Mav began the twelfth day by doing something he had never done before.
He explained himself to a plant.
He sat in the middle of his base, with his eight Subjects around him, and went through the situation in his head as clearly as he could.
He did not know how much of it they understood.
He did it anyway.
‘The eel is out there.
We cannot beat it today.
So we stay inside the light of the base, we get stronger, and we lose nobody.
When I have a plan that does not cost one of you, I will show it to you first.’
Nothing answered him.
But the coolness at the back of his neck stayed calm.
He took that as a yes.
Then he went to work.
If he could not hunt in the deep water, he would do everything else.
He had three bars to fill, and he had been ignoring two of them.
He started with the wounded.
Two and Five had come out of the fight with their fins in shreds.
Six had a row of deep holes across his shell and one claw that still hung useless.
The seaweeds were already stitching them with green thread, but it was slow, and it cost them strength.
So Mav fed them.
He could still hunt inside the light, where the eel did not come.
He speared shrimp among the stones, and small fish that strayed too close to the wall, and he did not kill them himself.
He carried them to his hosts, alive, and let each Subject make the kill.
That mattered.
Essence went to the one that killed.
When Mav killed a shrimp, the three points went to One.
When he held the same shrimp in front of Five and let Five finish it, the three points went to Five.
‘Then I should not keep the kills for the strongest.
I should give them to the ones that are behind.’
He tried it on the rooted seaweeds, too.
He did not expect much.
He held a wounded fish against Seven and thought, as clearly as he could, ‘Yours.’
Seven coiled around the fish and squeezed until it stopped moving.
[Seaweed.
Rank F-.
Essence: 7/100.
Host: none.]
Mav stared at the line, delighted.
Five points.
A rooted seaweed could kill.
It only needed someone to bring the prey to it.
‘So nobody has to be left behind.
I only have to hunt for those that cannot.’
For the next three days, that was what he did.
He became a kind of gardener.
He caught prey inside the light and carried it from one Subject to the next, and he made sure that each of the eight made its share of the kills.
It was slow, a few points at a time, but the numbers moved again, and they moved for all of them.
The rest of the time, he built.
He and Six raised the wall.
They carried stone after stone until it was a full ring around the Heartstone, as high as his chest, with a single narrow gate on the side away from the slope.
Behind the wall, Six dug hollows under the largest rocks, so that the crab and the fish had somewhere to sleep where predators could not reach them.
In one corner, Mav piled stones into a pen and filled it with live shrimp.
It was a larder.
If the eel kept them inside for a week, they would still eat.
He was surprised by how much he liked the work.
For eight years, he had owned nothing that could not be carried out of a room in one trip.
Now he had a wall.
He had built it himself, and things lived behind it that depended on him.
After all this work, the second bar had grown.
[Development: 9%]
The third bar had not moved.
He still did not know how to feed a Heartstone.
That was a problem for another day.
On the evening of the fourteenth day, a line appeared that he had been waiting for.
[The affinity of your Subjects has risen to Neutral.]
He let out a breath he did not need.
He was relieved.
‘Back to where I started.
Good.
Now I keep going.’
On the fifteenth day, he found the sprouts.
He was cleaning silt from the rock around the Heartstone when he saw something green in one of the empty cracks.
He bent closer.
It was the oldest crack of all.
It was the one that had held a torn stump since the first day, since the seaweed that grew there had come loose to wrap itself around the neck of a drowning boy.
The stump was not dead.
A shoot had grown out of it, no longer than his finger.
It glowed, very faintly.
There was another in the crack next to it, where Two had once been rooted.
And at the same moment, he felt them.
Two new points in his head.
They were faint, like candle flames seen from far away, but they were there.
[A new Subject has been born.]
[A new Subject has been born.]
[Subjects: 10]
Mav sat down on the rock, stunned.
Every species reproduced in its own way and in its own time.
He had known that.
He had not known how a seaweed did it.
Now he did.
When a seaweed left the rock to take a host, it left its root behind.
And if the place was safe, and the others were fed and at peace, the root grew a new seaweed.
He went through what that meant, slowly, to be sure he had it right.
He had six empty cracks.
Two of them had sprouted.
Every time one of his seaweeds took a host, it would leave a root behind, and in time, that root could become a new Subject.
‘So every host I take can give me one more seaweed.
My numbers do not have to stay at 10.
They can grow.’
That was more than good news.
It was the first sign that his talent could go much further than a few fish and a crab.
He had 10 Subjects again.
The count that had kept him awake for five nights was, once again, whole.
He felt lighter than he had in days.
He looked at the two shoots for a while.
They would need numbers.
He did not call them Three and Four.
Those two numbers belonged to the Subjects he had lost, and he was not going to hand them to anyone else.
The new ones were Eleven and Twelve.
That night, he looked at everything at once.
[Day 15]
[Rank E- Subjects: 0/10]
[Development: 9%]
[Heartstone: 0%]
He had 10 Subjects, a wall, and a base that could feed itself.
His Subjects no longer feared him.
But his best seaweed, Two, was only halfway through rank F.
The beasts in the water inside the light gave three points at a time, and five on a good catch.
He needed 700 for each of them.
He had 15 days left.
The flat gray fish of the deep were worth 12.
It was the only place in his World where the numbers were large enough.
Outside the wall, at the edge of the green light, a pale shape was circling.
It had come every night for five nights.
It was patient.
Mav was learning to be patient too.