Adamant Blood 422

“Of course I’m not upset, Mark, and yes, all of this is highly dangerous, but I trust you,” Lola said, for perhaps the third ti, as she drove the hovervan. “But these are dangerous actions, and they require so small amount of oversight so I’m glad you ca to instead of rushing out there into the field.”

“… And you’re really not upset at going for these sorts of magics?” Mark asked, sitting in the passenger seat.

It was just the two of them, and they were not going out to hunt monsters like how Mark had initially expected to do this. Instead, they were headed toward the western wall of the settlent, where so monster stock was kept in pens by the Farrs of Verdago. Reeni was going to be involved, too, though Mark didn’t know how, exactly, she was going to be involved. Lola had rely called her up to make sure now was a good ti, and then they were off.

Mark hadn’t even considered experinting on fard monsters with so known capabilities. Mark certainly hadn’t expected Lola to enthusiastically endorse this sort of ‘forbidden magic’.

“Of course I’m not upset at you wanting to delve into souls, rip them apart to see how they work, and then put them back together,” Lola said, with a tone that might have been sarcastic or not. Her own feelings on the situation were complicated, without even her knowing how she truly felt. Lola leveled with Mark, saying, “But to tell the truth… It is scary. These are scary magics, Mark. The initial steps are truly simple, too, if you stick to your own capabilities, which ans you will stay within the capabilities of Union and whatever your ‘house’ can do, which seems like a lot more than a normal person can do… the point is that the first steps are simple.

“It’s what cos afterward that is dangerous.

“I believe the demons did that on purpose, because those first steps are easy but the rest are like falling into an ocean. Most people realize they’re out of their depths very quickly, and if they’re lucky enough to survive then they keep trying. They make horrors. Eventually, 90% of people go to the demons.” Lola finished with, “I am glad you ca to for this experint, Mark.”

Mark finally didn’t feel bad about this, about involving Lola. He felt good, really. He said, “I’m glad I ca to you, too.”

Lola set the hovercraft down on the western side of the farms, saying, “I think we might have had a similar conversation before, but this ti you’re actually going for the forbidden magics.”

Mark chuckled as he opened his door, saying, “Maybe we did! A lot of stuff has happened in the last few years.”

“Freyala above, yes it has,” Lola said.

This part of the farms was new to Mark in that he had never actually walked here, but he had seen the place from the air many tis as he flew across the skies from one side of the city to the other. He rarely took the tram anymore, and Lola was the sa, which is why she had a hovercar. None of them could take the trams anymore, otherwise they’d be stopped by reporters all the ti.

Even now, sohow, so reporters were edging around the monster at compound, beyond the high and thick concrete walls, trying to find their ways in with cara drones and otherwise. Most of the drones stopped just above the wall. Sure, they could co inside, but they didn’t want to actually break the warti laws about spying on food production, which would break their drones. This was still a settlent in a warzone, and those walls were enchanted to destroy electronic devices and to give a nasty shock to most people who tried to scale the walls.

But Lola had called ahead. The hovercar had gotten in no-problem, and the person they were eting was already here.

Reeni Thumb, leader of the Agriculture and Resource Managent division of the settlent project, and a very short, very powerful witch, stepped out from behind a bush to tap the concrete walls, saying to the wall, “That’s enough spying for now.”

The reporters beyond the big wall mostly lost interest, most of them walking away, their drones hovering on the other side of the wall falling back down into the hands of the people who had cast them up there. All except for one person. Mark couldn’t see the person who had shrugged off Reeni’s suggestion to go away, but it had to be Nendi Page, and sure enough, the tall, thin woman with a severe set of eyes was at the gate, looking through the small gaps in the structure, right at Mark.

For a mont, their eyes t.

And then Nendi stepped to the side, about 10 ters away, inside of the concrete wall. She had a teleporter power, short range, eye-contact only, and she used it all the ti. She held up a little handheld screen/cara/dictation-device as she cheerfully needled, “Do you have a statent to make about Nobody Important’s threat two days ago, Mister Careed! Would you like to tell the world why you’re here at a butchery instead of solving the issues you have brought down upon us? Are you doing anything against Nobody Important? Have you given up the Reset Quest?”

Mark hadn’t known Nendi until he had co back from Endless Daihoon. In so ways, he wished he had remained ignorant of her antics. The woman got everywhere, easily, and she could retreat just as fast. But aside from how scary she had been the first ti she had jumped the line and gotten right in Mark’s face, she was… well, she was probably a plant from Okuana. Or maybe she genuinely hated the Reset Quest? Mark didn’t know. He felt her vector, though, and she was more satisfied than she had ever been before.

