Chapter 126: The Price
Alerts start flashing on my HUD. The red ones. The ones that fire when the system decides you’re about to die if you don’t figure something out, and fast.
[WARNING: SEVERE BLEEDING]
[OXI: 1,340/1,600...]
2
[...1,280...]
[...1,195...]
The number is falling in real time. Not dripping. Plummeting. The blood isn’t leaving through the cut anymore. It’s being ripped out.
The Blood Stone and the armor are pulling together, and my Rank E body is trying to feed a ritual built for Rank A at minimum.
The pain in my chest spreads to my stomach. My hips. My legs. Every heartbeat pushes more blood toward the stone and I feel the emptiness opening up behind it.
[OXI: 987 / 1,600]
"Focus, kid!" Elisser shouts. Her voice has changed—not the angry old woman. Controlled panic. "Don’t lose it! If you black out now, your heart stops before the stone finishes!"
I try to focus. My vision is narrowing. The edges of the world are going gray, then black, like someone pulling a curtain closed around my skull.
[OXI: 743 / 1,600]
Boris takes a step toward me. I catch his fists closing in my peripheral. The bear’s protective instinct firing up.
Oliver drops his canteen and moves in.
"STOP THIS THING! HE’S GOING TO DIE!"
"IT CAN’T BE STOPPED!" Elisser screams back without taking her eyes off the stone. "If you interrupt now, the contract breaks incomplete and takes half his soul with it! That’s worse than dying!"
Oliver freezes. His face is white. I see him searching for something to do and finding nothing. His hands open and close in the air, grabbing at solutions that aren’t there.
[OXI: 581 / 1,600]
Rhayne pulls Lola against her chest. Holds her from behind, Lola’s head tucked under Rhayne’s chin. Lola allows it. She doesn’t want to watch. But her fingers are drumming against Rhayne’s forearms—tap tap tap tap tap—fast, arrhythmic, her stimming cranked to maximum.
I’m on my knees.
When did my knees give out?
I don’t remember falling. But I’m on the ground, the cut arm still raised beside the improvised table, the blood being pulled upward against gravity now.
[OXI: 389 / 1,600]
This is too much. A Rank E body feeding a ritual with Rank A materials and a Rank S Blood Stone. The rank gap isn’t an obstacle. It’s a death sentence. I should have run the math before I said yes.
My free arm buckles. I brace against my thigh on reflex to keep from hitting the ground face-first.
My hand finds the Reentry Pearl in my pocket.
Cold. Smooth. The familiar shape against my fingers.
Mom. Lili. The apartment that smells like mildew. The linoleum peeling in the corner of the kitchen. Lili’s smile when I walked through the door.
I close my fingers around the Pearl.
Not here. Not now. Not like this.
[OXI: 214 / 1,600]
The armor on the table is pulsing to my heartbeat. The black scales have absorbed so much blood that the entire surface has a wet crimson sheen, as if something alive is breathing under the metal.
[OXI: 156 / 1,600]
My vision is a tunnel. I see the stone. I see Elisser. I see the red. Nothing else.
[OXI: 103 / 1,600]
"BRIGID’S HAMMER!"
Elisser raises the hammer. The same small hammer I saw her use on the shuriken now is bigger. And this time the head isn’t orange. It’s white—true white, the color at the center of a star, burning with an intensity that makes the Blood Stone look like a candle beside it.
She strikes.
The hammer hits the Blood Stone dead center.
And the world stops pulling.
The silence is immediate. Total. The hum and the wind vortices of the Blood Stone cut out like a switch being thrown and the only sound left is my own breathing—ragged, shallow, too fast.
The blood stops. The suction stops. The pain in my chest retreats like a wave drawing back to sea. I fall backward—not collapse, just fall, my body giving up now that the pressure is gone.
My hand goes to my inventory before I think. Scales. I grab a fistful without counting—five, ten, twenty, no idea—and shove them into my mouth. I chew so fast my jaw pops. The OXI comes back in warm waves through my stomach, climbing into my chest, out into my limbs.
[Scales: 355 -> 332]
[OXI: 103 -> 678 / 1,600]
I breathe.
Actually breathe, for the first time in—how long? Thirty seconds? A minute? It felt like an hour.
On the table, the Blood Stone is cracked. Fractures running across the entire surface like an eggshell someone squeezed too hard. The red light inside pulses one last time—faint, dying—and the stone comes apart. Piece by piece. Shard by shard. Until it’s nothing but red dust sitting on top of the armor.
The dust settles onto the black scales and the metal drinks it in. The abyssal alloy darkens another shade—impossible, it was already black—and a crimson undertone rises to the surface. Subtle. Like blood drying under dark lacquer.
I eat more Scales. Get to about 900. Functional enough.
[Scales: 332 -> 320]
[OXI: 678 -> 978 / 1,600]
Lola’s fingers have stopped drumming on Rhayne’s arm. She’s watching me now, face unreadable.
I stand up. Still out of breath. Legs shaking but holding.
Elisser is staring at the armor. Her lips are moving but no sound comes out. Whatever she expected this to do, the result went past it.
I touch the armor mesh.
The system explodes.
Not a notification. A cascade. Alerts stacking on my HUD in a sequence so fast I can’t read them—gold, red, blue, colors I’ve never seen before. Sounds the system has never made in front of me. A waterfall of information dumping into my vision as if Ocean’s Law is trying to tell me ten things at once and none of them are good news.
In the middle of the chaos, one line stands out. Larger than the rest. Red. Pulsing.
The Codex has collected its price.