Each battle requiring the full version of his attention and his ability and Magnar’s cooperation, and they worked through them with a steadiness that was not easy and was not comfortable but was consistent, which was all it needed to be.

The tenth Diamond class Stone Crawler died in the early afternoon, and Neil stood over it with his arm aching from the bruising that had accumulated and Magnar sitting nearby with a long scrape down his left flank that would heal but that had been earned in the final fight when a Diamond class creature had gotten beneath his guard in a way they had not anticipated.

He looked at what they had accumulated.

The Diamond class gene material was in the containers, ten units worth, dense and rich and representing the last threshold for both of them.

Neil found a flat section of stone away from the territory they had been working in and sat down.

He took out the accumulated gene potions from the previous day’s Bronze, Silver, and Gold class material along with today’s Diamond class additions, and began to work through them in the sequence Nemo had mapped, the process methodical and unhurried, each potion consumed and given a moment before the next.

Magnar worked through his own portion beside him with the same methodical patience.

The Bronze class improvement was baseline, integrated quickly and without drama.

The Silver class was a clearer step, something settling in the body’s foundation that had not been settled before.

The Gold class was a meaningful change, the kind that registered as qualitative rather than incremental, the physical structure responding to the accumulated gene material in ways that went beyond simple enhancement into something more fundamental.

And then the Diamond class potions.

Neil took the first one and felt the difference immediately, the quality of the material at this tier translating into an effect that was not comparable to what the lower tiers had produced in the same way that the Diamond class fights had not been comparable to the Gold class fights.

Something in his structure responded to it at a level that went deeper than the previous tiers had reached, the gene material integrating into the cores themselves rather than just the surrounding physical framework.

By the time he had finished all ten Diamond class potions the change was comprehensive and permanent, both in himself and in Magnar, who was sitting with his eyes half-closed and his body adjusting to the integration with the unhurried patience of a familiar who trusted the process.

Neil sat with the completed state for a while.

His cores were saturated. All five of them, at every tier, the full accumulation of the Realm’s gene material built into his foundation in the form it was going to stay in.

The density of it was different from anything he had experienced before, not a feeling of being full but a feeling of being correctly structured, like the difference between a building with adequate materials and a building with the right materials.

He looked at Magnar.

Magnar looked back at him with amber eyes that were clear and alert and carrying the same settled quality.

"Ready to evolve." Neil said. "Both of us."

Magnar made a sound of agreement that was as close to philosophical acceptance as a large lava-element familiar could produce.

"But first." Neil said, and paused.

Because the evolution to the fourth Origin required more than saturated cores. It required the energy within those cores to be in the right form, and approximately half of his energy was still in its unconverted state, the Phantom Essence transformation incomplete.

He had been converting it gradually through the method he had been using, the slow and careful approach that was sustainable but that was going to take a very long time at the rate it was progressing.

Too long.

He had things that needed doing and a body that needed to be at the level required to do them, and the gap between where he was and where he needed to be was not a gap he could afford to approach at a gradual pace.

’Freya.’ He said internally.

"I know what you are going to ask." She replied, and her voice carried the particular quality of someone who had been thinking about the same question he was about to raise and had already arrived somewhere on it.

’Is there a faster way.’

A pause.

"There is." She said. "It is not comfortable."

’Tell me.’

Another pause, longer, the quality of someone deciding something rather than remembering something. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

"The standard method works by gradually introducing the Phantom Essence transformation to the existing energy, converting it incrementally so the cores can absorb the change without destabilisation." She said.

"The fast method does the opposite. You force the cores to collide against each other, creating ruptures in their structure, and in the state of those ruptures you use a different absorption method entirely, one that pulls in a vastly greater volume of external energy in a transformed state all at once." She paused.

"The pain will be significant. The cores will crack. If your healing were not as fast as it is, and if your physical structure were not phantom-derived, the cores would shatter entirely and you would die." Another pause.

"Most people who have tried this version have died."

Neil was quiet for a moment.

’Teach me the method.’ He said.

Freya was quiet for a long moment after that, and he could feel the assessment she was running, the evaluation of whether he had actually understood what she had just told him or whether he had heard the word significant and processed it as a challenge rather than a description.

"You understood what I said." She said finally.

’I understood.’ He confirmed, after all even if he fails a few times, he can restart.

"Alright." She said. "Find somewhere empty. This is going to affect the surrounding environment significantly and you do not want anyone nearby."

The empty area past the Realm boundary took thirty minutes to locate properly, a section of open land with no settlements visible in any direction and no movement that suggested habitation.

The terrain was rocky and uneven, which was fine, and the sky above it was the same dull overcast as everything in this region.

Magnar settled a considerable distance away without being told to, which said something about what he had picked up from the energy of the preparation, his amber eyes on Neil from across the distance with an expression that was watchful and patient.

Neil stood in the centre of the open space and ran through the method Freya had taught him three times in his mind, the sequence of it, the specific way the cores needed to be oriented relative to each other for the collision to produce the right kind of rupture rather than the wrong kind.

’Ready.’ He said.

"Begin slowly." Freya said. "Not because it will be less painful slowly, but because the initial rupture pattern needs to form correctly before you accelerate."

He began.

The first core collision was a controlled thing, a directed pressure rather than an impact, and the sensation it produced in his chest was not pain exactly but was the immediate precursor to pain, the sensation of something structural being stressed past the tolerance it had been designed for. He held the pressure steady and waited for the rupture to begin.

It began.

A crack formed in the first core, hairline and precise, and the sensation upgraded from precursor to the actual thing in a way that his nervous system registered very clearly and very thoroughly.

He did not stop.

The second core came into the collision sequence, adding to the first rupture and beginning its own, and the sensation doubled and then more than doubled because the interaction between two cracking cores was not linear addition but something compounding.

He breathed through it with the deliberate steadiness of someone who had decided before beginning that stopping was not one of the available responses.

The third core.

The fourth.

The fifth.

By the time all five cores were in the collision sequence and all five were cracking in the organised pattern Freya had described, the pain was a comprehensive and total experience that occupied his entire attention without leaving space for anything else, and the only thing between him and stopping was the decision he had made before starting combined with the absolute certainty that stopping in the middle of this was the version that killed you rather than saved you.

He did not stop.

The ruptures in the cores reached the threshold Freya had described and he activated the absorption method she had taught him, the new form of intake that the cracked cores could perform in this state and could not perform in any other, and the energy began to come in.

Not gradually. Not incrementally.

In a flood, vast and fast and consuming, pouring into the ruptured cores in the transformed state that the Phantom Essence method required, the conversion happening inside the cracks rather than before them, the energy arriving as raw material and being immediately processed by the specific geometry of the ruptures into something darker and denser and more fundamentally changed than the slow method had ever produced.

His left side went cold.

Not temperature cold but cold in the way of something fundamental, an extreme that went far past the range of normal experience and kept going, the left half of his body dropping to temperatures that had nothing to do with the ambient air and everything to do with what was happening inside his cores.

❖❖❖

Thanks for reading... adios