Mark cheerfully needled her back, saying, “You’ll be glad to know, Miss Page, that we’re giving up the Reset Quest.”

“I don’t believe that for a second!” Nendi Page announced, moving closer with her recorder held forward until she was only 3 ters away. “Tell us the truth. Are you planning on fighting Nobody Important? On fighting the horrors beyond the System? How? Does that have anything to do with why you’re here, at a butchery, when you’ve never been here before?”

Mark put on his Blackvein persona, standing tall, as he said, “I’m here to pick out the very best at for my team. We’ve been working hard to make the world a better place, and Aurora had those nice steaks for us at the after party, but I want more!”

“A lie,” Nendi said.

“Yup!” Mark readily agreed. And then he said, “I’m done here.”

Nendi frowned a little, but then she dispersed that emotion. She barely glanced at the angry faces of Reeni and Lola as she happily told Mark, “I’ll be seeing you at the Winter Ball in Crytalis, Mister Careed.” She bowed. “Good day.”

And then she blinked and she was gone, back to wherever she had been before she had seen Lola’s hovercar… or maybe she had seen Mark on his way to the Church, and she had decided to chase after him then? She was gone, for now, and that’s all that mattered.

Reeni looked at the gate for a bit longer, and then she huffed.

Mark changed the subject, saying, “Hello, Reeni. We’re doing magics, yeah? Where and how?”

“You’ve never been here, so take a look around first,” Reeni said.

Mark was already surveying the butchery and monster at farm. It was peaceful on the surface, but it was sort of like a movie set. It was rolling green hills and separated green spaces where big pig/cow monsters, each weighing tons each, mated, spawned, and ate from constantly-filling troughs. Each of those greens spaces were about 100 ters to a hexagonal side, and were separated by wide concrete walkways. There were no fences. Instead there were tall, ter-thick glass walls that kept the monsters in.

Mark watched as a bull humped a sow, felt as magic took over where biology would be way too slow, and suddenly the sow was pregnant and walking away from the bull, mooing loudly, as she moved to a fountain-like food trough located about 20 ters inside of the enclosure. Her belly distended and her udders expanded as she pushed her maw into the trough and pellets cascaded over her face and down her very large mouth and throat. She gorged on food, and her belly distended more and more the whole ti, her udders getting massive in preparation for what was to co.

It was kind of amazing watching her go through her entire gestation period in under 4 minutes.

Soon, the mother stepped away from the trough, mooing loudly, announcing to the world that the baby was coming, and then she spread her legs and a calf fell out of her, hit its head, and then stumbled to its feet. It mooed, the mother mooed, and then the mother went back to eating from the trough. The calf went in for so milk, and Mark watched as the calf started growing very, very fast, as it suckled. But then it nipped, biting, and the mother tried to kick it away. Then the calf went back to suckling, and then it suddenly took a whole big bite of the udder and the mother kicked the calf away, bleeding heavily. Her udder healed, though, and fast, and the mother walked away, seeking out the bull again, who was currently occupied with another cow.

The calf went to the trough and started gorging directly, but then Mark and the calf felt as soone’s vector touched the now-500-kilo calf, and the calf looked up and around. Mark spotted the farr first. He was a Farr; Powered by the Chosen System and Verdago. There were two of them, actually.

A young guy stood by the glass wall about 150 ters away, near a tunnel that led into the ground, and that guy was doing sothing ntal to the monsterized calf/cow/boar/pig… whatever it was. Mark usually thought of them as ‘cows’ who had ‘beef’ but this thing was clearly not a normal cow at all.

The not-calf spotted the man tugging on its mind and it reacted exactly like a monster.

It roared, though the sound was subdued due to the magics on the glass walls, and then the cow took off running at the person touching its mind. The entire face of the cow opened up, revealing a ter-sized maw of teeth and tongue, its hooves slamming the ground as it charged right at the wall. The guy was not scared at all. He was behind the glass, after all.

Above the taunter, in a hidden enclosure, was another person. Another farr.

Mark saw flickers of tal in the air, bright silver. Not mithril, though. Just steel.

What occurred next showcased a great deal of skill in both of the people. They were professionals, and they had done this thousands of tis.

