Primordial Awakening: I Breathe Skill Points!-Chapter 128: Home at Last

The notification arrived on the transport back from Northern Bastion, three days after the facility and ten days after Zeph had last stood in F-District.

[LEVEL ADVANCEMENT]

[LEVEL: 35 → 42]

[MULTIPLE HIGH-LEVEL KILLS REGISTERED]

[CONTRIBUTION TO HARVESTER DEFEAT: EXCEPTIONAL]

[RANK CLASSIFICATION: C → B]

He read it twice, then looked out the window.

[SKILL EVOLUTION DETECTED]

[CALAMITY STRIKE: EXPERIENCE THRESHOLD REACHED]

[MINOR ENHANCEMENT UNLOCKED: CP GENERATION RATE INCREASED TO 1 PER 4 SECONDS]

The stats arrived beneath it.

STR: 200 → 218

AGI: 800 → 832

VIT: 260 → 285

INT: 45 → 53

WIS: 35 → 43

CHA: 30 → 33

He sat with the numbers for a long moment. 832 AGI. 285 VIT. 218 STR. Numbers that told a story about who he was now, not who he had been.

He checked his PP counter

PP:299,329

He was going to be faster, harder to kill, stronger. The person those numbers described was someone he was still getting acquainted with. He put the interface away.

The city filled the transport window as they closed the distance—lights, noise, the specific density of a place that had been going about its business without any awareness of what had happened in the Wildlands. It looked like the best possible version of ordinary.

"Best city I’ve ever seen," Seris said.

"It’s the only city visible from here," Kael said from the seat beside him.

"Still the best one."

Kael looked at the city for a moment. "You’re going to say that every time we come back from somewhere terrible, aren’t you."

"Probably," Seris said. "It’s going to be accurate every time."

Seris leaned forward from her seat behind Kael and Zeph. "I’ve decided I’m never leaving the city again."

"You’re a member of The Twelve," Kael said. "Leaving the city is the job."

"I’ve decided I’m never leaving the city again," Seris repeated, with considerably more conviction than the first time.

"You said that," Kael said. "It didn’t become more true the second time."

"I’m committing to it," Seris said. "Commitment makes things true."

Zeph looked out the window. The city was getting closer. "She’s going to leave the city again," he said to Kael quietly.

"Obviously," Kael said.

The comfortable silence of people who had been inside the same thing settled over the transport and nobody felt the need to fill it further. The city grew in the window and Zeph watched it and felt, for the first time in ten days, something that was not urgency.

-----

F-District looked exactly the same.

Same peeling paint on the stairwell. Same third-step creak. Same smell of whatever his old lady neighbor was cooking drifting down from the second floor.

All that time spent in the facility and F-District had simply waited with the patience of a place that had seen people come and go for long enough to have stopped tracking the going with any particular investment.

His apartment was exactly as he had left it—the unwashed cup on the counter, the gaming setup dormant in the corner, the cramped dimensions that had once felt like a reasonable compromise and now felt like something designed for a smaller version of him.

He stood in the doorway for a long moment.

"Same apartment," he said aloud. "Different person."

CV lifted from his shoulder and circled the space once with the focused assessment it applied to new environments. It found the corner beside the window, hovered for two seconds, and began constructing. A nest—small, crystalline, perfectly geometric, the same black crystal as its exoskeleton shaped with precision. Eleven minutes from start to completion. When it finished, CV settled in and looked at him with compound eyes that communicated: this is acceptable, arrangements have been made, you may proceed.

"That’s your corner now," Zeph said. "Fine. I wasn’t using it for anything important."

CV’s wings scattered prismatic light across the wall. The matter was settled and was not open for renegotiation.

He sat on the bed and opened his messages.

Landlord first: rent received for the next six months, thank you.

Six months at 8,000 credits each, paid from the Northern Bastion facility on the second day of observation. Remaining balance: 29,461 credits.

"Still not broke," he said to the ceiling. "Genuinely, actually, still not broke."

The ceiling offered no response. He took the silence as confirmation.

