Chapter 47- The Level-2 Core(2)

Chapter 47: 47- The Level-2 Core(2)

Sol went quiet for a moment, listening to her steady heartbeat against his ribs.

They had talked about this three weeks ago when Valera first broke into the Peak-Stage, and neither of them had a good answer yet.

"Tell me again how the nobles do it," Sol said. "Stepping into Level 2. Foundation Establishment."

"When a Moon cultivator hits a hundred percent Peak,"

Valera explained, her fingers tracing the collarbone he had broken in the Harvest House six months ago.

"Their bones and muscles can’t hold any more raw mist. To reach Level 2, you have to seal yourself in an ice-chamber with Level 2 cores and drink a cauldron of refined silver-wood sap. You force the lunar energy straight into your bone marrow until it kills your red blood cells and replaces every drop of red blood in your body with Silver Ichor."

"Like Cassian Vane," Sol said, remembering the slow, ten-second ba-dump of the High Lord’s radioactive silver veins in the Bone-Yard.

"Like Cassian," Valera nodded.

"Once your blood turns silver, you aren’t fully human anymore. You don’t age as fast, you don’t bleed out from normal cuts, and in some cases the energy can project outside your body. That’s why they call it Foundation Establishment, you’re building an immortal body."

She looked down at his chest, where his heart was beating fast, hot, and unmistakably red.

"If I do that," Valera whispered, "My Pure Moon bloodline is made for it. The Silver Ichor will stabilize my Permafrost. Wait until I have enough cores, and I’ll cross over fine. What about you, Sol? Your gift is the opposite of that. Everything you do comes from your blood burning. If you try to put freezing Silver Ichor into your marrow... it’ll put your fire out and you’ll die before you know."

Sol reached down to his belt, opened the leather pouch, and pulled out the smooth, walnut-sized sapphire of the Level 2 Silt-Serpent’s core.

Even wrapped in boar-hide, the orb radiated a heavy, stubborn pressure that tried to push back against his hand.

"The system in my head doesn’t call my path Moon Cultivation," Sol said, rolling the heavy sapphire between his calloused palms.

"When I broke into High-Stage, and again when I hit Peak a month ago, the letters didn’t say Apprentice. They said The Ash-Forged. The Moon isn’t the only thing that built pathways in this world, Val. Kan Hearth’s people knew about the old world before the Eye opened. Somebody out there, either in the archives or down in the deep pits of Gomorrah where they dig up pre-collapse bunkers knows how to build a foundation without turning into an icicle."

"Gomorrah is two hundred kilometers west across the Salt Flats," Valera said.

"And we need better weapons anyway," Sol pointed out, glancing at the cracked, bent hatchet lying by the bunker door and the stack of thirty rock-hard Level 2 serpent scales sitting on the pine sled.

"Marrow’s little coal pot at the Slag-Heap can’t even heat these scales up, and he doesn’t have an anvil heavy enough to forge those fangs. The big caravans that trade between the holds and Gomorrah pass through the Iron-Cross crossroads every spring. That’s forty kilometers west of here."

Valera looked at the pile of scales, then back at the sapphire core in his hands. "We absorb the serpent’s core tonight, cook the meat, pack the scales on the sled, and head west toward the crossroads?"

"Unless you’d rather stay in this bog and wrestle another snake with your bare hands," Sol said, a faint grin tugging at his beard.

Valera snorted, pulling back from his chest to grab the iron pot and two thick steaks of white serpent meat from the sled. "Not until you have an weapon that doesn’t bend like a spoon in every fight. Heat the rock, Sol. I’m starving."

They ate four pounds of roasted Level 2 serpent meat each, the meat so dense with pure vitality, even a single bite made their skin tingle and their cuts seal shut without leaving a scar, and then they cleared the center of the concrete floor to tackle their first Crowned core.

They didn’t sit back-to-back this time.

