Jinx had barely finished admiring the avatar when the cosmetic interface withdrew and left a single narrow bar floating beneath the model's feet. CHARACTER NAME appeared above it in unadorned silver lettering, followed by an empty field and a blinking cursor that somehow managed to feel more demanding than all the questions about anatomy, classes, and hidden contraband Mira had forced him through during the previous hour. Of everything Etheria had asked him to decide, apparently choosing what strangers would call him was the part that made him stand there thinking.
Several names crossed his mind and died before reaching the field. Using Jinx would have been easy, although carrying his real name into a world built around myth and reinvention felt almost aggressively unimaginative, while some of the elaborate Japanese names that would have suited the clothing made him feel as though he were naming another manga character rather than himself. He walked once around the finished model, watching the black-and-violet layers trail behind it, before an older joke returned to him and stubbornly refused to leave.
"Fuck subtlety," he murmured, and the keyboard of pale light appeared beneath his fingers. He entered Lucifer Morningstar, looked at the name sitting beneath that beautiful Heian-era silhouette, and found the combination pretentious enough to become charming again.
The System accepted the first name without objection, which was almost disappointing. A confirmation appeared asking whether Lucifer Morningstar would become his permanent public identity within Etheria, warning him that changes afterward would require uncommon circumstances rather than a convenient cash-shop token, and Jinx skimmed the language once before pressing SUBMIT. He had enough time to wonder whether another menu waited behind it before the entire creation chamber went white.
Light swallowed the model, the platform, the artificial stars and finally Jinx himself. There was no sensation of falling or being transported, only an instant in which every direction became brightness and another in which that brightness acquired temperature, dampness and the distant smell of wet earth. His eyes watered reflexively when darkness returned, which was how he discovered he had eyes to water with.
The forest around him seemed to have been grown specifically for something that disliked daylight.
Black trunks rose in crowded ranks from soil the color of old ash, their bark so dark that moonless stretches between the trees became difficult to separate from the trees themselves. The leaves were darker still, broad overlapping masses of pitch black that drank the weak violet light hanging beneath heavy clouds, and what little vegetation grew between the roots carried bruised shades of indigo, gray and dead purple. Somewhere far away water moved over stone, while closer by an insect produced three hollow chirps and then went abruptly silent.
Jinx remained where the game had placed him.
The first thing he noticed was the cold.
It crept beneath the collar of his new clothes and touched the skin along his neck with such ordinary precision that he rubbed the spot without thinking. Damp air filled his lungs when he breathed; there was weight in the moisture, the faint vegetable rot of leaves decomposing somewhere beyond sight, and something resinous from the black trees that reminded him vaguely of pine until a second breath convinced him it was sweeter. When he shifted his boots in the leaf litter, twigs cracked beneath his weight instead of playing some standardized footstep sound.
He spent the next ten minutes behaving like a man attempting to catch reality lying.
Jinx crouched and pressed his fingers into the soil until grit lodged beneath his nails, then rubbed dirt between thumb and forefinger and watched individual grains cling to the whorls of his skin. He plucked one black leaf and tore it slowly down the middle, studying the wet fibers inside before raising it to his nose and discovering it smelled bitter enough to make his upper lip curl. A tree several paces away received the indignity of being touched, scratched, knocked upon and finally kicked hard enough that the impact traveled from his heel through his ankle and up into the shin.
His new body moved beautifully. The proportions were different enough from his real ones that he had expected some awkward period while the brain reconciled longer legs, a slightly altered center of gravity, unfamiliar weight across the chest and the tremendous mass of hair falling almost to his ass, yet Etheria translated intention so naturally that within minutes he had stopped consciously accounting for any of it. He could feel individual strands brush the backs of his hands whenever the wind moved them.
There was a heartbeat inside his chest.
That detail troubled him more than almost anything else.
Jinx stood absolutely still and pressed two fingers beneath his jaw, finding a pulse there with the same practiced ease he would have used on a patient. The rhythm accelerated when he took several quick breaths, settled when he controlled them, and changed again after he sprinted between two trees and returned. He could taste saliva, feel the slight dryness that followed breathing through his mouth, detect the tension left in his thighs after the run and even experience the faint pressure of his bladder despite knowing with absolute certainty that none of those organs existed anywhere except as information being fed into his nervous system.
Ten minutes were enough for him to stop looking for obvious flaws.
There remained one test.
Touch could be simulated pleasantly enough to fool someone. Temperature, exhaustion and balance could be carefully curated, while smell and taste were ultimately only signals delivered to a brain already accustomed to trusting them. Pain was different, because every presentation Jinx had seen about Etheria danced carefully around how convincingly the commercial system reproduced something people ordinarily spent their lives trying to avoid.
He needed something sharp.
