The archway led not into another room, but into a transition of being.
The curtain of optic-fiber willow strands felt like cool, whispering fingers trailing across Noctis's skin as he passed through. The layered symphony of the main gallery—the synthesized strings, the organic breathing rhythms, the soft murmur of awe—vanished, swallowed by a profound, resonant silence that seemed to press inward on his eardrums and fill the hollows of his bones.
The space beyond was dark, but not empty. It was a long, narrow gallery, its proportions suggesting a sensory artery rather than a chamber. The walls, floor, and vaulted ceiling were made of the same seamless, softly bioluminescent material as the main room, but here, the shifting patterns were slower, deeper, like the pulse of a sleeping giant. There were no other patrons. No suspended sculptures. No tanks of drifting, modified forms.
There was only raw, imprinted sensation.
As Noctis took his first hesitant step onto the yielding, warm floor, the wall to his immediate left rippled like disturbed water. An image did not form on its surface, but within it—a vivid, fully immersive memory that was not his own. He felt a sharp, clinical lance of pain in his left arm, the sterile sting of antiseptic flooding his nostrils, and a profound, existential coldness as unfeeling alloy was fused, molecule by screaming molecule, to living bone and nerve. Accompanying it was a churn of emotions: fear, desperate hope, and the chilling realization of a point of no return. It was the memory of a first, major modification, experienced from the inside. It lasted only a heartbeat, then faded, leaving behind a phantom ache deep in the marrow of his own arm.
He froze, breath catching in his throat.
"It is a memory gallery," Rook's voice came, low and tense, from just behind his shoulder. The Warden had followed him through. "Not of events or faces. Of transformations. Each step you take triggers a psychic imprint left by someone who passed through this crucible on their way to their own becoming. You do not observe the art here, Witness. You relive the moment of its violent, beautiful creation."
Noctis swallowed, the taste of antiseptic still ghosting on his tongue. He forced himself to take another step.
This time, the floor beneath his right foot softened further, growing almost uncomfortably warm. A wave of pure, unanchored euphoria crashed over him—the chemical and spiritual bliss of a perfectly integrated neural graft, the dizzying joy of new, impossible senses blossoming like flowers in his mind. He saw colors for which no language had names, shimmering at the edge of the ultraviolet. He heard harmonies woven from the magnetic resonance of stones and the quiet hum of plant life. It was transcendent, addictive. He instinctively pulled his foot back, and the sensation vanished, leaving a hollow, craving emptiness in its wake.
"The Primer of Clay does not merely teach surgical technique or bio-augmentation formulae," Rook murmured, his azure lens casting a sharp blue beam that swept the undulating walls. "It teaches the complete philosophy of change. The raw pain of the chisel, the ecstatic joy of the new form, the terror of the unmade self, the quiet transcendence of alignment. To understand it, to be worthy of its touch, you must have felt them all. Not intellectually. Viscerally."
Noctis understood. This was the true test. Not of strength, but of empathy. A gauntlet of borrowed lives. To prove he respected the sacred, terrifying path of alteration, he had to walk through its condensed emotional aftermath without turning away, without judging, without breaking.
He steeled himself and moved forward.
The Gallery of Becoming opened its heart to him, and it was a heart of shattered glass and lightning.
He was assaulted by a cascade of imprints.
The searing, eternal regret of a modification catastrophically wrong—a phantom limb that burned with a cold no fire could touch, a constant scream from nerves that were no longer there.
The godlike, intoxicating arrogance of replacing a failing biological heart with a sleek, perpetual motion cell, the thrilling cheat of death, the intoxicating belief in one's own infallibility.
The suffocating, claustrophobic body dysphoria of a consciousness trapped in a form that felt like a ill-fitting, alien suit—a desperate, clawing, psychic itch to be unmade and remade, over and over.
The hollow, diminishing rush of the upgrade addict—each change a fleeting high, leaving the core self thinner, more diluted, a ghost haunting a palace of ever-shifting parts.
And then, a different kind: the quiet, profound peace of a single, perfect, intentional change. A woman who had traded her scarred, asthmatic lungs for elegant bio-synthetic gills, allowing her to breathe in the silent, forgotten cisterns deep beneath the district. In that memory, Noctis felt her overwhelming sense of belonging, of finding a home in a element she was never meant for.
