Chapter 107: Beads
Rhayne’s fingers are hooked into the back of my shirt.
She hasn’t let go since we turned around to walk back down the slope. Not gripping—hooking. Two fingers through the fabric, maintaining contact the way a child holds onto a parent’s coat in a crowd.
She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t need to.
I let her.
Oliver reads the situation before I have to explain it.
He taps Lola’s shoulder and points toward a stall selling mechanical salvage—springs, pressure valves, couplings.
Lola’s head turns. Her eyes lock.
Oliver steers her away from us without making it obvious.
Good man.
We head back to the creep lab.
We enter the Blue Light District. Past the blanket. Past the old man. Through the workshop—forge, weapons racks, the smell of cold metal and cured leather again. Boris pulls two stools from beneath a low workbench and drops them on opposite sides of a scarred wooden table.
He sits. I sit. Rhayne stands behind me, her fingers still in my shirt.
Boris leans forward. Elbows on the table. Hands clasped.
"The erosion isn’t about only time," he starts. No preamble. "I told you it was usage, because the simple version is easier to swallow. The truth is uglier."
I wait.
"It’s about active use. Ocean’s Law doesn’t care how long you’ve been here. It cares whether you’re engaging with it. Fighting. Killing. Using skills to push your rank. As long as you’re active—as long as you’re doing what the system built you to do—the erosion crawls. Slow. Manageable."
He unclenches his hands. Opens them. Stares at his palms.
"But the second you stop? The second you step back from the front line, stop activating skills, stop feeding the system kills and OXI expenditure—it accelerates. Your body remembers how to fight. Your muscles keep the memory. But the system doesn’t care about muscle memory. It wants active participation. Without it..."
He doesn’t finish. He just gestures toward the back room. Toward the beaded curtain.
I look at Rhayne. She’s pale. Her fingers tighten in my shirt.
"What are you doing to them back there?" I ask. Flat. No judgment. Just data.
Boris reaches into his coat and produces a small leather pouch. He opens it and tips the contents onto the table.
Beads. Small, translucent, slightly iridescent. Each one about the size of a pea, glowing with a faint internal light that pulses in a rhythm I recognize—the same slow, organic cadence as the tower on the horizon.
"Leviathanic crystal," Boris says. "We extracted these from the base of the tower one year ago, when we could still get close. They’re fragments of whatever that thing is made of."
I stare at the beads. My hand moves before my brain authorizes it—reaching into my own inventory, pulling out the pouch I’ve been carrying since the bioluminescent biome.
I tip my beads onto the table beside his.
Identical. Same size. Same iridescence. Same pulse.
Boris’s eyes widen. First time I’ve seen genuine surprise on his face.
"Where did you get those?"
"A glitched zone. Before we reached Lost Ark. The biome was unstable—magenta static, corrupted wildlife. These were embedded in the root structure of a massive, titanic leviathan."
Boris picks up one of mine. Rolls it between his fingers. Holds it to the blue light overhead. His brow furrows.
"We got ours from the tower. You got yours from a leviathan." He sets the bead down carefully. "Same material. Different source. I won’t even ask you how did you survive..."
He’s quiet for a moment. Processing.
"The people who arrive in Lost Ark—they don’t come from glitch zones," he says. "They come from functional stations. Normal cities in Thirstfall. One day they board a train, or walk through a portal, or enter a dungeon—and something goes wrong. They end up here. No explanation. No pattern."
"How did you get here?"
Boris leans back. The stool creaks under his weight.
"Second expansion. Our train was two days out from the Deep when something hit us. Not a simple monster—a Leviathan. The real thing. Something big enough that its attacks didn’t just damage the train. They ruptured the dimensional fabric around it."
He pauses. Runs a hand through his beard.
"One second we were in a tunnel. Next second the tunnel wasn’t there anymore. We fell through something—not a portal, not a gate. A tear. Landed here. Thirty-seven people. That was almost two years ago."
"And the beads?" I push. "What do they do?"
Boris picks up the leather pouch. Pours the beads back in slowly, one by one.
"When you dissolve them in a solution—OXI base, iron sulfate, a few other compounds we’ve figured out through trial and error—it produces a tincture. We administer it to the people who’ve lost their system completely. The ones whose minds are... gone."
"And?"
"It stabilizes them. Doesn’t heal. Doesn’t restore. Just... quiets the noise. They stop screaming. Stop hurting themselves. Stop attacking people. They become functional enough to exist without being a danger."
"Functional," I repeat. "Apathetic. Controlled."
"Controlled enough to not bash their skulls against a wall at three in the morning." Boris’s voice drops. "You saw the chains on the main road. That’s what happens without the tincture. They hurt themselves. They hurt others. They don’t know who they are anymore."
The silence stretches. Rhayne’s fingers tremble against my back.
"So they make great slaves," I say. The words taste like rust.
Boris doesn’t flinch. "And what would you have me do? Build prisons? We don’t have the resources. We don’t have the manpower. And every Red Tide creates more of them." He looks at me with eyes that stopped apologizing for this a long time ago. "The ones who can work, work. The ones who can’t, we keep alive. That’s the deal. Nobody here chose it. It’s just what’s left."
I hold his gaze. He holds mine. Neither of us blinks.
Then I push my entire pouch of beads across the table.
"Keep them."
Boris looks at the pouch. Then at me. "What do you want?"
"Two weapons. One for me. One for Rhayne."
His eyebrows climb.
"She’s going to need one." I keep my voice steady. "Starting now."
I look over my shoulder at Rhayne. She’s staring at me—her storm-cloud eyes searching my face, trying to read what I’m not saying.
I look away. Down at the scarred wood of the table. At my hands resting on the surface.
I’ll figure this out. I always do.
The words don’t come. For the first time in a long time, I don’t have a plan. Just a direction.
The tower. The answer is in the tower.
It has to be.