I slept like the dead, which, for me, was a truly novel experience. That night, for the first time in centuries, the relentless alarm in my head was silent. The spidey-sense, as I'd taken to calling it, was finally quiet.
The name was a relic from one of my shorter, more modern lives—from an old cartoon (you probably wouldn't know it). The way the animators drew it—a bunch of jagged lines flashing around the hero's head right before a fist flew at his face—was a pretty damn accurate, if low-budget, representation of what it felt like to have the universe constantly trying to drop a piano on you. It was the only reason I'd survived this long, but it also meant I never truly slept.
That night, in the safety of the bolted room, the alarm had fallen silent. For the first time, there were no alarms, no phantom threats. Just a deep, profound, uninterrupted blackness.
I woke late the next morning to the sounds of the city stirring outside my window. The exhaustion from forging my Core was gone, replaced by a quiet, steady thrum of energy from the Light Blue light now nestled in my soul. I felt... solid.
Feeling a strange new self-consciousness, I headed down to the common room of The Stonekettle. The midday crowd was thinner but no less lively. I took a corner table, ordered a platter of bacon and eggs, and for the first time, I truly looked.
With my Core now active, the world had a new layer, a texture of light and energy I could perceive as clearly as the wood grain on my table. Most people in the room were just... people. No glow, no aura. But a table of adventurers near the hearth lit up to my new senses like a collection of bonfires.
The scarred woman who seemed to be their leader radiated a steady, solid blue light... a Solid Blue Core. The eager-looking young man next to her had a flickering, sky-blue aura almost identical to my own... a Light Blue Core. But the third, a grim-faced man with a patch over one eye, was another matter entirely. His aura was a deep, dense, forest green... a Dark Green Core.
'Enjoy the light show while it lasts, kid,' Ronan's voice murmured, sounding bored. 'Your optic nerves are still raw from the breakthrough. You're seeing raw mana leaking from their souls because your brain hasn't learned to filter the noise yet. Give it three days, maybe four. Then the world goes back to looking dull, and you'll have to sense power the hard way—by getting hit with it.'
A respectable low-level party, Ronan noted in my mind. The guy with the green core is the group's powerhouse, but if I had to guess, he isn't the leader.
The young man, Finn, caught me looking and gave a friendly, curious grin. He was about twenty years old, if I had to guess, his face still unmarred by the adventuring life. He picked up his tankard and ambled over to my table.
"First time in the big city, friend?" he asked cheerfully. "You've got that 'eyes-wide-enough-to-catch-flies' look."
"Something like that," I said, my voice cautious.
"Leave him be, Finn," the scarred woman, Elara, called over, her voice rough but not unkind. "Not everyone's looking to make friends."
"Just being neighbourly, Elara!" Finn shot back, undeterred. He gestured back to his table. "We're just celebrating. Got our pay from the Guild for a troll bounty. Barely worth the smell, but coin is coin."
The Guild? The name meant nothing to me. Sounded like a union for carpenters or something. I opened my mouth to ask, but before I could expose my own ignorance, Ronan's voice was an instant, concise whisper in my mind.
'The Adventurer's Guild,' he supplied. 'A chartered organisation. They regulate contracts, post official bounties, and license professional mercenaries and monster hunters.'
I snapped my mouth shut and quickly pivoted. "Ah, right, the Guild," I said, nodding with a bit too much enthusiasm. "The Adventurer's Guild, of course. For a second there, I was confused which one you meant. A lot of guilds in this city."
Finn laughed. "Aye, that there are! Wouldn't want to get them mixed up with the Seamstress's Guild, eh? Less glory in hemming trousers, hahahha"
Elara didn't laugh. She just gave me a long, analytical look, as if trying to decide if I was a fool or just a bad liar. She finally seemed to dismiss it, taking a long drink of her ale. "You an adventurer, kid? Or just passing through?"
"Just passing through," I lied smoothly.
Finn leaned in, his eyes shining with dreams. "I don't care about the troll bounties. I'm saving up. I want to be on the first sanctioned crew that finds the Sunken City of Aeridor."
Gror let out a harsh, barking laugh. "Aeridor is a myth, kid. A bedtime story. Every 'hero' who's gone looking for it has either come back empty-handed and broken, or they haven't come back at all. It's a grave, not a treasure chest."
'Aeridor...' Ronan's voice went quiet in my head. 'Yeah, that name rings a bell. The stories say it was this ridiculously powerful city that got way too big for its britches and picked a fight with the old gods. So, the gods got pissed off and sank the whole place for their arrogance. If it's actually real and still down there, the treasure would be off the charts... but whatever's guarding it would be a complete nightmare.'
