The seventh day began with Mav taking his pack apart.
The frame of the pack was held straight by two metal stays, each as long as his arm and as thick as a finger.
He worked them out of their sleeves one at a time.
The pack sagged without them, but it still closed, and that was all he needed from it.
Then he took the knife, laid its handle against the end of one stay, and bound the two together with cord.
He wrapped the cord tight, knotted it, and wrapped it again.
When he was done, he had a harpoon.
It was ugly, and the blade sat a little crooked.
But it was longer than his arm, and it was sharp.
‘Good enough.
Now I can hurt things from a distance.’
That was the whole plan.
His seaweeds could only take prey that was already weak.
His two fish could wound small prey with their jaws.
With a harpoon, Mav could wound bigger prey himself.
More hosts meant more hunters, and more hunters meant more Essence.
He had 24 days left, and each of his 10 seaweeds needed 700 points.
He spent the morning learning how to use the harpoon.
It was harder than he had expected.
Water was heavy.
When he swung the harpoon like a stick, it moved as slowly as if he were pushing it through mud, and the fish were gone long before it arrived.
He missed 11 times in a row, and his frustration grew with every miss.
On the twelfth try, he stopped swinging and started thinking.
A swing had to push a lot of water out of the way.
A straight thrust pushed almost none.
So he held the harpoon close to his body, kept the point forward, and stabbed in a short, straight line.
The blade moved twice as fast.
‘Thrust, do not swing.
And wait until the target is close.’
At noon, the swarm of needlefish passed over his base, as it did every day.
This time, Mav was ready for it.
He gave his two fish the same order as the day before.
They shot into the swarm, cut one needlefish away from the others, and drove it down toward the wall where he was crouching.
The needlefish came straight at him.
It was too busy fleeing to notice the man behind the stones.
Mav thrust.
The blade went through the tail fin and came out on the other side.
The needlefish jerked, tore itself free, and tried to swim away, but it could only move in a slow, crooked line, trailing a thread of red.
He caught it with his free hand.
‘Now.’
The seaweed that had been coiled around his arm since the day before struck at once.
Its tip found the place behind the gills and went in.
Mav felt the key turn in the lock.
Two hearts, then one.
A third needlefish swam out of his hand, turned around, and came back to wait for orders.
He did it again an hour later.
This time, he went to the rock first, laid his hand on one of the six seaweeds still rooted there, and asked it to come.
It let go faster than the last one had.
He did not have to wait as long.
That was worth knowing.
His seaweeds were learning to trust him, and it pleased him more than he had expected.
By the middle of the afternoon, he had four fish.
He looked at them.
Four needlefish hung in the water in front of him in a neat row, each with a green seaweed wrapped around its body.
They watched him with flat black eyes.
He could feel all four.
Four small, quick hearts, and four points in his head that moved when he wanted them to move.
It was like having four more hands, and each of those hands could swim faster than he could run.
‘Hunt.’
They scattered.
Mav sat down by the Heartstone and watched his Status.
It was the first time in a week that he had nothing to do but wait.
The four fish were out in the water around his base, and every few minutes, something warm trickled into the back of his head.
That was the feeling of Essence coming in.
A shrimp gave three points.
A needlefish gave five.
By evening, the numbers had changed.
[Seaweed.
Rank F-.
Essence: 41/100.
Host: Needlefish.]
[Seaweed.
Rank F-.
Essence: 30/100.
Host: Needlefish.]
[Seaweed.
Rank F-.
Essence: 14/100.
Host: Needlefish.]
[Seaweed.
Rank F-.
Essence: 11/100.
Host: Needlefish.]
He read them twice, and felt a rush of excitement.
In three days of walls and training, each of his seaweeds had gained two points.
In one afternoon of hunting, his best seaweed had gained 36.
‘The fast way works.
At this pace, the first one will reach rank F in two days.’
There was a second good surprise.
His own seaweed, the one in his neck, had moved too.
[Seaweed.
Rank F-.
Essence: 7/100.
Host: Maverick Silkborn.]
He had killed one needlefish himself that afternoon, with a thrust that went in deeper than he had intended.
The five points had gone to the seaweed he carried.
As far as the Genesis was concerned, Mav was a host like the others.
When he killed, his seaweed grew.
‘So I can raise that one myself.
That will be useful.’
The third surprise was dinner.
One of his fish came back from the hunt with a dead needlefish in its jaws and laid it in front of him.
Mav had not ordered that.
He looked at the dead fish.
He thought of the six ration bars he had eaten in a week, and of the 18 that were left.
Then he ate the fish raw, bones and all.
It was cold, and it tasted of nothing.
He did not care.
It was the first time since the Bestowal that he would go to sleep with a full stomach.
‘Food is no longer a problem.
That is one less thing that can kill me.’
Before he slept, he looked at the three bars one more time.
[Day 7]
[Rank E- Subjects: 0/10]
[Development: 2%]
[Heartstone: 0%]
The first bar was still empty, but it would not stay that way.
The other two worried him more.
He had 23 days left, and he had barely started on them.
He was still thinking about that when one of his fish came racing back to the base.
It did not bring food.
It stopped in front of his face, turned to point down the slope beyond the wall, and trembled.
Through its seaweed, Mav felt what the fish had felt.
It was not fear.
It was the sharp, narrow hunger he had felt once before, on the day the first needlefish fell among his seaweeds.
His fish had found something.
Something big.
He took the harpoon and followed it.
About 50 meters past the wall, the fish stopped above a heap of gray boulders and hung there, waiting.
Mav looked at the boulders for a long time, and saw nothing but rock.
Then one of the rocks stood up.