Something was pulling at me.

  Not the mana — that had settled overnight into a baseline hum, two golem draws and nothing else now that the spear spring was spent and embedded in a dead alien's neck somewhere south of here. This was different. The directory, prodding. A drawer that kept sliding open on its own.

  I was awake before I understood why.

  Dark. The hollow still sealed in pre-dawn black, bark walls close enough to feel with whiskers I hadn't consented to own, the mineral smell of deadwood settled deep into everything. No light past the entrance. Night still held.

  [QUESTS]

  Survivor 3: Survive for 7 more days. Reward: +2 Class Levels.

  Predator 2: Kill 5 Sapients.     Reward: +3 Class Levels.

  Automator 1: Locked

  But the directory had changed.

  I felt it the way you feel a room after someone's moved the furniture — same space, different topology. The acclimation had completed in the deep dark while I'd slept, the seventy-two-hour clock running out without ceremony. New rooms where there had been suggestions. Clean edges where there had been blur.

  Translation matrix: online. Trait assimilation: online. Skill evolution: online.

  And the trait schematic was pulsing.

  Not urgently — more like quiet insistence, the encrypted biological data from the alien sitting in its drawer since yesterday's kill, accessible now that the assimilation system had come online, and the purge window was narrowing toward sunrise. The schematic had a deadline.

  I opened it.

  — — —

  The biological profile hit first.

  Four-armed bipedal anatomy rendered in a density of data that made my chest tighten. Skeletal architecture: dual shoulder-girdle articulation, independent motor control across all four limbs. Scaled integument: keratinized plate mosaic, thickness variable, tapering at joint junctions — the stress point where I'd driven the stone. Neural pathways: bifurcated processing centers running parallel cognitive threads I didn't have the framework to interpret. Metabolic rate. Sensory cluster mapping. Bioelectric discharge capacity linked to glandular reservoirs along the forearms.

  Clinical. Complete. The System had taken the person I'd killed and rendered them as a component list.

  My hands were doing something while I processed this. Picking at the bark wall, stripping thin curls from the grain and rolling them between thumb and forefinger — a capuchin fidget pattern I'd stopped trying to suppress on day two. The body needed to move while the brain worked. Compromise: the fingers moved. The rest held still.

  I read through it with the engineering brain running and everything else held in its drawer.

  I did not enjoy reading it. I read it anyway, because the alternative was losing the schematic at sunrise to squeamishness.

  Three trait options materialized below the profile, each tagged with token cost, compatibility, and adaptation risk.

  [MICRO-SCALE PIGMENTATION] — Ambient chromatic response. Fur pigmentation adjusts passively to surrounding light levels and dominant surface patterns. Cost: 1 token. Compatibility: Natural. Adaptation Risk: Minimal.

  [BIOELECTRIC DISCHARGE — MINOR] — Directed nerve-channel disruption via glandular reservoir development and neural pathway restructuring. Cost: 4 tokens. Compatibility: Forced. Adaptation Risk: Significant.

  [SENSORY CLUSTER ENHANCEMENT] — Expanded chemoreceptive and mechanoreceptive input channels. Cost: 2 tokens. Compatibility: Adapted. Adaptation Risk: Moderate.

  I had two tokens.

  The bioelectric discharge sat there being exactly what it was — the paralysis skill that had frozen the goat, scaled down, and completely out of reach. Four tokens. Forced compatibility. Running alien bioelectrics through capuchin nerves already routing mana. The engineering brain ran the risk assessment in two seconds and came back with a picture of me seizing on a branch fifty meters up.

  I closed it. The temptation was real and I let it be real without acting on it.

  The sensory enhancement: interesting, redundant. My capuchin senses were already ahead of what enhancement would add. Not the move.

  Micro-scale pigmentation. One token. Natural compatibility, minimal adaptation risk. A capuchin that already lived in dappled canopy light, becoming harder to see in it.

  I selected.

  The adaptation was brief and not pleasant — a ripple across my fur, every follicle recalibrating at a level below conscious access, the sensation of something being rewritten in the body's operating instructions. Ten seconds. When it settled, nothing looked different.

  I pressed my arm against the bark wall. The sensation was subtle — something in the fur responding to the surface behind it, a passive shift I couldn't see in the dark but could feel at the boundary where body met environment. Automatic. Ambient.

  Another thing my body did without asking. The list was growing.

  The component list was still open in the directory. I closed it. The data compressed back into its drawer, but the shape of what I'd read — four arms, bifurcated processing, a paralysis system more elegant than anything my species had engineered — stayed in the room like furniture I couldn't move. Someone's biology, rendered as a menu. I'd ordered from it.

  Dawn pushed at the hollow entrance. Pale light, the color wrong as always, orange bleeding upward through a violet gradient that no Earth sky had ever produced. The purge window closed behind me like a door I'd barely gotten through.

  I ate before opening anything else. Nodule vines, chewed mechanically. Copper-flat water from the pitcher plant reserve. The fueling process was still joyless. The body accepted it without comment.

