Alyx pushed her way through the streets of the lower city. It was already busy despite the sun barely rising over the horizon. Already, Festival goers were celebrating. Or perhaps, still celebrating from the previous night? The smell of alcohol was heavy in the air, mixing with the heavy spices of festival treats and overpowering the usual unwashed smell of the lower districts.

  “My lady, are you sure we have time for this today?” Telis asked as she followed Alyx. Marco bumbled behind the both of them, his eyes alert. “Should you not be preparing for the final showing?”

  It was the last day of the Festival. Each finalist would get one more arena fight to show off their skills, and then they would all be presented to the dragons this evening. Two of them would be selected as Knights, and their lives would change forever.

  “I have plenty of time. We already arranged for the monster last night. I’ve interviewed as much as I can with both my grandmother and the dragons. My sword is sharpened. My armor is in top shape. We even picked up the clothes for the after-party. You know all that as well as I do.”

  “Then you should be resting and focusing your soul, not pushing through the crowds like a madwoman on a mission,” Telis said.

  “I am not. I am walking at a perfectly normal,” though perhaps brisk, “pace. I have purpose.”

  “Why exactly are we goin’ to the Academy again?” Marco asked from the back.

  “I seem to have missed that explanation as well,” Telis said.

  Alyx bit her lip. There was too much she couldn’t explain. “I need to get something we found appraised.”

  “Does it need to happen before the tournament?” Telis asked.

  No. Probably not. It was a mystery she’d left alone plenty long so far.

  And yet. Her hand clenched around the orb in her pocket. The whispers grew louder. The impulse to shove the orb in her mouth grew.

  She forced her hand to relax.

  It was getting worse. She hadn’t felt anything off about the Keeper’s Cores when she’d picked them up in the Catacombs. She had barely considered picking them up. Only the vague memory of Cass collecting one from the Caretaker in the Deep had prompted her to do so.

  She’d mostly forgotten about it until the other night when she’d interrogated Cass about it. But, since she’d dug it out of her pack, she’d realized that the whispers she had been hearing had started inside the Catacombs. When exactly? After the blessing. Some point on the way back up?

  And the whispering had only gotten worse since then. Almost like discovering the source had increased the thing’s activity.

  The whispers stopped if she walked away from it, but she could feel herself becoming less and less willing to step away from it as time went on.

  Worst of all, it had something to do with Cass. Or Salos, she supposed.

  Which made it demonic.

  But why did she want it so badly?

  That was what she was here to find out.

  The tower poked out between the crowded buildings, and Alyx’s steps sped up.

  “I have some free time,” Alyx said, finally answering the question. “Why waste the time?”

  She pushed open the tower doors before they could argue further.

  The morning of the day of Binding, there was no one inside. Alyx quickly made her way to the receptionist’s desk. “I need to get an object appraised.”

  The receptionist looked up at Alyx, a dead look in their eyes. “Really?”

  Alyx nodded.

  “Today?”

  Alyx nodded again.

  “Did you just get out of the Catacombs or something? You know appraisals are double price until the end of the Festival due to reduced staff availability?”

  Alyx nodded.

  The receptionist shrugged. “What kind of object?”

  Alyx hesitated. She didn’t know how worried she should be about it. Was it safe to show it off here? Marco had already seen it. Alyx herself hadn’t initially thought much of it. She set it on the counter. “This.”

  The receptionist reached out for it. “May I?”

  Alyx nodded.

  The receptionist turned it over. “Huh. What are the odds of seeing two of these today?”

  “Two of them?” Alyx asked.

  The receptionist shrugged. “Natural magic manifestation. You’re in luck. We have an appraiser for that today. Someone is with them right now, but if you’ll wait a minute—“

  Kohen walked out of the room behind the counter.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  “Oh, that was the customer. Go ahead back,” the receptionist said.

  “What are you doing here?” Kohen asked.

  “Could ask you the same thing,” Alyx said.

  He smirked. “Desperately chasing any last leads to find an edge?”

  “Why would I need to?” Alyx asked. “I have the Major Blessing. Between me, with the Major Blessing, and Champion Fioreya, I think this year’s dragon knights have already been decided. Why are you still sneaking around? Just relax and let the inevitability happen.”

  He clenched his jaw. “We’ll see about that.”

  Alyx rolled her eyes as he huffed out of the room. He wasn’t fooling anyone. Her victory was certain. Everyone else was playing for second place.

  “This way?” Alyx asked, pointing at the door Kohen had come out of.

  The receptionist nodded.

  “Wait here,” Alyx said to Telis and Marco and went in.

  Inside was a small room, barely bigger than a closet, predominantly filled with a table and a pair of chairs. A man sat inside with his back to the wall. “Oh. Another customer? Already?”

  “I have something I need appraised,” Alyx said as she closed the door and slipped into the second chair. She set the orb down in front of the man. “Can you tell me what this is, what its value might be, and what uses it has?”

  His eyebrows went up. “Oh. Look at that. Another one.”

  “That’s what the receptionist outside said, too,” Alyx commented.

  “Ah, excuse the comment, lady. I’d never seen one before this morning, so getting two, one right after the other, is unusual.”

