Three days. Eleven barrier cleanups. Forty-seven threads absorbed.
Voss sat on the edge of Mira's hospital bed with his notebook open and his sister leaning forward in her wheelchair, eyes bright despite the dark circles beneath them. Her laptop was balanced on her knees, a spreadsheet already taking shape.
"Read them back to me," she said. "All of them. In order."
He started from the beginning. The wolf threads — gold, thick, anchored to skeletal muscle tissue. Strength increase per thread: approximately five percent of his pre-Sight baseline. Diminishing returns had kicked in after the eighth wolf thread. By the fifteenth, each new one was worth maybe two percent. He'd stopped feeling significant gains from wolf strength threads after twenty.
"Diminishing returns by species type," Mira said, typing. "That suggests a saturation threshold. Your body can only integrate so much wolf-specific muscle encoding before it stops being novel information."
"You're getting ahead of the data."
"I'm hypothesizing. You're getting behind it. Keep going."
The shadow lurker threads. Different color saturation — still gold but with a greenish undertone. Speed-dominant. Same five-percent-per-thread baseline, same diminishing returns curve. He'd maxed out the useful gain from lurker speed threads at around sixteen.
The interesting part was the stone beetles.
"District 14, E-rank barrier. Three stone beetles, killed maybe eight minutes before I got to them." He turned a page in his notebook. "Different thread profile entirely. The gold threads were there — strength and speed — but there was a new color. Blue-white. Rising from the exoskeletal plates, the carapace joints, the calcified bone structure."
"Defense," Mira said.
"Defense." He'd absorbed one and felt his skin tighten. Not visibly — no one would look at him and see anything different. But when he'd tested it afterward, pressing his forearm against the edge of his workbench hard enough to leave a mark on normal skin, the skin held. No bruise. No dent. Like a layer of armor had been woven into his dermis.
Mira typed in silence for thirty seconds. Her fingers were slower today. The stiffness was climbing past her knuckles into the joints above. She compensated by using her thumbs more, pivoting her hand angle. Adaptations she made without complaint and without acknowledging.
"So we have three stat types confirmed," she said. "Strength, speed, defense. All correspond to the monster's physical specialization. Wolves for strength, lurkers for speed, beetles for defense. The thread color is gold-spectrum with the hue indicating the stat type. And the diminishing returns suggest you need to diversify your sources."
"There's a fourth."
She looked up.
"District 3, D-rank barrier. Mana sprites."
Mana sprites were small, fragile, barely worth the clearance effort. They existed as mobile concentrations of ambient mana — no real body, just a shell of crystallized energy around a tiny core. The clearance squads popped them like soap bubbles. The cores were valuable for mana battery production. Nobody bothered to carve the shells.
"The sprite threads weren't gold." Voss turned to the sketch he'd made. Quick, rough, but accurate. "They were silver. Bright silver. Rising from the core and the crystalline shell, not from any biological structure."
"Silver threads from a mana entity." Mira's fingers paused over the keyboard. "What did they do?"
"When I absorbed the first one, my Thread Sight range expanded." He'd measured it. Before the mana sprite, he could see threads from about five meters. After absorbing three sprite threads, the range was nearly eight. The threads were clearer too — more defined, easier to distinguish individual filaments from the mass. "Mana threads. They enhance the sight itself."
Mira was quiet for a long moment. Her eyes moved across her screen, across the corkboard on the wall, across patterns only she could see.
"Voss," she said. "You're describing a self-reinforcing loop."
"I know."
"The more mana threads you absorb, the better your sight gets. The better your sight gets, the more efficiently you can absorb other threads. Your power source enhances your ability to use your power source."
"I know."
"That's not how Attuned abilities work. Attuned powers have fixed parameters — you can train them, improve them, but the fundamental capacity is set at awakening. What you're describing is a feedback loop with no inherent ceiling."
"We don't know there's no ceiling."
"We don't know there is one." She met his eyes. The same gray. The same steadiness. "You need to be careful with this."
Voss closed his notebook. "I need to be fast with this. Your treatment costs eight hundred thousand. I'm sitting on fifty-five thousand saved and fourteen hundred per shift. The math hasn't changed."
"The math has changed. You just told me you've gained twenty-five percent strength, thirty percent speed, fifteen percent defense, and enhanced mana perception in three days. You're not an F-rank anymore, Voss. Not by any measurable standard."
"My classification card says F-rank."
"Your classification card is a piece of paper. What you are is a Carver who can fight." She leaned forward. The wheelchair creaked. "If you could demonstrate combat ability — real, measurable, documented combat ability — you could apply for reclassification. A D-rank Attuned makes four times what a Carver makes. C-rank makes ten times. You'd have the money in months, not years."
She was right. The numbers worked if his rank changed. But reclassification meant testing, and testing meant demonstrating abilities in front of RDC assessors. Which meant revealing what he could do. Which meant questions he couldn't answer without exposing Thread Sight.
"Not yet," he said. "I need more data first. And I need to understand something."
"What?"