  Outside, the canopy was waking up in layers. The wet chirps first, building in overlapping frequencies, then the deeper drone from somewhere in the mid-canopy — a sound I hadn't catalogued, sustained and resonant, less like a voice than like something humming through the wood itself. Below, the six-legged rodent clusters were already running their morning routes, arcing wide around the dead section of branch. Consistent as always. Something about their formation looked tighter than yesterday — bunched, anxious. I filed it without interpretation.

  — — —

  [QUEST COMPLETE: SURVIVE THREE NIGHTS]

  Reward: +2 Class Levels

  Class Level: 7

  — — —

  Two more levels settling into the warmth behind my sternum. Restructuring. Clicking. New capacity expanding into spaces that hadn't existed a second ago.

  Three skill advancements. One new skill choice. One evolution charge. The directory felt crowded in a way that had nothing to do with data — and somewhere behind the new rooms, in a space I wasn't visiting, the confused expression on a scaled face was still sitting where I'd left it. It hadn't moved. It wasn't going to.

  Level 4 advancement into Golem. No deliberation — three advancements deep, the reasoning was settled, and explaining it to myself again wasn't going to make it more true. The advancement clicked into place, and I felt the skill cap. A threshold. The base architecture hitting its ceiling, no more room to refine within the current design. Golem was as good as it was going to get.

  Which meant the evolution charge had a target.

  But first: the new skill.

  — — —

  Three drawers. Three distinct flavors of capability, each presenting as potential I could trace partially forward.

  Map. Spatial awareness, navigation, eventually a tactical picture. A force multiplier — made everything else more effective. Not what I needed right now.

  Danger Sense. Threat detection. Directional awareness. Genuinely tempting — how many times in four days had something found me before I found it? The chase. The thing that cracked branches for twenty patient minutes. The alien I hadn't seen until it was crouching over a paralyzed goat.

  But.

  Identify. Names things. Gives you the true name of what you're touching, and the name carries properties inside it the way a label carries a warning. Starts surface-level, deepens with advancement.

  My tail had coiled around the branch beneath me at some point — tight, the grip of something that wanted to pace but wasn't allowed to. My hind feet were kneading bark unconsciously, the primate equivalent of bouncing a leg under a desk.

  The reasoning was structural. Map and Danger Sense were multipliers — they made existing capabilities more effective. Identify was the enabler. I could not build an efficient operation without knowing what I was building with. Every material decision since the drop had been made on feel and inference and educated guessing. The clay, the calcified fungus, the pitcher plant membrane, the tracking plant I couldn't explain — working hypotheses about all of them that could be wrong in ways I'd only discover when something failed under load.

  Identify turned hypotheses into data. The phantom-limb absence of it that had been bothering me since the tracking plant was about to become a real capability. And — the part I acknowledged without dwelling on — the biological profile I'd just read would have been legible from the start with this skill. I would have known what those scales were made of before I drove a stone through the gap between them.

  That thought occupied two drawers simultaneously. I let it.

  I picked Identify.

  The packet installed with the familiar rush — the System embedding something into my nervous system that hadn't been there and immediately was. I looked at the hollow wall without deciding to, and the information arrived. Not as data. Not as numbers. As a name.

  Greyvein Ironbark. A dense structural wood with layered grain.

  That was it. A name and a sentence. But the name did work — "iron" for the density I'd been guessing at, "grey" for the aging I'd been seeing without naming, the word "structural" confirming four days of tactile inference in a single descriptor. I'd been building with this wood since the first night without knowing what it was. Now it had a name, and the name meant something.

  The depth stopped there. More underneath — properties I could feel the skill wanting to resolve, meanings blurred behind a level I didn't have yet. Like reading a textbook with half the pages glued shut.

  Enough to start.

  Level 6 advancement into Identify. The skill sharpened — the same wall, the same name, but the sentence underneath expanded. Greyvein Ironbark: dense structural wood, layered grain, moderate compression resistance, low moisture uptake. Four properties where there had been one. The glued pages coming unstuck.

  Now the evolution.

  — — —

  The evolution charge and three options for capped Golem.

  Swarm Materialization. Ten golems, hive-linked, reduced individual capability. The offensive image was obvious — a cloud of constructs overwhelming a target through numbers. The math didn't survive contact with my current golem quality. My constructs were fifteen centimeters tall and struggled with bark knots. Ten worse versions of that was ten times nothing.

  Enhanced Cognition. Reasoning. Autonomy. Adaptive decision-making.

  Genuinely powerful. A golem that thought for itself, scaling upward indefinitely. Level 8 cognition. Level 10. Constructs making decisions I hadn't programmed.

  Which was exactly the problem. You don't release an adaptive system into production without understanding its failure modes.

  Advanced Schematic Synthesis. Custom design workspace. Mass Pool tracking total golem weight, Processing Pool managing capability allocation across constructs. Build anything within material and mana limits.