They joined me, and I spent an hour glued to that corner, letting the adventurers' stories wash over me. It wasn't a friendly chat; it was a firehose of free intelligence about this new, sharp-edged world, and I was soaking up every drop. They finished their drinks and stood to leave, Finn giving me a final, friendly wave.
The adventurers left, a gust of confidence and competence in their wake. I was left in the quiet corner, alone. They had a team, a purpose, and the power to achieve it. We had an inventory and a wobbly puddle we couldn't even use yet. The gap between them and us felt less like a gap and more like a continent-spanning chasm.
'Right, they're gone,' Ronan projected, his tone all business, cutting through my self-pity. 'First things first, Murphy. We need a baseline. We need to know the absolute limits of what you can actually do. That... Art of yours is not a viable combat strategy in its current form. We need a proper training ground.'
'And where do you suggest we find one?' I shot back, the sarcasm a thin shield for my frustration. 'I don't see a sign for 'Public Sparring for the Magically Inept and Recently Corporeal'.'
'The Adventurer's Guild,' he replied instantly. 'They'll have facilities for their members. It's the most logical place to start.'
The Guild Hall hummed with energy. It was a wide, noisy building of practical timber and stone that smelled of sweat, oiled steel, and the ghosts of a thousand spilled ales. Men and women of every race, clad in scuffed leather and carrying notched blades, were gathered in small groups, arguing over maps or gambling with carved dice. The main room was dominated by a massive bounty board, plastered with notices tacked over older notices. My eyes scanned the messy script: Eradicate the Slime Nests in the Lower Sewers - 5 Silver.Grave Robbers plaguing the Eastern Necropolis - Proof of Dispatch Required - 1 Gold per head.Goblin War-Chief 'Gut-Taker' - ALIVE - 50 Gold.
We approached a counter where a harried-looking clerk with a magnificent, impeccably waxed moustache was stamping documents with a heavy, final-sounding THUMP. He was a mountain of a man, squeezed into a stool that was clearly losing a battle against his sheer bulk. He didn't look up.
"Excuse me," I said.
THUMP.
I cleared my throat. "We're here to join."
He finished stamping a final page, blotted it with painstaking care, and then, slowly, with the infinite weariness of a man who has seen a thousand lifetimes of foolish ambition, he looked up. His eyes, small and buried in a fleshy face, glazed over me with practised disinterest.
"Application form 7-B?" he asked, his voice a monotone drone.
"Don't have one," I said.
He sighed, a deep, world-weary sound. "Citizenship papers? Proof of Lastlight residency?"
"Passing through."
"Of course you are," he muttered, pulling out a much smaller, grubbier-looking piece of parchment. "Transient Adventurer Probationary Application. Two silver fee, non-refundable, payable in advance. Name?"
'Huh. Can't say they're not thorough,' Ronan commented, a note of genuine admiration in his voice. 'A specific form just for transients? Here I thought for a second we were, as you would eloquently put it, fucked.''
'Maybe we're just used to the curse trying to screw with us every chance it got,' I shot back.
"Name?" the clerk repeated, his quill hovering impatiently.
"Jack."
He wrote it down. "Just Jack?"
"Err… Jack O'Neill." I gave the man a dumb smile, but he didn't even look up.
"Origin?"
"The Empire."
He paused his writing and looked up at me, one eyebrow raised. "The entire Empire? Or would you care to be a little more specific?"
"Nope," I said.
"Declared skills?" the clerk droned, his quill hovering impatiently over the parchment.
Ronan projected, and I could feel the mischievous grin in his voice. 'Tell him about all you clever jokes'
Two could play at this game. I met the clerk's bored gaze without flinching and took a breath. "My skills include..." I began, my voice taking on a ridiculously grand, heroic tone, "...Juggling —"
'No, stop!' Ronan's voice was a frantic hiss in my head. 'I was joking! You lunatic! You'll get us thrown out!'
'Too late to back out now,' I shot back, thoroughly enjoying his panic.
'Just tell him you're a Water Elemental Awakened!' Ronan shrieked in my mind. 'Say it now!'
I paused, blinked once at the clerk as if gathering my thoughts, and then continued in a perfectly normal voice, "...and Water Elemental Awakened."
The clerk stared at me, his magnificent moustache twitching with what might have been confusion or pure disgust. He slowly wrote it down, his lips moving silently. "Jug-gling... ' then he saw the stump on my left hand and wrote "Poor" before he continued. Wa-ter... Ele-men-tal A-wa-kened." He looked back up, his face an impenetrable mask of bureaucracy and added "Light Blue Core".
"Next of Kin? For corpse retrieval and debt settlement purposes."
The question hung in the air. A thousand names, all long dead, flickered through my mind.
"No one," I said, my voice flat.
A quiet wave of sympathy radiated from Ronan's side of our mind. 'You are not alone, Murphy.'
