He lunged forward and grabbed at the piece he'd thrown, which was skittering along the ceiling back towards him and the Assembler. It tried to dodge but he slowed at the last moment, seized it from the air as it moved to evade.

He dragged it down, away from the ceiling and toward his Cultivation cubby. A flick of one of the Spectral Claws fingers against the handle opened the cubby, and he shoved the spirit inside.

The other two quarters had reformed into a half and made use of his distraction to lunge at him, but Nicolai raised the Blade and beat it back with cold fury, his movements mechanical. He struck it with the flat, slapping it repeatedly until he'd gotten it into the same area. With the Spectral Claw he once more opened the cubby, and the part inside lunged out. But he'd given its twin a powerful slap with the Blade, using it like a baseball bat, and it went flying into the cubby just in time to meet the part emerging, both of them disappearing inside. He slammed it closed.

The rituals inside would hold it, just for a moment. The handle was tricky and he hoped it wouldn't be able to work it out.

Nicolai retrieved from his storage some items he'd purchased in the City, items he'd intended to use in his first ritual on the Black Gift. Fortunately, he'd bought spares.

Two forms of powder in bowls, and a jade talisman.

He settled before the cubby. The Angelic Blade rested on his lap, and the materials were placed before him.

Now Nicolai worked to calm himself, taking slow, deep breaths as he worked. For this, calm focus was a better fit than rage. The Modules guided his hands as they reviewed the digitised information, using the powders to draw precise shapes on the floor around him.

They were finished just in time, as he saw a red spot forming on the door, the metal melting. A hole tore open with a hiss and the spirit emerged.

The Spectral Claw was waiting for it, and he seized it immediately as it lunged in the direction of the Assembler. This time he didn't beat at it, or throw it somewhere else.

Instead, he dragged it right into the circle, until the thrashing, furious thing was right above him, and there he released it.

His palms pressed together, right above the Angelic Blade. The Artifact's energies focused and stabilised the ritual, and the spirit was, for just a moment, neither able to tunnel into his body nor leave the boundaries of the circle. It was trapped in the air around him.

The red energy became a howling tornado, ripping at his hair, biting at his lips, clawing at his fingers, attempting to rip and drag him off balance, to push him out of the circle, to prevent him completing his task. Nicolai ignored all distractions. Even as the energy tore over any piece of exposed skin and lashed his flesh open, even as it bit his chest and sucked at his blood, he held firm, and his palms pulled slowly apart.

With a strange rushing sound, the tornado around him shrunk, siphoned in streams and shreds into a red ball of crackling, pressurised energy floating between his palms.

He opened his eyes, calm and placid as a pool of still water, and gazed upon the angry light, spitting and hissing.

He raised his hands, and the ball fell into his mouth.

It felt like a fire on his tongue, a storm in his mouth. It ran furious fingers over his teeth, making them buzz and rattle. It dug at his cheeks and his lips, played with the muscles under his face and moved his features into deranged shapes. Nicolai maintained his focus, his Soul pressing down on the energy. He moved it under his tongue, held it down, then cut his finger on the Angelic Blade and began to draw.

His finger moved with impossible speed and precision as he drew a series of faintly glowing, bloody runes, linked together around his torn lips. They had to be completed before the blood began to run, and they had to be perfect. He finished with a line of blood, flicked between his lips like a zipper.

With a strange sensation, almost like biting into a mouthful of popping candy, the seal was complete.

He let out a slow sigh through his nose and wiped the bloody runes off of his face. That could have gone very badly. He bent and breathed the last of the healing mist from the Rejuvenation Orb, sucking the whole thing dry and feeling the many cuts and tears over his body start to knit together, along with the bite on his chest, the gouges in his lips. After that he had to halfway drain another Rejuvenation Orb, then cough some blood up out of his lungs, and at last he felt better.

Sitting back, he became aware of a very faint but constant buzzing through his jaw. The spirit. A drone came close and he opened his mouth, peering inside with the drones camera.

He saw a faint red light, crackling and sparking. There it was, and there it would remain, Sealed under his tongue, until he worked out a way to deal with it. Against his Soul, the Seal felt a tiny bit like a Symbiote crossed with a faint ache. He sensed that there was one thing he could do with this, other than simply holding it in place.

If he wished, he could release the Seal and spit the spirit out, returning its freedom. It felt somehow charged, and he knew that if he were to do so it would erupt from his mouth in a jagged red bolt that would tear into whatever it hit. He briefly imagined releasing it on someone, and found the idea strangely appealing. This being was bent on destruction, and he suspected that if fired into someone it would be briefly distracted by its need to do to them what it had begun doing to him. Of course, once it had finished destroying them from the inside-out, it would come for him.

It was very fortunate he had been making such an effort to study the area of spirits, bindings, rituals, and so on these last few days. The information he'd purchased relating to the Black Gift had been heavily involved in such matters. He hadn't expected to have a need to utilise the new information so soon.

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He didn't think on that long, because he realised that the spirit had left something in his Soul. Some shadow or stain of itself and its purpose, placed into him in that first initial rush when it had been injected into his body. He could feel it, in his body and Soul and Nodes. Just… something. He didn't know what it did, what its purpose was, but it was there. It didn't seem to be doing anything at all.

Regardless, a piece of knowledge had settled into him, and he knew it was true. Whatever it had left would remain until the spirit was killed properly. Until that moment, this stain was undying.

Time to tally up, see how much he'd lost to Heaven's Tribulation.

Five Nodes had been destroyed. Windpipe, right lung, liver, right kidney, right hip. The Tribulation spirit had torn in a rough line through his spiritual internals, and he supposed if he hadn't thrown it out when he had, it would've turned to the left and destroyed all the Nodes on that side of his body. That would have included his heart Node, which would have been crippling.