The raging cow raced at the wall. The cow reached the wall, but sothing ticked over in its mind and it went from raging to softly wondering what was happening. It closed its maw, and then it was quiet, just standing there, staring at the glass wall, trying to figure out why it was there. And then the guy on top of the wall, who was clearly invisible to the cow, slipped tal around the cow’s neck, and the cow’s head ca off. For a mont the body of the cow stumbled around, but then the taunter pulled a lever and the ground dropped out from under the monster cow’s dead body, and then… Mark supposed it went to processing. There were no vectors below the enclosure; it was all automatic down there.

Reeni spoke up, “Never seen it before, huh?”

“Never,” Mark said. “Not from close, anyway.”

“It’s good for you to know where your at cos from, so let’s do a little tour before we get to the magics.”

Mark had a little laugh as a thought crossed his mind, so he said, “I was just joking with myself— with Quark— about wanting to do this sort of stuff in a professional setting. Nota butcher shop.”

“There is shockingly little about the process of influencing souls that doesn’t involve a great deal of fleshwork,” Reeni said, walking along.

Mark walked with her asking, “Where are we going?”

Lola brought up the rear.

“We’re headed there, to that building,” Reeni said, leading the way toward a big grey brick of a building just down the way, through the glass-walled hallway that was a space between two fields. “It’s the butchery and cold storage. Monsterization is a big problem with cattle, so we put various animals into suspended hibernation in case we need them later. Prized bulls and good heifers, mostly. We have a lot of stock to replace cows that monsterize too far from the norm, but if you go through 6 targets then we’re going to have to change things up. I imagine you’ll get pretty far today, but you’ll get roadblocked by any number of normal issues, and then we’ll discuss those things. Inquisitor Lola will be able to help you out with your Union ideology more than I,” Reeni said, glancing backward, adding, “And if she wants, she can teach you the whole thing.”

Mark knew that Reeni and Lola had gotten together for so talks since they had gotten back from Endless Daihoon. He had no idea what those talks had actually been, but he knew that Lola had had a revelation about witchery while they were out there among the auroras.

Mark almost asked Lola what had happened, but that suddenly seed very rude.

Lola was 35-ish, and an Inquisitor for most of her adult life.

Reeni was 400-ish years old. Or maybe 350. Mark wasn’t sure.

Mark was the young guy around here.

Lola did a little curtsy as she walked, demurely saying, “I defer to those more knowledgeable.”

“I only do this stuff the right way so I don’t know all the ways in which soul magics fail,” Reeni responded, “I am completely sure that you have seen more of those failed cases than I.”

“Perhaps, but your thods would lead toward greater success, which is the hope.”

They reached the doors, and Reeni put her hand on the handle, saying, “Then I shall light the way for a short lesson, and then we can speak of the horrors involved in a cleaner setting afterward.” She opened the doors, adding, “Though the cleanliness of this setting is immaculate, and if it isn’t then I will be boxing a few initiates’ ears. Kinda cold, though!”

The warehouse was split into two, with a glass wall separating the halves. Mark entered into the storage half of it all, but beyond the glass wall was a bunch of conveyor belts and hanging flesh and people with enchanted knives slicing through at and dropping flesh onto separate tracks, and a lot of frozen blood. The people over there wore full body personal protective equipnt, the white garnts remaining white despite blood flicking around. The work continued.

Reeni led the way down the glass hallway, to a cold room, where cow/pigs held in frozen blocks of ice, on shelves, like they were very large ‘books’ stored on shelves in a very large ‘library’. It was not that cold, but Mark was made of adamantium with PLs at 99 across the board. He rarely ever got cold these days.

Lola and Reeni seed to be chilly, but they were fine.

Mark had a question before they began, “You got machines moving the beef to the slaughter house… Why aren’t there machines butchering stuff out there instead of people?”

Reeni said, “Because I don’t like to put butchery into the hands of machines. Everyone should always know how the sausage is made, and brawnies need good paying jobs, and so this is how I run this show.” She moved right along, gesturing at so cow-pigs on one of the bottom shelves, saying, “This is the shelf you will be experinting with. These 2 bulls have Healthy Body, as you can tell on this marker here on the shelf. These 2 bulls have Breeder. Sa deal. The M indicates male, the F indicates female, and if you couldn’t tell by the signs, then you can just look between the legs.” She gestured at the long hallway of frozen-but-living bodies, and at the door separating this warehouse of breeding stock from another room of the sa, saying, “We have 20 backup cattle here, and 20 in the other room. This is all of our frozen stock. We have 2500 head of cattle out on the fields, and we don’t keep much in here at all. The turnover in these frozen sections is slow. Most of these were taken off of the fields carefully and then frozen, in case we would need to replenish what is out there, in case it monsterizes faster than at the normal rate.