'Appreciate the offer, but I'm pretty sure they don't have a checkbox for 'imaginary friend',' I retorted.
The clerk seemed to take no notice. "No next of kin. Fine. That simplifies the paperwork." He slid the parchment towards me. "Sign here."
I made an 'X' on the indicated line. He took the parchment back, looked at the 'X' with profound disgust, and slammed his stamp down on it with a final, soul-crushing THUMP.
"Two silver," he droned.
I placed the coins on the counter. He swept them into a drawer and, without looking, slid two simple, rough-hewn wooden tokens across the counter.
"Probationary membership. Rank: Wood," he announced to the room at large. "You have access to the training yard and the latrines. Try not to die on the premises; the paperwork is a nightmare."
Without another word, he turned to the next person in line. With that underwhelming transaction, we were in.
The training yard out back was a wide, packed-earth arena that baked under the afternoon sun. The air was thick with dust and the thud of wooden swords against scarred training dummies. In a far corner, a few other low-level adventurers were sparring. They were clumsy, but even their sloppy swings were sometimes accompanied by a faint shimmer of Aether, a flash of light on a parry. Even these rookies had an engine, and we were still trying to figure out how to build ours.
'Before we start,' I said, remembering the idea I had yesterday, which sparkled with my usual unhinged brilliance if I do say so myself, 'I've got a real game-changer. A plan that requires zero actual skill on my part. We find a forge, I inventory a few tons of molten slag, and then I can just... spray lava at our problems.'
Ronan's mental voice was a dry, unimpressed sigh that was ten years of desert-living in the making. 'Murphy, do you have any idea what a proper forge would charge for even a bucket of slag, let alone a ton? We'd be broke. It's a ridiculously expensive and impractical plan. Now, focus.'
'Fine. Plan B it is,' I grumbled, and summoned my Art.
The wobbly, vaguely Murphy-shaped water sculpture appeared at my feet, sloshing pathetically. Out here in the bright sunlight, it looked even more useless.
'Right,' Ronan began, his voice taking on the tone of a frustrated drill sergeant. 'Simulacrum! Adopt a basic combat stance!'
The water-clone did nothing. It just shimmered, reflecting the sun. Ronan tried again, his mental voice louder, more forceful. 'I said, COMBAT STANCE!'
Still nothing. A few of the other adventurers were starting to watch us, nudging each other.
'What gives?' I projected, feeling the stares of the onlookers like tiny needles. 'You're the expert on all this magic crap. How come you don't know how to command it?'
There was a flicker of frustration from his side. 'I know the principles, Murphy, not the specifics! Every Awakened's Art is unique. It's a manifestation of their own soul, with its own rules and limitations. The Art a person gets is often a reflection of their core personality. I can't know the rules for yours until we discover them through trial and error.'
A reflection of my personality, huh? So it's unstable, disappointing, and barely holding itself together. Great. I pushed that thought aside. Unique rules. 'Maybe it can't hear you,' I thought. 'It's a puppet, Ronan, not a mind-reader. It's not wired into our private party line. It probably needs... you know... actual sound.'
I cleared my throat, feeling like a complete idiot. "Alright, uh..." What do I even call this thing? A slow, evil grin spread across my face. "...Rony. Hey, Rony! Adopt a combat stance!"
At the sound of my spoken voice, the watery sculpture actually twitched. It tried to spread its wobbly legs and raise its fists in a pathetic imitation of a boxer.
'You are not calling it that,' Ronan stated, his voice a flat line of disapproval in my head.
"Too late! He seems to like it!" I shouted gleefully, thoroughly enjoying Ronan's irritation. "Okay, Rony! Move forward! To the dummy!"
Rony attempted to take a step, lost cohesion, and collapsed back into a knee-high puddle before slowly, miserably, reforming itself
I tried to hand it a wooden practice sword. The sword simply passed through its watery hand and clattered on the ground
A low snicker echoed from the other side of the yard, and I didn't blame them.From the outside, this looked pretty humiliating, but I didn't really care. Honestly, this is the most fun I've had in... well, ever.
'Hey, Ronan,' I projected, the thought forming as I stared at the pathetic water clone. 'I know it's only been a day, and we've been a bit busy, but we haven't talked about it.'
'Talked about what?'
'The end game,' I said. 'You know. Getting you your own body back. Separating us. That's got to be our top priority, right?'
There was a strange pause from his side of our mind, a flicker of an emotion I couldn't quite read before it was suppressed. Then, a mental grunt. 'That's a long-term problem, Murphy. Something we can figure out way down the road. One thing at a time.'
