Adamant Blood

Mark woke feeling a whole lot better, and then the world came back to him. Mostly. Unionsense was scratchy. His adamantium was right over there where Isoko had dropped it, and that filtered back into his astral body like lumps of hard clay, allowing him to feel the floor under it once again. He tried to not scratch the floor, but he failed. Whoops! Eliot had made Mark's room with an extra strong floor but Mark scratched it up anyway.

With a deep breath, Mark breathed in the Good, and then he breathed out the Bad, and that hurt, but it got easier with every breath.

Adamantium floated lazily above Mark, like lumpy black balls, and Mark stretched himself to pull it apart, then push it together. After 10 minutes of stretching the adamantium was flowing almost like normal, but when Mark put it against his skin it formed blobs that stuck to each other instead of free-moving scales.

Mark got up and got dressed, all the while working on shapes with his adamantium, breathing in the Good and breathing out the Bad, his body feeling better and better with every passing minute. He dropped the adamantium and did full-length stretches, pushing his astral body as far up as it could go, way up into the sky by a little over 1,500 meters, and then down into the ground, about the same distance.

Mark's astral body un-kinked, like stretching one's arms in the morning, as he touched upon vectors in both directions that were all perfectly normal. Nothing worrying out there today!

Some pair of people were flying overhead, and they almost felt like the twin flyers, William and Wilma, but it was probably the Sky Shaper, Lee Windhopper, and someone that Mark didn't know. Their vectors were more Wind Shaper-ish, instead of the flyer twins' much more intertwined flight.

A whole bunch of people were in underground places under the noble district. Lotta bunkers down there, so that was pretty normal. There was a whole underground section of the city right underneath the main residence district, down south of the lake a few kilometers away. That was too far away to feel, but Mark knew it was down there. That place was for visitors, mostly; those who were scared of being in a settlement. That place down there was originally an evacuation location, but they had turned it into a full mini-city in the last month.

Half of Crytalis was underground, so underground places were pretty common. Lotta safety in having 500 meters of dirt between you and the nearest kaiju, after all. Not perfect safety, but a good amount.

Mark felt a lot better as he stretched some more, left and then right, forward and then back. Up, down. Through the whole set a few more times. And then Mark sat down and entered his soul.

His soulspace looked about the same as it originally had, all fractal, twisting black. A quick flight through the sky, with Quark right there beside him, helped him to locate anything that was actually different.

There was nothing too different.

Quark said, "I am sorry the Alteration was too detailed, sir."

Mark said, "Don't worry about it, Quark. Elaria told me of the risks of possible extra damage, and it happened, and that's on me. And it looks healed, anyway! So it's all good."

Quark showed a few places on the map of the Binding, like glittering silver sparks on distant parts of the ocean, saying, "These spots are still broken."

"But they're healing."

"They are healing."

Mark looked down, into his soul, to imagine the memory of holding that hexagonal warding plate—

And the memory was in his hands, like a broken moving picture surrounded by oozing, decaying black. The memory was damaged and kinda not even there anymore, and Mark wondered, as he looked at the memory, what color had the warding plate been, because the memory here was showing the hexagonal plate as purple…

But that was wrong, right?

Why would Eliot make a purple plate for a mockup?

"Say, Quark?" Mark asked, "What color was the mockup warding plate that Eliot gave me?"

"Grey, sir."

… So not the purple that he was seeing in his memory at all.

Mark winced.

He opened his eyes and he was sitting in his bedroom.

Mark sighed, saying, "It was a grey warding plate. Not purple, like the memory showed me… Fuck. Well… it had always been a risk, I guess."

Quark asked, "The memory changed, sir?"

"Yeah. Purple plate in the memory… and I can't even remember the grey plate version of the memory. But I can imagine it?"

Quark said, "Elaria recommended to never go off of imagination; always use direct memory."

"Yeah, and if you fuck up a spell, then you risk losing that memory. Which is what happened here." Mark sat there for a moment, and then he got up, saying, "Oh well." Mark walked out of his room and then upstairs.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

It was 1 AM, and Isoko was the only one awake.