Each step was a lifetime of motivation, a universe of desire and consequence, condensed into a single, overwhelming pulse of pure, unmediated feeling. He wasn't just learning about modification; he was learning the why. The desperate, human, glorious, and tragic reasons people chose to fracture their own wholeness in search of another.
The damper in his chest throbbed dully with each new imprint, a dead, heavy counterpoint to the vibrant, living emotions flooding him. It was a cage, and here, in this temple dedicated to the sanctity of transformation, its presence felt like the deepest sacrilege.
Halfway down the gallery's length, a memory of a different magnitude seized him. This one was not centered on the subject's joy or pain, but on a profound sense of purpose. He felt the steady, surgical certainty of a mod-surgeon's hands—not a back-alley cutter like Mender, but a true artist. He felt the immense weight of responsibility, the sacred trust of holding another being's entire future form in your hands. The goal was not to create something new, but to guide the existing self towards a more authentic expression. This memory was tinged with a deep, familiar resonant signature—a pattern of intertwining roots and pulsing veins.
Helix.
This was Helix's memory. Their first conscious, ethical act of creation.
The memory dissolved, leaving behind a single, crystalline thought-philosophy, imparted like a parting gift: The body is not a machine to be improved. It is a story being written. My hand is not the author's. It is the editor's, seeking only to help the story find its truest, most coherent voice.
Noctis stopped, doubling over, hands on his knees. He was drenched in a cold sweat, his heart hammering against his ribs as if trying to escape the onslaught. He had lived, fully, a dozen lives and a dozen deaths of the self in as many steps. His breath came in ragged, torn gasps.
Rook stood beside him, a solid, silent monolith in the storm of sensation. "You see now," the Warden said, his layered voice a ground wire in the psychic tempest. "This is not merely a gallery of monsters or marvels. It is a cathedral of choice. Some choices are ugly, born of fear or pain. Some are beautiful, born of courage or vision. All are human. All are valid. The Primer does not judge the choice. It only asks that you understand the cost."
Noctis could only nod, his throat too tight for words. He looked ahead, wiping sweat from his brow. The gallery ended in another, smaller archway, this one filled with a steady, warm, golden light that felt like dawn after a long night. The Root Room.
But between them and that sanctuary, the final section of the gallery awaited, pulsing with a deeper, more potent energy.
He took the next step.
This memory was fundamentally different. It was not of a modification to the body. It was of a revelation to the spirit.
He felt not the changing of flesh, but the awakening of the mind to a deeper, more ancient truth. He felt hands—his own, yet not—tracing the intricate, living lines of a book bound in something soft and warm. He felt knowledge flow into him, not as data to be processed, but as instinct to be known: the understanding of cellular harmony, the silent song of coiled DNA, the gentle art of persuading flesh to become something new without violence, through symbiosis and respectful dialogue. It was the moment of union. The moment the Flesh-Grimoire chose its bearer.
The Primer of Clay had shared its first, fundamental secret.
As the memory faded, it left Noctis with a profound, unsettling sense of kinship. The Grimoire's "voice" was utterly different from the Neon Grimoire's—softer, more intuitive, less about structured Tenets and more about flowing principles. Yet their source resonance, the foundational note from which they were both born, was identical. They were siblings. Separate movements of the same vast, broken symphony.
He had passed the test. He had felt the full, terrifying, beautiful spectrum of becoming.
As if in acknowledgement, the glowing, shifting patterns on the walls and floor stilled. Then, with a sound like a soft sigh, they parted like a curtain, melting away to reveal the final archway clearly, unobstructed. The psychic pressure that had filled the gallery lifted, leaving a cleansed, quiet emptiness.
Noctis, his legs trembling, looked at Rook. The Warden gave a single, grave nod.
Together, they walked the last few paces and stepped through the arch into the Root Room.
It was small, circular, and breathtaking in its simplicity. The walls were a living lattice of thick, ancient roots, woven together, through which a soft, dappled, golden light filtered as if from a hidden sun. The air was rich with the scent of loam, growing moss, and clean water. In the precise center of the room, resting on a pedestal of polished, silver-grey driftwood, sat the book.