Horizon Gaming: Welcome back! Hope your personal matter went well. Ready to schedule streams?

Zeph looked at this message for a long moment.

He read it with the quality of someone for whom streaming now felt like a concern from a different version of his life, a version that had existed before the facility and the prophecy and the crystalline bee redecorating his corner. He was going to have to locate the bridge between that version and this one.

"My personal matter," he said, "involved a twelve-foot crystalline predator, a facility that killed nine hundred and eighty-eight people, and a prophecy carved in alien stone about the potential end of civilization." He paused. "But yes. Ready to schedule streams."

He marked it for later and moved on.

Sarah Chen: Heard you were gone for a while. Missed our chats! Don’t forget you owe me 2000 credits !

Sarah Chen was 4’11" and operated with the confidence of someone twice her height and half her patience. The emoji at the end of her message communicated warmth and financial persistence in equal measure, which was Sarah Chen’s default mode of communication. His absence had not dimmed her enthusiasm in the slightest—if anything, she sounded like she had been looking forward to this specific message.

He briefly considered paying her right now, at midnight, just to watch the notification land at an unreasonable hour. Then he decided tomorrow was better. Paying a debt in person had a specific quality that a midnight transfer lacked—namely, the expression on the face of the person receiving it. Sarah Chen’s expressions were, in his experience, worth the wait.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

"I’m paying her tomorrow," Zeph told CV. "In full. I want to see her face when she realizes the leverage is gone."

CV watched him from the corner nest with compound eyes that did not blink.

"She’s going to find new leverage," Zeph said. "She always finds new leverage. But I’m going to enjoy the five seconds between paying her and her finding it."

CV remained silent. CV’s opinions on debt dynamics were, apparently, limited.

Grandma Chen: Young man, I made extra soup. Come by when you’re settled. You look like you need a good meal.

The smell from the second floor was confirming the soup’s existence in real time. "She’s not wrong," Zeph said.

The group chat was from Tank: First official party meeting tomorrow. 1800 hours. Location TBD. Don’t be late.

Kael: thumbs up.

Whisper: I WILL BE ON TIME.

Vex: define late.

Lyra: late means after 1800, Vex.

Vex: that’s what I thought, just checking.

Jin: does the bee count as a member or a plus one.

Zeph: it’s a full member. it has better combat stats than half of us.

Jin: fair.

Tank: no response to any of this.

Zeph sent a thumbs up and scrolled to the last message.

Marcus. Encrypted.

We need to discuss the Architect. The prophecy. What you are. Come to my office. Alone. Bring the bee.

He read it twice. Set the interface down. Picked it up and read it a third time. The words had the same quality the third time as the first. He set the interface down again.

"What I am," he said aloud. The words sat in the apartment with the specific weight of a question that had an answer he wasn’t sure he was ready for.

CV watched him from the corner nest with the continuous attention of something monitoring its carrier’s state as a matter of ongoing operational priority.

"I’m fine," Zeph said.

CV did not respond. This was CV’s standard response to assurances it had not requested and did not find convincing.

He lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling.

"I left here with 2,461 credits," he said. "Level 35. C-rank. Behind on everything." He paused. "I came back Level 42. B-rank. 29,461 credits. A party. A sponsor." Another pause. "A prophecy about the potential extinction of everyone."

CV’s prismatic patterns moved slowly across the ceiling above the water stain.

"The numbers are significantly better," Zeph said. "The situation is considerably more complicated."

He had a party of twelve who meant it. He had respect from people who didn’t dispense it without reason. He had a rank and a level and a stat block that described someone capable of things the Level 35 version of him had not been capable of.

He also had Marcus’s encrypted message. He also had tablet ten. He also had a System that a several-thousand-year-old facility had described as a harvest mechanism with a warning attached.

"what the fuck am I" he said to the apartment. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺

He picked up the interface. Opened Marcus’s message. Read it again.

The later was here. It had always been here. He just hadn’t been ready to look at it directly until now.

He was ready now.​