“I expect your experints to result in monsterification, or at least for the at to beco inedible as their Bindings turn them rancid—” Reeni corrected herself, “It won’t actually turn rancid. That’s what we call it when sothing gets too monsterized to use.”

Mark nodded along, taking it all in. He looked around, asking, “How much at does this place produce per day?”

“200 head of cattle, each at around 750 kilos, but only 200 of that is truly edible. The rest get turned into fertilizer. So about 40,000 kilos of beef per day.”

Mark’s eyebrows went up. “That’s a lot, right?”

Reeni shrugged. “It’s enough to keep the stores in deep stock, and the settlent of 250,000 people easily fed. This is only the beef, too. We got chickens, produce, other ats including fish, and lots of products. Too much to really list unless you got 5 minutes, and I know neither of us has that, so let’s get to it. Tell what you think you’re gonna do, and how you think it’s gonna work.”

Mark lined up his thoughts, then he said, “I’m going to connect with Union to one of the animals so that I can locate it in the dream, then I’m going to pull it in and shove at it a specific Binding for the incomplete Strong Body I have sitting in my house, as I extract the…” Mark looked at the cows, and decided, “The Healthy Body in this one first, I suppose.”

“And do you have an idea of how that will actually… work?” Reeni asked, a little unsure herself.

“Nope! None at all.”

“Let’s start at the top, then. Do you know how to connect your soul to another?”

“With Union, primarily.”

“Do you know how that works, though? At its base?”

Mark easily said, “I touch the astral body of a person with my own astral body and the world, forming a connection that I tune toward a specific dichotomy. By modulating physical action, I tune the astral body to begin to pump from one direction to the other, along the axis I choose, at a rate I choose.”

Reeni nodded. “Have you done a decoupling ritual with Union like you have with Adamantiumkinesis?”

“Sort of, but not on purpose. Not for Union.”

“Why not?”

“I have ‘decoupled’ my Union to ntal-action-speed before, like when I didn’t have a heart but I was still beating my Union in ti to my heart, but maintaining the physicality of Union is important for flow control. So no. I don’t think I’ll be decoupling Union anyti soon. The three basic Unions of Breath, Blood, and Brain, are more than enough allowances for shifting power along known directions and speeds. I have done a Union of Life before… a lot, actually. But that’s for big action, like against kaiju, and the tap being fully open seems like it would be bad for delicate work.” Mark looked at the cow-pig, adding, “I imagine soul work is delicate work?”

Reeni nodded, seeming less concerned by the mont. “There are as many ways to do soulwork as there are Skills in the System. Witchery is the base thodology that I was taught to use regarding soulwork, and it’s the thodology I would teach most people, but I feel as though you would have an easier ti than most to actually use your Skill instead of trying to create a frawork for soul adjustnt. So I’ll stop worrying there. Proceed how you feel best.”

Reeni stepped away.

Lola was already standing on the other side, near the other racks of at popsicles.

Mark turned to the frozen Healthy Body bull in front of him. It was currently positioned ass-out in its block of ever-frozen ice, probably because if the ice systems ever failed then they didn’t want it to be looking out at the rest of the hallway, and it was easy to tell, at a glance, what kind of cow this was when it was turned away… But… Hmm.

Mark asked Reeni, “Can I pull him out of the rack? I don’t want to look at his butt while doing this.”

“Do what you think you need to do.”

Mark turned back toward the animal… and then he pulled off his fingers, turning the bits of adamantium into wide, flat grippers, as he healed his own fingers back into position. He studied how the animal’s ice cube was stuck in the slot, and then he braced himself against the floor and flicked a few chanical grips on the holding slot. The ice cube was still frozen into the slot, but Mark gripped here and there, and he pulled. The ice scraped on the steel, frost curling off of the surface, onto the floor, as Mark pulled the entire 4,000-ish kilo block of ice-and-beast out of the ‘library shelf’. With a gentle, barely straining grip, Mark lowered the cube to the concrete floor, and then he turned it around.

The cow-pig’s face was monstrous, but not nearly as dangerous-seeming as the calf Mark had seen the farrs outside take down, not 10 minutes ago. The calf’s face was split open into rows of teeth. This cow-pig’s mouth looked… normal. Barely any fangs at all. His eyes were closed and his vector internalized, his astral body quiet.

