Die. Respawn. Repeat.

It's a testament to how much my skill with Firmament has grown that I don't need to go searching for some obscure herb in order to help heal Naru, though the parallels obviously aren't perfect. For one thing, the Interface isn't trying to actively destroy Naru's core—that factor was a big part of what kept Tarin in a coma and prevented him from healing.

With Naru, it's different. There's nothing trying to actively erode his core. In fact, if this were anyone else, I'm certain that healing them would be a patch job with Firmament Control that would take no more than a couple of minutes.

Except there's a problem.

Just about everyone I've encountered so far has a Firmament core that heals itself naturally. It's not something I've paid much attention to—damage to a Firmament core is typically either so extreme that it can't heal itself or so minor that it heals itself quickly, with very little in-between—but the general rule is that given enough time, any individual's core can usually recover on its own.

Naru's isn't. There's no indication that it's even beginning to heal. Where I'd normally see Firmament flowing and beginning to repair the cracks, there's just... nothing. No movement, no life.

From the wear and tear on his core, he's been damaged like this for a very, very long time.

I keep my Firmament sense on him just in case there's something obvious I'm missing, but the more I observe, the clearer it is. His core is broken in some way, not from the self-inflicted carving but from something else. I look deeper, pushing past the layers of his Firmament, from the anchored layers to the unanchored ones—he's a first-layer practitioner, so everything past the first layer is only vaguely defined.

And then I see it.

There's a spiderweb of cracks running through the very foundations of his Firmament. I trace the pattern, and it only takes me a few seconds more to identify exactly what they are and where they're from.