Arthur was surprised when he saw Jet's core.
A normal core is a perfect sphere without fractures or details on its surface, shining like a star above the heart.
Jet's, however, was peculiar.
He already knew that her core was fractured. It also seemed to lack the ability to naturally regenerate essence and had a bizarre ability to absorb the soul essence of others by killing.
It looked like a sphere fractured in many places, with different fragments from other cores embedded within it, creating the impression of something completely broken.
And it was this that caught his attention.
Mixed within those different fragments of other cores she had acquired were two fragments of Aether cores.
One of her abilities was to gradually absorb shards of broken soul cores from those she had killed to build up and strengthen her own, both in size and capacity.
Which meant that when she struck him, she absorbed two shards from the Aether cores she had broken.
He hadn't died because he was a Titan at the time, but if he had only been a Beast or Monster, he surely would have.
Arthur should have felt afraid at the possibility of dying in that moment, but instead, as he observed Jet's core, he also noticed something important—and felt fear, not for himself, but for her.
The Aether core fragments had retained their properties, meaning they were attracting Aether toward them, and this Aether moved toward the fractures in the core, trying to heal them.
But at the same time, Jet's core was broken.
This created a constant battle between two forces.
Her Flaw—or whatever maintained her broken core—and the attracted Aether were locked in a fierce struggle for dominance, and for now, they were evenly matched.
Which was strange, because… was it her Flaw that kept her core fractured and therefore condemned her to remain dead? Or had her fractured core been what killed her, later becoming the origin of her Flaw?
Arthur didn't know. But he did know that she had died in her First Nightmare, yet somehow survived at the same time, and in doing so, she ended up with a broken core—which was strange in itself.
When someone dies, their core remains in perfect condition—only the essence contained within is absorbed by whoever killed them, leaving the core empty.
But Jet's was fractured, causing her to constantly lose essence and be unable to generate it on her own.
Regarding the loss of essence… the constant battle in her core was causing Jet to lose essence at an accelerated rate…
Meaning that if he did nothing to help her… Jet would die—permanently.
Arthur truly felt panic, because it also meant that Jet would remain unconscious until that happened, leaving her in something similar to a vegetative state… until her essence finally ran out.
He sat there, staring at Jet's figure. His mind failing to grasp the concept of Jet dying because of him.
If he had been more careful, this wouldn't have happened.
But before entering the spiral of guilt, he remembered that the Spell had spoken to him before.
Apparently, news of him in Antarctica had already become known, but he did not focus on thinking about the reasons because when his runes were opened, they said:
Legacy of Life: Mastery Level: [2/4]: Seed of Progress: You can plant fragments of your knowledge into others.
Arthur stared at the runes for a while.
'What is that supposed to mean?'
How could he plant fragments of his knowledge into others? Through what method?
He frowned.
The branch of the Aspect Legacy didn't give him any interface like the previous one, but it was true that the previous one only activated when looking at Memories. However, this one seemed more abstract.
Which meant it must not be related to his runes, but to something else.
The only clue he could get was that when he focused on them, he felt something strange in his chest… more specifically… at the height where his cores would be.
In fact, they felt more real? As if they wanted to take a physical form, but it was impossible for them.
'…That's strange.'
But it was perfectly the sign he needed.
'Didn't I do something similar with Sylvie when she came out of the egg?'
At that time, she was an Echo, and he, using his fragments, managed to make her emerge from it and become an independent person.
But… Jet wasn't an Echo, and she wasn't inside his Soul Sea either.
'Maybe it's related to the strange feeling in my chest?'
Suddenly, Arthur's face lost all emotion when he realized what he had to do…
'...I just lost two cores, and now I'm going to end up losing another one?!'
Still, looking at Jet's unconscious figure—dying once more on the sleeping bag… All doubts left his mind, and he got to work.
First, he tried to speak with Sylvie and Regis—but he couldn't.
Arthur was completely confused. Why couldn't he talk to Sylvie or Regis?
