You will not become a true Pathbearer if you're afraid of taking risks, if you're afraid of doing new things, if you're afraid of developing yourself. You cannot let yourself go stagnant. But part of that is recovery. Part of that is having new experiences. Part of that is learning new things.
Talk to people. Sink into the world. Immerse yourself. Open your mind to new encounters. Let your understanding of the world be varied and develop more than one skill.
It is a common thing for Pathbearers to over-focus, to over-commit to a singular aspect of themselves, like a warrior who commits only to be a frontline warrior, prideful of their Physicality, Toughness, and Mace Proficiency, but nothing else. Perhaps they will find themselves accomplished in the use of a shield as well. But what worth is that in times of peace? To live is to war. War does not just mean struggling against an adversary. It means to struggle against progress, against yourself, to build up your communities, and to forge a kingdom worth living in.
If all you are worth is the weapon in your hand, then what worth will you find of yourself when there are no adversaries to slay? Perhaps you will throw yourself time and time again into the fray until you truly find yourself favored by the System. But that is unlikely. It is more likely that death will find you first instead.
Become rich. Become broad. Once you establish a foothold with one skill, use it to expand your other choices as well. Breadth is choice, students, and choice is life. Choice is vitality. Choice is hope for the future. And choice is how you advance beyond your bottlenecks.
Become more. Don't just fight to hold and build up what you have right now. This is not a time of scarcity. This is a time for eternal growth.
-Master-Instructor Hercule Attano, Phoenix Academy GEN-PREP 101
106 (I)
Peace
After dealing with their “Idiot Weaveress Commander” problem, Courtney, the Court Leviathan, remained where it was; Angelo was allowed to remain aboard Courtney and stare catatonically into his soup, and Uva was allowed to remain in place at her current post, provided that a few other Umbrals kept an eye on her in case she exhibited any eldritch symptoms.
All in all, this was the most optimal outcome. Null Mont was annoying, troublesome, and frankly kind of an asshole, but Shiv had dealt with assholes before. She wasn't any more special than a customer demanding special treatment or some noble who thought himself better than everyone else.
And I can't exactly kill all of my problems, Shiv thought to himself. Well, I could. I could definitely kill Null Mont. I could probably definitely eventually kill anyone, I think, but it's not that useful. Frankly, it'll make me more enemies than allies. The System is already gunning for my head. I need to be a little bit careful and subtle.
He snapped his fingers. Finesse was the word he was looking for. Finesse gave him more options and kept things from getting messier. He’d killed enough people to populate a small town recently. A bit of a pause was due. If he kept going like he did before, Shiv worried that he might slip closer to the state he was in when he was affected by the Orcish Skill—not a place he wanted to be.
As a moment of calm followed, he observed two dozen Umbral Geomancers supported by Can Hu lifting sections of the fallen gate back into place. Massive stone supports sprouted out from the ground, forming rows of pillars that led from the Surface Gateway to the Abyssal Gateway. Between them, the gateway to Vulketh was sealed twice over, once by spell and once again by a layer of dense alloy.
For now, the Vultegs and Lord Scorn hadn't even done anything, but Shiv was sure the peace wouldn't last. Lord Scorn was quite offended that his gate had been taken and that his Lesser Marshal and forces had been butchered. Shiv expected another fight on that front sooner or later.
Preferably later right now, though. Right now, Shiv and the others could really use a moment to recover. They had to build up their arms and prepare for the ugliness to come. And there was going to be a great deal of ugliness coming down the way. Especially with Lord Scorn’s Quest hanging over their heads.
And that's another asshole trying to kill us, he thought to himself. Oh, there's nothing for it. If they're gonna come, I'm gonna have to break them. But if he wanted to break them, he needed to prepare, just like everyone else.
Adam used the opportunity to get some much-needed respite. Right now, he was watching the city from on high. His vector wings sprouted wide, each of the pyramid-like shards glistening in the air. He hovered beside his mana core, and Valor was there with him, gesturing, talking. Shiv found it amusing how Valor and Adam's relationship had developed.
At first, Valor demanded that Shiv stick him in the Young Lord's eye during the incident at Cradle. Now? Now they were talking about all sorts of things. They're practically spending more time together than I am with either of them, Shiv thought. Then again, he'd had a busy few weeks too.
Every now and again, Shiv would see one of Uva's mana strands flick across the city, probably scouting down leads or trying to make sure no one was plotting any devious schemes. Her priority assignment right now remained the Owl, figuring out what Aviary was planning, why they were in league with the Educator, and, more importantly, discovering what the Educator exactly was. She also asked for her eldritch book earlier. Shiv was slightly reluctant to give it to her, but then again, he did have the Odes as well, and she needed to understand her new skill. To understand her increasingly Eldritch…
His mind trailed off.
He wasn't sure what the Dreamtaker exactly was. The Outsider had come in and assisted Uva when things got desperate. It reached out to her through the Eldritch Insight skill, and attached part of itself to her—or infused its eldritch domain to her eyes somehow—after she connected her mind to the eldritch tome.
