Unlike cultivating from magical beast gems, where trying to take in all that concentrated power was a death sentence for gems more than one or two Grades higher than a person’s soul rank, absorbing the ambient power in the air that came from a magical beast’s corpse was a different story. They could limit the amount of power that was sucked into their souls if they concentrated, which meant Leo was able to teeter along that dangerous line of nearly having too much power within his grasp for him to control, yet staying just within the limit of what was feasible. By the time the beast finally stopped radiating power, nearly three hours after they’d taken it out, Leo’s soul was already nearing the halfway mark to rank 17.

  Even better, he’d finally found something Taylor wasn’t able to do better than him without even thinking.

  Groaning, Taylor lay on her back off to the side, rubbing her stomach as though she’d had too much to eat. At first, Leo had thought the spider’s venom was simply slow acting, and she was finally succumbing to the toxins floating around her bloodstream. It wasn’t until she quickly began getting better after stumbling away from the spider’s corpse that he realized what had happened.

  Taylor was naturally able to take in ambient power from magical beast corpses simply via breathing.

  But she couldn’t regulate how much power she took in.

  For the first time, she’d encountered too much power. Her strange body and soul blend seemed to make her immune to soul damage at the very least, which is what would happen if Leo or any other gem holder took in more power than their souls could handle. But while she didn’t need to worry about damaging her cultivation, she wasn’t totally immune. As far as Leo could tell, Taylor got a soulache when she tried to take in more power than she could handle. This resulted in her being plagued by pain and nausea until her body naturally dispelled the excess power that it couldn’t handle.

  “How are you feeling?” Leo asked, sitting down beside her and trying not to laugh as Taylor glared at him.

  “Everything hurts,” she complained, not quite managing to stifle another groan as she weakly rolled from side to side.

  “You brought this upon yourself, you know. I told you you could just sit this one out,” Leo reminded her. After discovering what was causing her pain, Leo tried to get Taylor to leave the higher-Grade magical beast alone. But true to her nature, Taylor refused to give up on any opportunity to grow stronger and strengthen herself. Thus, for the past three hours that Leo had been meditating, Taylor had been walking back and forth between the magical beast and the nearby tree, sucking in a few deep breaths of power before running away to suffer as her body worked to process what it could and dispel the rest.

  “No regrets,” she managed, groaning as she punched the ground a few times.

  “You’re ridiculous,” Leo said, finally letting himself chuckle. “Here.”

  The next time Taylor rolled in his direction, he reached out and guided her closer, pulling her head and upper body into his lap as he began rubbing her back. Taylor seemed to stiffen for the barest of moments at the unexpected touch, before relaxing, the tension flooding out of her body like a wet noodle as he absentmindedly traced circles over her shirt.

  “My mom would always do this to me whenever I got sick,” Leo explained, smiling at the warm memories from when he was little. “I actually used to get sick quite a lot, funnily enough. Had plenty of visits with Jim, our plane’s healer. Turns out, I just had a bit of an overactive immune system. My mom was always the harder of my two parents, but anytime I ended up sick, she was the first person to try and make me feel better. She could lower the temperature of her skin until it was cold as ice, and feeling her hands on my forehead when I had a fever was utter bliss.”

  “That sounds nice,” Taylor muttered, and Leo felt another painful shudder rack her body as yet another burst of invisible power forced its way out of her. “I remember… a song… I think my mom used to sing to me when I got sick. But I can’t remember the words.”

  “Did you like the song?”

  “Yeah. I liked it a lot,” Taylor admitted, sounding like she was going to say more before hesitating. Just as Leo went to ask what was wrong, to his surprise, Taylor began humming softly.

  Leo blinked at the sudden noise, continuing to gently rub Taylor’s back as she hummed out a quiet, pleasant tune that sounded like some nursery rhyme she must have had on her plane. Yet another spasm of power vacating her body nearly made her stop halfway through, but she powered through to the end, letting out a sigh of relief as though getting through that entire song meant a lot to her.

  “It’s a nice song,” Leo said once she’d finished up.

  “Yeah…”

  The two of them sat like that for a while, with Leo gently rubbing Taylor’s back as she suffered for her hubris and desire to grow stronger whatever the cost. At some point, Taylor reached out and wrapped her arms around his midsection, burying her face into his shirt and squeezing him every time another burst of power forced its way out of her. It was strange seeing the feral woman capable of ripping magical beasts apart with her bare hands in such a vulnerable state, but it was nice being the one comforting her for a change. Taylor had been there for him throughout his many nights of tearfully talking about his collapsed plane and the people he’d lost. The least he could do was help her get over her soulache.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Of course, the fact that Taylor was suffering didn’t change their current situation. Leo made sure to keep most of his focus on their surroundings even as he comforted his partner, not wanting to be caught off guard by any opportunistic magical beasts. The good news was that in most cases, magical beasts closer to a plane's upper tier tended to hunt alone. That meant there probably weren’t any other camouflage spiders prowling around in the immediate vicinity. On the other hand, it had been a few hours since they’d taken down this one, which meant they couldn’t be too careful.