This tale has been pilfered from . If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

… Mark stared at the cow…

… This was harder than Mark thought it would be, actually, and not for any magical reasons. It was a cow! Mark had no trouble killing monsters, but this wasn’t exactly a monster and mutilating the soul was a new experience for him.

He delayed the experint with a question that suddenly bugged him.

“Do these cow-pigs really have Healthy Body? They don’t go through the Tutorial, though? Obviously they don’t go through the Tutorial. I thought monsters didn’t have normal Bindings like people did?”

Reeni said, “It takes a lot of work to breed the proper natural Skills into monsters so that they breed cleanly, but Skills do naturally occur when under the presence of enough mana. All the Tutorial does is ritualize it and secure it. Other ways to secure a Skill is with breeding, which is why Skills run in families. These cows are actually from very old stock, and people try to innovate on them all the ti, but the stock that was made about 2,750 years ago remains strong. Historically, Healthy Body might have even co from these cows; from people eating them and manifesting that power in themselves.”

“Oh,” Mark said, looking at the cow in a whole new light. “They remind of so cows I had to put down with Isoko back in mphi, a year ago.”

“The ones crossbred with the snake tails, yes?”

Mark perked up. “You know about that?” Mark suddenly rembered how Isoko had been there with Mark for that, and how they had joked that they would never know the cause of that monster issue. They almost never found out where obviously-experintal monsters ca from. “I never did find out why that happened.”

“So criminals stole a high-value bull from Lani’s Stockade in Southern mphi and they tried to breed it with a normal cow in a hidden bunker north of mphi, back before the wall moved to encircle that place and the gate went up,” Reeni said, “Everyone perished in that experint. No one really knows why it happened, but I heard so theorizing revolving around flesh snakes that burrowed into the cow and parasitized it. I wasn’t involved, but I looked into it because of my experints trying to figure out how to separate Addavein back into Addashield and Kanda. None of those really panned out, though I did figure out a particularly spicy flavor of snake-chicken that is sort of like a basilisk, but much easier to raise.”

Mark smirked a little, marveling at the connections that happened far outside of his own perspective, and then he turned to the cow-pig… He still didn’t know what the hell he was doing. But now that he was here, and the animal was sleeping, and sleeping caused dreams… Hmm.

Mark settled into himself, just a little, falling into that liminal space between wakefulness and sleep, where his eyes beca windows to look through, to see the world reflected in a fragnt of a divine mirror.

Both of them were ‘asleep’ now, and that was the real trick to it all.

Mark stood in the extra room he had made in his house, near the surgery table.

Mark also stood on a concrete floor in a frozen warehouse, looking at a 4,000 kilo block of frozen, living cow-pig.

In his dreamspace, Mark unfurled a blueprint for Strong Body in his left hand. It was dark blue paper, the color of a dream, but it was also lined with illusionary lines and shapes and hexagons, betraying a depth to itself that wasn’t possible in real life. It was a fully ford sphere of Sigildry. It was also nothing more than an idea.

In reality, Mark reached out with his Union, touching upon the sleeping vector of the cow-pig—

Sothing strange unfurled in Mark’s vision.

The Healthy Body bull stood in the grass beyond his dream, and all around it was sunshine and tall grasses and lots of heifers. He was the king of his harem, and life was good.

… And then the bull looked at Mark, standing just beyond its green grasses, in his surgery room among the short, black, adamantium grass, in the dark space.

The bull mooed loudly and charged at Mark, right into his house, and Mark instinctively seized it with his Union and his Adamantiumkinesis, which took the form of a hundred hands grabbing and holding the bull.

In the dream, Mark grabbed all of the monster, his entire soul. Even the parts he wasn’t actually grabbing, Mark grabbed.

In reality, the ice cracked over the bull’s face and the bull’s frozen eyes flickered as its maw angled open, fangs exposing, frozen gums pulling back. But the ice held.

As Mark held the bull, the bull struggled, tearing at itself, and Mark found himself rapidly able to pull him apart. The bull died before Mark even understood what he had done, turning into dust in the air that Mark began to feel out like they were parts of his own house… and yet not. It was still alive. But Mark had expanded it outward, like those exploded diagrams of construction projects that Eliot sotis had on the screens in the house.

In the dream, Mark gazed into a living soul as that soul expanded and unfurled, and the dream of the happy bull in his green field, under the bright sun, with loads of heifers, was actually the very center of the bull’s Binding, and suddenly the bull’s entire dream beca a sphere of Sigildry in Mark’s right hand.