The thought had hardly finished forming when the center of his right forearm twitched.
Jinx looked down.
Something moved beneath the skin.
There was no dramatic System announcement preceding it. The flesh simply tightened as though a muscle had contracted in the wrong direction, a dark ridge traveling from beneath the elbow toward the wrist before splitting into several branching lines. Jinx's expression emptied as bone, muscle and something blacker than either flowed outward through an opening that should have dropped him screaming to the ground.
Instead an ornate sword grew from him.
The process took perhaps three seconds.
A katana emerged from flesh as naturally as a thorn forcing itself through a stem, the blade hardening from wet organic material into dark patterned steel while strange ocular shapes formed along its length. One of them opened before Jinx had decided whether he was imagining it. A purple-black pupil moved once toward the forest and then back toward him.
Jinx stared.
The sword stared back.
Neither seemed particularly certain what etiquette applied.
"Mira," Jinx said eventually, turning his wrist and watching the living eye compensate for the motion. "We are going to have a very long conversation about your interpretation of Kokushibo."
A System window opened beside the blade as though offended that he had reached a conclusion without consulting it. The text occupied far more space than an ordinary weapon card, and the heading alone told him that whatever Mira had given him was no longer simply the sword whose design he remembered from those nights working on Kimetsu no Yaiba.
METSUGAN NO TSUKIKAGE
"Moonshadow Blade of the Thousand Eyes"
Bound Owner: Jinx Nerona
Current Avatar: Lucifer Morningstar
Classification: Unique Biological Weapon / Flesh-Born Armament
Weapon Type: Living Katana → Seven-Branched Sword
Origin: Flesh, bone, blood and ocular tissue of the bound owner
Affinity: Lunar • Organic • Blade • Ocular
Description: Metsugan no Tsukikage is not conventional equipment. The weapon is biologically manifested from the owner's own body, restructuring flesh, bone, blood and supernatural tissue into a living blade that remains connected to its creator even when physically separated. The eyes distributed throughout the weapon are functional organs rather than ornamentation, allowing the sword to perceive its surroundings and providing living growth points from which further weapon structures may emerge.
Organic Blade Construction: The owner may convert biological material into blades and manifest Metsugan through the hand, palm, arm, back or other viable portions of the body. A constructed weapon may remain joined to the body or detach while preserving a biological and magical connection, and damaged sections can later be broken down and rebuilt from available tissue and energy.
Blade Construction: Additional blades may be generated from either the owner or Metsugan itself, with shape determined by intent and sufficient control. Swords, spikes, hooks, claws, cutting ridges and secondary edges may therefore be developed during combat rather than requiring the weapon to retain one permanent silhouette.
Lunar Blade Construction: Lunar power may be condensed along existing organic structures to create blades of moonlight. These formations may reinforce physical edges, extend their cutting reach, produce crescent-shaped surfaces or detach temporarily as independent lunar blades before dispersing.
Eye Blade Construction: Every mature eye grown upon Metsugan serves simultaneously as a sensory organ and a potential weapon-growth point. Blades may erupt directly from their pupils, allowing sudden edges to emerge from the guard, spine, sides or branching structures at angles difficult to predict through conventional swordsmanship.
Seven-Branched Sword Transformation: Metsugan may undergo controlled mutation in which six living branches erupt from the central blade and create a true Seven-Branched configuration. Each branch retains independent biological properties and may lengthen, bend, rotate, retract, regenerate, produce additional eyes or develop further blades according to the owner's control.
Seven-Branched Sword Proficiency: Because every portion of Metsugan remains neurologically linked to its owner, the weapon's unusual geometry does not register as foreign equipment. Its branches can eventually be perceived almost like additional fingers, enabling abnormal precision in trapping, hooking, parrying, disarming and attacks delivered along several vectors at once.
Flesh Recall: A separated Metsugan can be recalled by causing its structure to liquefy into living matter and return to the owner, or it may be dismissed entirely so another can be manifested. Abandoned weapons eventually die and decompose once their connection is deliberately relinquished.
Living Regeneration: Conventional breakage does not permanently destroy Metsugan. Missing blades, branches and ocular structures may be regenerated by supplying sufficient biomass, stamina or supernatural energy, although increasingly catastrophic damage will demand increasingly significant resources from its owner.
Unique Weapon Art — Seven-Eyed Flesh Moon
Metsugan assumes its complete Seven-Branched manifestation and develops one major living eye upon every blade. Organic blades, ocular blades and lunar formations continuously grow across and through one another, allowing the weapon to change between individual attacks; a branch severed during one movement may regenerate into an entirely different shape during the next, while an eye may create an intercepting blade without requiring the wielder to consciously reposition the main weapon.