Was it because of the chaotic state of his mind, or some external influence? Could the Call of a Category Three Nightmare Gate prevent them from doing so?
No, that didn't make sense—they had been doing it before. Only when one was in the Dream Realm and the other in the Waking World did this happen… and that wasn't the case currently.
Still, it wasn't time to look for the reason—Jet came first.
Arthur sent the reasons for not being able to communicate with them and why his stay in Antarctica became known so quickly to the back of his mind and got to work.
First, he decided to manifest an Aether chair and sat down. Then he summoned his storage Memory and took out something very simple.
A book.
Not just any book—and certainly not a simple one.
It was the book containing the Djinn language.
All the runes Grey knew—or at least was willing for him to know—were in that dictionary.
Immediately, Arthur began flipping through page after page, searching for something that could help him. The light generated by Djinn of War created soft lights that helped him read the runes.
He knew that the Djinn used these runes to achieve different objectives—it was a kind of sorcery. He had seen and experienced them in the infinite corridor during his first visit to the Relictombs, and in other cases as well.
He also had proof that once you mastered knowledge of a branch, a rune would be drawn on your body.
He had the runes for Realmheart, Static Void, Destruction, and Godstep on his back, arms, and beneath his eyes.
That was where his idea was heading—perhaps he could create something similar.
If he could find the right runes, he could resolve the conflict in Jet's core, stopping her from losing essence at that rate—or completely.
There was a danger to this and many other issues he didn't fully understand.
What was the relationship between her broken core, her essence loss, and her Flaw?
The first two were easy to connect, but the relationship with the last was complicated.
Her Flaw was that she was dead—but did that keep her core fractured? If that were the case, then fixing her core would mean defying her Flaw…
Which Arthur had absolutely no idea what would happen.
His Flaw was relatively straightforward—when forced to follow an order he didn't want to, his entire body tried to destroy itself. But his Flaw was more psychological with a physical consequence?
While Jet's was more physical?
'What a mess…'
Still, there was something he could do.
Arthur could create a time difference between both processes, allowing them to happen without interfering with each other.
If he could make the Aether core fragments pause for a few seconds, allowing the fractured core to lose essence, then absorb Aether from the environment and prevent it from doing so—he would be making both processes happen without interrupting each other, and without defying Jet's Flaw.
After flipping through pages and pages, Arthur found one of the runes that would help him, and after many long minutes, he found another.
Finally, after twenty minutes, he had all the necessary runes.
Jet's condition was worsening and worsening as time passed, but Arthur decided to focus on his work before panicking.
To avoid forgetting the chosen runes, he had been using his Awakened Ability to draw them in a permanent state.
The essence cost to make them permanent had been more than double what he would have spent to create a sword, and considering he has two fewer cores, he's going to have to be careful when doing so.
Now, with all the necessary runes in front of him, he changed the positions, seeing how they could fit together, so they would achieve the effect he wanted.
A trick he started using was imbuing his intent into the runes so they would actually do what he wanted.
Arthur didn't know how to accurately describe the concept of intent. It was something that had come to him during the process, and, almost unconsciously, he had come to believe that it was what would allow him to achieve the result he was aiming for.
Was it some kind of manifestation? Or was it closer to a desire? He didn't know. In his current state of mind, he couldn't come up with any other explanation. Maybe he was wrong, and it was something else entirely. Maybe what he was really doing was manipulating the information encoded within the runes as he made them permanent. Or maybe he was simply talking nonsense...
Regardless, there was something else that had been confusing him as well, and it was the very reason it had taken him so long to discover the runes.
The dictionary Grey had left him only contained the runes and their purpose. It didn't say how they should be combined—there was no example of how to place them.
The only analogy that came to Arthur's mind was like teaching someone all the letters of the alphabet without explaining what a word was.
Each rune held power in its meaning, so he had to be careful when deciding how to arrange them.
He even changed his mind several times about runes he had already chosen, selecting others instead.
Eventually, after a long time of pure experimentation with different runes, he believed he had found all the correct ones and placed them in the necessary order for the effect he wanted.
