After reporting what they'd been talking about to Johanson, and what'd happened in the dungeon with the Integrated from another system, but leaving out the egg, Luke returned to his list of skills. He was a healer, yet the system had given him so many options that could cause harm. Again, he dismissed the harmful ones. If he wanted to hurt someone, Threads of Mana and Needle of Life were more than adequate.

  That left Strengthen Thread, Heartthread, and Weaver's Boon. The first and last were some sort of buffs, and they both sounded similar. And Heartthread, if he had to guess, could bind him to someone and keep them alive for longer, feeding off his health. Neither alternative felt quite right. Truth be told, they were boring, yawn-inducing picks.

  Rather than waste a skill point on something he didn't feel excited about, Luke returned to his training and worked on extending the thread of mana even more. Reach, more than anything else, was an exciting avenue to more power across his whole skill set. The current Lifeweaver skills were already good enough. For the moment, Luke would train and train until he passed out.

  "Pst," Luke said, catching Dot's attention. "Want to try hurting me?"

  Once they’d agreed on a few ground rules, like no attacking Luke’s vitals or brain, and a firm promise to Hiroki that no blood would stain his car seats, they began.

  Dot rested her hand on Luke’s forearm, since she needed touch to use her skill, not having acquired Weaver's Grasp yet. Her palm was warm and a little sweaty. Nerves, and who could blame her? Luke closed his eyes, bracing himself. The anticipation of pain was worse than the pain itself.

  When Dot stabbed into his leg muscle with Needle of Life, Luke clenched his teeth and sutured the wound together in an instant. He could feel her threads moving through him, probing along his mana channels, searching for good spots to strike.

  At first, she kept it simple with muscle tears, a cut tendon, and the destruction of a bone. But as Luke’s healing caught each injury, she grew bolder. A sliced artery here. A punctured lung there. While he scrambled to patch those, she sent a shock of pain through his stomach, then stabbed at a nerve bundle in his shoulder, making fire shoot down his arm.

  At first, she murmured, “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” with every strike. But once Luke reassured her he was fine, healing himself over and over, she stopped apologizing and threw herself into the exercise. Pain flared everywhere as he chased her damage with his threads, sometimes too slow, forced to trigger Weaver’s Renewal or even the Healer’s Moment when things got too overwhelming.

  It was brutal training, but also invaluable. Soon, he’d be facing Relian. This was just what he needed.

  And then Dot gasped. “I leveled up."

  Luke gritted his jaw, repairing a shredded shoulder, sealing a lesion in his liver, and knitting together nerves in his foot. Dot didn't let up for even a second. After a while, the pain dulled. Not because it hurt less, but because he was growing used to it. His tolerance was increasing.

  Dot pressed harder, emboldened. She added a third thread, slicing mana channels, squeezing others, even tugging on his meta-heart. That last one sent cold panic through him, and Luke reacted on reflex, severing her threads with his own until she whimpered and pulled back.

  Luke opened his eyes. “Sorry. Did that hurt you?”

  Sweat dripped from her forehead, and her red hair looked like it was trying to escape her braid, standing out in wild strands. Even her clothes clung to her body, drenched in sweat, and she was breathing hard, lips parted like she’d just finished a sprint. Despite her exhaustion, her eyes glittered with excitement. Dot was enjoying herself.

  “You’re asking me if you hurt me?” she panted. “After all that? I don’t know how you stand it.”

  “I got used to it,” Luke said.

  “Coming up on Toledo,” Hiroki cut in.

  Luke blinked. “What? Already?”

  Curtis was still snoring in the passenger seat. Hiroki tapped the dashboard clock. “We’ve been driving for almost two hours. I even stopped for gas.”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Dot made a vague hand gesture. “I think we lost track of time.”

  They both reached for water bottles. The cold liquid was bliss, and Luke let out an incredulous laugh. “I got almost a third of a level. And 3 attribute points.”

  Boon of Potential grants you an attribute point (+1 Focus).

  Boon of Potential grants you an attribute point (+1 Focus).

  Boon of Potential grants you an attribute point (+1 Willpower).

  “Attribute points?” she asked, wiping her face.

  “Yeah. Focus, Willpower, you know?”

  “I know what they are. But you gained points?”

  “My boon,” Luke explained. “Boon of Potential. It lets me train attribute points.”

