“I’m so hungry, children.” Uso’s voice sounded at once like the screech of metal on stone and the deep beat of a drum. “Come and tell me some more stories.”

  BOOM!

  Dario winced as another heavy impact shook the stone hatch on top of the stairway. His body was tense, expecting the slab to collapse and beasts to come streaming through, but it held. He grimaced as he realized once again just how dumb his idea to crack it open had been. Once the monsters came streaming in, they’d have nowhere to run.

  “I believe it is reinforced. Let me assess the damage,” Nika said before setting her jaw and running up the stairs. Even though his reserves of light Ki were already below half his capacity, he sent out a small orb of light.

  Nika ran her hands along the walls as she walked up and he could see bits of dark aura flowing into her skin. She was already moving a lot more smoothly than just a day ago.

  BOOM!

  She flinched, but still the thick stone showed no signs of breaking. When she touched it, a strong pulse of dark Ki was sent in and he could see her nod to herself. She repeated the process two more times, withdrawing something - he assumed it was hardness - from the walls and infusing it into the slab of stone.

  “The top layer is granite but underneath is a thick slab of boron. It will hold for now. I will perform another working to reinforce both the slab and the supporting pieces of wall. Even if the assault continues unabated, I would bet a chest of pearls that it will hold for a while - two days at the least.”

  Dario nodded, his brows lifting as he felt a flash of relieved surprise.

  “Then we have-”

  BOOM!

  He frowned at the rude interruption before continuing.

  “We have some time. But we should probably make some kind of plan? Or did you want to just…” he mimed a few punches, as if to suggest they should come out swinging.

  “Let us take some time to consider tactics. There are certain things I could do with the stone, but… It will depend on my progress in the next few days.”

  Dario nodded and made to turn away, but then he paused, looking at Nika. Now that she’d recovered, she stood as straight-backed as ever, but he thought there was a bit more than the usual stiffness. Her gaze was cold and hard and she looked strong despite her messy pale hair and the many dark stains and cuts across her tunic.

  He cursed inwardly, realizing that he was going to have to apologize. However much he hated those kinds of conversations, they still needed to fight together, so he bit down on that nervous feeling and cleared his throat.

  “About the other day. I, err… well, I wasn’t thinking straight. At all. My plan was dumb and, well, I said some things I shouldn’t have. So, umm, sorry, I guess?”

  “...Are you asking a question?”

  BOOM!

  Both of them ignored the strike this time.

  “Umm… No?” He scratched his head, looking embarrassed. “Look, I’m really not good with this kind of stuff. I apologize, alright? I shouldn’t have said what I said about your parents. I take it back. I get that you may still be upset, but… well, we should be partners. At least for this next fight, we should have each others’ backs, right?”

  Nika looked at him with an inscrutable expression and for a moment he thought she would refuse, but then she gave a stiff nod. “I think neither of us were quite in the right state of mind. Apology accepted. I vow that I will not leave you behind to be devoured by the beasts if I can help it.”

  Dario frowned at the precise formulation. It was probably for the best that he apologized, though he felt like there might still be some unresolved tension there. But anyway, he needed to get moving. They would have to make the most out of the few days they had left here and make sure to increase their arsenal.

  It was time to get serious about finding shortcuts.

  After all, it had always been his opinion that shortcuts had gotten a bad reputation. The way he looked at it, it was just about being clever. Hard-working cultivators who prided themselves in their discipline and took on suffering like it was a hobby would sneer at people taking ‘the easy road’. But if you could get similar results with less work, then who was the idiot?

  The first shortcut he found was on his problem with the seeds. Now that he was looking at the problem again with fresh eyes, he tackled it with good old farmer’s practicality. It was clear that he wasn’t going to be able to extract those tiny, mushy bits of aura anytime soon.

  But if the thing you were working with was too small, well, couldn’t you just make it bigger?

  He went to find one of the plants that had a round fruit with seeds that were a tad bigger than the others, then fed it enough plant Ki to grow a fruit that was nearly double the size than it normally was. The seeds had grown too and when he picked them out, they proved much easier to work with. He knew from his frequent training with puzzles that small, incremental changes were the best way to get through a bottleneck.

  When working with those larger seeds for a few hours, using the mental image of gently picking up an eggshell with two feathers, he finally managed to maintain his hold on a bit of aura and carry it into another seed. But to his surprise, there was resistance when he tried to shove it in, and when he finally managed, it pushed out all the other aura, leaving only what he’d carried over.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “No, damn it! I need that!”

  He flicked the failed seed away and grabbed the scrolls that explained splicing theory. After skimming them a few times instead of properly studying them, he often found himself needing to go back and look for hints on how to solve the problems he was running into.

  ‘Adding more of a native aspect is considerably easier than introducing a foreign one. In order for a seed to capture aspects that it would never naturally possess, an entirely different process is required. Indeed, this is where we get to the essence and purpose of the art of splicing, as we grow able to achieve things that would never be possible by mere selective breeding.’

  Dario groaned after reading the passage. “Why is nothing in the world of cultivation ever straightforward.”

  The scroll went on at length about different ways to ‘stabilize the seed while weaving the aspects together to change its very nature’. There were complicated patterns which needed to be laid out in Ki, strange circular shapes full of lines and flourishes, where the seed was meant to be put at the center.