In reality, the ice refroze. The bull stayed asleep. The enchantnts in the warehouse ensured as much, and the bull wasn’t really inside of his body anymore. He was both inside Mark’s grip, and inside of his body, all of his vectors jumbling around in Mark’s hand.

An incomplete Strong Body in Mark’s left hand. It was all hexagons and various other sigils half woven together and half sifting into the dream, like Tactile Telekinesis searching for sothing to hold onto.

A living Healthy Body and the heart of the bull’s astral body in his right. It was complicated and solid, built around a mory, like a building made of open windows.

Mark just went for it.

He pushed the Strong Body at the bull and he plucked at the Healthy Body, trying to pull it apart.

It was like Mark had two puzzles and he was pulling one apart and crafting another right where the other one had been. The pieces were all ssed up way before Mark even understood he had ssed up. He kept trying, though.

The bull’s psyche began to fray, its mory breaking, as Mark manhandled power made of adamantium around a cage of a dimming mory. It tore. Too much force, too fast.

The cow was dead before Mark got halfway through the exchange, and before Mark even realized it was dead. Sohow, he was just holding on to a soul, and that soul was already fading.

Standing on concrete and with his dreamsight fading, Mark looked down at the cracked ice, and at the fanged monstrosity just below the clear surface. It was dead, but it had almost escaped. Blood leaked through cracks and froze when it touched the air.

“Good first attempt,” Reeni said, stepping in. “Much further than most people.”

“I didn’t even feel it die. It just… died.”

“You disrupted the Binding, which is the sa as ripping at the entire soul. The Binding is not just a domain of mana twisted into function and handed back into the control of the user. The Binding is the soul, the mana, the mory; all of it. This is a common failure point for almost everyone, because almost everyone goes too fast. Here is the trick:” Reeni said, “You must go slower. Softer. You must trick the soul of the target into believing that they are in control, because they are. If you tear at the soul, and if the soul is strong, then it will tear back at you, or it will tear itself to get away, as what happened here with this bull. But if you allow them to becosothing else. If you guide them into a path of change, then you can begin to understand what it ans to be a Skiller.”

It seed kinda impossible to go softer. Mark was adamantium, after all. But… He could be soft, when he wanted. Maybe.

Mark turned toward the cow beside the frozen corpse of the bull—

Reeni pressed on the side of the corpsicle, and suddenly she was pushing the whole 4,000 kilo thing into sowhere else, into whatever space she walked through whenever she popped up wherever she wanted to pop up. In a few short seconds, the tiny witch had vanished the corpse into Elsewhere, and then she stepped back.

“… Where did it go?” Mark asked, which was unusual. Usually, he never asked, but sothing about Reeni pushing sothing into Elsewhere felt a whole lot like she was moving stuff around inside of her witchy wyrd. It seed like a pertinent question.

“The slaughterhouse, about 40 ters that way.” Reeni pointed.

“Oh,” Mark said, turning toward that direction. Sure enough, so workers over there were spotting the new task, sa as all the rest, but they weren’t annoyed, which is how Mark realized that sohow, between here and there… Mark asked, “Did you unfreeze it, too?”

“I did. The ice is magical, so it unfreezes fast when you dispel it properly.”

“… Neat.”

Mark concentrated on his task, but in the back of his mind he wondered if Reeni was doing any wyrd-magic to him right now, to help him learn this stuff. Her vector was all over the place, so it was hard to tell… But maybe she was just being soft, huh? Walaria had started off her professional relationship with Mark with a whole lot of hardness, but Mark had rebelled, not willing to accept the first Mage Society contract that he got through Grand Mage Solari, Tartu’s father. But then Walaria had co in person, shown what she could do, which garnered a lot of respect, and then she offered acceptable terms.

Mark had stepped into Walaria’s wyrd, hadn’t he? He had stepped into her ‘System’.

That wyrd had helped Mark overco the death crystal gaweapons of Verdant Citadel, when they escaped from Okuana. Mark had still died, but he had extinguished the death with his connection to Aluatha, and then he ca back to life.

And now he was inside Reeni’s wyrd, too.

Mark thought about that as he pulled the Breeder cow out of her storage slot, so he could face her frozen eyes and frozen muzzle. She looked calm, and her vector was contained to her dreams.

