Leaving a generous tip for Lemar, we stepped out onto the central square. I immediately noticed how much everything had changed. At this hour it was usually spacious here—tourists already scattered along their routes, locals sitting in cafés. Today, it was a sea of people. Several tourist buses, an overflowing parking lot, TV cameras, microphones, reporters with bright press badges. Our new Gate was already in every news broadcast.
I also noticed several Creatures, as usual moving unhurriedly among the tourists and journalists, who paid them almost no attention. What caught my eye was that all the Creatures were heading in the same direction—away from the Gate. Apparently, I thought, they had all just come through the new Gate from other Variants.
“So, where to?” I asked.
“Let’s take a walk,” Art replied, slipping his other arm through the backpack strap and adjusting it on his shoulders. “Across the bridge.”
The bridge spanned the canyon. The view was mesmerizing: the river far below, shreds of mist drifting above it, sheer cliffs and pine-covered slopes on both sides. We walked in silence. The wind brushed our faces, and in that quiet it felt as if the rest of the world had dissolved.
“Essence,” Art began, “is everywhere. In the air, in the water, in the ground. But it can only stabilize in solid matter—primarily in stone.
“When Storms happen—and they’re essentially Essence ejections from the Gates—it settles and accumulates. Most of the time, it forms light, unstable clusters. But when conditions align, nuggets form. That happens when the Storm’s flow creates vortices, like small tornadoes. Such a vortex has to form close to rock or stone—somewhere Essence can anchor and stabilize, forming a nugget.
“As you move farther from the Gate, both the size and number of nuggets drop. That’s why we start picking right at the Gate and move through our sectors, gradually increasing the distance—until the nuggets become too scarce and too small to be worth the effort.”
He spoke calmly, slightly off to the side, almost as if talking to himself—but I knew this explanation was for me. For who I had become.
“Nuggets vary in shape, size, and level. We call it depth. Not depth in the ground, but internal depth—the Essence level inside the cluster. Some nuggets reach several hundred quints in depth and contain hundreds of amphoras of Essence. A regular human has five to ten amphoras, seven on average, depending on body type. So a single nugget can hold as much Essence as dozens of people.”
“And the biggest ones?” I asked.
“They say some exceed a thousand amphoras. I’ve never seen one.”
On the far side of the bridge, a narrow trail began, running along the canyon. Tourists rarely went that way. We turned onto it. To the right—a slope and a drop. To the left—rock faces.
“Can you actually see them?” I asked. “The nuggets. The clusters?”
Art pulled a pair of glasses from the inner pocket of his jacket. Thin, almost invisible frames. Light, transparent lenses. When he put them on, they seemed to merge with his face. Then he took out a second pair.
“This is called a Mask. We usually carry two—one as a backup.”
He handed the second Mask to me. I put it on. It fit perfectly, as if it had been made for my face. I looked around—and saw exactly the same thing as before.
“Nothing unusual.”
“And now?”
The image shifted. A nearly transparent green layer appeared. Not a color, but light—shimmering, fluid. Like looking through emerald glass. What was especially striking was that the green of the grass and leaves stayed the same, while this was something else entirely. An inner glow. I looked at Art—and saw his contour glowing. Mine was even brighter.
“That’s Essence?” I asked.
“Yes.”
He explained. The Mask was a device that allowed you to see different layers of what we call augmented reality. Some of those layers displayed sensor data built into the Mask. One of them was an Essence-field sensor. But that sensor only worked when the Mask was worn by someone with a high Essence level—by a strider. On ordinary people, it didn’t activate, unless there was an external source involved. I didn’t fully grasp all of it, and Art promised to explain it in more detail later.
I took off the Mask and noticed tiny lenses embedded in the frame—like cameras, only miniature.
“It’s controlled mentally,” Art said. “That’s called n2e. Neurons to electrons. When you think about something or imagine it, the device recognizes that and translates it into an electronic signal for other devices.”
“And the other way around?” I asked. “Electrons to neurons?”
He smiled.
“e2n? Yes, that exists too. It’s used for learning, memory retention—even for implanting memories. But it isn’t safe. Only licensed specialists are allowed to use it.”
As I kept looking around through the Mask, I first noticed—and then consciously registered—one particular difference. There was a clear distinction in how nonliving objects—stones, cliffs, soil—appeared in the Essence layer, compared to living things: trees, grass, Art, and me.
Everything alive was sharply defined. Each living form seemed to exist within an invisible but unmistakable boundary. By contrast, the glow around rocks and cliffs was diffuse, their light bleeding outward, forming areas of greater or lesser density without any clear edge.
I raised my hand and studied how it looked in the Essence layer.
As if reading my thoughts, Art explained:
“Yes. That’s what life looks like. All living things. That’s exactly how life differs from non-life—by having its own internal Essence, held within a contour that separates it from the surrounding field.”