  “Kohan, the man before me, brought one in too?” Alyx asked.

  “You know the gentleman? Yes. He came asking about a very similar orb. It looks a lot like a Concept Gem in form and general make-up, doesn’t it? Yet, it is certainly not one. Isn’t it interesting?”

  “You’re getting ahead of yourself,” Alyx said. “Start at the beginning.”

  “Yes, yes. Apologies,” the man said. He tapped the orb and said, “This is a ‘core.’ It is a crystallized ball of Potential, just like a Concept Gem.”

  “But it isn’t a Concept Gem,” Alyx said.

  The man nodded. “Not even remotely. It looks like someone took the premise of a Concept Gem, storing a highly condensed and aspected collection of Potential, and applied it to… well, I’m not sure what. Not a Concept, though. I can tell you that much.

  “More interestingly, it has a remarkably low presence. In fact, if it was not so highly condensed, we might not be able to perceive it at all. I would speculate its natural state has next to no presence.”

  A literal soul if Cass was to be believed.

  “As for value, it’s hard to say,” the man continued. “My previous client claimed his was harvested off a monster in the Catacombs, which might make it of interest to curio collectors, as it’s so rare. But, given that rarity, I can’t say I know of any uses for it.”

  Alyx frowned. It would be just like Cass for it to be useless to everyone else. But no, Kohen had one too. He’d seemed pleased with himself when he’d left a minute ago. There must be something else they could do with these.

  “You said these were crystallized Potential?” Alyx asked. “Couldn’t it be used as a power source for an enchantment?”

  He shook his head. “No, the Potential is not nearly orderly enough for that. “How much do you know about physical structure? About the difference between, say, glass and a crystal, like quartz?”

  Alyx shrugged.

  “Ah, too bad. That would have helped. Let me try to summarize. Quartz is a true crystal. Its internals are orderly and laid out in repeating patterns in every direction. Most consumable gems and the like follow a similar pattern in their potential structure.

  “On the other hand, despite looking very much like quartz under the right circumstances, glass is not a crystal. Its structure is internally messy. There may be repeated motifs, but you cannot describe the entirety of the structure with any single sub-pattern. That’s what we are looking at here.” He tapped the core for emphasis.

  “What does that mean?” Alyx asked.

  “It means that the structure is too irregular internally to be used to power an enchantment. How much do you know about enchanting?”

  Alyx shook her head. She knew the little bit which was common knowledge, but not much more.

  “Well, let’s put it like this: when a mage lays down runes to be powered by an external source, they need to describe where to find that energy. Mana Crystals are excellent because you can shape them to pool that energy in a single place because of their regular structure.”

  “And you can’t do that with this?” Alyx asked.

  He shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to try.”

  “There must be some way to extract the power from this thing,” Alyx said.

  He shrugged. “Runes aren’t the way to do it. You need something much more flexible.” He hesitated, then added, “I don’t recommend this because who knows what’ll happen if you do, but it’s possible your body might be able to extract the energy inside it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He tapped the table, his brow furrowed. “A body’s primary job is absorbing potential. That’s how you level up. This thing,” he tapped the core again, “isn’t particularly stable as far as I can tell. Under the pressure of your aura, it might burst. If it bursts inside your body, that potential will have nowhere to go but into you. Maybe.”

  “What happens then?” Alyx asked.

  He shook his head. “If I’m right, this is possibly a natural experience stone. Perhaps that is what the ancients modeled their mysterious experience stones after. If I’m right, you should get a burst of experience. Enough to level up several times, probably.

  “If I’m wrong though…” He shrugged. “Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe you’ll explode. I don’t know.”

  Alyx tapped the table, thinking. A level booster, then? Was that all this was? Was that why her body was hungry for it?

  It was plausible. The Blessing was supposed to have opened her up for the binding between her and her dragon. Part of that would change her stats and skills as she and her dragon paired.

  Perhaps, unlisted among its effects, it also increased the ease at which one gathered experience.

  Plausible.

  But that didn’t explain Cass’s reaction to it. Or Cass’s explanation of it.

  Cass could be wrong. Salos could be lying. But if this was the truth, she didn’t see how an elaborate lie like the story those two were spinning was useful to them.

  “The item description when I Identified it said something about ‘crystallized fragment of a soul,’” Alyx said. “Do you know what that means?”

  He shook his head. “Occasionally, the System provides fanciful descriptions. Let me assure you crystallizing souls is impossible. It certainly wouldn’t happen naturally on the death of a monster.”

  “Humor me,” Alyx said. “What would the ramifications be of consuming this like you described if this was a soul? Or part of one?”

  His face blanched at the thought. “An unpleasant idea, certainly. I don’t know. I will profess souls are quite a ways outside my area of expertise, and, you may not know this, but in truth, they are a highly restricted, almost taboo, area of research. I can pass your question on to a colleague who might have speculation in another department, but she’s out until next week, and even then, it would only be speculation.”

  Alyx shook her head. She didn’t need this speculation being spread around more than necessary.

  She didn’t have the answers she wanted at all. But how did she ask about her cravings for it without raising alarms?

  There wasn’t a good answer to that. For now, she’d leave it alone. She could ignore the whispers.