Mark slipped into dreamsight and he saw that her dream was a lot simpler than the bull’s dream. All she wanted was to graze in the sun and maybe spot a nice bull once in a while, but that was a distant sort of need. Still rather central to her being, though. She had a calf walking next to her, and she was very pregnant right now.

Mark pulled out the incomplete blueprint for Healthy Body from his storage, and he changed his setup, just beyond his surgery center, into a pair of pens.

One pen was the cow’s, situated just beyond Mark’s house. It was all green grass and sunshine and it wasn’t actually on Mark’s property at all. It sort of just extended out into the heifer’s land.

The other pen was on Mark’s property. It was dark black, yet still sunny.

Mark took his blueprint for Healthy Body and he dread it into a bull shape that he maneuvered onto the black grass, then he made it walk around, looking like a real bull. That wasn’t enough, though.

So Mark Called to the cow, “Mooo!”

The cow perked up, looking over at the dark grass, at the big bull standing tall and virile.

She walked over to the dark pen all on her own, and along the way, Mark felt a pressure build up around her like a force, rolling downhill, and rolling faster and faster as the cow stepped closer and closer to the black bull of adamantium.

Mark found himself watching sothing that he didn’t understand.

The cow stepped away from her Breeder Body Skill and she beca Healthy Body, the black bull she was chasing vanishing like a dream, but it did not vanish away. It vanished into her, like she had stepped out of one set of clothes and into another that Mark had offered. Her mory in the middle of her Skill remained the sa, but everything about the outside changed, and sohow it all worked.

And now Mark had control over the sunny, green grassy location that was Breeder Body, but it wasn’t a location anymore. It was a blueprint, in his right hand.

Mark… put the Breeder Body blueprint into the filing cabinet, and he pulled away from the dream, his dreamsight fading as—

—he stepped onto the concrete, to look down at a cow frozen in ice.

Her vector was calm, but not fully asleep. She was experiencing just a little bit of pain. Certainly not enough to wake her. Her body seed… okay? No. She was in pain.

Reeni softly said to Mark, “See if you can heal her into her new Binding.”

Mark did a much more normal Union this ti, fully awake, and along an axis of life itself, since the cow’s heart wasn’t beating, the brain was too slow, and it certainly wasn’t breathing. Mark stood still, connected and living, with the cow.

Good trickled into both of them, and Bad left like a slow fog, rolling away into an unseen, bright sunny sky… So of the fog coming off of the cow was dark black, though, and it clouded the space between flesh and ice like fruit rotting under glass.

“Fuck, what is that problem… oh,” Mark paused. “That’s adamantium. I’ll just… grab that.” Mark twisted adamantium effluvia out through tiny cracks he carved in the ice, making sure to keep most of the ice intact. “Not sure why that happened?”

The cow remained frozen, and whatever sort of malformations might have happened in the Binding transfer were smoothed away, and the cow’s vector began to calm, to fully internalize. She slept deeply, as Mark pulled away the last of the adamantium he had imbued into her.

“Are the cracks going to be a problem?” Mark asked.

“Not a problem. We’ll defrost her and put her out in a pasture and see what happens, though,” Reeni said. “You left the original mory alone, yes?”

Mark pulled away, feeling like he was looking at a Big Deal, but he didn’t quite understand how big of a deal it was, and he didn’t fully understand what he had done, either. He looked to Reeni, and to Lola, and both of them were surprised and shocked, but Lola radiated confidence and pride and that was good enough for Mark.

“Yeah. I left the original mory intact… I think?” Mark said/asked, trying to figure out Reeni’s angle… And then he looked at the adamantium he had pulled away from the cow. “Is she adamant blooded now?”

“Doubtful,” Reeni said.

Mark breathed a sigh of… of he wasn’t sure? Relief?

“Could be, but doubtful,” Reeni said, “That’s advanced magics, and almost impossible to do.”

“Thrashtalon Wilded his family into adamant blooded before Okuana took them.”

“Almost impossible,” Reeni repeated, only having eyes for the cow. “More successful than I expected, though.” And then she turned toward Mark. “Do you know how you did that?”

“I set a trap with a new Binding in it based on what she knows of what she wants, and she walked into it, like she was shedding one coat for another.”

“Higher level and certain Skills, like Incorruptible Body, can resist that, but you hit the target true…” Reeni looked up at Mark, almost studying him, asking, “Do you think your soul house made it easier?”

“Oh yeah.”

