The Mycelial Wastes had a steady beat now. Gone was the freaked-out buzz from when Leo was young. Now, it was a low, on-purpose hum. He stood looking at the new edge: a big ditch dug into the god's skin, now like rock. Symbiote tendril-weavers and Sanctum engineers were working side by side down there.
This was the first big piece of the Terraform Project: the Aqua Vita conduit. The idea was to use the god's old capillary system, now hard as stone, as a base. They'd clear out the psychic gunk and dead stuff, then line them with mycelium to control moisture. This would give both the Wastes and Sanctum a good, clean water source, so they wouldn't have to depend on the gross, Echo-filled lymph deep inside.
Pressure's building in sector seven! a former Carver yelled, sounding stressed. The old tissue doesn't want to be cleared out. It feels like... the tissue remembers being blocked.
Leo put his hands on the ditch wall, feeling the network. He felt it too—a deep, stubborn tension, like a bad habit. The god's body had gotten used to being sick. It's scared of flowing, he said. It thinks flowing means loss, like the lymph being taken away for Karu.
He told a group of Symbiote hummers to start a low, steady pulse—a song about how circulation is healthy and movement is life. It was the opposite of the old lullabies they used to use to calm things down for harvest. This was a song to wake things up.
Little by little, the tension faded. The hardened stuff they were trying to remove shifted, then broke apart, showing a dark, damp channel. A little clear, cold water trickled out. It tasted like old stone and nothing else. It was the first purely physical thing, not from the god, that many of them had ever seen.
A tired but real cheer went up. It was a victory, one drop at a time.
Later, at the new joint camp, Leo met with the project leaders. Kira, an engineer from Sanctum who was all about getting things done, pointed to a plan. The mycelium is taking root, but it's sucking up more nutrients from the host tissue than we thought. It's making some spots weaker. We fix one problem and make another.
It was the never-ending give-and-take of symbiosis. The line between helping each other and being a leech was super thin.
We need to feed it from our side, Leo said. Compost. Leftovers from the Vat-Bread, treated human waste. We close the loop. The Host gives structure and water. We give it food. A real trade.
Kira nodded, writing things down. It's gross, but it's smart.
While they were working, a runner from Sanctum came looking for Leo. It was a young guard, looking worried. Scout Vance says there's... a problem at the old Nerve-Jungle border. Some of your people and some of ours are... arguing about the memories.
The Nerve-Jungles were still unstable, with synaptic flowers showing painful flashes of the god's past. Since the Great Weaning, some people—former Heretics, scholars, and just curious folks—had been going there to try to understand what was gone. For the Symbiotes, they were sacred wounds that should be left alone to heal.
Leo got there to find a standoff. A bunch of Symbiotes with living thorn-staves were blocking the path to the Jungle. Across from them was a group of Sanctum people, led by a skinny, intense guy Leo knew as a former scribe from the Palate.
The memories aren't yours to keep! the scribe argued, looking like a fanatic. They belong to all of us! To history! We have to record them before they disappear!
They're pain, a Symbiote elder said calmly, her face covered in lichen. Touching them just makes the wound hurt again. Let them rest.
But understanding the pain helps us not do it again!
Leo stepped between them. The air was buzzing from the Jungle nearby, filled with visions. The scribe has a point, he told the Symbiotes, but so do you. He turned to the Sanctum group. You want knowledge, but are you ready for what it costs? These aren't books. They're raw trauma. They'll change you, maybe break you.
We have a right to know what we were! the scribe insisted.
Knowing and feeling are different, Leo said. He looked at the pulsing, beautiful, awful growths. We'll allow a study, but not a free-for-all. One controlled trip, led by someone who can handle the pain, with Symbiote guides to pull you out if you get stuck in a memory.
It was a compromise that made everyone a little unhappy, so it was probably fair. The scribe agreed since he was too eager to get the info. The Symbiote elder looked disappointed but gave in.
The first official trip into the Nerve-Jungle was a week later. They took precautions: amulets to block the noise and dampeners tuned to the new, slow rhythm. Leo led, with Cassandra Vaughn—the human who was best at navigating the god's memories—as the main diver.
They went into the grove of throbbing light. Visions hit them hard: the crushing loneliness of creating a universe, the amazing joy of dreaming a butterfly into existence, the burning pain of the ten-thousandth cut.
Cassandra moved through it like a swimmer in rough water, feeling the currents but not getting carried away. She pointed out patterns to the scribe and his team, who took notes with shaky hands. See? The memory of creation always comes with a memory of providing. The god didn't just make things; it took care of them, until we started taking from it.
It was a terrible lesson. They came out hours later, pale and shaking, but with a new, grim understanding. They hadn't found answers, but they'd found context. The weight of their civilization's sin felt real.
The report they wrote wasn't happy. It was like a funeral song for a broken relationship. Copies were put in the open Scriptorium. People read it and cried, not for the lost Ambrosia, but for the love that had been there all along, mistaken for something to eat.
The Aqua Vita conduit kept growing slowly. The Nerve-Jungle stayed, a sad reminder. And the people of the world, both the blight and the immune system, took another step away from being just consumers and moved toward being children at a grave, finally learning the real story of their parent.