  I caught myself grooming my forearm. The fingers working through the fur in short, efficient strokes — stress behavior, the body self-soothing during a decision it could feel the weight of but couldn't participate in. I let it continue. The grooming and the thinking could share the same minute.

  The others solved problems I had. This one solved problems I hadn't encountered yet — and created a design space I could grow into indefinitely.

  An engineer doesn't want a better tool. An engineer wants a better workshop.

  I chose it. Level 7 advancement into the freshly evolved skill, because if I was going to open a workshop I wanted it running at more than baseline on the first day.

  The workspace opened.

  — — —

  The first impression was too much.

  Not a screen. Not a blueprint. Not anything with a name I could borrow. The workspace arrived as a mental space I could reach into but not see clearly — fuzzy, intention-driven, responding to visualization rather than input. I reached for a component and it moved approximately where I meant, which was better than nothing and worse than useful. The Mass Pool registered as a felt weight limit, a budget sensed rather than read. The Processing Pool was a percentage split across active constructs, each allocation a constraint I could feel but not quantify precisely.

  I could make changes to the materials as well. Fine tune them, but the workspace only appeared with my eyes shut. I shaved off a bit of wood, expending mana to do so. I had absolutely no idea how that worked, and didn’t want to think on it yet.

  Then I looked at the golems.

  Inside the workspace, the existing golem structure was transparent. Not anatomically — structurally. I could see the propulsion system. Not muscle. Not mechanical actuator. Channels. Thin lines of mana running through the organic material like a circulatory system, each carrying the instruction set that told bark how to move. Slightly wrong-looking — the way something that functions correctly can still look wrong, like seeing the inside of a clock for the first time and not understanding why the gears are shaped that way.

  I traced one pathway from the hip joint through the leg. Followed the logic of it — down through the articulation, along the fibers, to the foot. It made a specific kind of sense once I found the grammar. Not mechanical sense, not biological sense. System sense. The mana wasn't powering movement the way a motor drives a shaft. It was carrying permission. Each pathway was an if-then chain rendered in light, telling material what it was allowed to do.

  I could reprogram these.

  Not yet. Not with this precision, not with this mana budget. But the understanding of what I was looking at landed with the weight of a much larger room becoming visible behind a door I'd paid for with a stone through someone's spine and two tokens pulled from a body that stopped being confused and started being components.

  The monkey body made a small sound — between a chirp and a hum, originating from somewhere in my chest I didn't have conscious control over. Pleased. The joy arriving half a second ahead of the arithmetic of what it cost, the way the body always ran ahead of the brain in this chassis.

  I didn't suppress it. Either of them.

  — — —

  I went out with both golems and Identify running on everything I touched.

  The body came alive the moment I left the hollow. Four limbs and a tail moving through the branch network with a fluency the human brain still found slightly unnerving — the hands gripping and releasing in a rhythm I didn't consciously direct, the tail hooking branches a half-second before I needed the anchor, the whole locomotion system running on primate firmware I'd inherited with the chassis. Brachiation. Forty million years of arboreal engineering baked into muscle memory I hadn't earned. My feet gripped bark with an articulation that human toes had given up on somewhere in the Pleistocene, and every swing landed with a precision that felt like cheating.

  The canopy at midmorning ran on a different schedule than dawn — steeper light angles, the wrong-colored sky producing shadows that fell amber instead of grey. The layered chirps had settled into a background drone that my ears tracked involuntarily, rotating at every shift in pitch, and somewhere in the mid-canopy something large moved with the slow regularity of a commute. Not threatening. Routine. The forest doing what forests do, which was everything, all the time, without asking.

  The pitcher plant membrane: Waxcatch Film. Flexible organic membrane, water-shedding, high tensile yield. Each Identify activation cost a flat, brief draw — a camera shutter, the skill firing and returning a name that filed itself. And the name did work. "Wax" for the hydrophobic surface I'd been testing by feel. "Catch" for the way it held shape under tension. Four days of inference compressed into two words.

  The calcified fungus: Stonecap Shelf. Dense calcium deposit, brittle under shear, compression-rated. I ran my fingers over it and the name confirmed what my knuckles had guessed for three days — the "stone" wasn't metaphor. It was diagnosis. Brittle under shear was new information, though. I'd been considering it for load-bearing applications. Now I knew better.

  A section of trunk bark with unusual coloration caught me. Dense. I pressed both hands against it. Identify returned: Ferric Vein — and then static. The name half-formed, the description encrypted, specifics locked behind Level 3. But "ferric" was enough. Metal. Threaded through the wood's grain like rebar through concrete. What kind of metal, what I could extract, what it would take to work — all behind the glued pages. The name told me it was there.

  I marked the location with a filed image. Come back with better skills.

  The tracking plant. I stopped at it deliberately. Still there — broad leaves in their loose spiral, oriented toward the direction I'd last approached from. I circled it. The leaves followed. Identify returned a name that stopped me.