“I did not consider it would make it this much easier…” Reeni’s voice drifted off as she regarded the cow. And then she stood as tall as she could and said, “It’s harder with people. Near impossible. You should practice on so unwilling targets, with Skills you don’t know, to see what you can pull out of them. Perhaps think about drawing out an entire soul, if possible, and putting it into a ‘book’ in your ‘library’, to see if you could summon the entire being back to life. That is the main purpose of the house, yes? Resurrection.”

Mark grinned a little. “Yeah, it is…” Mark looked away, at the wall but also thinking about what lay outside of the city. About monsters. Mark asked, “Do monsters haveSkills? I always thought they had, like, basic functions of crystallized magic and purpose, but do they actually have Skills? CouldI pull the monster out of a monster?”

Reeni looked to Lola.

Lola was already stepping forward, saying, “In the Reveal, many people monsterized due to mana poisoning and mutation. Even to this day, so people still monsterize. Whatever you are doing to exchange Powers between the cows, it is considerably more complicated than simply stripping the entire Binding out of a person and burning them down to themselves. This is what Castellan fire is most used for. I imagine that you can do sothing quite similar, Mark, if only you should try.” Freyala was in Lola’s sight, a hand on Lola’s shoulder, eyes locked with Mark, as Lola said, “We imagine, with ti and practice, you could strip a person down to nothing without harming them like the fire would. This sort of capability would be very useful for ending threats without endingthem. If you would be anable to attempting such a thing, then we would ask you to try that, either with the cattle here or with monsters out there, and then eventually with people who cannot be trusted to have power.”

Mark had a mont, then he went, “Oh.”

A lot of thoughts happened in a rapid space of ti, and Mark suddenly wondered if he could truly strip the Powers from a person permanently, instead of temporarily. He had just switched out the cow’s Breeder for Healthy Body, after all. If he could do that, could those people go through the Tutorial again? Could they get different Powers?

And then Mark looked at Lola, who had a broken Body Power.

Mark asked, “Could I… take your Power, and you could go through the Tutorial again, and regain what you lost years ago?”

Lola smiled softly and Freyala grinned to the side like a golden ghost. Lola said, “Perhaps. And maybe one day, if you are capable of doing such a thing, I might pursue that path. But don’t hold as a goal, Mark. I am more than capable of taking care of myself in most normal situations. What you need to solve are bigger problems. 500 ter tall problems, or more.”

“But starting small is how you start,” Mark countered.

Lola simply did a small curtsy, and said, “Co what may.”

Mark wasn’t sure how he felt about Lola bringing up the possibility of real healing of a different, necessary sort, and then denying that healing for herself. It felt wrong, sohow. Like soone always cooking for others and never partaking of their own food for whatever reason. But… Lola’s personal choices were not Mark’s choices to police. Instead, he would simply learn this new skill of the Skillers of Empire.

Mark asked, “Skillers routinely heal corrupted Skills, right?”

Reeni answered, “Yes, they do. Regarding full-stripping of a Skill, though… That has been done before. Targets rarely survive having their Binding fully stripped, for any reason, because the ghost of a Skill always remains in the mory of the person so stripped. In those cases, the person will instinctively use their Skill, but without the Binding, so they kill themselves in any number of ways.

“A Fire Shaper tries to Shape Fire but without the natural immunity to flas, and so they burn themselves to death.

“Those that do survive the process of Skill removal cannot re-enter the Tutorial, though, so you can forget that. Just figure out how to repair Skills, or grant entire new ones, Mark. That seems much easier for you.”

Mark nodded a little, thinking…

Lola, and Freyala behind her, both looked surprised. Lola asked, “You can’t re-enter the Tutorial if you have a baseline body? Because that’s what a full-stripping would do, yes?”

“I’m both surprised and not that you did not know that,” Reeni said, “The Skillers keep the Chosen out of their profession, though, so maybe it shouldn’t be that surprising.”

Lola and Freyala had so deep thoughts.

Mark blinked away his dreamsight and Freyala faded entirely. Mark said, “This is a big deal, huh?”

“Seems to be the normal state of affairs around you, Mark,” Reeni said, as she pressed her hands against the frozen block of ice containing the Healthy Body cow. She pushed it Elsewhere, and soon it was gone. She slapped her hands together, brushing off the frost, saying, “Let’s get you to so more targets, and then you can go outside of the walls and try de-monsterizing so monsters. I suggest fish, to start.”

In a few hours, Mark ssed up several tis, but he succeeded many more tis than he failed. Cows, especially the sleeping kind, were easy to work with.