The sun was rising as I put the finishing touches on the fishing boat. This wouldn't be our final boat. Obviously, that needed more than a day's work to build. I wanted to make sure it would allow us to survive and escape if a Third Ascension creature showed up.

I was out of Mana from growing it from scratch. I could try pulling in more through my skin to test out the Mana Taming feature of Rimeshrouded Cambium, but I didn't really want to be the test subject. Not after… anyway!

"Hey Novi! Have you tested the Cambium yet?" I called out towards the bluffs.

"No? I thought you'd want the honour of being the first to try it out," she yelled back, her voice enhanced with Sound.

"I would sooner force you through the Oath to be the first one to try it than do it myself. You know this," I replied while running up the bluffs to her. I was going to watch it happen, and she was going to do it for me because she had taken our tendency to become codependent and applied it to me for some reason.

I couldn't seem to find her when I arrived at the wall until she popped into existence right in front of me.

"Alright, let me know how it goes," I said, sitting down to watch Novi. Ready to pull my hammer out of my Inventory and smash her like a bug if she did anything to indicate she was compromised.

She was pouting and just hummed in agreement before starting to pull Mana through her skin. The silver veins running across her midnight blue surface turned dark, matching the rest of her skin.

Novi raised a hand to her face, staring at it.

"Everything is Mana," she whispered to herself.

I had already pulled the hammer out, but she seemed to snap out of it as I was just about to smash her. Blinking her eyes on and off rapidly, she looked up at me.

"Yeah, it works. Just don't take too much at once. It didn't like that," she said, then frowned at the way she worded that sentence. "Sorry, I need a moment, just don't pull too quickly like I just did, and you'll be fine."

I nodded and let a tiny amount of Mana in through my skin. The midnight blue part of my skin glowed silver, and the light washed away all of the dark in an inverse of what happened to Novi.

As the Mana entered the confines of my soul, I felt an odd tingling that Novi hadn't described, like pins and needles, but for the soul. That made sense. She didn't have a soul in her body.

I also had a subtle desire to subsume myself into the Mana within my surroundings. It was so slight that I could barely tell it was there. But it was there, a pulsing glow of Mana. I could see that pulsing glow within everything. Every little particle that the universe was made up of consisted of bits of Mana acting in predetermined ways.

I blinked and saw Novi had left a while ago and started working on growing auto turrets for the wall. I had just been standing there staring blankly into space. Touching my face, I realized I had been drooling.

Well, this would be useless in combat if it rendered me practically brain-dead for even a few seconds. I was affected even worse than Novi was. Was that because it touched my soul, or was there another reason?

I tried it again, this time holding my mind together with Winter while I pulled Mana in. It was a little bit better, but there was just something about external Mana that fucked up my mind.

To make it work, I'd have to absorb it into a Cambium battery completely separate from my body. Somehow Tame it while it was still outside my body, then take that already Tamed Mana in and probably run it through another cycle of Taming just in case.

I didn't have time to figure that out or even determine if it was possible at the moment, after all, we were gonna go fishing!

"Come on, we're going!" I called out to Novi, only to feel her insect body tap the back of my leg. Looking down, I saw her motioning for me to hurry up. "Yeah, okay, I'm going to be able to see you through that stealth one of these days."

She only snickered in response.

Running back down to the dock I had built, I pulled Mana out of the air as I ran. Suddenly, I found myself lying face-first on the ground beside the dock. Don't run while absorbing Mana, gotcha.

Standing next to the boat in the water, I found I could quintuple my Mana regeneration before weird shit started to happen and I completely lost focus. It wasn't a game-changer like Novi and I thought it would be, but it was still useful enough. I brought myself to three-quarters full before deciding I could finish filling my Mana naturally.

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Boarding the boat, I sat in the captain's seat located inside a pilothouse and connected to the control circuit on the table in front of me. My vision stuttered for a moment, and it looked like the world had dropped to a crisp three FPS. Then it finished compiling, and a vast network of circuitry resolved in my mind.

"So what did you add to the boat?" Novi asked, and I realized she had managed to find her way to my shoulder.

I let out a sigh and decided to let her have this one.

"Those will be a surprise. Oh, but I did get this."I said as I released the level-up I had received from building the boat.

Profession Level (Greenweaver) Increased +1 (26) +4 Wit, +2 Spirit, +2 Arcana, +4 Eidetic Drops

"I thought only I could hold levels back," Novi muttered.