At complete manifestation, Metsugan no Tsukikage functions less as something held than as an externalized portion of the owner's anatomy. As long as sufficient biological matter and energy remain available, meaningful disarmament becomes extraordinarily difficult because the destroyed or lost weapon can simply be grown again.
Jinx read the window without moving, occasionally glancing from one of its descriptions to the living sword extending from his arm. Mira had taken the foundation he gave her and then apparently asked what would happen if Kokushibo's weapon were allowed to grow without the restrictions of manga choreography, weapon physics or good taste. He reached the description of Seven-Eyed Flesh Moon, imagined the thing covered in open eyes while six branches moved beneath his hands like additional limbs, and silently amended the list of things for which he owed Mira gratitude.
He dismissed the weapon experimentally.
Steel softened beneath his fingers.
The blade lost its reflection first, collapsing into red-black tissue that flowed backward along his hand without spilling a drop onto the ground. The eyes closed one after another before being swallowed into his palm, and within seconds his skin had sealed over until no scar remained.
Jinx stared at the empty hand.
Then he extended it before him, palm upward.
This time he did not merely think weapon. He imagined the blade beginning in the center of the palm and gave the command the same clarity with which he might have tightened a fist.
Metsugan answered.
Pain drove through his hand with exquisite immediacy.
The point of the sword punched through the center of his palm and continued outward while skin split around it. Blood welled hot against his wrist, ran between his fingers and struck the dead leaves beneath him in thick drops, and for perhaps half a second Jinx's mind became magnificently empty beneath the pure electrical fact of being hurt.
He stopped breathing.
His eyes widened.
Then his mouth opened in wonder.
"Oh," he whispered, flexing the fingers around a blade currently passing through the center of his hand. The pain sharpened when he moved them, bright and vicious enough that his shoulders trembled, and the expression that came over his borrowed face would have made Mara reach for the nearest telephone before asking questions. "Oh, you beautiful fucking thing."
The first laugh escaped him quietly.
It sounded almost embarrassed.
Another followed it, deeper this time, and then another until something Jinx had kept chained behind manners, family, education and simple awareness of consequences finally discovered there was no chain attached here. His laughter spread through the black forest and came back from between the trees warped by distance, growing louder until birds erupted from the canopy in a frantic wave and some unseen creature crashed away through the undergrowth.
Jinx bent forward around the blade, hair spilling over his shoulders while blood pattered from his palm. His laughter had ceased resembling ordinary amusement by then; it came from too deep, almost breathless at first and then rich enough to make his ribs ache, the sort of delighted, dangerous sound that would have made even someone accustomed to madness reconsider whether remaining nearby represented good judgment.
"I can feel it."
He raised the injured hand into the dim light and watched blood travel down his wrist.
Every pulse hurt.
Every heartbeat moved the blade against something inside him and sent another clean line of pain racing toward the elbow.
Jinx smiled until his teeth showed.
"I can actually fucking feel it."
There had always been something wrong with Jinx when fighting began.
His parents discovered that before he was old enough to understand why adults became frightened by certain kinds of children. Jinx was capable of empathy in ordinary life, sometimes too much of it, yet once a confrontation crossed whatever private threshold his mind classified as combat, a very old set of rules seemed to take possession of him. Teachers spoke about restraint, proportional responses and stopping once someone was no longer a threat; Jinx understood every word academically and then forgot why any of them mattered the instant someone hit him with enough conviction.
At eight, a larger boy bloodied his mouth during a schoolyard fight and Jinx smiled at the taste. The teacher who separated them remembered that smile more clearly than the fight itself, because the other boy had already wanted out while Jinx was only beginning to become interested. At twelve, a supervised sparring match ended when his partner went down and the instructor physically caught Jinx around the chest because Jinx had already begun following him toward the floor, not from anger but from the calm assumption that a fallen opponent remained part of the fight until incapable of continuing it.
The evaluations afterward produced words his parents hated.
Combat-specific moral disengagement. Abnormally low aversion to physical risk. Elevated reward response under pain. Aggressive persistence beyond ordinary competitive inhibition.
His grandfather used much simpler language.
The boy thinks like someone born before referees.
That had frightened his father far more than any diagnosis.
The old man who created Slaughter Art in Vietnam understood exactly what he was looking at because some portion of the same instinct had survived inside him. His art demanded that every strike carry complete belief in ending the battle, that there be no such thing as a probing attack once genuine combat began, but years of war had taught him when to put that conviction away. Jinx had learned the technique beautifully and absorbed its philosophy far too naturally.
Pain made the problem worse.
