My Scumbag System Chapter 722: Scaffolding for a God

The railing creaked under my hand and I made a note to fix that later, probably never.

Six months ago my biggest morning problem had been finding pants that still fit. Now I stood on a staircase mapping the thermal output of sixteen sleeping teenagers while something older than human language turned its face toward a volcanic rock in the middle of the ocean and thought about me.

Character growth. Everybody talks about it. Nobody warns you it comes with a sensory package you cannot uninstall.

I let go of the railing and finished the stairs. Maki trotted ahead of me with her tails held high, twin banners announcing the arrival of somebody important, which in her assessment was herself.

The kitchen light was already on.

Of course it was.

Emi stood at the counter in an oversized pink shirt and a pair of shorts that had lost an argument with her hips sometime around June. Her sapphire hair sat in a knot on top of her head with a pencil stabbed through it, which was not a hair tie, and which meant she had grabbed the closest object and committed. Flour dusted the counter, her forearms, one cheekbone, and a section of her thigh that had no business being that close to a mixing bowl.

She was rolling dough at five fifty-four in the morning like a woman running from something.

"You’re up," she said without turning around.

"You’re baking."

"I’m not baking. I’m processing."

"Emi. There is dough."

"Processing sometimes involves dough."

Her healer’s aura sat around her in a soft green film, thin as breath on glass. It flickered when I stepped through the doorway. Not a lot. A stutter, like a candle catching a draft.

She noticed it before I did. Her shoulders locked.

"Okay," she said. "So that’s confirmed."

"What’s confirmed?"

Emi set down the rolling pin with the kind of care people used when they were trying very hard not to throw something. She turned around slowly, deliberately, and looked at me with those warm, reddish-brown eyes that had cried on my behalf more times than I deserved, in situations I had engineered, for outcomes I had calculated. Her two antenna strands—those ridiculous little cowlicks that made her look perpetually surprised—twitched once, hard, the way they always did when her brain finished running a calculation she absolutely did not enjoy the results of.

She was good at math when the numbers involved people she cared about.

"I woke up at five thirty-one," she said. Her voice was level, clinical, the tone she used when she was deliberately not panicking. "My aura went off on its own. That happens when someone in range has an injury my body reads as urgent. Broken bone, internal hemorrhage, mana channel collapse, anything that threatens critical function. It’s involuntary. A reflex. I don’t control it any more than you control a sneeze when someone kicks up dust."

"And?" I prompted.

"And you don’t have any of those things." She wiped her hands on her shirt in a gesture that accomplished absolutely nothing except transferring flour from her palms to her lower ribs and pulling the pink fabric tight across her chest in a manner that suggested the universe had strong opinions about where my attention should be focused. I ignored it. Mostly. "So my Aspect flagged you as a medical emergency, Satori. A serious one. And my Aspect was wrong, which has never happened. Not once. Not in four months of watching you get hit by things that should have killed you, broken, burned, or left you bleeding out in the street."

She said it like an accusation. Like my continued survival was a personal insult to her understanding of biology.

I leaned back against the doorframe, arms crossed, and watched her work through it. Maki chose that exact moment to wind between Emi’s ankles in a figure-eight pattern, and Emi bent down automatically to scratch behind her ears without breaking eye contact with me. It was an impressive display of multitasking and also probably the entire reason Maki had started tolerating her presence in the apartment. The cat was a sucker for competent physical affection.

"Say the theory," I said quietly. "You’ve had twenty minutes to build one."

"Twenty-three," she corrected immediately.

"Say it."

Emi straightened up, leaving Maki to pad over to the water bowl with an annoyed flick of her tails. She crossed the kitchen in three strides, bare feet silent on the tile, and stopped directly in front of me. Close. Close enough that I could smell the faint sweetness of whatever lotion she used and the sharper bite of nervous sweat underneath. She raised one hand, hesitated for half a second, and then placed her palm flat against my sternum, directly over the pendant, over the place where my heart should have been beating at a normal, human rhythm.

The second her skin made contact with the fabric of my shirt, the new thing behind my ribs stood up and paid attention.

I felt her pulse. Ninety-one. Elevated.

I felt the temperature of her hand. Ninety-eight point four.

I felt the green edge of her Aspect slide against my skin and find no wound to close and hesitate, confused, like a dog nosing an empty bowl.

And I felt the exact moment she stopped breathing.

"Oh," Emi said.

"Yeah."

"Oh, that’s. Um."

"Yeah."

Her fingers curled into my shirt. Not pulling. Holding, the way you hold a railing on a staircase you do not trust.

"Your channels changed," she whispered. "That’s what my Aspect is reading. Not injury. Structure. There’s more of them, Satori. There were fourteen primary pathways when I mapped you in August and now there are, I don’t know, I can’t count them, they’re overlapping, they’re braided, some of them run through places human bodies don’t have channels."

"How many places."

"I don’t know. Twenty? Thirty? It feels like looking at a city at night from a plane and trying to count windows." Her voice went thin. "My Aspect thinks you’re dying because it thinks your body is coming apart. It isn’t. It’s building. It’s just building something my Aspect doesn’t have a template for."

There it was. The thing I had known since I woke up and had spent ninety minutes not admitting.

The integration had not finished when I walked out of that chamber. It had only paused to catch its breath.

Nel arrived without being invited, which was standard. Confirming Miss Aoyama’s assessment. Secondary structural expansion initiated at approximately zero four hundred hours. This is not damage. This is scaffolding.

Scaffolding for what.