The four of them lay on the glowing floor.

The wash of essence hit Bruce, fuller than the deer had given. Not dramatically more, these were still F-rank beasts, but denser. The clean cool purity of the forest essence was replaced by something warmer, more alive, the way a pepper is more alive in flavor than plain salt. It spread through his soul-body differently. Not better or worse than the forest. Just differently suited to the terrain.

"Feels different," Theron said, looking at his hands, where the essence had landed.

"Heat-type soul essence," Kael said. "Different character than natural-type. Some awakened souls do better with one type than another. Some want variety." He flexed his hands. The glow on him had brightened. "I want variety and also I want this."

"Don’t overextend," Bruce said.

"You sound like the guard."

"The guard was right."

"I know she was right, I just want to enjoy the fact of being here for one moment before you tell me to be careful again."

Bruce waited one moment.

Kael grinned. "Okay. Let’s kill more lizards."

The cinder-crawlers were different again.

They came up through the floor-cracks, small, multi-legged things, roughly the size of a fist, emerging from the lines of liquid light in small clusters of four and five. They were not strong individually. They were strong because they came in numbers, swarming over a target from every direction at once and attacking at the joints of a soul-body where the glow was most accessible.

Theron, to his credit, found them the most interesting.

He had been thinking about what Bruce said at breakfast, what is a scythe really for, and the crawlers gave him something to test against. He experimented as they came up, varying his swings. The wide arc killed three at a time but left him exposed on the recovery. He shortened the arc, increased the frequency, let the scythe move in tighter faster circles. The crawlers could not reach him. He was not killing them in groups of three but in ones and twos, but he was controlling the ground, keeping a clear radius around him at all times, and the crawlers that reached the edge of his circle simply died.

He stopped after a few minutes and looked at his own hands.

"That felt different," he said.

"Your arc changed," Bruce said. He had been watching while managing his own crawlers with a slow sweeping ink-tentacle that he dragged across the ground like a net. "You were controlling space, not killing. The scythe as a boundary rather than a weapon."

"Yes. That’s exactly..." Theron turned the thought over. "When I hold it like a boundary, it feels like the talent responds more. Like it approves."

"Listen to that feeling," Bruce said simply.

Theron listened to it for the rest of the crawler wave.

They hunted for three hours in the heat dungeon.

They did not see a lava-shell tortoise. They saw the signs of one, a great circular scorch mark on the canyon floor, too large to have been anything smaller, with three dead cinder-crawlers at its edge looking as though they had been stepped on by something enormous, and Bruce steered them away from that section of the level without discussion.

They killed lizards and crawlers in steady rotation. The lizard carcasses were worth more at the exchange than the deer, fire-scale leather sold at a premium, the stall keeper in this district had told Theron when he asked, because fire-resistant material was always in demand. The cores were denser, brighter, selling higher per unit.

By the time they came back through the portal, the carrying frames were loaded to near-capacity. The hide sacks were full. They had run out of soul-seal paste on the last three lizards and had to carry those cuts unsealed. The frames were heavy. The hooks were doing the work of a proper spatial bag in a limited way, it was still not enough, and they all knew it, but it was what they had.

The guard at the heat portal watched them come out.

"Tortoise?" she asked.

"Avoided," Bruce said, they planned to hunt it, but knowing it’s probably the boss they’d leave it for later, high chance its E ranked...

She gave him the same small nod.

The exchange at the Guild gave them significantly more than the day before.

Kael’s eyes did a quick calculation as the clerk called out values.

When the total was announced Bruce called up his window before the clerk had finished speaking.

Soul Points: 341

He looked at the number for a moment.

Three hundred and forty-one F-rank soul points after two days. The spatial ring was eight hundred. At this rate, improving, not static, climbing toward better dungeons and denser cores, the ring was four or five days away, not seven.

He closed the window.

"You’re smiling," Theron said beside him.

"I’m calculating," Bruce said.

"You were smiling while calculating."

"That’s allowed."

Kael, looking at his own window with the same quiet satisfaction, reached over and clapped Bruce on the shoulder once.

"Good second day," the demon said.

It was a simple thing to say. Bruce did not have a response that would have improved on it.

"Good second day," he agreed.

They went back to the room. They ate well. They slept deeply.

The climb had started.

The night passed without incident, it was crazy, Bruce tried but he for some reason, could feel the leeway back but just couldn’t break through. He eventually slept and woke again before the others.

This was becoming the pattern, he understood. He was a man who had spent decades waking before anyone else, before the first rounds of the day, before the surgical lists were posted, before the house stirred. The habit had survived his physical death, his transmigration, his transformation into something that was no longer entirely the man who had first developed the habit. It had apparently survived the Soul Realm descent too.

He lay still for a moment and listened.

Kael was breathing the same slow even way as the night before. Theron was not curled against the wall this time, he had rolled onto his back at some point in the night, one arm across his chest, one leg dangling slightly off the side of the pallet. His glow was steady and warm, a good clean light, no cracks anywhere.

Bruce looked at the ceiling.

He thought about Theron’s question from breakfast the day before. What is a scythe really for. He had planted that seed deliberately, the way a teacher plants a seed, not giving the answer, just pointing at the question and letting the student’s mind work on it overnight. He was curious what Theron would have found in the hours since.

He thought about Kael in the heat dungeon. The way the ambient fire had deepened the demon’s glow. The self-control Kael had shown, despite clearly wanting to lean into it. That was more discipline than the demon’s loud cheerful surface suggested. Bruce had been watching Kael carefully, the way he always watched people he was beginning to trust, looking for the gap between who someone seemed to be and who they were underneath. There was not much gap in Kael. The demon was, largely, what he appeared to be. Confident. Generous in a loud way. Observant under the loudness, more careful than the noise implied. He had chosen Bruce as a buddy to protect in the mist, and he had meant it, and he had done it.

That was a person worth knowing.

Bruce got up quietly.

He washed. He came back and sat at the table with the map.

Today, he decided, was the stone dungeon.

He had a reason beyond simple variety.

The heat dungeon had given them fire-type essence, which had been good for Kael and decent for Bruce and Theron. The forest had given natural-type essence, clean and light. But Bruce had been paying attention, as he always paid attention to things, to which essence felt most useful to him personally. Not which was strongest, all F-rank essence was roughly comparable in raw value, but which integrated most cleanly with his own soul and talent.

The forest essence had been pleasant. The heat essence had been interesting. But when he sat with the memory of both, the forest essence had settled into him more cleanly. It had moved through his soul-body the way water moves through a channel it was made for, without friction.

Which told him something about [Sanare Veritatem]. His talent was linked to truth, to restoration, to writing, and natural essence, the essence of things that grew and lived in their own uncomplicated way, resonated with that more than fire-essence. Fire was transformation, consumption, change through burning. His talent was about restoration and truth, which was closer to growth and nature than to burning.

The stone dungeon would be another data point. Mineral essence, static, the essence of things that did not grow but simply were. He wanted to know how that felt in him.

The information was practically useful. A soul who knew which essence type suited them could prioritize accordingly, hunt in matched terrain, eat matched cores, advance faster than a soul who took any beast from any dungeon without preference.

He looked at the map. Grey marker. Stone terrain, mineral-type beasts.

Twenty minutes from the Guild, north of the heat portal. A mid-distance walk through a district he had not yet seen.

He heard Kael stir.