Chapter 171: One Drop of Blood
Brannoch made him sit down for the waiver, and read the relevant clauses aloud, and asked him twice whether he understood.
"This egg is sixty-three days overdue and its vitality is declining. Verrow’s assesses hatching probability under standard incubation as negligible. This sale is final. There is no refund in the event of death, failure to hatch, or any other outcome. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Sign there. And there."
He signed twice.
[Payment Received: 1,800 Cr]
[Balance: 1,200 Cr — deferred, automatic deduction against flexible academy support]
[Personal Savings: 380 Cr]
[Ownership transferred: Ashwing Sparrow egg, unit 11]
[Sale status: FINAL — as-is]
Brannoch handed him a transport incubator, and Jin understood the limits of it before she finished explaining.
It was a padded case with a heating element, a battery, and a display. It held a set temperature to within half a degree and it would keep the egg alive on a walk across the district and probably for weeks after that.
It had one temperature setting. Its fixed vents provided passive ventilation, but it had no fan, no controllable airflow, and no way to run a programmed air cycle.
"That’ll hold it steady," Brannoch said.
"I know."
"Steady is what it’s had, and it’s now sixty-three days overdue," she said. "I’ve watched you think about that for two days, so I assume you have an idea. I don’t want to hear it, because if you’re doing something unlicensed to an animal I’d have to report it, and everything you can legally do to your own registered egg is your business."
"It’s my business, then."
"Good." She closed the case and slid it across. "Don’t come back and tell me it worked, either. Half the students who do that are lying and the other half make me feel terrible about a decision I made correctly."
He carried it back across three districts inside his kit bag, which he had chosen because it looked like every other student’s kit bag, and did not take it out until his dormitory door was shut.
The Fourth Class rooms were slightly larger, which mostly meant he now had somewhere to put a transport incubator that was not the floor.
Glitch was awake and had opinions from the moment the case came out.
He came over immediately, low, weight forward, and put his nose against the seam of the case and scented it for a long moment. Then he circled it. Then he circled it the other way, which Jin had never seen him do, and made a low sound in his chest that was not a growl and was on the road to one.
"Stop that."
The bond came back defensive and territorial and slightly offended. There was a thing. It smelled unfamiliar. It was in the room, which was Glitch’s room, and it had Jin’s entire attention, which was Glitch’s attention.
"It’s an egg."
Glitch conveyed that this did not address his concerns.
Jin unlatched the case anyway and lifted the lid.
The egg sat in its cradle, pale grey with the darker mottle toward the narrow end, small enough to hold in two hands. It did not look like anything. It looked like an object.
He took the pin out of his kit, pricked the side of his thumb, and let one drop fall onto the shell.
It landed, and beaded for perhaps a second, and then went in.
The shell absorbed it without a mark, without heat, without any of the drama Jin half-remembered from a night four months ago when Elsa had held the lamp and Arthur had told him where to press. It simply took the drop and there was nothing on the surface where it had been.
Then something opened.
It was not the contract. Jin knew the contract; he lived inside one, and this was not that. There were no commands available and no shared sense of the body and nothing he could direct.
What he got was a thread. Thin, distant, and so faint that he lost it twice in the first minute by concentrating too hard.
Along it came almost nothing at all. A sense of weight. Something like warmth that was not quite warmth. And under that, so slight it might have been imagined, a kind of pressure that Jin’s mind insisted on translating as tired.
[Provisional Bond Established — Egg]
[Ownership recognized. Full Beast Contract pending successful hatching.]
Glitch had gone very still.
Jin looked over. The lizard had stopped circling and was standing with his head level with the open case, nostrils working, and the aggression had drained out of his posture entirely.
Whatever came through proximity, or through Jin, or through both, had reached him.
He did not do anything affectionate. He did not nose at the shell or make a sound. He stood there for perhaps twenty seconds, taking in something Jin could not access, and then he backed up two paces, lay down beside the table with his chin on his forelegs, and looked at the case.
He stayed there.
Yeah, Jin thought. That’s about the right response.
The Engine caught up thirty seconds later.
[New Owned Entity Detected]
[Registering...]
[Species: Ashwing Sparrow]
[Quality: Iron]
[Hidden Potential: SS]
[Dormant Bloodline: Sunpiercer Roc]
[Condition: Critical — pre-hatching. Terminal maturation not initiated. Vitality actively declining.]
Jin sat down on the edge of the bunk.
He read it three times and the words did not rearrange themselves.
SS.
He had spent two months telling himself a story about finding something mispriced in a case, and the story had always been vague on purpose, because he had known it was mostly a way to make an impossible savings target feel like a plan. He had imagined a Bronze-quality beast with a Silver ceiling. Something quietly good.
He had not imagined this, and he found that he was not enjoying it.
Sunpiercer Roc.
He did not know what that was. He tried a public register query out of reflex and got nothing, which told him the name was not in the open registry at all, which told him something else he did not want to think about at eleven at night.
Then the Engine did the thing it always did, and made an avatar.
[Generating digital avatar...]
The window opened and Jin looked into it and felt the entire discovery invert.
The chick was small enough to sit in a palm with room left over. It was wet-looking and grey and almost featherless, with the dark mottling running along what would eventually be wing roots, and its eyes were shut.
It was not standing. It was lying on its side in an empty grey render space with its legs folded under it, and its chest was moving, and that was all it was doing.
[Avatar Status: Non-combatant]
[Cannot stand. Cannot move independently. Cannot engage.]
[Baseline condition mirrors host. Registration does not alter physical state.]
[Note: on avatar defeat, respawn returns entity to current critical baseline until a permanent improvement is achieved.]
Jin read that last line and understood it immediately and completely, because it removed the only tool he had.
Everything he had built in four months ran on one mechanic. Send a copy in, let it die, learn something, come back. The avatar was free because the avatar came back the same.
This one came back the same too.
It respawns at critical. That’s not a tool. That’s just watching it die repeatedly.
There was no grinding this. There was no clever route, no farming loop, no dungeon he could send it into to make it stronger, because it could not stand up.
He looked at the two panels side by side.
[Hidden Potential: SS]
[Cannot stand. Cannot move independently.]
It’s got the highest potential I’ve ever seen on anything and it can’t lift its own head.
He tried, out of an obligation to be thorough, to find a countdown. He ran the vitality read on the egg again, then asked the Engine directly, and got the same answer from both.
[Vitality: 11% — declining]
[Rate: variable. Insufficient data for projection.]
No timer. Nothing to plan around. Only the direction, which was down, and the complete absence of any way to know whether down meant a week or tonight.
Glitch had not moved from the floor beside the table.
Jin sat with the two panels open for a while and then closed them both, because looking at an SS rating was doing nothing for anybody and there was exactly one thing in this room that mattered.
The transport incubator held thirty-six point four degrees, to within half a degree, forever.
Steady. Correct for almost everything.
Wrong for this.
Heat to start it. Directed air to move it. Then again, and I need to know the ratio before I try it, because if I get it wrong I’ll finish what the prolonged stall started.
He pulled the case toward him and looked at the housing, at the single element, the fixed vents, and the battery bay, working out what he would have to take apart. The SS rating no longer felt like a reward.
SS means nothing if it dies before it ever hatches.