Unfortunately, that meant he had to do the job of consuming the Dreamseed himself.

“You’ve got an arm for it!” Dross said. “Just walk over there and slurp it up.”

“it won’t work. My arm can’t draw anything into my core.”

“Get it into your madra channels and I’ll do the rest.”

When Lindon tried to consume the first Dreamseed, which clung to one of the nearby walls in a translucent purple blob, his arm of hunger madra drained something out of it and left it a lifeless husk of dissolving dream essence.

The next time, he restrained the limb, pulling the Dreamseed into his core as delicately as he could. It swirled into his spirit, a mass of impressions that felt surprisingly compatible with his pure madra. Dross had been right; these spirits were less like real dream madra and more like pure madra pretending.

That was interesting, but not as interesting as what happened to Dross when he absorbed the Sylvan.

He shivered inside Lindon’s core, his essence shifting, and some of the sparks inside him gathered together. It looked like he was forming a core of his own.

“Oh yeah, that’s it. That’s the right stuff. Now grab the one that looks like a flower.”

It took six Dreamseeds before Dross stopped talking. Inside Lindon’s spirit, the construct spun, turning in faster and faster loops.

Lindon funneled as much power from the Spirit Well to Dross as he could. He didn’t know if it was helping, but he reasoned that it couldn’t hurt.

Dross started pushing at Lindon’s core. It was only a little pressure at first, but it grew stronger and stronger, until Lindon had to extend his left hand and push the construct out like he was releasing a Striker technique.

The ball of purple light spun into the air, wobbling. He was more solid now, a more clearly defined orb. Now, twisting lines of light formed a web through the mechanical spokes at his center, all leading back to a single spot of bright light.

A madra system. He had grown madra channels and a core.

“Oh, this is brilliant! Brilliant stuff! It’s like all my thoughts and memories are crawling together and breeding new ones! I’m having ideas now!” Dross spun excitedly around Lindon’s head. “We don’t have to go to the portal at all, do we? We could harness fish and ride our way up! No, wait, we’re in a pocket world. We could harness fish and ride our way through space.”

He stopped in front of Lindon’s face. “I can activate the tablets myself now! Don’t be surprised if I return as a master of the sacred arts.”

He whizzed off, out of the Spirit Well room and down the hallway.

Ziel watched the whole exchange with a complete lack of interest, sitting against the corner and staring at him from beneath emerald horns.

“Forgiveness,” Lindon said. “I did not mean to disturb you.”

Dead eyes drifted over to the Spirit Well.

“If you don’t mind, how long until I reach Truegold? In your estimation.”

“Two more weeks,” Ziel said without looking over.

“And we have that long, don’t we? You said a month…”

“You don’t want to stay here.”

Lindon wasn’t sure if that was a warning or not. “This is my new favorite place in existence. I want to stay here forever.”

“And you want to leave.” Slowly, Ziel’s eyes returned to Lindon. “Don’t you?”

Lindon stood there for a long moment before he moved and took a seat beside Ziel. “Well, I have this friend. She—”

Ziel held up a hand. “No. Stop. We don’t know each other well enough for this.”

“Of course, I’m sorry.”

“You’ll reach Truegold. Whether you do it in two weeks or two years, it won’t make much of a difference in the end.”

“Actually—”

“Stop. It’s my turn. I have nothing against easy advancement, but don’t let it blind you.” He raised a finger, pointing to the ceiling. It took Lindon a moment to see what he was pointing to: a long cobweb stretching from one corner to another.

“The decay has already begun. That is a naturally forming spatial crack. You still have three weeks or so before this world collapses, so long as nothing accelerates it. By the time they form fast enough that you can see space cracking, you should have left already.”

He pulled his worn cloak around him. “If you’re going to a deeper habitat, you’ll have plenty of time if you leave now. You don’t want to be racing the hourglass with a collapsing world.”

Lindon thanked him, though he was part relieved and part disappointed. He had already been apart from Yerin for so long; he found himself wondering more and more what she was doing on the outside. He had expected that to fade with time, but it had only grown worse.

On the other hand, he felt like a fool for leaving the Spirit Well without milking every second.

He filled every spare container he could find with the blue water: all of the vials he’d emptied so far and everything he could scavenge from the junk rooms in this facility.

He’d opened his void key and prepared to leave, Little Blue on his shoulder, Orthos at his side, and Dross in the Eye of the Deep. Still, he looked over the pool of blue water like he was abandoning a fortune.

Ziel waited for them at the entrance to the room, leaning on his hammer like an old man on a cane. He hefted a bag in one hand and tossed it to Lindon. It clinked as he caught it.

“Six bottles,” Ziel said. “Should be enough to get you to Truegold in at least one core.”

Lindon held the bottles for a moment before placing them into his void key. He actually teared up.

Ziel ignored him.

When they were ready to leave, they stood lined up in front of the wall of black water. Dross assured them that this was the way to the final habitat, the one containing the entrance to Northstrider’s quarters.

It was filled with the swirling blue lights of Diamondscale Sea Drakes.

Orthos chewed a mouthful of stone to gravel and swallowed it. “Hmmm…I left too many alive.”

He and Ziel had consumed far more of the original Drake’s corpse than Lindon thought should be possible, but when it started to decay, they had tossed it into the ocean. Had that attracted the others?

Little Blue chimed like a bell from his shoulder, and he patted her tiny shoulder with one finger. Together, they stared down a wall of flashing silver scales and blue lights.

“Do we have time to swim around?” Lindon asked.

“That depends,” Dross said. “Do you still need air?”

A loud scraping grew closer and closer, and they all turned to see Ziel dragging his hammer two-handed over the tile. “They focus on the biggest threat in their territory. I will punch through, and you head to the habitat. This is no task for a Gold.”

He hesitated and glanced down at himself. “…although I guess it is, isn’t it?”

With a heavy sigh, he pushed through the bubble and into the sea, his cloak billowing behind him. The faded symbol on the back reminded Lindon of spread wings this time.

“You could learn from him,” Orthos said, eyes blazing red. “He has the spirit of a dragon.”

“I’m not sure he would take that as a compliment.”

An instant later, a green script-circle bloomed above Ziel’s head. It was big enough to swallow his body, but then the ring expanded. And expanded again.