Chapter 156: Half, Safely
The panel finished and Jin read it three times.
[Resource Type: Rare Physical-Development Consumable]
[Effect: Strengthens overall physical foundation and bodily development. Strength, toughness, stamina, long-term physical development.]
[Does not confer skill. Does not trigger evolution. Does not alter Quality. Does not advance combat rank.]
[Recommended Method: Physical consumption for maximum efficacy.]
[Avatar Consumption Efficiency: 50%]
[Safety: Toxicity, biological rejection, species incompatibility, and dosage risks negated during avatar consumption.]
He stopped on the second-to-last line.
Fifty percent.
He read the rest looking for context, found none, and asked the question directly, which was something he had learned to do with the Engine only after a great deal of wasted time.
The answer came back as a general rule, phrased with the Engine’s usual complete indifference to how long he had been operating without it.
[Physical consumable resources produce full effect when consumed by the bound beast.]
[Physical consumable resources produce 50% of original beneficial effect when consumed by the digital avatar.]
[Avatar consumption negates poisoning, rejection, incompatibility, overdose, and adverse reaction.]
[Applies to: herbs, fruits, minerals, glands, and comparable consumable materials.]
[Does not apply to: experience, combat data, skill acquisition, fragments, or standard synchronisation gains.]
Jin sat up on his bunk.
Every herb.
He thought back through the earlier Quarry runs, to every herb and other physical consumable he had let the avatar use without a second thought because feeding things to the avatar was safe. None of them had failed to work. They had simply delivered less than the same resource would have given the real beast.
Half. All of it, half, because the Engine had never volunteered the rule and Jin had never thought to ask what avatar consumption efficiency might imply when it was not written on a screen in front of him.
His first reaction was pure irritation, and he allowed himself about thirty seconds of it.
It tells me respawn timers. It tells me fragment counts. It will explain a skill’s limitations at length without being asked. It never once mentioned that I’ve been halving every resource I’ve eaten since I started.
Then he made himself look at the other side of it, which took longer and was less enjoyable.
An ordinary tamer who found an unknown fruit in an unmapped chamber had a genuinely hard problem. They would need to identify it, establish that it suited their beast’s species, work out a dose, prepare it correctly, and accept a real chance of poisoning an animal they had raised for years. Half the reason the Association maintained a beast-development branch at all was to stop tamers feeding the wrong thing to something they loved.
Jin could hand an unknown object to a digital copy and watch what happened.
If it was poison, the avatar died and came back in two hours. If it was incompatible, he learned that for nothing. There was no version of the experiment that harmed the animal asleep on his floor.
Half the benefit, none of the risk.
He turned it over once more and admitted the trade was fair. Irritating, badly documented, and fair.
Which left the actual problem, and the actual problem was never the fifty percent.
Full effect required the real Glitch to eat it.
Jin looked across the dark room at the shape on the floor, at a beast whose file currently carried a comparative-development flag, a validated sensory skill, a Rift commendation, and a technician who had written above species baseline more than once.
And then I feed him a growth resource before a class review, with no idea what it will do to his numbers.
He put that thought away deliberately. It was not tonight’s decision, and tonight’s decision had a clock attached to it.
The commander’s rhythm was coming back.
It was still distant, working through the eastern galleries, but the pattern was becoming regular again. Hunters that had been drifting or arriving late were beginning to reposition in cleaner sequences, and the heavy rhythm itself was steadily moving closer to the descent.
The network was recovering.
Jin did the arithmetic.
Four minutes. Probably less.
He looked at the fruit hanging over the lower tier and considered leaving, and he knew while he was considering it that leaving was the correct answer.
He had achieved the entire objective of the run. He had proved that the commander could be moved off the door, found the descent, seen the nest, located a resource, and gotten a scan on it. Everything he had come for was already in the log.
Going down there added one thing and risked one thing, and the thing it risked was two hours.
Two hours.
That was the whole cost. The real Glitch was six days rested and asleep beside the bunk and would not feel a scratch of it. Jin had spent many avatar lives in this quarry learning where the floor was thin, and he had never once had to explain any of those deaths to a technician.
And the window doesn’t come twice. It isn’t leaving that junction again for the same trick.
He sent Glitch down the passage.
The descent went well at first, which was the part he would think about afterward.
Tremor Sense gave him a clean read as Glitch moved lower. The commander was four hundred meters back and closing. Deeper in the nest, plenty of small, light bodies went about whatever young mantises did. Far to the west, two heavier patterns shifted repeatedly within narrow areas without travelling anywhere.
No movement came from the final passage or the visible tiers beyond it.
That did not make the route empty.
Run seven had taught Jin the difference, so Glitch inspected every niche with his eyes before passing it.
The passage narrowed between curtains of mineral roots. Beyond them, the chamber floor remained several meters away around the tree’s central hummock. Glitch was still short of the threshold when he eased one foreclaw forward.
The screen jerked.
There was no attack Jin could see.
Nothing came out of the dark. No shape crossed the edge of the frame, no sound separated itself from the chamber, and no vibration reached Glitch’s feet even a fraction of a second before it happened.
The view lurched violently to one side, went sideways, and turned black.
The bond cut out like a switch.
[Avatar Defeated]
[Respawn Time: 02:00:00]
Jin stared at the screen and ran the last moment through his memory.
Glitch’s foreclaw had been lowering. The roots had not moved. The dark stone had offered no shape he could separate from the wall.
Then the avatar had simply stopped existing.
There was no combat log, damage source, or creature name. The Engine had recorded the death and offered nothing whatsoever about its cause.
Jin lay back and looked at the ceiling.
Something standing still. Tremor Sense would never have seen it. That limitation was printed on the panel, and he had read it aloud to Wren Halloway in a Rift.
Or something inside the nest that isn’t an ordinary mantis. The colony had a commander. Nothing said it had only one thing worth protecting.
Or the tree.
He disliked that possibility and could not dismiss it. Something had grown a single fruit in a chamber full of predators, and the predators had left it alone.
Or a mechanism. Old mining, unstable tier, something that drops.
Or something I don’t have a category for yet.
He could not choose between them because he did not have enough information to choose.
The honest position was simpler: the avatar had been killed at an unknown range by an unknown method, and Jin had observed none of it.
On the floor beside the bunk, the real Glitch slept through everything. Six days rested. Two-minute intervals. Entirely unharmed.
Jin looked at the timer.
01:59:41.
He had moved an intelligent enemy off a doorway it had guarded through every earlier run. He had read a network out of vibration, broken a transmission spine, split a colony’s reporting, and walked through a gap he had built himself.
Then he had died in the final passage before entering the main chamber or getting anywhere near the fruit.
So the commander wasn’t the real danger.
01:59:12.
He watched the number go down.
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