Chapter 55: The Inventory of Nothing

  The shift ended with a whistle and with a psychic pulse that felt like a migraine slamming into the front of my skull.

  "Movement," the Warden barked, his voice amplified by the grill of his mask. "Processing is complete. Return to containment."

  I pulled my hands out of the chute. They were shaking. The skin was red and irritated, buzzing with the phantom sensation of the chaotic sludge I’d been filtering for six hours. My Prismatic Weave had protected me from the toxicity, but the sheer volume of energy I’d handled was exhausting. I felt like a wire that had been running too much voltage.

  We shuffled out of the cavernous factory floor—a line of broken men and women in grey rags, heads bowed, collars humming.

  I kept my head down, but my Kensho was wide open. I was mapping the route.

  Left at the junction. Up three flights of spiral stairs. Corridor B. Cell Block 4.

  It was a labyrinth. A deliberate one. The Spire didn't just lock you up; it buried you under layers of stone and bureaucracy.

  We reached the cells. I was shoved into mine, and the force field hummed to life behind me, sealing the entrance with a shimmer of violet light.

  I slid down the cold stone wall, letting out a breath that rattled in my chest. My stomach cramped, a sharp reminder that I hadn't eaten anything but a bowl of thin gruel in twenty hours. My ribs, healed by the potion days ago, ached with a phantom memory of the Hull-Breaker’s claw.

  "Inventory," I whispered, closing my eyes.

  I reached for my belt. It was gone. The Wayfarer’s Sash, the Void-Knife, the Ever-Spring Flask—all stripped from me during intake while I was unconscious.

  Panic flared, hot and sharp. Without the Flask, water was going to be a problem. Without the Knife, I was toothless.

  But then I remembered the nature of the Locus. It wasn't a bag. It was a hole in the universe shaped like my soul.

  I focused inward. I pushed past the gnawing hunger in my belly and the throbbing of the Tier 3 Suppression Collar.

  Open.

  The mental space bloomed. It was the same rainy London rooftop, cluttered and comforting.

  I did a mental headcount of my assets.

  The Abyssal Weaver’s Cord lay coiled in the corner, glowing with faint purple light.

  Oren’s Almanac, the leather-bound book from Grey-Water, sat on an AC unit.

  The single Sun-Glass Prism I’d kept as a spare battery was there, dim but intact.

  And rolled up against the chimney was the Null-Weave Bivouac—my magical camping gear.

  Then, I looked at the far corner, sheltered under a tarp.

  [Item: Crate of Nutri-Bricks (x40)]

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  [Item: Void-Fruit (x8)]

  I nearly laughed aloud. I had a stockpile. While the other prisoners were starving on prison rations, I had a crate of high-density calorie bricks and luxury alien fruit sitting in a dimension only I could touch.

  And next to the food, looking innocuous but radiating potential, was my emergency fund.

  [Currency: 30 Lucent Shards]

  [Currency: 14 Faint Shards]

  The crystals glowed softly in the mental gloom. Those weren't just money; they were instant refills. If the suppression collar tried to drain me dry, or if I needed to overcharge a spell to blow the door, I had the juice. I was a walking power plant disguised as a prisoner.

  "Stale bricks, electric fruit, and a pocketful of batteries," I thought, the tension in my shoulders loosening just a fraction. "I'm technically the best-stocked prisoner in this zip code."

  They had taken the clothes off my back, but they couldn't touch the pantry inside my soul. If I ever got out of this cell, I had a place to hide, rope to climb, food to run a marathon on, and enough raw energy to jumpstart a golem.

  It wasn't an escape plan, but it was a start.

  "You are twitching," a raspy voice said from the shadows. "And muttering. The collar usually takes the fight out of a man by day two."

  I opened my eyes. My cellmate, the old man who had warned me about the refining process earlier, was watching me.

  "I'm just checking my pockets," I said, fighting the urge to pull a Void-Fruit out right then and there. It would be too flashy. Too hard to explain. "Metaphorically speaking."

  "There are no pockets here," the old man wheezed. "Only the stone. And the hunger."

  I ignored him for a moment, my mind drifting to the one asset I couldn't check.

  Vrex.

  Where was the mountain?

  Vrex’s POV

  Vrex was bored.

  He was also currently suspended in a magnetic containment field inside a spherical chamber that smelled of ozone and burnt hair.

  Four heavy, iron chains were clamped to his limbs, pulling him taut in an ‘X’ shape. But the chains weren't holding him; the gravity was. A localized spell was increasing the gravity in the room to roughly ten times the standard.

  To a human, it would be liquidization. To Vrex, it was... a heavy blanket.

  "Fascinating," a voice murmured.

  A Magister stood on a viewing platform behind a wall of thick glass. He was adjusting a complex array of lenses, peering at Vrex.

  "The subject is composed of granite, basalt, and trace amounts of star-metal," the Magister dictated to a floating quill. "Yet it possesses a biological mana-circulatory system. It is... living earth. Quite different from the golems in our continent, Rare evolution?"

  Vrex opened one golden eye. "I am standing right here," he rumbled. His voice was deep, unaffected by the crushing gravity. "You could just ask."

  The Magister jumped, dropping his monocle. "It speaks! Intelligence confirmed. Rudimentary, but present."

  "Rudimentary?" Vrex scoffed, the sound like grinding millstones. "I have forgotten more about structural engineering than your civilization has ever learned. Your archways are derivative and your load-bearing pillars are purely decorative. It is offensive."

  The Magister bristled. "Silence, construct! You are a specimen. We are calculating the pressure required to crack your shell to extract the core."

  Vrex tested the chains. They were Sea-Iron. Strong. But Grade 2 at most.

  He looked at the gravity generator humming in the ceiling.

  His Horizon was 60. His Mantle of the Stubborn Earth was fused to his shoulder, currently dormant but ready to trigger its Dictum if he took lethal damage.

  He wasn't worried about dying. He was worried about Kaelen.

  The glitch-human was fragile. He relied on speed and tricks. Speed was useless. In a place like this, where they clamped a collar on you and threw you in a hole.

  "You have a partner," the Magister said, reading from a slate. "The human. Strange resonance readings. We put him in Processing. He will burn out in a week."

  Vrex closed his eyes.

  "He will not burn out,"

  "Oh? And why is that?"

  "Because," Vrex said, allowing a small, terrifying grin to crack his stony face, "you have put a virus inside your operating system. And you have mistaken it for a battery."

  Vrex flexed his arms. The Sea-Iron chains groaned. The gravity generator whined in protest.

  "I will wait," Vrex decided. "Till the alarms start ringing... then I will break your decorative poles."