I shook my head in response, "Nope, if I really concentrate when I know I'm about to level, I can catch it."

With a pulse of Mana into the table in front of me, the Kinetic Mana caused the ropes holding the boat to the dock to untie themselves. Around the base of the ship, Water Mana was sucked in, filtered and used as propulsion. With a soft gurgle, we started moving.

After accidentally slamming the boat into the shore, I got it going in the right direction.

Checking the depthfinder every thirty seconds, I brought us out far enough that the seabed was six metres away. Because that was probably the best way to avoid sea serpents. Then, using a pulse of Sound Mana, I send a ping across the seafloor.

A map of the area was constructed in my mind as the sonar returned, forming a basis for [Combat Simulations] to work off of. The sound had bounced off mostly granite and algae; no fish in sight.

"You mind sticking your head in the water and checking if there are any fish?" I asked. This was the first time I'd tried out the sonar outside of a simulation. I wasn't sure how well it would work in a real environment, but I knew it had issues with smaller objects.

"I do mind. You know I'm not a fan of getting wet," Novi replied, tensing up her claws, pinching my cloak a little tighter.

"What are you, a cat?" I ran a hand over her carapace as I directed the boat along the coastline. She leaned into my hand and purred. "Did you install a motor just so that you could do that?"

She didn't respond, which I took as an admission of guilt.

As we travelled, I'd occasionally send out another ping. The part of the sea right off the seashore was practically dead for some reason. I really should have installed cameras on the bottom of the boat; maybe I'd be able to see clams or something, because I couldn't make out a single moving object along the entire beach.

My eyes turned towards the Frightened Mare, its fear aura lightly pushing against my mind just from looking at it. That was probably the issue.

There were two obvious solutions: either we go further out and risk sea serpents, or we see if the Frightened Mare would leave if I asked its captain politely. Honestly, the first option felt safer. That demon looked like he could kill me with a thought. He was almost certainly at an equivalent or higher Ascension than Nyxie, but what he was doing out here in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, I couldn't say.

The gods couldn't have put him with the intention of helping me; otherwise, whoever it was that wasn't supposed to find out about me would know exactly where I was.

I let out a sigh. Why did everything have to be so complicated? Getting involved in divine politics wasn't something I had ever planned on doing. Unless you call destroying the status quo 'getting involved'.

I guess being dragged kicking and screaming into the games of the gods at least came with one perk, a neat little tool, gifted to me under the bullshit pretense of a half-baked Quest. Did Kaelzar even care that there were intruders on the Plane?

"I will find fish soon," I whispered aloud. All of the Authority I had been keeping bundled away was burned in an instant, with very little to show for it.

Well, I did say 'soon', not 'instantly', maybe I just needed to wait a little bit.

The boat was also now moving out into the ocean. It took me a moment to notice both that it had changed direction and that I was causing it to do so. It wasn't the command forcing my boat to move. It was more like my body had been hijacked. I assume because this was the easiest route for it to accomplish me finding fish soon.

That was fine, it didn't feel like I was being puppeted, or at least not any more than I already felt that way, that is. Given that I was a small metal ball puppeting a plant shell.

As the vessel continued to move further out into the ocean, I periodically sent out sonar pings. The water was getting deeper rapidly, but there was still no sign of fish.

Novi scuttled into the hood of my cloak, curling up around the back of my neck like one of those pillows you use to sleep on an airplane.

"You've really taken to your insect form, haven't you?" I commented, only receiving a hum in response. "What happened to that third body that you made? You had the doll with the knives, the insect with its gun, and there was a third one that I forgot the function of."

"I didn't want to take up any more of your Wit, and I haven't been able to get anywhere with improving the ritual on the artificial Core. The third body needs a lot of work put into it to make it work any—" She cut herself off when I signed 'quiet'. I couldn't see anything on the sonar, but something felt wrong—like we'd crossed an unseen line into waters we weren't meant to enter.

The sound of waves lapping against the hull of the boat and the quiet gurgle of the propulsion system were the only sounds that met my ears. Running Winter through my mind to prevent it from being affected by potential antimemetic properties, I scanned my eyes across the waterline.

With the next sonar pulse, I realized what was causing me to be on edge; I had found my fish. Unfortunately, it had found me, too.

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