  Watcher's Spiral.

  And nothing else. No description, no properties, no gloss — just the name, sitting in the directory with the weight of something the skill recognized but couldn't parse. Level 3 or higher for specifics.

  But "Watcher" wasn't a property. It was a behavior. The System had named this thing by what it did.

  The leaves tracked me as I backed away. I filed the name, the location, and the specific quality of discomfort it produced.

  The moon. I stopped on a wide branch and scanned the full horizon, giving the capuchin eyes every angle they wanted. Nothing. The sky was wrong-colored and empty in every direction — no pale disc, no branded symbol, no indication it had ever been there. Two days absent now. The filed image sat in the directory with a precision that felt increasingly like a record of something that might not come back. I didn't know whether that mattered yet. I filed the uncertainty alongside the image and kept moving.

  Something brushed the edge of my awareness. Faint — not sound, not direction. The translation matrix activating on input I couldn't localize, processing language at the outer boundary of its range. A cadence. Syllables that almost resolved into structure before dissolving back into distance.

  Someone was talking. Somewhere in this canopy, people were having the conversation I'd spent four days waiting to have.

  The matrix settled back into standby. The silence afterward felt different than the silence before — not empty anymore, just out of reach.

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

  — — —

  A mana discharge from a parallel branch — and then the tree I'd been crouched behind simply stopped. A clean hole, edges blackened, smoke rising from both sides. The beam had passed through twenty centimeters of Greyvein Ironbark like it wasn't there.

  What the fu–

  The second shot caught my left leg before I'd finished processing the first. A strip of fur along my calf gone, the skin underneath registering as heat damage in a frequency my capuchin nerves didn't have a category for. Not critical. Not ignorable either. Filed under the growing list of things my body was doing that I hadn't authorized, which now included being on fire.

  I was already moving.

  Behind the next trunk. Heart slamming. The engineering brain coming online with a coldness the rest of me didn't feel — it can shoot through cover. Cover is not cover. Move differently.

  I got my first clear look at it through a gap in the foliage and the engineering brain nearly stalled.

  It stood on a branch forty meters out, and it stood wrong. The body was a hunched mass of interlocking plates — not scaled like the four-armed alien I'd killed, but segmented, chitinous, each plate a matte charcoal that absorbed the amber canopy light instead of reflecting it. Like looking at a hole cut into the forest. The silhouette was broad and low-slung, built for the mid-canopy the way a suspension bridge is built for its span: wide stance, four thick limbs gripping the branch with tarsal hooks that had visibly punctured the bark. The torso — if that's what it was — rose from the leg assembly in a curved hump that made the whole body look like a fist clenched around its own center of gravity.

  No head. Not really. Where a head should have been, a cluster of dark, glossy nodules bulged from the top of the hump — each one the diameter of a marble, packed together like fish eggs and glistening with a wet sheen that caught the light the plates refused. Sensory organs. Dozens of them, oriented in every direction, and the knowledge that I was being perceived by all of those simultaneously produced a specific kind of nausea I didn't have time to catalog.

  The forelimbs were the worst part. Longer than the rear pair, thick as my entire torso, each one terminating in a structure that wasn't a hand. The discharge organelle — because that's what it was, biological, integrated, not a weapon held but a weapon grown — sat at the end of each arm like a malformed flower bulb, petals of dark chitin peeled back to expose a recessed aperture that glowed faint violet between shots. The glow was cycling. Building charge.

  I had maybe two seconds.

  I needed golems. I didn't have them — I'd let both constructs dissolve an hour into the material run when the Identify pings started competing with golem maintenance for mana ceiling, every scrap of capacity routed to cataloguing. A decision that made perfect sense sixty minutes ago and was about to kill me now.

  I squeezed behind a Greyvein trunk wide enough to block two of me and shut my eyes.

  The workspace opened. Familiar. Completely indifferent to the fact that something was trying to kill me on the other side of my eyelids. I grabbed the capuchin template — the original pre-evolution golem schematic, the four-limbed primate body with its basic mana-vein locomotion. I'd used this shape a dozen times before the evolution opened up custom design. It was reliable, fast to assemble, and right now reliable and fast were the only two parameters that mattered.

  One modification: lighter. I stripped the template down — thinner limbs, reduced mass allocation per unit, faster movement at the cost of structural integrity. Two of them, splitting the Processing Pool sixty-forty. I didn't need them to survive. I needed them to move and to buy me time.

  The workspace accepted the schematic. I opened my eyes and pushed the command outward.

  The branch answered.

  Bark peeled from the trunk in thin curls, lifting as if by static charge. Dirt rose from the junction below — loose soil, decomposed moss, fragments of Stonecap Shelf, a handful of dried vine fiber. The materials spiraled inward toward two focal points beside me, assembling in a process that looked less like construction and more like something remembering what shape it was supposed to be. Bark wrapped around frames of compressed dirt. Moss packed into joint cavities. Twig-thin limbs articulated into position with small clicks I could feel through the mana connection rather than hear. Pebbles from the branch surface slotted into eye sockets I hadn't consciously specified — the workspace pulling from the template automatically, using whatever mineral-dense material was closest for the sensory nodes.