That changed Uva’s Eldritch Insight Skill into something else altogether. The tome they'd taken from Confriga’s vault was aptly named The Colors Beyond. At times, the book murmured, but it spoke with a myriad of dissonant voices calling out still to the dead Gate Lord, not responding when either Shiv or Uva spoke to it in return.
And there was another mystery they had to deal with. The second book-based mystery, they had, actually. There was still the Educator's Tome of the Forgotten Artist they had to work through. Shiv had taken a glance at that a few moments ago. It was badly burned throughout, but some pictures were still somewhat intact, mostly depicting people or locations from the past. Most of the pictures were utterly ruined, but Valor had said he might be able to restore some of them and uncover some more details regarding the forgotten Ascendant.
As for Shiv himself, he retreated to his personal quarters aboard the Court Leviathan. He suspected these quarters once belonged to the captain of this Leviathan, the one who probably died when Shiv's Inertial Overdrive went off time and time again. But with the interior of the beast so badly demolished, and Shiv uninterested in the vampiric aesthetic of blood and torture anyway, some redecorating was in order.
But that was for later.
His first focus for now was meal preparation. While everyone else worked on their personal tasks for the gate, Shiv pursued his own art form—his own primary non-combat contribution to his team and the gate. He was thankful that the System allowed him this moment of calmness to further focus on his cooking. At some point, either he or a group of Umbrals and Weaveresses would need to move out to survey the surroundings again.
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Frankly, he preferred it to be himself. He suspected that the First Blood would likely launch counterattacks or at least scouting teams, and the difference between Compact and Weave’s defensive powers was substantial. Weave, increasingly, seemed the weakest of the Five Faiths to Shiv. They were careful, they moved in the dark, and they operated using small teams to survey their enemies and strike strategically, doing everything they could to avoid battles of attrition.
Shiv had also noticed a distinct lack of high-powered martial Pathbearers among the Weaveresses and Umbrals. Still Water was one of the major Heroes, and her specialty was in Stealth. Her Reflexes were Master-Tier, as was her Physicality, but aside from that, Shiv wasn't sure about her other skills. There was also Dven back at Cradle. However, it, like many of the Heroes or higher at Weave, was more along the lines of utility Pathbearers, people who offered logistical or structural advancements for their society.
I wonder if it's all being held together by the Composer herself.
Shiv considered that. He considered how accessible the Composer was, how easy it was for her to interact with her people. Her song was always playing, and she had her own place at the heart of her dimension. Compared to that, the Challenger seemed of a higher nature altogether, a fundamental force of existence, a natural disaster of cosmic scale lurking behind a veil. The System supposedly kept gods at bay, but the Composer seemed to have fewer restrictions than all the other ones. Maybe that's her special nature, he considered. He recalled her saying something like that. Maybe that's because she's more of a demigod than a full one. She was born from the Great One, whatever that means for her.
These were some of the passing thoughts he experienced as he worked on making more food. An Umbral Cryomancer and several Weaveress engineers dropped by to help him set up a few storage silos, large cylindrical structures made from alloy and infused with Cryomancy that were built beneath the Court Leviathan. Furthermore, not far away, Shiv had a “cooking arena” set up for himself.
He didn't exactly have a full kitchen set available to him, but after using his Biomancy to clean the meat a bit and using his Skysplitter’s Master Magical Amplification to heat his massive pan via Pyromancy—or to fill cauldrons with boosted Hydromancy, he started preparing meat by the tons.
The Chef Unwavering 55 > 57
They still needed a self-sufficient water treatment plant along with a waste plant and functional sewage. So far, the survivors of the gate were out of the most critical circumstances, and a great many of them were weak. Many were young, and some had problems with their bodies from long before. Shiv's regeneration had given them a brief surge of vitality. Their organs were rejuvenated, their lesser diseases were obliterated outright, but more complicated difficulties still remained, some far beyond Shiv’s current capabilities to help.
And that made Shiv wonder. When my Biomancy fused with my Cooking earlier, I could see the effects of… Well, if I just cannibalized someone using my Biomancy, if I absorbed them into myself… I think that's what the skill fusion lets me do. But it also listed out the exact benefits, so I don't need to just taste them blindly to find out. This will be good for me to come up with a book of recipes. In fact, I should, yeah, I definitely should start writing something like this. Take down the details and list out what I can do.
Then, he paused as he considered his Plaguefueled skill.
But not only ingredients, not only dishes. I can absorb plagues now. Hell, I can absorb diseases. Anything that destabilizes my functional organic state should count as a disease. So if I inflict more of those on myself and absorb them, well, that's like another layer of Berserk on top of Berserk. Frankly, it's better than Berserk. It makes me feel a little bit drunk, but I function better with it. They can probably also go together. I should test that out sometime. If I use my Plaguefueled skill on myself and then follow up with Berserk, how powerful will I get?
