Building himself from scratch turned out to be considerably harder than the first time, and the first time had involved being born, so the bar was not low.
He started immediately after the decision was made, which was the moment he set the manual down in the hold and recognized that waiting served no purpose when he had the knowledge, the Aether, and a ship that was apparently immune to the decay of time. The technique’s imprint was complete in his mind — not a set of instructions but understanding, the difference being that instructions were a path you followed and understanding was the terrain itself, and you could not get lost in terrain you had fully internalized.
The Ghost required volume.
Not the gentle circulation he had been running since the breakthrough, the warm steady current moving through his pathways in its established rhythm. This was different — a sustained outward push, drawing from the source deep in his chest rather than the surface channels, feeding Aether into the space before him the way you filled a container rather than poured water over your hand. He had the metaphor from the manual and the direct knowledge from the imprint, and he sat in the hold and began.
For the first four hours: nothing visible.
He knew it was there. He could feel the Aether leaving him and accumulating in the designated space — a growing density in the air before him that wasn’t physical but was present, the way a thought about something was present before the thing itself arrived. Like water filling a clear mold, building toward a shape it hadn’t committed to yet.
The problem was volume. He ran dry after four hours and had to stop.
When he stopped, the accumulation partially dissipated — he could feel it losing coherence the way a sandcastle lost definition when the tide came in sideways, not destroyed but degraded, the edges going soft. When he resumed, the first hour of the second session was spent re-establishing what the first session had built. He was making progress that his rest periods were partially erasing, and the net gain per cycle was not the rate he wanted.
He sat with this and calculated.
At the current pace: seven to ten days. Which was seven to ten days on the surface of a planet with a survival rating of Critical, in a shipwreck that was safe only because of environmental factors he didn’t control and couldn’t guarantee would remain unchanged.
He looked at the ring on his right index finger.
-----
He had understood since the Inheritance that the ring was a transport mechanism — it had taken him from the ship into the white space, guided him through the doors, and returned him here when he was finished. But sitting in the hold with a regeneration problem and a timeline he didn’t like, he looked at the ring more carefully and thought about what Grur’s journal had actually described.
The grand resources, riches and treasures contained within the Inheritance. Resources that the Morag Clan had accumulated over centuries and which were meant to be available to the worthy recipient.
Available. Not stored somewhere he had to physically travel to retrieve.
He brought the System interface up and focused his attention on the ring itself rather than its transport function, looking for the secondary architecture he suspected was there. The System read it after a moment’s examination.
Morag Inheritance Ring. Transport function: active. Spatial storage function: active. Current accessible inventory: Morag Clan treasury, Aether crystal reserves, catalogued artifacts.
He sat with this for a moment.
’It’s a storage ring,’ he said, to the hold, with the tone of a man who had been carrying the answer on his finger since the Inheritance and had simply not asked the right question until now. ’The transport is the secondary function. The primary function is that it carries everything inside it.’
The spatial pocket inside the ring held the Morag Clan’s accumulated resources — not in the Inheritance space, not in the crystal chamber that he had left behind, but here, on his hand, portable. The Inheritance space was a destination the ring could take him to. The treasury was a different thing entirely: a storage dimension built into the ring itself, accessible anywhere, at any time, by the ring’s recognized owner.
Which meant the eight hundred and forty-seven thousand Aether crystals he had seen glowing in that chamber were not locked away in a room he had to return to. They were in his ring. They had been in his ring since the moment the Inheritance recognized him.
He accessed the inventory and found them immediately.
Aether Crystal — High Density. External Aether source. Absorb to accelerate cultivation and technique development. Current inventory: 847,000 units.
He absorbed one experimentally. It dissolved on contact — not consumed exactly, more like integrated, the Aether it contained entering his pathways with the clean specificity of something processed and refined rather than raw. His regeneration rate climbed. Then climbed again. The crystals were not just supplying Aether — they were supplying better Aether, purer, more efficiently integrated than his own natural production.
’Eight hundred and forty-seven thousand,’ he said quietly, to nobody. ’Centuries of accumulation. For someone who hadn’t arrived yet.’ He paused. ’They were very committed to this prophecy.’
He started using them in quantity.
-----
He worked in sessions with four-hour sleep intervals between them, eating when his metabolism required it, drinking from the galley’s preserved water supply, using the crystals from the ring’s storage to maintain Aether volume at a level that would have taken weeks of passive regeneration to achieve naturally. The Ghost mold grew. He could see it by the end of the first day — a faint outline in the air before him, the shape of a standing human figure rendered in the palest possible light, present as an absence more than a presence, visible only in the way that very thin glass was visible against the right background.
By the end of day one it had density. Not physical — Aether density, the accumulated weight of directed energy that had reached the point where it was becoming rather than just existing.