  Two capuchin shapes. Crouched on the branch beside me, assembled from canopy debris in under four seconds, wearing the body plan of a primate built from everything within arm's reach. Four kilograms each. Pebble eyes live and tracking. Processing power already splitting between them in the ratio I'd set.

  Another discharge hit the trunk. The Greyvein shuddered. The beam punched through the bark half a centimeter deeper than it had the first tree, and the smoke that curled from the exit wound smelled like something between ozone and burned sugar. The alien was adjusting. Learning the material.

  I split commands without thinking it through, the instructions arriving as image-packets rather than words: one toward the threat, one with me, fast.

  The first golem launched. Down the branch — four kilograms of bark and moss sprinting in a convincing capuchin body, moving like it was furious. A direct charge toward the alien's position. Not subtle. Not clever. Just fast and loud and exactly what a panicked animal would do if that animal had chosen violence over flight. Its bark feet hammered the branch with a rhythm that sounded alive.

  The alien's next discharge tracked left, following it. The branch behind the golem exploded into blackened splinters, but the golem was already past the impact point, chattering with a voice I hadn't programmed but the capuchin template apparently included as standard equipment.

  The second golem came with me. Vertical. Straight up into the branch density where the wood thinned and bent under even my four kilograms, the kind of altitude where nothing heavy could follow. The golem climbed alongside me, matching my pace on a parallel limb, its bark hands gripping the branch highway with a coordination that burned processing power faster than I wanted to acknowledge. The camo shifted behind me, fur catching bark patterns in my wake.

  Below, the first golem reached the alien's branch level. Through the golem's pebble eyes — the image fragmenting, low-resolution, motion-priority — I watched the hunched shape orient, forelimb rising, the violet aperture cycling bright. Another discharge. The golem jinked sideways, hit a gap in the branches, and fell. The mana connection severed with a snap I felt behind my sternum, and the bark and moss that had been a capuchin a second ago scattered into debris before the remains reached the understory.

  One golem gone. The alien paused — the sensory cluster rotating in a slow lateral sweep, dozens of glossy nodules processing input from every direction, scanning the canopy for more movement. Recalculating. I was three meters above its datum line, pressed flat against a trunk barely wider than my body.

  The scan swept toward us.

  I looked at the second golem, crouched on the branch beside me. Pebble eyes reflecting the amber light. Four kilograms of bark and moss and borrowed time.

  I sent the command.

  The golem launched off the branch — not away, not up. Down. Directly at the alien's sensory cluster, dropping with the committed trajectory of something that had no survival instinct because it had never been alive. The capuchin shape descended through the canopy headfirst, limbs spread, bark fingers extended.

  It landed on the alien's head. Or what served as a head — the hump of clustered sensory nodules, the wet-dark targeting array the alien used to find things and kill them. The golem's bark hands dug into the gaps between the glossy nodules and locked. The capuchin grip — the one thing the original template had always done perfectly, the whole reason I'd kept the primate body plan — held with the obstinate strength of a design built to never let go of a branch. Four kilograms of canopy wreckage clamped across the alien's primary sensory input like a hand over someone's eyes.

  The alien flinched. Both forelimbs came up — not to fire, but to grab. The discharge organelles cycled uselessly, violet light guttering as the arms reached for the construct instead of the target. Chitin-plated fingers scraped at bark and moss, tearing chunks away, but the golem reformed around the damage the way a System construct does when processing power is still online — material shifting, redistributing, the mana veins rerouting through whatever structure remained.

  I ran. Horizontal. Fast. Thirty meters along the thinnest branch highway I could find, covering the distance in seconds that felt like the space between two heartbeats. The camo doing whatever it did behind me, the amber light catching nothing because there was nothing to catch.

  Below and behind: the sound of something tearing apart something else. The golem's processing allocation was dropping — I could feel it through the connection, a percentage falling in increments. Sixty percent. Forty. Twenty.

  I hooked a conditional trigger before it died: if structural integrity drops below threshold, release all bindings. Scatter. The command was loaded and waiting.

  The trigger fired. The golem detonated its own assembly — bark and moss exploding outward across the alien's sensory cluster in a spray of debris, the silhouette dissolving mid-grapple. Nothing left to hold. Nothing to track. Just a cloud of canopy litter drifting down through the amber light.

  The alien stood in the mid-canopy for a long moment.

  I didn't breathe.

  Then it moved on.

  My hands were shaking. I noted this without interest. The leg I'd burned in the first exchange pulsed with heat I'd mostly stopped feeling. The hole in the tree where I'd been crouching was thirty meters below me and I could still see the smoke rising from it in the amber light.