The Flesh-Grimoire. The Primer of Clay.
Its cover was bound in what appeared to be mottled, living dermis, pale and smooth as a newborn's skin. Fine, delicate veins, pulsing with a soft verdant light, were visible just beneath its surface. The book lay slightly open. Instead of paper pages, Noctis saw layers of translucent, membranous leaves, between which intricate, three-dimensional diagrams of anatomy, symbiotic ecosystems, and flowing energy pathways slowly shifted and reconfigured, alive with knowledge.
Standing serenely beside the pedestal was Helix. Their subdermal tattoos flowed in calm, meditative patterns—slow spirals and gentle pulses. Their warm, ordinary brown eyes held a deep, settled look of approval.
"You walked the gallery," Helix said, their voice a gentle, resonant hum that harmonized perfectly with the room's peaceful energy. "You did not flinch. You did not cling to joy or recoil from pain. You did not judge the choices. You witnessed them. That is the first and greatest law of the Primer: true understanding must precede any action. To change a thing, you must first love it as it is."
They gestured with a slow, graceful hand toward the living book. "It has been waiting. Not for the Keybearer of Shadow and forgetting. But for the Witness. It knows you carry the Mother's deep, blue pain in your soul. It knows you seek not to conquer, but to mend. To bridge the chasm between what is wounded and what could be whole. It will teach you the silent language of healing flesh, of knitting not with thread, but with intent."
Helix stepped back, dissolving into the shadow of the root-woven wall. "Take it. But hear this truth, which is the book's final lesson before the first: it does not grant power. It grants responsibility. To hold its knowledge is to forever see the world as a thing that can be—and perhaps, in its suffering, should be—remade. It will change how you see every scar, every illness, every aging face, every life. It is a burden of infinite compassion."
Noctis approached the driftwood pedestal. The damper in his chest felt like a cold, leaden stone, a foreign abscess. The living Grimoire seemed to sense this obstruction; its veined cover pulsed with a faint, sympathetic light, a rhythm that sought a harmony it could not find.
He reached out, his hand trembling slightly, and placed his palm flat on the warm, breathing cover of the Primer.
A wave of gentle, profound warmth flowed up his arm. It was not the heat of magic, but the warmth of life, of growth, of acceptance.
And then, a single, clear line of understanding bloomed in his mind. It did not come from the Grimoire before him. It bubbled up from the deep, locked-away, silenced part of his own being—the part that still remembered the taste of resonance, the part that was kin to both the book and the broken Cradle.
TO MEND THE WORLD, YOU MUST FIRST REMEMBER HOW TO FEEL IT.
The message was pure, resonant truth.
And the damper in his chest reacted.
It gave a sudden, violent, convulsive throb of negation. A white-hot spike of pain, sharper than Mender's incision, lanced through his chest and down his arm. It was the pain of contradiction, of a system designed for silence rebelling against a demand for song. He gasped, a choked cry tearing from his throat, and stumbled back, his hand breaking contact with the Primer as if shocked.
Helix's eyes widened, their calm fracturing into concern. The swirling tattoos on their skin stilled. "The silence in you… it is not just an absence. It is an active suppression. It fights the connection. You cannot commune with the living knowledge of the Primer while you are muted. The two states are antithetical."
Rook stepped forward, his bulk suddenly dominating the small space. His copper eye was fixed on Noctis with grim understanding. "The implant," he rumbled, the synthetic buzz in his voice harsh. "It must come out. Now. The Primer is not an object to be seized. It is a consciousness to be met. It will not speak to a ghost. It requires a voice. Your voice."
Noctis clutched his chest, the aftershock of the pain fading to a deep, warning thrum that echoed his frantic heartbeat. He had found the Flesh-Grimoire. He stood before the second note of the Choir.
But to claim it, to hear its song, he would have to perform a brutal, immediate act of un-making. He would have to remove the very device that hid him from the relentless, learning hunter on his trail.
And here, in the heart of the Bio-Mod District, a place of exquisite sensitivity to energy and change, letting his silenced, unique resonance scream back into the world might be the most spectacular, and final, mistake of his life.
The choice was upon him, as sharp and sudden as a surgeon's blade.