By the middle of day two it had features.
His features.
He recognized them the way he had recognized the figure in the ancient Septur city — not because he saw them clearly but because some part of him had always known this shape and was confirming rather than discovering. The face assembling itself from the energy he was pouring into the space before him was the face that had run laughing through those streets, the face he had chased for four days, the face he had finally held by the wrist in a plaza and found crying with relief. Not a copy of his body. A manifestation of something that had been present in him since before he understood what he was.
He worked through the final hours of day two without stopping. The Ghost was nearly finished — he could feel it the way he felt the last moments of any significant process, the specific tension of almost, the sense of a threshold preparing to resolve.
Then the Ghost opened its eyes.
-----
His eyes. His exact shade, his exact shape, every detail matching with the precision of something that had been made from original material rather than approximated. But the quality in them was the quality he remembered from the ancient city — not the mad grin, which was gone, but the brightness underneath it, the clarity of something that had been waiting to look at the world directly and was finally doing so.
The Ghost looked at him.
He looked at the Ghost.
Then the sensory connection activated and the world became two worlds simultaneously.
It was not painful. It was not wrong in any way he could point to. It was the specific disorientation of a system receiving twice the input it was designed for and needing a moment to reorganize itself. His own vision was intact — the hold, the portholes, the green-water glow, the crate of his purchases against the wall. But alongside it, occupying the same cognitive space, was a second complete visual field from two feet to his left and slightly forward, showing him the hold from that position, showing him himself sitting cross-legged with his eyes open and something that was also himself standing in the air before him.
He was looking at himself looking at himself.
The audio doubled. The temperature readings doubled. The entire sensory layer of his reality arrived in stereo from two slightly different positions and he sat with it and waited for his brain to decide how to handle this, which it did over approximately ten minutes — separating the feeds into parallel channels, his own primary and the Ghost’s available, the way two simultaneous conversations could be tracked with practice if you knew which one to keep in the foreground.
’This,’ he thought, ’is going to be a significant adjustment.’
He gave himself another five minutes. Then he started testing.
-----
Damage Transfer first, because it was the ability with the most immediate survival relevance. He instructed the Ghost to absorb an impact and struck his own right arm at full force — full Strand-enhanced force, the same force that cracked stone. The blow landed on the Ghost. He felt the impact as a faint echo, the forty percent feedback the knowledge transfer had specified, nothing that registered as damage. His arm was untouched.
He tested the ratio twice more with varying force levels. Consistent. Forty percent to the Ghost, sixty to him. At his current physical capability, sixty percent of most incoming damage was manageable. As his cultivation advanced and the Ghost’s level climbed, the ratio would shift further in his favor.
Embodiment next. He called the Ghost back into himself and the merge was immediate — not painful, not even particularly dramatic, just a sudden upward step in every physical capacity simultaneously, his already-enhanced body climbing another tier with the Ghost’s Aether folded into it. He held it for sixty seconds, ran a circuit of the hold at this combined level, noted the result, and released. The Ghost re-externalized without resistance.
Then the separation range. He sent the Ghost through a porthole in the hull’s side and followed it through the sensory link as it moved along the ship’s exterior. The range held cleanly within what he could observe directly. At the edge of his line of sight the feed began to degrade gracefully — not a sudden cut, a softening, the connection becoming less precise rather than absent. Workable.
Retraction: instant. The Ghost folded back into his mind with the completeness of a thought you stopped thinking.
He stood in the center of the hold and looked at the space where the Ghost had been standing. He had two days of work behind him, a significant portion of the ring’s crystal reserves used, and a technique at its most basic level that had already changed the fundamental conditions of his survival on this planet.
’Infant stage,’ he thought. ’This is the Infant stage.’
He paused, genuinely, to sit with that.
’Higher stages are going to require new vocabulary.’
He was still working through the implications — the combat applications, the scouting applications, the specific scenarios he had already survived that would have gone differently with this active — when the sound reached the hold.
Low. Deep. Not biological, not the roar or screech of any of Vorga’s fauna he had encountered. Structural — the kind of sound that came from something very large moving through rock, the cave system itself transmitting the passage of significant weight through its passages. The green water visible through the lower portholes was moving differently than it had been, small urgent waves crossing the lake’s surface in a pattern that the lake had not been producing a moment ago.
He looked at the porthole.
The sound came again. Closer.
Not the centipede. Not the spider’s frequency. Something he had not encountered yet, moving through the underground toward the clearing with a mass significant enough that the cave system was announcing its passage before it arrived.
He sent the Ghost through the porthole immediately.
He looked through its eyes at the clearing outside, at the green water, at the stalactites, at the passage entrances in the chamber walls.
At the passage to the north, where the darkness was beginning to move.