the corpse made sounds so disgusting not even the doctor thought he could keep his last meal if this continued for much longer. When he was done, Michael’s face had darkened to the point where the queasiness caused by the sounds and smells fled from the doctor’s mind, scared off by the weight of the man’s anger.

  “Someone tampered with this. There’s a kind of energy I never felt before.”

  David frowned, “different from Renegade Energy?”

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Michael nodded but didn’t speak.

  “An even higher tier?” pressed the older man. “Renegade Energy is already Platinum Tier, I don’t think we can handle Emerald tier shit even if we throw everything we have at it.”

  “We can’t handle a single Gold-rank even with me here, make no mistake. Rank is absolute, even a False Gold would wipe the floor with most of us,” warned Michael. Perhaps it wasn’t the full truth, but it was close enough that it didn’t matter. “No,” he paced around the room, “fortunately this stuff here is not higher tier, nor is it outright stronger. But it surely is stranger, and capable of things… it vanished as soon as I tried to grasp it, but the sheer potential I felt, it was staggering. And I’m sure of one thing: this energy is not from here, nor from the dungeon. Not our dungeon, at least.”

  After that they left, each digesting the news in silence. Michael updated Icarus and made sure that all the important people knew of this new development. He met Johanne on the way out, who had rushed to the biolab, eager to investigate, as soon as she heard the news.

  He let her, instead finding himself in a little office he had been told was reserved for him while the actual headquarters were still being built. Amber liquid, cooled with the precision of Hycean Ice, swirled in a small ornate glass.

  He closed his eyes, and plunged his consciousness into his Skill Sanctum. It had stopped resisting entry a few hours earlier, while he was in the middle of the examination. The fathomless lake, formerly the source of Black Ice, was still there, but now above it hovered a new structure that reminded Michael of a star.

  Getting close to it, he realized that it wasn’t a star at all. It was a planet entirely made of ice, milky blue and blindingly bright, surrounded by a haze of energy like a halo. An aurora of pure cold, deep azure energy of the purest Elemental. Even the thunderclouds of Intent, when they got close to the planet, seemed to grow sluggish and slow despite being several tiers of magic more powerful.

  Michael opened his eyes again, ready to leave the solitude of his empty office and resume his daily tasks. But the moment he opened the door, it was as if the little action of no significance tipped some sort of scale, the last grain of sand of an hourglass, or perhaps a drop of water breaking the camel’s back. Energy gathered and rushed to him, Unity energy that still felt so impossible and alien and elusive to him, entering his Sanctum and empowering the skill that carried the same name, even now still disguised as a skill of a lower rarity than it was.

  Unity level up!

  “…huh?”

  ***

  “What the actual fuck are you doing?” Travis’ voice was equal parts surprised, tired and something else very similar to a disgusted tone.

  “Every action has significance,” muttered Michael, moving about in a frenzied, manic state.

  “What does it have to do with whatever the hell you are doing?”

  The door slammed shut, followed by a window being opened.

  “Why are you just standing there?” asked Travis, exasperated.

  Michael shushed him with a finger, standing close to the window with his eyes closed. “…nothing.” He muttered, “damn it.”

  Before he could rush to another building, Travis stopped him. “Explain.”

  “It’s Unity. What if every action is significant in some way, and thus always generates Unity? What if not only my actions, but all actions are? Are sentient beings the limit, or are things that happen in a moving but unaware universe also of significance? I must investigate.”

  Travis put a hand to his face, “is this what you call investigating?”

  Michael stopped. He was opening doors left and right, then coming back to close them before doing the rounds again. “I mean, it did trigger it last time. I was on the cusp, sure, but now that I’m empty I am more sensitive to energy unbalances.”

  Travis’ eyes narrowed, “sounds like bullcrap to me.”

  “Hey,” Michael’s own eyes narrowed as the air turned dangerous.

  “Sorry. It’s just what I’m thinking, can’t help it.”

  The aura of danger dissipated. “I like you more this way anyway,” Michael said, still jumping from place to place.

  “Yeah. Anyway. People are looking at you, Michael!” Travis said, but his fatherly tone was slowly shifting into full on lecture mode.

  Michael could hear snippets of conversations with his enhanced senses, even through the wrappings of aura and Qi that prevented him from overloading his brain with information and dulled the outside world. People were wondering what he was doing. Some of them were outright scared, worried that perhaps he had gone crazy, while some others had theories that maybe he was performing some profound or devilish ritual and that they were all going to die. Others were simply amused, watching him and the exasperated Travis as they made their way through the Site.

  Then Travis’ phone beeped, and Michael was forced to interrupt his experiments.

  “Kavanaugh is here. He brings gifts,” the man said, “in exchange, he wants to be carried up to Silver.”

  Michael sighed, “fine. I wasn’t getting anywhere with this anyway.”