  The complexity of the pattern and the amount of Ki needed would increase with the level of the seed, but since this had been gathered on the lowest floor, the simplest of the patterns should be enough. Still, this is where splicers would normally use the giant instrument to help them control the fine layers of Ki. Dario only had his eyes and brain to do the work with. Instead of seeing it as a challenge, he thought of it as a shortcut.

  After looking the patterns over for a while, he figured out yet another shortcut. Since the patterns were so neatly drawn on the scroll, he just traced the lines with light Ki, then held the pattern stable as he moved it to a flat surface. This saved him the time and effort of trying to copy it by hand. Then, he had to follow a few steps: first extract the aspected aura from the one seed, then move that in the pattern to keep it stable, before extracting aura from the second seed and adding it to the pattern as well. Then he had to carefully weave it together, as if knitting a scarf, before letting that weave sink back into the second seed.

  After another few failed attempts, the method finally delivered its first result: a round, plump fruit that tasted like a raw tuber.

  “Ugh, gross,” he said as he spat out a large bite, but still, it was the taste of progress.

  During pauses where he let the experimental plants grow, he would either focus on expanding his seams, or work on his control of the cloud-like mental Ki.

  By now, the main seams in his legs stretched all the way to his feet, and he was beginning the work of digging out smaller channels that led into his muscles. The technique of guiding the plant Ki with light was still effective, though it made the insides of his legs itch like there were maggots inside. Still, compared to the intense pain of the hammering method, this was a great shortcut.

  During what he thought was the second day, he got his first actually useful result from the splicing. He’d taken a single plant with larger than average seeds, then simply focused on strengthening a single aspect, which he thought of as ‘wetness’ and resulted in juicier fruits. This was a lot easier than weaving different aspects together, and faster too. By boosting the growth with his plant Ki, he could go through several iterations in the space of a few hours.

  Once its small fruits were filled with juice behind a thin skin, he then took the aspect of poison from a flower known to have paralytic pollen and wove that into the seed.

  The final result was a plant with thin branches that could barely hold its fat blue fruits. They were small enough that he could hold a few in his hand and, by now, juicy enough that they would splat open and spread their juices when thrown at something. There’d be no way to know for sure how effective the poison was before testing them out, but for that, he’d have to wait.

  Half of the previously dead chamber was now filled with a variety of plants, offering plenty of plant Ki to draw from. Dario took in a touch more each time he drew it in, stretching the seams in his legs before focusing on digging them out further. As the seams began to spread further like thin worms through his muscles, there was a noticeable difference in how fast he could move and how high he could jump. When he was waiting for his Ki to recover or his headaches to go away, he went through some basic stances and minor physical exercises to get used to the changes.

  The other exercises he did were close to what they’d gone through in the testing rooms. In order to counter the beasts, he would need to fight ‘fire with water’, as the man from the memory crystals had said. He’d noticed during the tests that some memories were more effective than others in producing the weird emotional Ki and that it had not been easy to call them up under pressure. So he practiced to keep a few important and effective ones at the ready, like arrows in his quiver.

  During all this time he spent switching between splicing experiments, expanding his seams and practicing the usage of mental Ki, there was, however, a little voice in his head nagging at him. It said that he was doing all these useful things, while avoiding the biggest and most important thing, which was working on the revelation of his true desire. But each time his thoughts tried to approach that topic, he flinched back as if it was a glowing piece of iron fresh out of the foundry.

  Instead of pushing through, he jumped into his most ambitious splicing experiment yet.

  “Alright big boy,” he said to the large core he held up in front of him, “the two of us are going to make something really cool.”

  After shredding some of his favorite clothes as well as his own skin to get the core of the hard, thorny plant, it had better deliver something good. Its actual seeds were a tad smaller than those of the poisonous flower, so it took him a dozen attempts before he managed to grasp the slippery aura. Only when he finally thought he had a good grip on it, he found that it was hard to move.

  It took another dozen attempts of trying to force it out, before he finally realized the problem.

  “Hardness is really a stubborn aspect, huh?” he mumbled as he sat cross-legged on the ground, bent over a few seeds with flickering images hovering in front of him.

  He then remembered something Nika had said about the way she worked with mineral Ki: it had to be broken down bit by bit. With the mental image of a tiny chisel chipping away at the aura, he got to work again, chipping off small pieces and gathering them together. The focus required to hold the bits together while chipping off more was giving him a serious headache, but he pushed through until he thought he had enough.

  On his first attempt, the seed burst into flames.

  “Pretty sure that’s not supposed to happen,” he muttered while frowning at the charred speck, then looking back at the core. There were only six seeds left to work with, so he’d have to be careful.

  The regular impacts that sounded from the stone hatch were a constant reminder of what was waiting for them out there. It seemed like whenever he felt like taking a nap, a louder bang would echo through the hallways, keeping him on edge and reminding him that time was quickly running out.

  He frequently went to check on the slab of stone, but there still was not a crack to be seen and Nika kept reassuring him that it would hold for a while still.

  The hours spent on splicing and training all blended together, broken up only by short naps. Now that Uso was preoccupied with beating down the door to this basement, he found that the nightmares were gone even without the tea. The constant pressure kept him going through the exhaustion and he had no idea how much time passed, until there came a time where Nika put a hand to the slab of stone and took in a slow breath.

  “The matrix is starting to break up. It’s hard to pinpoint when, exactly, it will fail, but certainly less than a day. To be safe, we should expect no more than twelve hours. The time has come to make a plan.”