"14 hours!" Isoko looked over from the paused television, asking, "You feeling better?"

"A lot. Thank you. Memory changed, though."

"It wasn't a big one, right? Just that mockup of the warding plate?"

"Yup." Mark went to the kitchen and grabbed a premade meal of whatever-it-was and shoved it into the oven. He tapped some buttons, and the machine whirred to life, heat and air flowing inside and around the dish. "I remember it as a purple plate, but I thought for a second 'that's not right at all', and yeah. Quark told me it was originally grey. My memory changed… Or at least I think it did. It's all so weird and different to see memories in the soul. They really do look like dreams more than anything real.."

"That's a mind fuck."

"Do you know if yours changed at all?"

"I went through the home movies and they looked the same."

Mark nodded. He watched his food twist in the machine. Then he turned back toward Isoko. "Whatcha watching?"

"Battle trash. I woke up about an hour ago. Sally was here but she left again; it was a break in the training with Walter. Someone was awake while you were out of it, but not me! But now I'm awake again. We could watch more show, or go on a hunt after you eat. Get that astral body moving again, though it feels like you're mostly okay."

Sally's training paused, huh? Mark wondered what that was abo—

The machine dinged and Mark smiled. He pulled out a big plate of meat, potatoes, and roasted veggies. The whole thing had entered the machine as a bunch of disks, cubes, and wrinkled shapes, and now here it was a full meal, and it looked good! Sally loved this machine, and Mark felt the same way.

"Gods, I love this machine."

Isoko chuckled.

Mark plopped on the couch next to Isoko as he made adamantium shapes in the air overhead, saying, "Let's watch some battle trash."

Isoko grinned. She pressed play.

Mark asked, "So Sally had trouble with Walter?"

"Not much, I think?" Isoko said, "She said that Walter had to go do shit for a while. She left with Eliot, though, when I woke back up. I don't know the whole story. I think it's Executioner stuff."

Mark hummed.

Mark took it easy for a little while.

And then, of course, shit happened.

Some guys out on harvest patrol found a new hole in the ground on the other side of the Shine, about 15 kilometers away from the settlement. They went poking and an eruption of death slimes followed.

The slimes curled out of the air like floating black cells each the size of a person and they cloyed onto the people who broke the seal on their birthing hole. Those people didn't die right away, but Mark and a few paladins went out to rescue them and seal the hole so they could deal with it later.

Once the death-afflicted team was back in the settlement and laying in bed, they certainly seemed like they wanted to die, though.

"I want to fucking die," said one of the men, laying on his stretcher in the hospital.

Mark was still healing them, purging the Bad, bringing in the Good. That was as much as he should be doing right now, according to Lola. A lot of paladins were doing the same, including 12 of Derek, and Isoko.

Lola was right beside Mark, Isoko, and Derek, saying, "Death aspected miasma is rather dangerous because it is highly insidious, as these people have found out. It'll be the work of a week to safely clean up that hole in the ground out there, and someone will probably start the cleanup by using fire and then mushrooms —probably from the mushroom forest down south— but we'll all go out there tomorrow and start working on it, too. Death mana is insidious because it replaces living functions, and stuff takes on an unlife. All of the unlife eventually decays because it's not actually alive; it doesn't know how to be alive. But it does know how to mimic life well.

"When people are infected with it, and not fully converted, they usually get really depressed. These people will be on suicide watch for the next week."

The four people who were infected all certainly seemed like they actually did want to die, too; the man saying he wanted to die was not hyperbole. That was concerning.

Lola added, "They'll get worse before they get better. Day 3 will be the worst. You kids might do other things, but we'll still be around here cleaning up the issues as they happen."

One of the patients started sobbing and crying as they laid on their back, and then they vomited.

Mark cleaned it up with a brush of Purity/Impurity.

Mark asked, "Surely there are better ways to clean up this problem, yeah?"

"Oh yes," Lola said, "You can do a weird Union of Life and Life, but that tends to catastrophically kill whatever you're trying to un-death. You do that in an emergency, and then you cycle Good/Bad on yourself so that you don't fill up with tumors, yourself..."