I nodded, thinking that people must have intuited something like this unconsciously—if not consciously—long before.
We kept walking.
Most of what I saw through the Mask was a soft, pale green glow. But some plants—certain branches, flowers, blades of grass—had a noticeably lighter background. Some were almost transparent.
“Transparent means death,” Art said, once more ahead of my thoughts. “When a living thing’s Essence level drops to zero, it dies. The contour disappears. After that, the body—now just a nonliving object—starts accumulating Essence again, up to the baseline. A hundred quints. But without a contour.”
“And visibility?” I asked. “It’s only close-range, right?”
“Yes. Twenty, maybe thirty meters at most. That’s why you won’t see it from orbit.”
By now, we were alone on the trail.
From time to time, patches of more concentrated glow appeared. Art pointed to one of the stones beside the path.
“Want to try picking a bit?”
The stone lay almost on the trail itself. Shaped vaguely like a horse’s head. Bright. Alive with light.
Art sat down on the grass beside it, legs crossed. I followed suit.
He unclipped his belt. It was the same color as his clothes—soft, flexible, almost organic. Several subtle thickened segments were visible along it. When Art ran his hand across one of them, the material flowed apart, revealing a rectangular device inside, something like a miniature phone. As soon as he removed it, the material sealed itself again.
“Formin,” he said. “All of it is formin. The belt, the clothes, the backpack. It’s a material infused with molecular mechs—tiny machines. They’re controlled via n2e and can change shape, color, and structure. Faster or slower, depending on the size and complexity. Connecting or separating edges is almost instant. But turning this jacket into, say, a pillow?” He smiled. “That would take close to a minute.”
He held up the device he’d taken from the belt.
“This is a quint-box. Or just the box. Inside it is an artificially grown emerald. It’s the best known accumulator of Essence. Diamond, ruby, and similar stones hold it almost as well. And the best conductor of Essence is platinum—that’s what the quint-pump and all conductive elements are made of. And yes,” he added, “as you’ve probably guessed by now, other precious metals—especially gold—are excellent conductors too.”
I nodded.
“So that’s why those stones and metals were always considered precious?”
“Yes. People sensed it intuitively.”
“And the casing?” I asked.
Art nodded approvingly.
“The casing is made of two layers of ultra-strong polymer, with a vacuum—or near-vacuum—between them. As I told you earlier, in a perfect vacuum the Essence level is always exactly one hundred quints, and that can’t be altered. So a vacuum layer is the best possible insulator, the best way to keep Essence contained. Of course, the plastic layers are connected by microscopic bridges, so the box still leaks Essence a little—but very little. Overall, it’s a highly reliable and efficient container. This one, for example, can hold up to ten thousand amphoras.”
I realized that was more Essence than a thousand people combined, and let out a low whistle.
Art continued:
“In practice, though, boxes are rarely filled to capacity. The transfer rate of Essence is directly proportional to the depth of the source and inversely proportional to the depth of the receiver—and in both cases, the relationship is exponential, not linear. So filling a box all the way is only realistically possible from extremely deep nuggets. Otherwise, you’d be sitting next to each cluster for hours—or even days. Naturally, no one does that.”
He fell silent for a moment, as if considering something, then continued.
“Now for another important device—perhaps the most important one of all. The quint-pump. It’s built into the box itself and doesn’t run on electricity, but on Essence drawn from the box. Like the Essence field sensor, the quint-pump only functions when the user’s Essence level is above a certain threshold—more precisely, above 187 quints. That’s why ordinary people can’t use these devices. Technically, they could—but only if their Essence level were constantly maintained at 187 quints, and doing that would consume nearly all the Essence the pump collects. At that point, the whole process becomes pointless.”
He paused briefly. I listened without interrupting.
“The quint-pump and the Essence field sensor,” Art went on, “were both created at the same time, by the same person. His name is Hikaru Yugura. Their appearance was a turning point—the foundation of all technology that allows us to use Essence at all. Both devices were invented exclusively in our world, Variant One. That’s why, under no circumstances, they can be allowed to fall into the wrong hands,” he said, then repeated more slowly, choosing his words with care. “Especially not into the hands of representatives from closed worlds.”
He looked at me to make sure I was following.
“In case that ever does happen,” he continued, “the box with the quint-pump—and, incidentally, the Mask and every other piece of our gear that hasn’t been developed in other Variants—are all equipped with a self-destruction protocol. In a critical situation, the molecular mechs will turn them into dust in a matter of seconds.”
He returned the box to his belt—or rather, simply pressed it against it. The formin immediately flowed around the box, the edges rising and sealing over it, swallowing it whole. Once again, it was just a thickened segment of the belt.
Art gestured to the other segments.