  Two golems gone. The alien had shot through a tree. These were both facts I filed with the same coldness the engineering brain used for everything, and neither of them stopped my hands from shaking.

  I waited five minutes before I descended. Counted them. Every single second a negotiation with the capuchin body, which wanted to bolt — not toward anything, just away, the primate flight response screaming through nerves that didn't care about tactical patience. My hands kept trying to release the branch. My feet kept shifting toward the next grip point. I held position with the engineering brain and nothing else, overriding four kilograms of monkey that had just watched a tree get shot in half and wanted very badly to be somewhere that wasn't here.

  The attack had come on a foraging route I'd used three times. Predictable patterns in a canopy full of things that learned patterns. I'd been moving through the same section of secondary growth since day two — the same branch highways, the same altitude, the same schedule. Anything watching would have had enough data to predict me by now.

  Another variable in the growing argument for not staying alone.

  — — —

  Back at the hollow. Materials spread across the bark floor: dense branch sections, clay from the trunk junction, Stonecap Shelf fragments, handfuls of moss still damp from the mid-canopy humidity, bark strips, vine material from three days of collecting, and a stick I'd found during the material run that had stopped me cold. Hollow. Segmented. Structurally identical to bamboo in ways that made the engineering brain do something it hadn't done since the drop.

  My leg pulsed. I ignored the pain and opened the workspace.

  For the first time in four days, I was building something because I had the tools and the space to design rather than react.

  The disc came first.

  Soft material — the workspace handled it well, dragging particles into position with modest mana cost. A flat disc, twenty centimeters across, compressed from moss, dirt, and clay. I cut the circular groove by hand — the workspace was still unreliable on curves — then retouched it mentally for symmetry.

  Twelve clay ball bearings. Rolled between my palms, compressed with a mana nudge, seated into the channel. Left to harden in the sun.

  The top half: a half-sphere of moss, dirt, and bark, compressed and bonded until the workspace gave it structural integrity my hands never could. Twelve shallow indents on its underside — each cradling a ball loosely but keeping it constrained, compacted and sanded for minimal friction. I placed it over the bearings.

  It wobbled. Then settled. Free to rotate on twelve points of contact.

  I could feel the excitement starting. The body noticed before I did — weight forward, fingers twitching toward the next material, the posture of something that wanted to build faster than the brain could design. I was getting ahead of myself, over-designing, but whatever. This is the first ounce of joy I’ve felt in days.

  I applied the mana veins.

  Into the bottom groove first — thin channels, laid with the workspace's capability, each one a pipe. Because that's what mana was, in this context. Hydraulic pressure. The veins were pipes. Pump pressure into a region and the material pushes outward. Control which regions get pressure and in what sequence, and you control movement.

  I'd learned this by studying the original golem design — the capuchin-shaped template the System generated, the one I'd stared at in the workspace an hour ago with its if-then chains rendered in light. Vines as tendons. Moss as padding. Bark as bone. The mana veins ran through all of it like a hydraulic network: contraction and expansion, pressure routed through organic pipes. The System had already solved this problem. I was reading the answer key and applying it to a different test.

  I visualised the functions of the mana vein. Expansion in the groove — right behind where each of the ball’s sat. The balls rolled forward, the balls in motion pushed against the top half’s indents.

  I tested it. Sent the command.

  The top half rotated.

  Not smoothly. Not fast. A grinding, stuttering arc, maybe forty degrees before the bearings caught on an imperfection in the channel and the momentum died. But it moved. Under command. It was hard visualizing it, a dozen spots areas where the disk’s groove expanded. It cost mana each time, but wasn't taxing.

  I refined. Smoothed the catching points by hand. Adjusted the pressure sequencing.

  I started adding and visualizing functions. The skill packet’s information permemating my brain gave me the vague notion i could. I imagine the bottom grove expanding upwards, just behind or in front of the ball, constantly. I filed this idea as a packet in my mental structure, and thought of it as rotating. Then, I placed my furry hand on the groove’s mana vein, and sent the packet into it.

  Rotate now, I commanded it via the Golem skill.

  It rotated, more smoothly now. I worked on this for a while, refining, adding a degrees coordinate system to it. It could now rotate by any amount of degrees needed.

  I could have used a simple machine for the rotation — a crank and gear arrangement, purely mechanical, no mana required. But gears were a resource I didn't want to spend here. And I only had 3 uses of Conditional Automation I could have at a time. I had plans for simple machines. Later. Different applications. This method kept the mechanism inside the golem framework, which meant it scaled with skill level rather than staying fixed at whatever precision my hands could manage today.

  Optimization. Resource allocation. I lived for this. I had spent three days surviving. This was the first time I'd spent an afternoon engineering, and the difference was the difference between treading water and swimming.

  I cut a wide slot in the front face of the half-sphere. A vertical channel, open-ended, with two small holes drilled on either side at the midpoint. Then I picked up the stick.