Being hurt inside a fight did something deeply inconvenient to him. The first shock caused the normal reaction—adrenaline, narrowed perception, accelerated heart rate—but instead of creating fear, the sensation frequently sharpened into exhilaration; pain meant the opponent could reach him, which meant the opponent was real, which meant the contest had finally become interesting. By his teens, his parents had stopped signing waivers for full-contact tournaments, discouraged contact sports, warned schools not to let him settle arguments physically and spent an exhausting amount of effort making certain Jinx's fascination with combat remained technique rather than opportunity.
They had been right to worry.
Jinx knew that better than anyone.
He remembered Vivienne kneeling in front of him after one school fight, holding ice against his split lip while her expression carried a fear so naked it had briefly sobered him. His father stood behind her arguing with someone on the telephone about suspension paperwork, and Jinx—still thirteen, still trembling with leftover adrenaline—had been thinking almost entirely about the moment the other boy finally hit hard enough to make his vision flash.
The memory should have embarrassed him.
Instead, standing beneath Etheria's black trees with a living katana through his palm, it suddenly seemed like the story of someone who had spent his entire life being taught how carefully he had to exist.
Jinx straightened.
His laughter faded gradually, though the smile remained.
"Do you know what they spent years teaching me?" he asked the forest, Mira, Etheria or perhaps no one at all. He pulled the sword another inch through his hand just to feel what happened, shuddered pleasantly at the vicious flare that followed, and looked toward the dark canopy with violet eyes gone almost fever-bright. "How to stop."
His voice carried strangely between the trees.
"Pull the strike. Stop at the bell. Don't follow somebody down. Don't hit here, don't cut there, don't use that technique because the human body is fragile and everybody has parents waiting for them to come home." He laughed again, quieter now, almost fond of the absurdity of it. "My whole life has been people telling me the interesting part has consequences."
Blood slid from his fingertips.
Jinx turned the hand over and watched it fall.
"And they were right."
That admission tasted surprisingly good.
"In the real world, if I want to know what happens after somebody breaks an arm and keeps fighting, that person has to live with the arm. If I want to test a sword properly, somebody can die. If I decide to find out which one of us is really willing to keep standing, there are hospitals afterward, police, funerals, mothers crying in hallways, and some poor bastard whose life became the price of my curiosity."
His grin widened as he looked around at the impossible forest.
"But here?"
The wind moved through his long hair and carried the copper smell of his own blood back across his face. Somewhere beyond the black trees, something howled once and then fell silent, and Jinx listened with the attention of a predator hearing another animal claim territory.
"Here I can lose an arm and grow another one. I can bleed until this body forgets what blood is supposed to look like, get torn apart by something stronger than me, crawl back out after dying and ask it to do better next time." His fingers tightened around the living blade and his voice grew warmer with every word, the dangerous excitement no longer bothering to disguise itself. "I can finally find people who don't need me to be gentle."
Something stirred beneath his skin.
Jinx barely noticed.
"I can fight someone with everything I have and, if they're good enough, they can answer with everything they have. No teachers diving between us. No father dragging me backward. No doctors explaining why enjoying a broken rib is apparently an inappropriate response to having one."
The air became heavy.
A tiny spark snapped from his shoulder and struck a leaf drifting nearby.
The leaf ceased to exist.
Jinx's eyes moved toward the empty space where it had been, but his thoughts were already running too hot for surprise to take hold. Black electricity crawled down his right arm, its edges burning with a deep magenta that seemed far too vivid for the moonless forest, and another strand jumped from his hip into a nearby trunk.
The tree exploded.
Not burned.
Exploded.
Bark and black wood burst outward in a shower of fragments while the lightning continued through it and vanished somewhere in the forest beyond. Jinx stared at the ruined trunk for half a second before the laughter returned, lower than before and infinitely more delighted.
"Oh, this is going to be bad."
Lightning answered him.
Black-magenta arcs erupted from his body in branching lashes, striking roots, trunks, stones and empty air with enough violence that every contact point burst apart. The earth around his boots split into thin glowing fractures, dead leaves blasted outward in circles, and trees that had probably stood untouched for centuries broke beneath forces Jinx had not consciously summoned.
His hair lifted around him.
The living eyes along Metsugan opened.
Every one of them turned upward.
Jinx followed their gaze.
Clouds covered the entire sky, thick black masses packed so heavily above the forest that not even a star had been visible since his arrival. The pressure gathering around him climbed anyway, a sensation deeper than electricity and too large to belong comfortably inside one person, until the surrounding woods began groaning beneath it.
For most of his life, Jinx had treated that part of himself like contraband.
Keep it hidden.
Keep it amused.
Give it games, controlled training, drawings, stories and imaginary monsters. Let Slaughter Art exist in forms and exercises instead of somebody's flesh. Never permit the ancient, ugly certainty underneath it to forget that civilization had rules for very good reasons.
Etheria had just offered him another answer.