Then, apologizing to Jet—although she couldn't hear him—he turned her over, exposing her back. Sitting on his knees next to her, he extended his hands—slowly and carefully he placed the runes on her lower back.
Arthur took a deep breath and closed his eyes.
Now came the painful part.
But it was crucial not to show pain in the slightest—he had to do everything perfectly down to the last detail.
He commanded Djinn of War to leave his body, and Umbral Husk didn't appear in its place. Then, he took off the suit the government had provided them—which was extremely comfortable and warm—leaving his chest completely unprotected.
He took a torch from his Memory and placed it illuminating his surroundings.
The light created shadows that danced on the smooth walls of the place, while illuminating his figure and, more importantly, Jet's.
Then, he took another deep breath, and Dawn's Ballad appeared in his hand. He held the sword in a reverse grip and, with precision, began pushing it into his chest.
Arthur clenched his jaw hard enough to break his teeth—fortunately, his were very resistant.
At that moment, he opened Seed of Progress again.
He began to feel his core acting differently—it was a strange sensation to explain.
Arthur started to feel as if in his chest, his core was beginning to take on a more physical form, causing his internal organs to have to adjust to the new intruder.
While making the hole in his chest, enduring the pain of performing surgery on himself, he commanded the Aether in his body not to rush to the wound to heal it—yet it still began to do so, excruciatingly slowly.
Which meant that if he didn't hurry, everything would be pointless.
He started cutting his chest faster, enduring all the pain and suppressing the groans threatening to escape his mouth.
Finally, after painful moments, a perfectly circular purple core appeared in the hole he had made in his chest.
The sword disappeared from his hand, and Arthur thrust his hand inside his chest.
Immediately, his fingers wrapped tightly around his Core, and in one dry motion, he pulled it out—using his Intent to make the core contain only what he wanted.
Arthur couldn't hide the scream of pain from tearing out a core so abruptly—his eyes squeezing shut harder, his jaw clenching with more intensity.
It wasn't physical pain, even if the source of it was. Rather, it was as if a sharp stab pierced straight through his soul, sending an agonizing ache through every fiber of his being in a single instant.
Then, he opened his eyes, and they were full of tears—but that wasn't what mattered. So he pushed all his pain to the back of his mind.
The next moment, he placed the Aether core with his blood on top of the drawn runes, and in front of his eyes, a prompt appeared.
[Do you wish to plant this seed of knowledge?]
Arthur didn't hesitate.
"Yes!"
[As you wish.]
What happened next was difficult to explain.
The runes began to glow with a completely blinding light, consuming everything around them in a purple hue.
The Aether core began to dissolve into the runes, as if they were consuming it. All the essence and fragments contained within the core dissipated through the runes, causing them to fulfill their purpose.
Once that process finished, the runes began to descend and descend until they settled firmly on Jet's lower back.
They began to emit a kind of sparkling silver light, and when that process ended—
—The runes began to imprint themselves on Jet's back.
Arthur noticed how, the moment they touched Jet's skin, they tried to reject her.
It was an expected reaction, since she had no affinity for aether, therefore he acted immediately.
Commanding the ambient Aether with his Awakened Ability to press the set of runes onto her back, and then instinctively activating King's Presence.
He didn't know why, but the moment he did, the runes yielded much faster and finally printed on her back.
Jet's muscles began to tremble and spasm as they adapted to the new runes settling over them.
Finally, after long minutes of Arthur doubting whether it had worked or not, the runes lit up with a purple light, remaining constantly illuminated.
Arthur's chest had already healed by then, and he didn't even think about the fact that he was now a Devil or that he didn't have much essence left.
He stared at her, analyzing her figure, and her breathing was completely steady. Then he shifted his vision and observed Jet's core.
In the end, he had chosen none of the options he had previously considered—because he remembered a very important fact.
The Djinns were considered the People of Life.
So… he focused on giving her the broadest interpretation of what it meant to be alive.
Jet was a person who was not quite alive, but also not quite dead. Which meant there might actually be some kind of loophole in her Flaw.