Digesting a Level 2 core while still in the Level 1 realm was dangerous, the energy inside the sapphire sphere wasn’t loose like a Blighted shard, it was compressesed. If Sol crushed it too fast, the sheer pressure would rupture his arteries before his furnace could refine it.

Instead, they sat cross-legged facing each other on the furs, knees touching.

Valera took off her coat and her shirt down to her linen bindings so nothing would block the thermal transfer, and Sol sat bare-chested across from her.

He placed the sapphire orb in the center of his left palm, covered it with his right hand, and Valera wrapped both of her bare, ice-cold hands directly around his knuckles, forming a four-handed seal around the Level 2 core.

"Ready?" Sol asked in the dark bunker.

"Go slow," Valera breathed, her knees pressing against his thighs. "Just crack the outer layer first."

Sol closed his eyes and squeezed.

With a Level 1 shard, his Peak-Stage grip would have turned the stone to powder in a second.

The Level 2 sapphire didn’t crumble, it pushed back like a ball of solid iron until Sol poured a concentrated jet of solar fire straight into the center of his palms.

Tink.

A single hairline crack opened across the sapphire sphere.

Instantly, a jet of freezing, hyper-dense blue liquid-mist shot out of the crack, trying to freeze Sol’s palms solid to the bone and climb up his wrists into his heart.

Sol’s jaw locked. His core roared up to meet the invasion, turning his forearms into twin chimneys of glowing orange heat that caught the heavy Level 2 essence, boiled away the feral snake-consciousness still lingering inside the crystal, and broke the thick matrix down into a roaring flood of warm, golden-blue vapor.

Through the skin of his knuckles, Valera drank in fifty percent of that refined flood the exact millisecond it left his palms.

Both of them gasped at the same time, their heads thrown back as the sheer quality of Foundation-grade fuel hit their Peak-Stage bodies.

One drop of this energy was worth ten Peak-Stage beast shards.

In Sol’s chest, the walls of his furnace didn’t just expand; the muscles and tendons anchoring his ribs and spine felt like they were being dipped in molten bronze and quenched in cold oil, growing heavier, tighter, and more explosive with every breath.

Across from him, Valera’s white hair actually lifted slightly in the air as her Pure Moon core spun at twice its normal speed, her hands clamping down on Sol’s burning knuckles like iron vises to keep the circuit closed as frost and steam swirled around their intertwined fingers.

It took them six hours just to empty that one walnut-sized sphere.

By the time the last flake of sapphire turned to warm gray ash between their palms, both of them were drenched in sweat, slumped forward with their foreheads resting against each other’s shoulders, breathing in deep, ragged unison.

In the quiet dark of the bunker, the frosted letters in Sol’s mind flickered and updated:

[CROWNED CORE (LEVEL 2 - LOW) ASSIMILATED.]

[STATUS: Level 1 (Flesh and Bone / The Ash-Forged) - Peak-Stage (14% Progression).]

[NOTE: VESSEL DENSITY APPROACHING MORTAL LIMIT. Golden Blood PREPARATION AT 14%.]

Sol blinked his glowing eyes against Valera’s damp shoulder.

So his body wasn’t just filling a tank anymore. Every percent he gained in the Peak-Stage was slowly re-forging his blood vessels to handle whatever waited for him at Level 2.

"Twenty-eight," Valera whispered against his ear, her fingers still loosely tangled with his hands between them. "I jumped from nineteen straight to twenty-eight percent off half a core. Sol... if we hunt three more of those serpents before we reach Gomorrah, I’ll be over sixty percent."

"Not in that bog we won’t," Sol murmured, lifting his head and rolling his stiff neck. "Wait till tomorrow morning. Once the other Level 2s along the river smell that the Silt-Serpent’s dead, two or three bigger ones are going to move in to fight over its territory. We take our scales, we go down to the Slag-Heap one last time to trade our spare meat for travel rations and a map of the western trails, and we move."