He turned back three pages in his notebook. The entry from last night's shift. "D-rank barrier, District 19. Wolf alpha. I found a thread that wasn't like the others."
Mira's eyes sharpened. "Different how?"
"Not a stat thread. Not gold, not silver. This one was — I don't have a good word for it. Thick. Pulsing. Like the stat threads were veins and this was an artery. It ran through the alpha's entire body, rooted in the core and branching out through every major muscle group."
"An ability thread?"
"I think so." He hadn't touched it. Hadn't dared. The stat threads were passive — they offered power and he took it. This thread had felt active. Alive, despite being anchored to a dead animal. Like it was waiting for something. "The alpha was a D-rank with C-rank musculature. Same species as the wolves in the District 22 barrier — the ones that fought in formations."
"You're connecting the two."
"I'm noting the correlation." He closed the notebook. "I need to go back to that district. The barrier pattern you mapped — seven E-rank barriers in three weeks — I want to carve the next one that opens."
Mira pulled up her data. The monster movement map was more detailed now, updated with RDC reports she'd pulled that morning. "District 14 had another barrier open yesterday. E-rank. Clearance is scheduled for tomorrow at oh-six-hundred."
"I'll take the cleanup shift."
"Voss." Her voice changed. Softer. The way she sounded when the paralysis reached a new part of her body and she was cataloging the loss. "The thing in District 22. The one that came out of the ground. You killed it with carving blades."
"I told you—"
"You told me you got lucky. I know what you look like when you're lying. Your left hand goes still." She looked at his left hand. It was very still. "You fought it. With the strength from the wolf threads. You fought a monster in a sealed barrier with non-combat weapons and no training and you won because you'd absorbed enough power to survive."
He said nothing.
"You're going to keep doing this."
"Yes."
"Going into barriers. Taking the dangerous shifts. Absorbing threads from things that can kill you."
"The threads come from dead things. The living things are just the obstacle between me and the bodies."
She laughed. Short, sharp, the kind of laugh that hurt her jaw but came out anyway. "That's the most Voss thing you've ever said."
"I need to keep my head down. No reclassification. No attention. I absorb what I can during legitimate cleanup shifts, I build my baseline, and when I'm strong enough—"
"Strong enough for what?"
He didn't answer right away. The question was bigger than the room. Bigger than the hospital, bigger than the fifty-five thousand credits in his account and the fourteen months left on Mira's clock.
"Strong enough to get into the barriers where the real monsters are," he said. "S-rank and above. Where the cores are worth hundreds of thousands each. Where the threads are worth — I don't know. More than wolf muscle. More than beetle armor."
"You'll die."
"I'll be careful."
"You'll die carefully."
He stood. Adjusted his jacket over the bandages on his back. The claw marks were almost healed — two days ahead of schedule, another data point for the notebook. "I'll be back tomorrow evening. After the District 14 shift."
"Bring the data."
"Always."
He was at the door when she said his name. He turned.
Mira was sitting very straight in her wheelchair. Her hands were folded in her lap, hiding the tremor. Her jaw was set in that specific way that meant she was choosing her next words from a list of options and discarding the ones that were too honest.
"Be messy if you have to," she said.
Coming from a Dren, it meant: survive at any cost.
---
Voss went home. Cleaned his blades. Ate a bowl of rice with canned fish — the same meal he'd eaten six nights out of seven for the past three years. Sat at his kitchen table with the notebook and added the day's entries.
Forty-seven threads absorbed. Strength up roughly thirty percent. Speed up thirty-five. Defense up fifteen. Mana sensitivity up twenty. Thread Sight range: approximately ten meters. All from E-rank and D-rank cleanup shifts.
At the bottom of the page, he made a list.
*Thread types identified:*
*1. Stat threads (gold spectrum) — permanent physical enhancement. STR, SPD, DEF, MAG.*
*2. Ability threads (thick, pulsing, color varies) — unknown function. Suspected skill transfer. UNTESTED.*
*3. Unknown category — requires higher-rank specimens.*
Below that, a second list.
*Requirements:*
*1. Fresh corpses — 10-minute window maximum.*
*2. Physical contact for absorption.*
*3. Daily absorption limit — approximately 5 stat threads before cognitive fatigue.*
*4. Diminishing returns by species — diversify sources.*
*5. Mana threads improve Thread Sight itself — prioritize.*
Below that, a number.
*745,000 credits remaining.*
Below that, a smaller number.
*14 months.*
He closed the notebook. Set his alarm for oh-four-thirty. Lay down on his bed in the dark apartment and stared at the ceiling.
Somewhere in the city, a barrier was forming. He could feel it — a faint tremor in the new sense behind his eyes, a ripple in something he didn't have the vocabulary to describe. A Rift opening. Monsters pouring through. A dome sealing over them like a blister.
By morning, those monsters would be dead. And Voss would be there with his blades and his steady hands and ten minutes to take what the dead were offering.
He turned off the light. The dark didn't bother him. It never had.
The dead were quiet company, and he'd always worked best in the silence.