One that would make what Arthur attempted not defy her Flaw, nor conflict with her core.
A core that, right now, was still fractured, but the conflict of wanting to heal it had stopped completely.
What Arthur did was a mixture of several processes, with his Devil Core as the focus of everything. He used this core instead of his Tyrant's, due to the number of fragments in the latter.
First, he had to create a connection with the Aether core fragments in her core and force her body to create some Aether channels to connect the runes on her back with the fragments in her core.
Then, using his new branch of his Aspect Legacy, he implanted his knowledge on how to influence it.
He also remembered that his blood was special—he was the last descendant of the Djinn after all…
For that same reason, he didn't clean his core when he placed it on the Aetheric runes, and using his intent, he tried to make them absorb part of his affinity for Aether through his blood.
The combination of all this resulted in runes that would prevent Jet from losing essence—using the ambient Aether and her Aether channels to shape it to encapsulate the broken core, so that any essence it tried to lose would be reabsorbed.
The final result was that Jet, right now, would never lose essence again. That alone was already huge news—but there was something more.
By encapsulating the fractured core, the essence it lost remained within the same capsule and was then reabsorbed by another property he had embedded in the runes.
He remembered when he saw the cube in the wall when he got the Blood Armor, and then the process of how Djinn of War absorbed Aether from the environment to sustain itself.
So he thought of repeating that process, but changing the target—and that target was obviously normal essence.
Now, the runes on her back had the property of absorbing normal essence, instead of Aether essence. Something similar to what his core does, transforming the soul essence of his kills to absorb them into his core; that's the reason he is able to receive all the fragments when he kills a human.
The runes he used weren't powerful enough to achieve all of this on their own—it was his Devil Core, which he used as the nexus of all the processes. For that very reason, the runes now acted individually as a core.
Meaning that right now, Jet was generating essence on her own through the runes on her back.
Arthur developed this plan thinking of a device that existed before the Spell descended upon the earth. There were some people who had artificial hearts, created purely with technology, that functioned perfectly.
Obviously, he didn't do the same thing, but he took it as inspiration. A person's core is much more delicate in that sense, which is why he went with this option—to create a false core that would have the functions hers lacked.
Right now, Jet would have a slight affinity for Aether thanks to his blood—the blood of a descendant of the People of Life.
He also gave the runes the property of being adaptable. If in the future Jet's core grew larger by absorbing more fragments from other cores, the capsule and the runes would adapt to the new size.
He watched the process for several long minutes, and everything worked well. Arthur suspected that she must have received a new Attribute or multiple Attributes after all this.
He finally let out a sigh, and all his nerves and worries left his body.
He had done something impossible—truly impossible. Jet now had the blessing of the People of Life—the Djinn. Making her obtain the highest expression of being alive.
Finally, after much study, practice, moments of tension, and stabbing himself in the chest, Arthur finally sat down, leaning his back and head against the wall.
His eyes closed unconsciously, and a sweet, necessary sleep embraced him.
---
Arthur stirred, his eyes slowly opening where he had fallen asleep.
He blinked multiple times, and his vision adjusted to the light around him.
The first thing he noticed was the ceiling, which was strange—because he had fallen asleep sitting up.
Arthur tried to sit up abruptly to understand how that had happened, but the moment he sat up, his golden eyes focused on the figure sitting in front of him.
Jet was looking at him with her arms crossed and a slight smile on her face.
"Good morning, sleeping beauty," she said.
He rolled his eyes and let himself fall back onto the sleeping bag, staring at the ceiling.
"I can assume you're fine if you're in the mood to tease me."
Jet let out a soft laugh that echoed in the hallway where they were.
"Not only am I fine—I'm better than ever." Her voice dropped a tone and came out happy. "What… what did you do?"
"That might be something difficult to explain," he replied without moving, though a smile was on his face. "First, could you tell me what you got?"
Arthur noticed Jet shrug.
"I got two new Attributes and something else… but we'll leave that for later." He raised an eyebrow, and Jet continued. "Before I tell you, I'll make it clear that you're going to have to answer a lot of my questions."