Jinx tipped his face toward the clouds, the sword still embedded through his bleeding hand, and his smile lost the last trace of embarrassment.
"I don't have to pretend here," he said, and there was almost tenderness in the realization. "I don't have to turn every fight into a sport so everybody can go home feeling civilized. If something comes for my life, I can answer like it actually means it. If it gets back up, I'll put it down again. If it takes a hundred strikes, then every single one of those hundred strikes will be the one I believe ends it."
Metsugan trembled in his hand.
The lightning thickened.
"And if somebody out there thinks they're immortal…"
Jinx breathed in, slow and deep, until the cold night filled lungs that did not truly exist.
"Good."
His eyes narrowed with something almost joyous.
"I've always wanted enough time to stop holding back."
The forest disappeared beneath black and magenta light.
Electricity detonated outward with a sound too deep to resemble ordinary thunder, rolling across the trees as entire sections of woodland bent away from him. Great crooked arcs climbed instead of falling, tearing from Jinx toward the heavens like inverted lightning, and when they struck the cloud cover the darkness overhead split along a jagged line stretching from one horizon to the other.
Clouds recoiled from the wound in the sky.
For several breathtaking seconds the night opened.
A vast moon hung beyond it, silver-white and impossibly clear, bathing the ruined forest in cold light while black-magenta electricity continued crawling through the edges of the divided clouds. Jinx stood beneath it with blood on his hand, living eyes open along his sword and laughter still breaking quietly through his breathing, looking for the first time since entering Etheria less like someone who had created an avatar named Lucifer Morningstar and more like someone the name might eventually have been waiting for.
Somewhere far beyond the shattered trees, creatures had already begun fleeing the pressure rolling through the forest.
Jinx did not chase them.
He remained beneath the uncovered moon for a while, flexing his wounded hand around Metsugan and discovering that pain still answered every movement faithfully. The grin on his face softened only slightly as the first of the severed clouds began creeping back across the silver sky, because after twenty-two years of being warned what could happen if he ever treated a real fight the way his instincts wanted him to, Etheria had finally given him a place where he could ask the question properly.
Now he only needed to find something willing to answer it.
It took me close to an hour to stop acting like I had been let out of a cage.
I had no idea how much of that hour I spent laughing and how much I spent actually testing things. At some point the distinction stopped mattering. I ran until the black trees blurred past me, let Metsugan tear its way out through my forearm twice simply because the second place hurt differently from the first, and spent an embarrassingly long time trying to make the black-magenta lightning come back after it finally began fading from the air around me. Every time I thought I had myself under control, I would remember that I could feel all of this—the impact when my foot hit the ground, the cut of a branch across my cheek, the ache left behind when I landed badly—and that stupid grin would come back.
The forest around the spawn point looked considerably worse by the time I finally sat down. A few of the black trunks had been split open, dead leaves had been thrown into every nearby bush, and there was a shallow crater where one of those lightning arcs had hit the ground hard enough to make me reconsider standing near myself when I got excited. The clouds had started crawling back over the moon too, and without that white light the forest went dark fast, until Metsugan's living eyes were some of the brighter things around me whenever they caught what little light remained.
I rested the sword across my lap and tried working a knot out of my hair with my fingers. The thing had somehow collected half the forest while I was running, which was impressive considering it had only been hanging down near my ass for an hour, and I was halfway through deciding that my first purchase in Etheria was going to be a comb when I rubbed my hands together.
My right palm slid over my left without catching on anything.
I stopped working on my hair and looked down.
For a second I thought I had the wrong hand, which was stupid enough that I actually checked the other one before coming back to the first. The center of my palm should have looked ruined. Metsugan had come straight through it earlier, not some little needle prick either; I had watched flesh split around the blade, watched blood run between my fingers, and then made the excellent decision to move the sword around because apparently pain plus freedom had temporarily taken custody of my brain.
There was nothing there now. I stretched my fingers apart, brought the hand closer to my face, rubbed my thumb over the exact place where the wound had been and then pressed harder because maybe Etheria had simulated scar tissue so well I simply had not noticed it. The skin felt exactly like the rest of my palm.
That pulled some of the leftover excitement out of me.
I checked my forearm next. Gone. The little cut along my shoulder from when I had tried making a blade come out backward was gone too, and when I pulled part of the robe aside to inspect my ribs, the scratches from running through the woods had vanished with everything else.
I sat there staring at my own stomach for a while, trying to remember whether I had missed something obvious during character creation. Etheria had made a point of its injury rules before launch. A normal human-shaped player did not just sit around and regenerate HP because the game felt charitable; either you had something that healed you, somebody else healed you, or you found a potion and hoped whatever was trying to kill you waited politely while you drank it.
I had done none of those things.