  Eventually, Leo realized it had been some time since Taylor last spasmed from power flooding out of her, and he paused in rubbing her back. Surprised she hadn’t said anything, he peered down at her.

  “Feel better?”

  “...Yeah,” she mumbled, her face still hidden as she kept it pressed against his stomach. “...Did you do this sort of thing with Francy?”

  “What?” Leo asked, taken aback by the unexpected question. “No, we were close, but not in that way… Not yet… Where did that come from?”

  Rather than answer him, Taylor squeezed his midsection one last time, before finally letting go. Pushing herself out of his lap, she stood up, taking a deep breath and shaking her head as if to clear it.

  “Just curious. Want to find out what gems we got?”

  “Sure,” Leo said, giving her a confused look as Taylor hastily made her way over to the spider. While Taylor had asked him a question here or there about his parents in the past, she’d never bothered asking about Francy before.

  Plunging her hand into the spider’s corpse, Taylor plucked out two glowing gems, grinning as she held up one that was nearly the size of an egg. “Oh, powerful skill! Grade 15 camouflage!”

  “Grade 15?!” Leo repeated, immediately forgetting his current line of thinking as he rushed over to her. The gem was clear as crystal, yet no light seemed to reflect from it. “Are you serious?”

  “Yep. Want to turn invisible?”

  “Tempting… but no, we’d have to give up all our skills just for that one,” Leo sighed, his sudden dreams of stealthily walking straight up to the Planar Lords and stabbing them in the face vanishing just as quickly as they’d come. Granted, they probably had their own skills which would make such a thing pretty much impossible in the first place. “It’s a shame you don’t go through evolutions like regular gem holders. Ingraining some simple camouflage into your physical form would go a long way.”

  “Not like we have a method of keeping the gem intact until I hit rank 20 anyway with the gem box already filled,” Taylor shrugged, popping the gem into her mouth and somehow managing to swallow the giant gem like it was nothing.

  How does she do that without cutting up her throat?

  “Dense gem,” Taylor said, grinning as she licked her lips. Holding up the other one, a much smaller gem that was a familiar mixture of green and purple, she nodded to it. “More poison in this one. Feels stronger than Venomous Jab, but I think it’s bite-only.”

  “I mean, you do tend to bite pretty much everything we fight,” Leo pointed out, memories of removing giant splinters from her mouth after she’d tried to bite her way through a tree still fresh in his mind. “Want to make the swap?”

  “Might as well,” Taylor agreed, popping the gem into her mouth and tucking it inside her cheek in order to draw out the skill. “So what now?”

  “If that guy who chased after us into this plane hasn’t found us by now, I think it’s safe to say we gave him the slip. Which means it’s time to focus on our primary objective.”

  Leo pulled out his makeshift map of the planarverse, opening to a new page and beginning to record their findings for the colossal plane. “Before he died, my dad told me I needed to find a colossal plane, and that the gem box he gave me would hold the key to saving everyone within the Nexus. I don’t have the faintest idea as to how that’s going to work, but I’m not supposed to open the box until I hit a soul rank of 20 anyway. I figured that would take me a good couple of months at the very least, but with your help, I’ve already managed to hit rank 16 in only a month and change.”

  “So we kill magical beasts until you hit soul rank 20?” Taylor asked.

  “While simultaneously exploring the colossal plane and ensuring there aren’t any incredibly dangerous magical beasts or natural threats that might kill everyone from the Nexus the moment they’re brought in here,” Leo nodded. “They’re rare, but even lower-tier planes can have natural disasters capable of wiping people out. My dad once told me about a plane they discovered where it rained molten lead once a week, and another one where winds could whip up to such powerful gusts that entire trees were ripped out of the ground and hurled around with incredible force.”

  “So grow stronger, explore the plane, and make sure it’s survivable,” Taylor said, ticking items off on her fingers. “Sounds like fun.”

  “While also keeping clear of any of the Planar Lords’ agents that are undoubtedly crawling around,” Leo added. “I think we'll be safe, but if they recognize me from those sketches, that would be bad. They’ll probably be pretty strong.”

  “But if we do run into any of them, we kill them, right?” Taylor asked, looking perhaps just a touch too eager for his tastes.

  “If we can’t run away… then yeah, we’ll have to,” Leo confirmed. “Millions of lives are at stake here. Not just those living in the Nexus, but everyone in all the other planes that rely on them. We can’t risk the Planar Lords catching wind that I survived, or that I still have this mystery box my father left behind.”

  The focus of one or two of his evenings being comforted by Taylor may have been on his encounter with Jess and the sensation of her body growing weak as he choked the life out of her. He knew he was prepared to do whatever it took to carry out his mission and save everyone, but that didn’t mean he liked taking such drastic actions.

  At the very least, Taylor was more than happy to step in and get her hands dirty.

  “Soul rank 16… we have a way to go to get to rank 20,” Taylor said, rubbing her hands together eagerly at the thought of all the battles to come. “Let’s get started!”

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