  Hollow. Segmented. Uniform inner diameter. Rigid walls. A natural barrel — although the reader sitting behind my eyes who thought in those terms wasn't labeling things yet. He was letting the geometry talk.

  It fit into the slot with room to traverse. I fashioned an axle from a Stonecap fragment — shaped by hand, brittle under shear but compression-rated, meaning it would hold a pin joint fine as long as the forces stayed rotational. The axle passed through the barrel and into the two holes on either side of the slot. The barrel could now pivot up and down within the channel.

  Vine rope — stripped, dried, the tensile properties confirmed by the Waxcatch Film identification earlier. I tied one length from the top of the slot to the upper face of the barrel. Another from the bottom of the slot to the lower face. Ran mana veins through both.

  Contract the top vine: barrel tilts up. Contract the bottom: barrel tilts down. Release both: neutral.

  Same principle as the rotation — I compressed the concept into a packet and pushed it into the veins. Aim up. Aim down. Degrees. Done.

  The half-sphere could spin. The barrel could aim. The geometry was alive now, and the body was doing things — a rhythmic clicking from somewhere in my throat I hadn't authorized, the capuchin equivalent of humming while you work. My tail was wrapped around the branch in a grip that had nothing to do with balance and everything to do with containment. It had also been serving as a third hand for the last hour, holding components steady while both actual hands worked — a collaboration I hadn't requested but had stopped questioning around the time it passed me a vine end I'd been reaching for. The dexterity was unsettling. Tails shouldn't be this helpful. The-no-my body trying to hold still while the brain ran ahead of it, for once. It was still hard to grapple with ebing a little monkey.

  Now the hard part.

  I attached a disc to the inside of the barrel's rear — flush, sealing. Two springs next. Conditional Automation constructs, the same mechanism I'd used in the spear. I anchored them against the rear disc, compressed. In front of them, a second disc, free to slide inside the barrel. The piston.

  And then I stopped. Because something clicked that hadn't clicked before, and the realization arrived with the specific clarity of two systems fitting together for the first time.

  I ran a mana vein through the spring.

  Conditional Automation and Advanced Schematic Synthesis. Two different skills. Two different architectures. And the mana vein — golem infrastructure — could interface with the spring — conditional automation construct. The vein carried a signal. The spring received it.

  The two skills talked to each other through a shared hydraulic language I hadn't known they spoke.

  I set the spring's trigger condition: if mana pulse detected through the connected vein, release.

  The workspace accepted it. Clean. No resistance, no incompatibility flag, no error. Just integration.

  My hands were shaking. Not from fear this time.

  I attached vines to the piston disc, threaded them back through guides along the barrel's inner wall, and ran mana veins through these too. After the spring fired and the piston shot forward, these vines would contract — pulling the piston back, recompressing the spring against the rear disc. When the spring hit full compression: vines release. The spring holds its shape until the next mana pulse.

  Wind. Hold. Signal. Fire. Wind. Hold. Cycle.

  Next: the feed. I cut a hole in the top of the half-sphere and fitted a short section of hollow tube above the barrel — a vertical channel, open at the top, sized to hold clay balls. Inside, a hatch: a shelf of bark suspended by a mana-veined vine. When the vine contracted, the hatch lowered, dropping a single ball down into the barrel behind the piston. Below the hatch, a notch in the barrel's wood — a mana vein threaded through it that, when pressurized, expanded the wood upward, catching the ball and holding it in firing position. Before firing: contract the notch, release the ball. Drop the hatch. Fire.

  Load. Seat. Drop. Fire. Reload.

  The sequence existed in my head as a single image now. I sent the whole thing into the workspace as a packet — not the individual pressure sequences, not each vein's function, but the concept- then sent that into the mana veins. I’m getting the hang of this.

  The abstraction was going to matter. I could feel it the way I could feel the skill ceiling — not visible yet, but present. The distance between "pressurize this specific vein at this specific moment" and "fire" was the distance between assembly language and a compiled function. One scaled. The other didn't.

  Last piece. Sensory input.

  The workspace had designated component categories I'd been ignoring — functional slots I hadn't explored. I reached into the sensory subsection. Options resolved: eyes, mana nodes, receptors. I grabbed two pebbles from the hollow floor and mounted them on the front face of the half-sphere, flanking the barrel slot.

  They worked. Immediately and better than anything else I'd tried — the mineral density of stone accepting the sensory mana node with a clarity that bark and moss couldn't match. I didn't understand why pebbles worked best for this. I filed the question. The result was sufficient: two points of visual input feeding data back through the golem's processing allocation.

  I could see what it saw while in the building phase. Low-resolution, motion-priority, the visual fidelity of something that resolved shapes and trajectories rather than details. Directional. Functional.

  I began setting commands:

  Rotate to look toward me–input provided packet image of myself and send to golem–If: I point–input image packet of me pointing, and the area pointed to highlighted–Aim barrel at the target pointed at.