"Status," I said, and immediately hated that saying it aloud made me sound like I had been waiting my entire life to get isekai'd.
The menu unfolded anyway.
I barely looked at the name because I knew what I had typed. My eyes hit Level One, went down another line, and then came back so quickly I actually moved my head as if that would somehow help.
LUCIFER MORNINGSTAR
Level: 1
Race: Corrupted Lunarian — Fallen/Lunarian Hybrid
Primary Element: Water
Secondary Elements: Cold • Underworld • Godslayer Magic • Fire
Class Set: Cursed User • Godskin Celebrant • Frost Witch • Underworld Mage • Fallen • Ice Barrier
Titles: ??? • ??? • Conqueror Haki User
I read Corrupted Lunarian once, looked down at Fallen/Lunarian Hybrid, and then went back to the first word because apparently reading it twice would make me remember selecting it. I hadn't. I remembered the scan, the class list, Cursed hiding in the corner, Mira's ridiculous roulette, the Devil Fruit, building my body, and naming myself Lucifer Morningstar; nowhere in there had anybody asked whether I wanted to become whatever a corrupted Lunarian was.
I touched the race name.
A second window opened just enough to irritate me.
CORRUPTED LUNARIAN — FALLEN/LUNARIAN HYBRID
Further racial information must be discovered.
I waited.
That was it.
"Right. Of course."
I went back to the overview, intending to check the race modifiers, and instead noticed Ice Barrier sitting at the end of my class list. That made me forget about the healing for a few seconds because Mira's roulette had given me Godskin Celebrant, Frost Witch and Underworld Mage, while Fallen could at least be blamed on whatever had happened to my race. Ice Barrier had simply arrived without an invitation.
I tapped it and got a class window full of locks.
There was enough visible text to tell me it had something to do with water and cold, but not enough to explain where it came from. I closed it, opened it again because maybe I had missed a line, then gave up when the same locks stared back at me.
That was when Conqueror Haki User caught my eye.
I stopped moving the windows around.
The memory came back too clearly: black and magenta crawling off my skin, pressure rolling through the forest, whole trees breaking apart, then the clouds splitting over me until the moon came through. I had been a little busy enjoying the moment to name whatever was happening.
"Well. That answers one thing."
I touched the title.
CONQUEROR HAKI USER
Additional information unavailable at current proficiency.
It did not, in fact, answer one thing.
I tapped it again just in case Etheria respected persistence more than intelligence. The same sentence appeared, so I dragged that window aside and found the resource page underneath it.
PRIMARY RESOURCES
Stat
Value
HP
2,020 / 2,020
MP
600 / 600
CE
13,000 / 13,000
Stamina
2,650 / 2,650
EXP
0 / 1,000
Level
1
Player Rank
Rookie I
Rank Points
0 RP
Fame
0%
I had already reached CE before the HP number registered properly, so my eyes bounced back up.
Two thousand and twenty out of two thousand and twenty.
I turned my palm over again.
Full.
There was no little green regeneration symbol beside the number, no status effect crawling beneath it, nothing telling me a potion or class passive had been working in the background. My hand looked like it had never been opened at all.
Then my eyes went back down.
13,000 / 13,000 CE.
I stared at it long enough that I lost track of the healing question again.
"Thirteen thousand?"
I touched CE.
CURSED ENERGY
Additional information unavailable.
I gave the window a look that would have been much more effective if software had feelings. Cursed Energy was not exactly difficult to identify when I had a class called Cursed User, but it had never appeared on any of Etheria's public interfaces, and thirteen thousand of anything at Level One looked suspicious unless the average player started with a small country's worth of resource bars.
I opened Cursed User from the class list. Most of it was locked.
I went back to CE.
Still thirteen thousand.
"Mira, you better not have made me a fucking boss character."
Nothing answered me, which probably meant she was finally doing whatever actual job she had disappeared back to.
The Stamina number was almost as stupid at 2,650, but before I could decide what that meant, I noticed my attributes had opened in another pane because I had apparently brushed the menu while moving things around.
CORE ATTRIBUTES
Attribute
Lv. 1 Value
Vigor
16
Mind
24
Endurance
14
Strength
10
Dexterity
20
Intelligence
49
Faith
17
Arcane
25
Luck
12
Forty-nine Intelligence made me pause for completely different reasons.
I looked at it, looked away, then came back because I liked it more than I should have. If the scan had actually used my real knowledge and neurological profile to influence the starting values, it made sense, although seeing Strength sitting down at ten beside it felt a little insulting until I remembered I had built myself to look like somebody's terrifying court princess rather than a bodybuilder.
Then I reached Luck.
Twelve.
I thought about the roulette.
Kokushibo's sword. Godskin Celebrant. Frost Witch. Underworld Mage. Two Epic weapons.