Arthur understood this perfectly. In the end, he should have died from Jet's blow—instead, he didn't. Which was already strange, but what happened afterward was even stranger.
She must have connected the dots—Jet was smart enough for that.
Now came the problem.
Only three people knew he was a Djinn, and the same number knew about the existence of Aether. He decided to not count Eurys and Azarax in that group.
There was also the matter of his Divine Aspect—Jet must have already noticed something strange about his cores.
Then there was the fact that she had already realized the changes in her core—that she was no longer losing essence and was even generating it.
Finally, there was whatever her Attributes had in their descriptions.
"I will," Arthur agreed. "But also, there are things it's better you don't know… it's not that I don't want to tell you, but because knowing them could be dangerous."
Jet made a "meh" face.
"When is something not dangerous to know?"
Arthur blinked and ended up nodding.
'She has a point.'
"Well," Jet began to speak as she opened her runes. "The first Attribute is called Mark of Aether." She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. "Its description says: The last descendant of the Djinn has acknowledged you. As one of his chosen, you have been marked to receive the Blessing of the People of Life."
Arthur remained silent, absorbing the information. And just as he expected, the Spell used words he didn't want it to use.
It wouldn't be a serious problem with Jet—he trusted she wouldn't say anything, and with the little information available about them, it was impossible for Jet to know about the existence of the Djinn. The same could be said about Aether…
'…Wait.'
Arthur frowned.
Why did he think it would be a bad thing? In fact, Aether was something very powerful. Wouldn't it be better for him if his loved ones could use it to be safer and stronger?
Jet would be able to do exactly that now, though it would depend on what affinity she had acquired… still, if she got an Aether sense, that alone would be a great help for her.
She was already quite strong, and now she wouldn't lose more essence—meaning she wouldn't need to kill to survive, improving her capabilities in long-term battles.
In short, everything was positive. Who knew if in the future she couldn't learn Djinn runes to do sorcery?
He cleared his throat.
"That's great, Jet. I'll explain everything later… now, what's the other one?"
Jet nodded, and in her eyes reflected pure curiosity.
"The other one is more complex, I'd say? It's called: Blessing of the Djinn." She leaned forward slightly. "The description says: You received the blessing of the people of life; your blood has been slightly altered, granting you a subtle affinity with the deepest laws of the world."
'A subtle affinity to Aether…'
"I can imagine you have a lot of questions about this, and as I said, I'll answer them—but is that all?" he asked curiously.
In fact, what Jet had already gotten was great, but if she had gotten something more, it would have been even better.
Jet stood up from where she was sitting.
Suddenly, her figure was shrouded in cold mist. That mist flowed along the lines of her body, finally forming into a ghostly blade. Then, the shape of that blade changed, elongating until it turned into a beautiful war scythe. Its dark steel possessed a dreadful sheen to it, with frost patterns decorating the sinister curved blade.
The ghostly scythe seemed to absorb all warmth from the world, emanating a frigid sense of lethal cold.
An amused smile appeared on Jet's face.
"You... won't believe it. I guess the Spell... really liked what you did, because... it gave me my Aspect Legacy..."
Arthur was momentarily stunned.
Jet was a strange existence—someone who was not quite alive, but also not quite dead. So, there was a strange and poetic logic to her Aspect Legacy being locked behind the act of attaining the purest expression of one of these states… in this case, being alive.
He suspected that if Jet died again, it would also be enough to unlock it—although… if she died again, she would die completely…
So, what an insane requisite—to literally die?!
Fortunately, it wasn't necessary, as Jet received the blessing of the People of Life.
Poetic—truly poetic—that someone whose Flaw considered her dead had received the blessing of the Djinns, making her alive. Or giving her a similar expression to being alive, since her Flaw was still that she was dead.
Arthur opened his mouth to say something, but Jet beat him to it.
"Now it's your turn to talk, okay?"
'Shit.'
The rest of his time there was going to be complicated…