  If: command FIRE sent, proceed with shooting protocol

  Shooting protocol is defined as: wait for mana signal, decompress/lower notch, activate spring via mana signal, compress spring using vines, reload, repeat.

  Now to test it. I chuckle lightly under my breath, a faint ooh ooh arising from it as I rub my furry hands together. Those ambushing aliens aren’t gonna know what hit them. Literally.

  The whole assembly sat on the bark floor of the hollow. Half-sphere on a disc, bristling with vines, pebble eyes flanking a hollow tube that protruded from the front slot. Ammunition feeds on top like a chimney on a bad building.

  I loaded three clay balls into the hopper. The hatch dropped the first one. The notch expanded, caught the ball, held it. I contracted the notch, let the ball settle into the barrel behind the piston.

  Walking around it, the turret turned to face me at all times. Which was admittedly, a little frightening. Pointing to a tree 20 meters away, it rotates to view the location pointed to.

  FIRE

  The pulse traveled the mana vein. The notch lowered. The spring released. The piston slammed forward pushing the clay ball with it. Had the ball had a gap between the inner disk and itself, instead of constant contact, it would have shattered on impact.

  The clay ball left the barrel fast enough that I genuinely didn't see it go. A crack — sharp, percussive, louder than the spear had ever been — and then the ball hitting the far wall and fragmenting into a cloud of dust and shards.

  The vines contracted. The piston pulled back. The spring recompressed. The hatch dropped another ball. The notch caught it.

  Ready to fire again. Three seconds after the first shot.

  The monkey body lost all composure.

  Several sounds. A screech, a chatter, something that might have been a laugh if capuchins had the architecture for it. My hands released the branch and my body was moving — a short arc, three swings through the hollow's upper structure, the body expressing something kinetically that my human brain identified as joy approximately one full second after the body was already living in it. Physical delight in the form of locomotion. Uninstructed. Unplanned. The most alive I'd felt in four days, and the body got there before I did.

  Nobody saw that.

  The turret doesn’t count.

  I dropped back down and studied what I'd built.

  The rotation was stiff — grinding at two points where the groove channels hadn't been cut cleanly enough. The elevation range peaked at maybe thirty degrees up and fifteen down. The firing accuracy described a general cone rather than a specific target — the pebble eyes couldn't distinguish between a bird and a thrown rock at distance. The mana cost of two springs, the rotation veins, the elevation veins, the sensory nodes, plus two golems, ran me close enough to the ceiling that Identify pings required releasing something else temporarily. The reload cycle sat at three seconds and I wanted it under one. Not only that, It required more than 60% of the processing power, and 50% of the mass available by the skill for the construct to function properly.

  It was terrible. By every standard I knew how to apply: terrible.

  It was also the most sophisticated thing anyone had built on this planet in four days. It existed because two skills spoke a shared language I'd discovered by accident, and because nobody else with those skills was an engineer.

  For the first time since the drop, the problem was my kind of problem. The tools were my kind of tools. And the constraints were mine to solve within.

  Still excited, I prowled around looking for an alien evil to blast — the body low and quick on all fours, ears rotating at every sound, the post-build energy needing somewhere to go after hours of sitting still and doing precision work with fingers that wanted to swing from things. My hands ached. Not from injury — from holding positions capuchin hands weren't shaped for, gripping tools at angles the primate architecture considered suggestions rather than requirements. I flexed them, cracked knuckles I definitely hadn't owned six days ago, and kept moving.

  Unfortunately, the alien from earlier who shot me is not around and no one from earth was getting eaten. Fortunately I mean. Ahem.

  I sigh, letting out a soft oohh.

  Then my ears perked up. I had an idea.

  Rock shrapnel!

  — — —

  The sun was moving toward the horizon in colors I was never going to get used to.

  The translation matrix had been online since before dawn. I hadn't used it because there'd been nobody in range to use it with. The excitement and joy from earlier faded. It was time to talk to the others.

  But there was a group. South and down, in the direction I'd filed from yesterday's exchange. A gorilla, a cat, a wolf, a velociraptor, and a goat who owed me something or didn't, depending on how you accounted for things.

  I could talk to them now. I had things to bring: Level 7, a turret that launched stones inaccurately. I added legs to it, which was a little weird and ungainly, but menacing. I had Identify, a camouflage trait tested under fire exactly once, four days of material knowledge about this section of canopy, and two bark golems with commitment issues.

  Not nothing. Not enough. What I had.

  The hesitation lasted one moment. Three days of bark constructs and pebble eyes, and the fear that conversation would make everything real — that asking about Chris and Arturo would collapse the uncertainty into an answer I might not survive hearing.

  Later. I'll find them when I'm stronger.

  Then I moved. South and down.

  The turret waddled after, tube pointed at the back of my head. I chose to find this reassuring.

  Somewhere ahead, people were waiting who could hear me now. And somewhere behind me — I was increasingly certain — the thing with the sensory cluster and the violet discharge was waiting too.

  I moved faster.