Immortal

18. I spy.

Things picked up again after I had learned my lesson on trust. I began to teach myself tricks to manipulate the system in my favor. My whole set of tactics changed almost overnight. I stopped being reserved, and began to form connections that I had a pretty late start too.
I was reassigned to a different position, moving crates around and making sketchy deliveries. I never went back to the lab again. The work was tiresome and temporary but it was an arrangement Eliam had once again paid the price for.
Since then, I didn't really know what became of Izen. In a way he was someone who was dead to me. Our bond from the fighting ring didn't matter to me anymore. What happened, happened. Even though I had gained a resource from it, if ever needed.
Claire was still in business although losing Alaric had cost her quite a bit.  The retrieval team also never showed up at our doorstep. I suspected part of that had to do with Eliam's hand in things. It made me wonder who he really was. What kind of person he actually was. If I ever actually knew the true depth of the being I'd always known as my older brother.
I also began to see the point system in everything I did. Everyday became a game of strategy, scamming my way through shopkeepers stuff. Reducing the value of items and trading things I used to hold onto a little too tightly. I became okay with having nothing and trading everything. Anything I needed I would use for the purpose it was intended for and once it was complete I would trade or sell it for points.

It was the most effective way I could think of to make the most amount of points possible, in a place that didn't give them so freely. I was able to score food that we hadn't the luxury of eating for a long time. There were a few times I even got my hands on lab grown meat. It was a little passed its best quality date but it was still delicious at the end of the day.

I looked for materials that would be useful to me. As for studies I was now doing them on my own. I learned the value of my previous work. I didn't know before that a successful art form was worth twenty thousand points. They would divide that by two people so ten thousand each. That meant I had one hundred thirty thousand points from each creation. I had made thirteen art forms successfully. The soul drive itself was a little less than than the complete art form. Worth about five thousand points, which could make for a decent trade off.

I had learned that all the equipment needed to make an art form was actually available at a point price. Which meant I could keep up my lab work, outside of the lab. I could design soul drives at home and sell them for points to greedy shopkeepers. I could do the same work and make my own personal gain from it. It was completely illegal, but what wasn't these days?

Books I realized where a harder resource to come by and worth more points. The two books I had taken from Claire's building that Amity shared with me were the only two resources worth good amounts of points in my possession. I had hidden them from Eliam, even though I had read the contents of both fairy quickly. 

I became more aware to the rhythm of this sector and how it worked out. The ways everyone made their little pieces of living. How everyone went home happy to have won a little something for themselves. The system set up in a way to function best in the manner of everyone for themselves. If you wanted to benefit you needed to be okay with possibly dragging someone else through the mud.
Work in that aspect never stopped coming. Everyone was always a little too comfortable with destroying someone else. Something I found as equally fascinating as I did irritating.

I didn't think much on the new information about my mother that I discovered. It still gnawed away at some piece of my mind, becoming an itch I couldn't scratch. It was a subject I couldn't let myself hyper fixate on. It lived in the far back of my mind were I attempted to suffocate it, until the subject became relevant again. Even so she played a role in everything that was happening. She was in the shadows of all of it.