Twelve.
I looked up toward the clouds.
"Mira."
No answer.
"You cheated."
The forest gave me wind through the branches and nothing else.
I smiled anyway because twelve was almost funnier than if the stat had been ninety-nine. Either Mira had adjusted those rolls directly or the roulette had not been using this Luck stat at all, and I could already imagine her sitting somewhere with that stupid little pleased look she got whenever she knew something I didn't.
I was still thinking about that when the elemental section opened.
ELEMENTAL AFFINITIES
Godslayer Magic — SSS
Cold — S
Underworld — S
Water — EX
Fire — SS
I skimmed Godslayer first and nearly moved past the rest before EX stopped me.
Water.
I went back to the top of the main screen.
Primary Element: Water.
Then back down.
Water — EX.
I frowned at it for a while because I had absolutely no memory of choosing Water. Frost Witch accounted for Cold, Godskin probably accounted for at least some of Fire and Godslayer Magic, Underworld Mage was not exactly subtle about Underworld, but Water had apparently wandered into character creation, made itself my primary element and then somehow outranked everything else.
I touched it.
Nothing.
I did it again.
Additional information unavailable.
"Why?"
The menu did not feel any sudden obligation to answer.
My first thought was the Devil Fruit.
That lasted until I realized I had no idea what the Fruit actually did, which meant blaming it for Water was basically blaming the nearest mysterious thing because I had run out of suspects. I tried opening a description for the Fruit and found nothing obvious connected to it anywhere on the status screen, which only made the problem worse.
I went back to Water.
Still EX.
Something about seeing that rating bothered me more than the thirteen thousand Cursed Energy. Maybe because CE at least had Cursed User sitting there waving a sign beside it, whereas Water had arrived like an old friend I had somehow forgotten meeting.
I left the window open and finally got to the racial modifiers.
RACIAL MODIFIERS — CORRUPTED LUNARIAN
Modifier
Effect
HP
+126%
MP
+15%
Magic Resistance
+15%
Fire Resistance
+45%
Cold Resistance
+20%
Dark / Curse Resistance
+25%
Holy Resistance
+35%
Demonic Resistance
−30%
Defense while Back Flame is Active
+120%
Speed while Back Flame is Inactive
+100%
Fire Attack while Back Flame is Active
+42%
The first line dragged me straight back to what I was supposed to be investigating.
HP +126%.
That could explain why I had so much health.
It could not explain why I had all of it back.
I read the rest more slowly, then stopped at the back flame. That part was familiar enough from Lunarians that I immediately reached behind myself, only to grab a handful of my own hair and have to pull it over one shoulder before I could properly feel along my back.
No flame.
I stood up from the root, twisted around uselessly, then finally tried simply thinking about it. Back flame.
Nothing.
I pictured the Lunarian flame clearly.
Still nothing.
Then I remembered what had happened with Conqueror's Haki when I had been too excited to think properly, and for the next few seconds I stood in the middle of a pitch-black forest trying to make myself feel strongly enough about something that my back might catch fire. The stupidity of what I was doing reached me before the flame did.
I sat back down.
"That one can wait."
Demonic Resistance: −30% was stranger.
Almost everything else on the race sheet was generous to the point of being rude, and then demonic effects apparently received special permission to beat my ass thirty percent harder. I opened the modifier and got Racial incompatibility detected, which meant absolutely nothing to me except that there was probably some disagreement going on between the Fallen and Lunarian halves of whatever I had become.
I tried the race information again.
Still locked.
Fine.
Healing.
I had somehow spent ten minutes investigating everything except the reason I opened the menu.
I pulled up the ability list and started searching through anything that could plausibly restore HP. There were racial abilities, class abilities, Metsugan's biological functions, several Cursed User entries I could not even read yet, and more locks than I cared to count, so I stopped trying to understand the whole screen and started hunting words.
Regeneration.
Nothing.
Healing.
Nothing useful.
Recovery.
Nothing that matched.
I checked Godskin Celebrant next because flesh and regeneration felt like they might live in the same ugly neighborhood. It gave me black flame, ritual effects, anti-divine traits and several things I could not use yet, but nothing that said sit around for an hour and reconstruct your hand.
Frost Witch was no help.
Underworld Mage had something about restoring spiritual damage that I could not access.
Fallen had resistances and corrupted holy abilities.
Ice Barrier mostly refused to speak to me at all.
Then I returned to Cursed User.
One branch of the class tree bothered me immediately because a slot near the bottom had no name.
Not question marks.
Nothing.
Just a dark space connected to several other locked abilities.
I touched it.
The whole class window closed.
I stared at the empty air.
A few seconds later I reopened it and touched the same place again.
Closed.
I sat there with my finger still raised.