The prospects of that made him feel a little giddy, but Shiv centered himself before he got a little too deep into the fantasy. He needed to learn more about diseases, about viruses, about nerve agents, and all the things that could compromise a physical body's structure.
Within the Court Leviathan, he died many times. He'd had absolutely no answer to the complexity of the viruses flooding into him. Any other Pathbearer—well, any other organic Pathbearer—would have fallen then, slain by the Biomantic plagues and sicknesses of the First Blood. He was a different case. He could learn in a way no one else could. He could experiment in a way no one else could. And with this Court Leviathan, he had more than just a steady supply of meat. He had something of a biological playground: a perfect test subject.
As long as I can keep it alive. It has a Biomancy Core, but I think it still needs to eat. It looks smaller than it did before. Also feels a little bit sluggish, maybe? And then Shiv recalled the prisoner containment pods on the underside of its body, and how it could assimilate biomass. It consumed a few of his bodies as well, directly through its brain. That would be a useful capability for Shiv to learn, wielding biomass directly and potently like that. But also, that might be the cost of sustaining the Court Leviathan. It might be able to regenerate, but its metabolism still ran off a substantial amount of calories, even magically reduced to a minimum.
"Maybe I'm gonna need to go out and hunt down some cave biters for you anyway, huh, girl?" He didn't really know if the Court Leviathan was a girl, but he was already calling it Courtney. So. It was a girl to him. A large, monstrous, plague-infused girl.
At present, Uva said it was mostly in a docile state because it was passive, bred to be so, biomantically and psychomantically altered to be this way. If they wanted to spur it to violence, they needed to control both its body and its mind. She said she doubted she could do it alone since a lot of its biological structures were complicated, requiring more than a few Biomancers to integrate and direct its bodily functions.
Right now, Shiv was barely tapping into any of its proper capabilities. The regeneration it was capable of was simply a passive thing. The beast was capable of shapeshifting, of modifying its biological architecture within and without. It could grow those large maggots that fired out and detonated themselves in spreads of parasitic acid. Shiv had destroyed all those creatures, but the Court Leviathan was definitely capable of growing more of them as well as more varied bio-organisms. It had those wounds within it as well, places for the vampires to conduct whatever foul blood or flesh rituals they did to shape Blood Horrors and other monsters.
Or maybe even themselves, Shiv thought. Maybe even myself. He remembered how some of the vampires could shapeshift and adjust the nature of their flesh on the fly. Shiv was doing a very rudimentary version of that with his bone armor, but he needed to think further, and if he wanted to get to that point, he needed to advance his Practical Metabiology.
As he finished preparing the bulk of the meat, he made a few easy-to-eat military rations for his allies as well. He stored some of the Court Leviathan flesh in small packages, ones that could fit in a pouch or slot on someone's armor. With the amount of regeneration the Court Leviathan provided, it would be useful for Adam, Uva, or any of the Umbrals and Weaveresses to bring this on a battlefield.
Shiv couldn't always be there with his Woundeaters, and allied Biomancers might be missing as well. If he could cook, if he could continue providing such powerful boosts in combat thanks to The Chef Unwavering, then he was going to do so. Frankly, that was another avenue of advancement for everyone: varied ingredient boosts.
He wanted to see just how many boosts he could offer someone through a combination of different dishes. Right now, it seemed like it furthered someone's existing skills or amplified their physical and mental condition in some way. He hadn't cooked anything that affected magic, though. That was what he wanted to figure out next. Could he make magic better? Could he make someone learn faster if he just cooked the right meal or used the right ingredients?
Yeah, definitely starting that recipe book. He had an easy way of making functional health potions for everyone in the form of well-cooked Court Leviathan meat. Mixing in Mendules and some of the river weeds—what were they called again? Whatever it was called, it dramatically boosted that effect as well.
But there were many creatures across the Abyss, many creatures Shiv had yet to sample. Why am I just thinking about the Abyss, either? The Surface is also filled with creatures I haven't sampled yet. If I can do this with the Court Leviathan or the Jealousy, what might I be able to get from something like… Shiv considered a hawk, a rat. Do those offer bonuses as well? More than a recipe book, he was likely going to need to open something of an experimental slaughterhouse for himself. And a farm.
After a few hours, Shiv finished his preparations and stored a good supply of meat for the coming days in a few of his silos. This would go a long way to maintaining the gate’s stability and keep the weakest people fed and hale. He would need to go out and harvest more things in time, but for once, he felt like he had time.
Right now, the System was suspiciously merciful. There were no problems coming from the mercenaries, no fires started, no bombs triggered, no eldritch beings invaded.
Shiv decided he would have time for a moment for himself as he landed upon Courtney, taking a seat on the beast's massive, sloped head.
He watched as half of a district was being connected to the surface district, offering the survivors more room to expand. Soon, they wouldn’t need to be so cramped anymore. The surface district also no longer had any buildings either. Most of their foundations had been compromised, and with how unstable they were, they had to be knocked down anyway, reused as material.
District Gained: [Unspecified District]