“Terminal. Resonator. Batteries. I’ll show you all of that later and explain how it works. For now—let’s get to work.”
We stood up.
In the corner of my Mask’s display, a green icon appeared: the box. The number next to it read 0. Near the stone, a floating annotation popped up, ending in two values: 124q, 36α. I understood these as the nugget’s depth in quints and its capacity in amphoras.
Art turned toward me, as if to draw my attention.
I looked at him—and flinched.
The right shoulder strap of Art’s backpack, the one closest to the stone, suddenly stirred and began to change shape. It split lengthwise into two parts. The lower end of one section detached and slowly lifted upward, writhing slightly as it rose.
It looked like a tentacle.
Or like a snake lifting its head from the ground, preparing to strike.
“That’s a tacle,” Art explained calmly. “Like the rest of the backpack, it’s made of formin. Inside it runs a platinum core. Right now, it’s connected to the quint-pump.”
The tacle extended toward the stone. Its tip seemed to bite into the surface.
The numbers on the box icon began to climb: 1α… 2α… 3α…
On the Mask’s display, the stone gradually grew paler. The numbers slowed.
Art disconnected the tackle when the box reached 24 amphoras, and the nugget’s indicators settled at 106q, 8α.
“As you can see,” he said, “when the depth is low, the process is slow—and the speed drops exponentially. On top of that, the percentage of losses increases. More and more Essence simply dissipates into the surrounding space. Picking nuggets below 105 quints isn’t worth it—it takes too much time, especially once the box is partially filled. And extracting anything below 100 quints is impossible altogether.”
As he spoke, the tackle smoothly coiled back and flowed into the backpack strap, disappearing as if it had never existed.
“Let’s look for a few more,” Art said.
We continued along the trail. Over the rest of the day, we found roughly another dozen nuggets. Almost all of them were smaller than the first one, so by the end Art’s box held around two hundred amphoras—an amount of Essence roughly equivalent to that contained in twenty to thirty people.
Each time before extracting Essence from another nugget, Art would glance around, making sure no one was nearby and no one could see us. After that, he would usually position himself with his back to the nugget, keeping an eye on the surroundings. In those cases, the tacle formed not from the strap but from the backpack itself, which made the whole process almost completely invisible.
When we finished picking the last nugget, Art said:
“That’ll do for a first day.”
It was already around seven. Dusk was setting in. We started heading back. Even though I was exhausted—and my head was already overflowing with new information—I decided to ask a question that had been on my mind for a while. Or rather, to test a suspicion.
“I wanted to ask you something,” I said. “You striders—you’ve been here for a long time already, haven’t you? I mean, in our Variant.”
He smiled tiredly.
“About ten years. I don’t remember exactly. When the Gates appeared, we—like everyone else—immediately rushed to study them. But unlike the other Variants, we managed to learn how to see and collect Essence, and most importantly, to understand what it actually is and what it can be used for. After that, things moved very fast. The first strider was identified, then gradually the rest. Striders began walking through the Gates, bringing back information about other Variants. That’s how we figured out the structure of the Delta of Worlds. Then the striders split into Reds and Greens. ARC was created and organized the work of us Greens. Altogether, it took about five years.”
He paused, as if thinking about something.
“Your Variant is classified as closed. That means we striders hide ourselves and our activities from the locals. There are open Variants as well—places where everyone knows about us. But here, we’ve been keeping a low profile, and I think we’ve managed to do that successfully. Still, to operate properly, we need a lot from your world—from basic information about how things work, all the way to money and documents. So we gradually recruited and trained the right people—agents—who now provide us with everything we need. Some of them are locals who agreed to confidentiality. Others were brought through the Gates after having their Essence boosted.”
“Boosted?” I interrupted immediately. “Is that even possible?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?” he said calmly. “You can raise the Essence level in a person—or in any material object, for that matter. The same quint pump used for collecting Essence is used, just in reverse. The elevated level immediately starts dropping, with Essence leaking outward, until it settles at the level determined by the person’s contour. To pass through a Gate, the Essence level has to be higher than the Gate’s own level—what we call the threshold. That’s why we striders can cross at any time, but a regular person has to be boosted, preferably right before the crossing, so their level doesn’t drop below the threshold before they enter.”
“And the threshold level is… how much?”
“It varies. Some Variants have higher thresholds, some lower. On average—around two hundred quints. Give or take twenty. Oh, and by the way, the crossing itself consumes Essence too—about twenty to thirty quints. You don’t get that back instantly. So even we striders can’t just run back and forth endlessly.”
He smiled.
By that point, the stream of information had completely exhausted my ability to absorb anything new—or even to think clearly at all. So for the rest of the walk home, we barely talked. We bought a sandwich and a juice each at a small shop, and finally reached my place. I gave him the bed and took the couch.
I fell asleep instantly.