"Well, now I'm definitely touching you later."
That got me thinking about the two hidden titles again, so I went back to the overview and opened them.
???
Nothing.
The second ??? did exactly as much.
I tried holding the first one instead of tapping.
Nothing.
I switched to the second, dragged it, double-tapped it, then felt stupid enough to stop before I started verbally negotiating with punctuation.
Neither title wanted me to know what it was.
I let all the menus hang in front of me and leaned back against the tree.
The forest had settled while I was poking through myself. Somewhere off to my left, something small moved through the dead leaves and froze when I turned my head toward it, while farther away that same hollow three-note insect call started up again.
I looked at my palm.
Nothing.
I summoned Metsugan once more, but instead of putting it through my hand I let the flesh along the outside of my forearm open and feed the blade outward. There was still pain, bright and sharp as the tissues rearranged themselves, though it no longer surprised me enough to make me laugh.
I watched my HP drop.
That was useful.
When Metsugan finished growing, I dismissed it again and watched the wound close enough to stop bleeding, but my HP did not immediately jump back to full. Whatever had happened earlier was not some instant automatic correction every time the sword damaged me.
I kept the status window open.
One point returned eventually.
Then another.
I leaned forward.
"Oh."
That was the first useful thing I had found in nearly half an hour.
I watched.
The recovery was slow enough that I could have missed it entirely during the first hour because I had been too busy running around like an escaped psychopath. There was still no buff icon and nothing in my visible Skills describing passive HP regeneration, yet the number was climbing on its own.
I pressed my thumb into the fresh wound on my forearm while it continued closing.
That hurt.
Good.
I watched another point come back.
There was no little explanation beside it.
No highlighted ability.
No System message announcing Hidden Regeneration Unlocked or anything else convenient.
Something inside my build was healing me, and Etheria apparently did not think I deserved to know what.
I looked over the status screen again, but this time I did not bother trying to organize it.
Corrupted Lunarian.
Fallen.
Ice Barrier.
Two hidden titles.
Conqueror's Haki.
Thirteen thousand Cursed Energy.
Water at EX.
A Devil Fruit I could not identify.
And somewhere inside all of that, something capable of putting me back together without asking permission.
I should probably have been more worried.
Instead I caught myself smiling.
Not the same smile from earlier. That had been the stupid, hungry thing that appeared when the sword went through my hand and pain suddenly became something I could chase without leaving a hospital bill behind. This one was quieter.
I liked not knowing.
That surprised me a little, because in real life not knowing usually irritated the hell out of me. Machines were supposed to explain themselves if you took enough of them apart, anatomy had structure, art had intent even when the artist lied about it, and most people became easier to understand once you stopped listening to what they claimed they were doing and watched what they actually did.
Etheria was apparently willing to look me in the face and hide half the machine.
I touched the first ??? title one more time.
Nothing.
"Fine."
I closed the title window, then reopened it almost immediately because I wanted to check whether Conqueror Haki User had gained anything after that hour.
It had not.
I closed everything again.
Three seconds later I reopened the main status sheet because I remembered I had never properly looked at the combat ratings.
COMBAT RATINGS
Rating
Value
Physical Attack
72
Magic Attack
184
Godslayer Power
216
Curse Power
198
Healing Power
74
Physical Defense
91
Magic Defense
137
Status Resistance
126
Poise
58
Movement Speed
108
Casting Speed
121
Critical Rate
7%
Critical Damage
150%
I stared at Healing Power: 74 long enough to briefly hope I had finally found the answer.
Then I opened it.
It only affected the strength of healing abilities.
I closed it again.
"Fuck."
For another few minutes I sat beneath that black tree, opening things I had already opened and checking numbers I had already checked. Every so often my attention drifted back to the healing wound on my forearm, and each time there was a little less of it.
Eventually even I had to admit I was not going to solve this by bullying the interface.
I dismissed the menus and let the darkness come back properly around me. The place felt larger without translucent screens filling my vision, and for the first time since arriving I realized I had no idea where the nearest settlement was, what level anything in these woods might be, whether night actually mattered to monsters, or whether I had spawned somewhere players were expected to leave immediately.
Metsugan's eyes shifted along the blade.
I looked at them, then at the forest.
My forearm was almost healed again.
I laughed once under my breath and got to my feet.
Whatever was fixing me could keep its secret for now. I had a race I had never selected, classes I had never rolled, a power system nobody was supposed to know about, and enough unanswered questions that standing beneath one tree poking menus had started to feel like wasting the whole reason I came here.
I took three steps into the forest before stopping.
Then I opened my status again.
I had forgotten to check what Ice Barrier actually did.
"Goddammit."
I turned back toward the root, sat down again, and pulled the class window into view.
Apparently I was not leaving quite yet.