Chapter 583 | Source: Not System-Originated [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 583: 583 | Source: Not System-Originated [CASTLE BONUS]

The status screen floated over Marcus and Reina’s photograph, which felt like a metaphor I didn’t have the energy to unpack.

Twenty-seven thousand four hundred and thirty Scumbag Points. Attributes sitting at one hundred across all five categories, which put me somewhere between a competitive first-year and a geological event depending on how honest I felt like being. Pain Tolerance in a passive slot, handed to me like a party favor from a house I’d almost died in.

And then, underneath all of it, a line with no label.

〘 ? : 1 〙

A question mark. A colon. A one. No rarity tier, no description, no obnoxious flavor text explaining that I was a terrible person for owning it. The interface had never once passed up an opportunity to editorialize about my character, and now it was showing me something it refused to name.

I’d looked at that line fourteen times since Sunday morning. The count had not changed. Neither had the question mark.

"You want to talk about it?"

Nothing.

"Come on. You told me about Musk. You told me about Ecchi Logic, which I still maintain is a war crime. You billed me for a passive that makes doorknobs damp. But this gets a question mark?"

The interface flickered, which was new, and then the flat register came in. The one it uses when it stops finding me funny.

〘 Query acknowledged. Output recorded during Crucible engagement at 11:52:17 does not correspond to any skill, trait, or item in the Host’s inventory. 〙

"I know. I was there. I’m the one it came out of."

〘 Classification unavailable. Source: not System-originated. 〙

I sat with that for a second.

Because here’s the thing about the interface. It’s cold, it’s smug, it has a documented history of being right about matters I did not want it to be right about, and it has never in three months admitted to a gap. Every notification it sends is a filtered version of something bigger it already knows. That’s the most important fact about it and the one I try hardest not to think about at two in the morning.

But it didn’t know what the gold was.

Or it knew and had decided the honest answer cost more than the lie, which was worse, and which I also filed into the drawer where I keep things I’ll examine after I graduate and have leverage.

"So a mystery power came out of my spine and you’re telling me it isn’t yours."

〘 Correct. 〙

"And you’re not curious."

〘 Curiosity is not a function I possess. Observation is. I am observing. 〙

"That’s the most ominous thing you’ve ever said to me and you once told me my survival odds were forty-three percent while I was brushing my teeth."

The interface went quiet in the particular manner of something that had already made its point.

I closed it. Then I put two fingers flat against my sternum, right on the bone, and pressed until it hurt.

There it was. That second beat underneath the first one, offset, patient, like a motor idling in a room on the other side of a wall. It got louder when I paid attention to it, which meant either it responded to focus or I was developing a very expensive brain problem. Juno wanted tissue samples. Juno was going to get exactly as many tissue samples as I could survive handing over without a scanner lighting up like a slot machine.

I tried to call the gold. Stood up in the middle of my own room and reached for whatever had gotten between Sloane’s arm and a wall of black fire, and I got absolutely nothing except a sore shoulder and the sound of Caden losing an argument with the microwave two floors down.

Fantastic. A one-time miracle with no reorder form.

My phone went off against my thigh.

SLOANE: ok so we’re just never talking about what that pillar said in front of a man with a stylus

SLOANE: correct?

SLOANE: that’s what we’re doing?

LUKAS: it said ten to twelve

SLOANE: I KNOW WHAT IT SAID

LUKAS: that’s a sixty seven percent increase

SLOANE: LUKAS

LUKAS: I’m just proud of you

SLOANE: I hate you so much

SLOANE: my mother heard. my MOTHER heard a robot tell a stranger my output went up sixty seven percent and then she looked at me and said "we’ll discuss it at home"

SLOANE: do you understand what that’s like

SLOANE: do you have any idea

LUKAS: I’m gonna guess mortifying

SLOANE: I have to go get scanned. in thirty days. by dravid’s lab. a man who is currently held together by surgical staples is going to look at my numbers and know

LUKAS: he’s not going to know

SLOANE: HE’S GOING TO KNOW

The typing bubble appeared and vanished four separate times. I waited, because that particular pattern means she’s writing something honest and deleting it because honest is harder than loud.

SLOANE: it’s not even the scan

SLOANE: I hit ten in the plaza. I felt eleven sitting right there. and I was so scared I didn’t even stop to think about it, I just kept going, and the whole time you were on the floor not breathing

SLOANE: so I don’t actually care where the extra came from

SLOANE: I care that it wasn’t enough

LUKAS: it got you to me

SLOANE: too slow

LUKAS: you always get there eventually

SLOANE: don’t be sweet at me over text I can’t punch you through a phone

SLOANE: text me before you sleep

SLOANE: I mean it

Three knocks landed on my door. Soft ones, spaced out, the sort where you can hear the person deciding between each one.

I knew who it was before I opened it, which says something about how quickly a life reorganizes itself around small facts.

Rina stood in the hall holding the sheep mug in both hands like it was structural. Oversized cream sweater, leggings, white hair still damp at the ends, and those spiral horns picking up the light and turning it purple somewhere deep inside the black. Her tail sat curled tight against her leg, which is her version of a locked jaw.

"Hi. Sorry. I know it’s late, I saw the light under your door, and I wasn’t going to knock, and then I did, so." She stopped. Breathed. "Sorry."