As to his actual losses, he wasn't overly bothered. Only the stomach Node was Major, and replacing it was of course his first priority.

Other than that, he'd lost three Symbiotes. The Black Ink Snake, which had been in his windpipe Node, plus the Charging Flashbug and, upsettingly, the Blue Hornet, which had both been in his right lung.

He hadn't even realised the Blue Hornet was there. He supposed it had quietly migrated to spend time with the Charging Flashbug, as the pair had seemed to enjoy one another's presence. Now, both were gone.

The Blue Hornet was now entirely outclassed by the Spectral Claw, and he preferred to use a Skin Shield type in his heart Node, but even so he felt strangely morose to have lost his first ever Symbiote.

He supposed he was lucky that he still had so few Symbiotes, that he'd not yet been able to place one in every Node, and that his heart, which unique among Nodes could hold seemingly infinite Symbiotes, as opposed to just a few, and was thus his storage, had not been hit.

As to the Symbiotes of the Spectral Claw, he found that they were slightly damaged but not in a way that seemed permanent. Cracked shells, bent legs and wings. Like they, too, had been in a fight.

His Soul was torn and damaged, but Oma was continually draining from his Nodes to repair it. Also, he knew that if he were to remove his clothes he'd see that his skin was flaking off in a line down his right side, where the spirit had moved through him and burned him. The Rejuvenation Orb had healed that, so rather than an injury there would just be a covering of sloughed skin. He absently crushed half-a-dozen crystal, refilling his depleted stores, as he headed over to the Assembler.

There was a small hole in its side, and it had automatically shut itself down when detecting damage. The portion that was damaged had the gears for some automated tools behind it, used in the primary bay. That was fine, as it those same tools were present on the other side of the bay, for when the Assembler was used to make multiple duplicates at once. He'd simply have replacements made and install them here. It would take a little time, was all.

He quickly stripped off, opened up a medi-kit and used the cooling packs within to cool his burned flesh, thus preventing further damage. That done he applied burn-ointment. As he'd been quick, the burns shouldn't be too bad. Only perhaps second degree. No need to waste a Rejuvenating Orb on that, he'd have time to heal while he finished building his internal system, and he only had a couple of the orbs left.

While treating himself he had settled into a chair in his workstation, and stared thoughtfully, curiously, at the bot he'd been repairing.

It was still humming, shifting spiritually.

Within he found the Major Node, a heart Node, which he had created. Between its battery, ventilation system, and its processing units.

Around that there now lived a Soul. So far as he could tell, this Soul was blank and empty. He poked at it but it was unresponsive. As was the bot as a whole.

Contacting the bot's software, its mind, revealed nothing. The software did not respond. It was stuck in some kind of endless broken reboot. The Modules were already trying to get into it and fix it, but in its broken state they quickly found there was simply nothing to be done—at least for now.

He could see that its Soul was attempting to grow, and it had of growing to do. That was the only thing he could get from it. It needed to grow. As it was, this piece of Soul was far smaller than a "real" Soul.

If its Soul was able to finish its growing process, who knew how it might change?

He sat back, considering. Perhaps this event hadn't been purely negative. Perhaps he'd gained something.

It would take a lot of Oma to complete whatever was happening here, but Oma was something he currently held in spades. He only needed perhaps 2,000 of his 4,000 crystals to complete his internal system, even with the recent losses. The mining bots were starting to get to work, too. Oma wasn't an issue.

Thus the thought of simply ignoring the bot came and went in an instant, the Modules and even the Mask crying out against it. Of course, it had to be given all that it needed, so that it could complete its Node and finish its Soul, and they might see what use it might be to them. Though, since he'd been through one Tribulation already, would he have to worry about that again? According to what the Titan smith had said, once one passed a Tribulation, they could ignore the rule that had caused it.

Perhaps he could make a whole army of—

Something flexed in his Soul. The stain, shifting and coming alive, extending painful barbs. A hiss of pain slipped free from between his lips as the thing consumed small chunks of his Soul, and grew slightly. His initial, instinctive effort to contain and destroy it failed utterly. Even Cyberwarfare saw no hope, as in its movement the shape and scope of it became clear. It had been layered into his Soul in some extremely deep manner, and he even saw that it was maintaining its ratio as his Soul regenerated. Thus, even the dismembering method of simply cutting away a portion of Soul and letting it regrow wouldn't work, as the stain would simply return with his reforming Soul.

Now he understood what it was that the Tribulation spirit had left in him. It was an enforcement on his Soul. Seeing it in action he was reminded of Soul Rot, though a far more unremovable and implacable kind, and one which, fortunately, did not grow randomly and continually.

As he stopped thinking on building more spiritual bots, it relaxed. But he'd seen exactly what it was, felt it like a knife against his throat.

This was the true agent of the Tribulation. A piece of barbed wire intricately and intimately sown through his Soul that would work to tear it apart if he attempted to break that rule again. Until he destroyed the Tribulation spirit properly, it would remain. Thus, he hadn't passed the Tribulation but merely put it off. According to Cyberwarfare this being wasn't actually in any way a part of Heaven, and he sensed it contained no Heavenly energy. It was some strange entity that had been made or employed for this purpose.

Thinking of providing the spiritual bot Oma crystals and whatever else it might need caused no reaction from the enforcement. This told him clearly that now the bot was created, he was fine to do whatever he wished with it, and Heaven no longer cared. But if he wanted to make another, he would have to overcome the spirit.

Decision made, he rose and retrieved one of the large sacks full of crystals, gained from the Hao clan Primarch. He hefted it thoughtfully, standing before the bot. The sack held perhaps four hundred Oma crystals. Enough to make a start.

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