  "Sounds like you picked a good one." Her eyes widened. “I gained almost two full levels!"

  “So you’re level 4 now?”

  “That’s right!"

  "You'll be able to rank up skills at 5. That’ll help with thread control."

  "I can’t wait to get that weird time-freeze thing you do.”

  “The Healer’s Moment? That’s level 10. You’ll get there soon enough.”

  She grinned. “Want to practice more?”

  “Save some strength,” Hiroki said. “Like I said, we're nearing Toledo. You promised me a session with the staff, remember?”

  Luke gave her a look. "Tomorrow?"

  “Tomorrow then,” she agreed. After a pause, she added, softer, “And maybe… maybe we can switch places sometime too.”

  “You want me to hurt you like that?” Luke asked.

  She swallowed and then nodded. “I think it’ll help me improve. I’ll do anything to get better. Imagine the people I could heal if I grew as strong as you?”

  Luke gave her an encouraging smile. “More training tomorrow.”

  She nodded, cheeks red, and turned to the window. Fields and trees rolled past as the city drew closer.

  Luke sold off the goblin corpses he’d collected. It didn't pay near what he’d earned from the dwarves or the dragon, but still totaled over 9,000 credits. That brought his total above 16,000. The monster cores, he kept. They'd prove useful in the future, he just knew it. If that company were able to start mass producing whatever they'd done to harness power from the things, the whole world might soon run on cores.

  While he didn't want to waste credits, he spent 200 to get a new quarterstaff. Not magical, but it would do for sparring with Hiroki.

  “Could we stop at a mall?” Dot asked, pointing out the window as she leaned forward to Hiroki. “I really need clothes.”

  They pulled into a place called Fallen Timbers, not so much a mall as a large cluster of shops. Dot vanished inside one while Luke, Hiroki, and the now awake Curtis sat in silence at the food court, picking at their meals.

  During this time, Luke quieted his other senses to focus on Weaver's Echo and the strange sort of sense his profession, Seeker, gave him. Different from the Lifeweaver skills in a way he couldn't quite explain, it was like the two complemented each other. The class showed him the weave that made up the system, and the Seeker's sense, or whatever you wanted to call it, was similar but also different, showing him the world beyond the world. Kind of. Just thinking about it was making his head hurt. Explaining was impossible. He needed to learn more, to grow as a Seeker.

  First, he relaxed, without looking for something specific, and felt Curtis and Hiroki’s presences right next to him, both through Weaver's Echo. Then, a little farther off, Dot moved about in the stores. Breathing deep through his nose, Luke relaxed, expanding his search, allowing all other Integrated he'd healed to filter into his consciousness. All this was still through Weaver's Echo. Grasping for whatever intangible information filtered through the Seeker profession was, he found, like trying to catch a fish underwater. It just kept slipping, darting away.

  Far west of them, in Chicago, he sensed a whole lot of Integrated he'd healed. Some of those echoes were no longer in the city, but he found that honing in on their thread was possible if he wanted to find their identity.

  And it was a fitting name, too, because each person moved on a thread, part of an impossibly complex weave that made up everything and everyone. Closing his eyes and allowing his mind to roam, he felt as if he could reach out with his hand and grab the threads. At the same time, he knew that if he tried, his hand would pass through, because this weave was not in the physical realm, perhaps not even in the metaphysical one.

  Relaxing into that realization made the information filter in more naturally, and Luke thought he could tell what each person at the end of every particular thread was up to, all at once. Milla, his sister, was at DEA headquarters. Luke thought she was agitated, but it was impossible to tell why. Pulling back a little and away from everyone in Chicago, Luke quested east instead, toward Relian.

  There was a difference to his thread. More solid, in a sense. More so even than Dot’s. And far away along that thread, light glimmered. Luke couldn’t help himself and reached out to it, feeling his senses hone in on a particular spot.

  Like with Milla, he got a sense of the Fallen Shepherd’s state of mind and what he was doing. Luke saw blood, parts of people arrayed on a sterile floor somewhere, with Relian standing, hands on his hips, inspecting them as if satisfied after a job well done.

  It was like watching over Relian’s shoulder. And when the man they hunted turned around and looked up, right at him, a jolt of shock thrummed through his chest. Amusement radiated through the thread. Danger. Luke pulled back, dropping the thread, as if it had turned burning hot.