'Huh? What? It should absolutely be a high priority,' I pressed. You're stuck in here. We should be actively working on a plan, not to mention the fact that neither of us has had a second of privacy for close to ten years!? '
'You're right. It is a priority,' Ronan agreed, but his tone was flat, lacking any real conviction. Before I could say another word, he shut down the conversation, his voice suddenly sharp and focused again. 'And our immediate priority is making this thing not completely useless. Look at it.'
'It's too fluid,' I projected to Ronan, catching his cue to drop the subject. 'It's just water.'
'Then make it solid!' he shot back. 'It is your Art, your will! Focus!'
My will. Right. I took a breath and focused not on the whole clone, but just on its right hand. I pictured it not as water, but as something solid, like ice. I pushed my will into it, forcing it to hold its shape. The watery appendage shimmered, its transparency becoming milky, then hardening into the form of a translucent, solid hand.
'Let's try it again,' I grunted.
I placed the practice sword into its grip. This time, the solidified fingers closed around the hilt with a faint crystalline sound. They held fast.
'Progress!' Ronan projected, his excitement at being back on task palpable.
'Now, Rony! Raise the sword!' I called out.
Slowly, with the jerky, deliberate motion of a rudimentary golem, the clone's arm lifted the sword.
'Excellent! Now, hit the dummy!'
The clone shuffled forward, its watery feet struggling to maintain cohesion on the dusty ground. It drew its arm back and swung. The strike connected with the wooden dummy with a wet, pathetic thwack, leaving a dark, damp spot but not so much as a splinter. It had all the force of a wet noodle.
We spent the next hour trying to teach Rony. We discovered it could follow simple, one-step commands, but that was all. It had no initiative, no speed, no ability to react. It was a glorified automaton that was barely smart enough to put one foot in front of the other.
'Block left!' I commanded during a practice drill. The clone slowly raised its sword to the left. 'Now parry high!' The clone, having completed the first command, then slowly began to parry high, long after an imaginary enemy would have run it through.
'It's useless,' I projected, the frustration a bitter taste. 'By the time I tell it what to do, we'll already be dead. It's a puppet that requires you to pull every single string, one at a time.'
'Then you will have to be the strings,' Ronan said, his voice quiet with sudden insight.
'What if I... pushed my mind into it?' I thought the idea was both brilliant and deeply unsettling. 'Controlled it directly?'
'Try,' was all he said.
I took a deep breath and focused on the clone. I reached out with my consciousness, picturing my mind leaving my own body and pouring into the watery vessel. The sensation was a dizzying, nauseating lurch, like lucid dreaming while falling down a flight of stairs. For a second, I was in two places at once, and then my perspective snapped violently.
I was looking at my own body.
It was slumped against a weapon rack ten feet away, eyes vacant, completely limp. I could feel Ronan in there, but his presence was distant, muffled. He was a passenger in a parked car, and the driver had just left.
I looked down. My hands weren't flesh; they were coalesced, transparent water, yet they felt solid. I flexed them. I took a step. The form held. I walked over and picked up the wooden sword, and this time, my watery fingers closed around the hilt. It worked.
I turned to the training dummy and charged. My water body was fast—shockingly so. I was agile, light on my feet, but my technique was atrocious. I swung the sword with all the grace of a man trying to kill a spider with a broom, my one good hand making the blade feel clumsy and unbalanced. My footwork was a chaotic, stumbling mess. After a few decent swings that actually hit the dummy, I tripped over my own feet and landed hard, dissolving into a large, warm splash on the packed earth.
My consciousness snapped back into my own skull with a violent lurch that made my teeth ache. The clone was gone. My real body took a gasping breath, the sounds of the yard rushing back in.
'It works,' I panted, my head swimming.
'It does,' Ronan agreed, his voice tight with a new layer of concern. 'But the cost is immense. Your body is completely vulnerable while you're 'piloting' it. And I am trapped within it, helpless.'
'Yeah, well,' I said, pushing myself to my feet, my knees aching from a fall a body made of water had just taken. 'It's better than a talking puddle.'
We spent the next few hours "hard grafting," as Ronan called it. We learned the limits. The clone couldn't use the Inventory—the connection was tied to my real body. We discovered that any damage the clone took, I felt a phantom echo upon my return. But we also learned that with me piloting it, the clone was solid enough to act as a mobile, if weak, shield. Over and over, I would project, spar clumsily for a minute, get "hit" or fall, and then snap back to my body, the mental exhaustion mounting with each attempt. My fighting skills remained abysmal. I was a fast, agile brawler with one good hand who fought with the elegance of a falling sack of bricks.
Finally, drenched in sweat, covered in bruises from falls my real body never took, and mentally drained to the point of collapse, we called it a day. The sun was setting as we trudged back to The Stonekettle. My laundry duties awaited. After making short work of the mountain of linens, I came back down to the common room, grabbed a table, and ordered a plate of something greasy and a mug of ale.