Katarina groaned.
"Here."
"Huh?"
"Some tea."
Katarina took it from her hands and took a sip. The relief was immediate.
"It's enchanted with Grace qi."
[God bless magical healing.]
It had been six days.
Six days of Katarina at the workshop bench from sunrise until the lamplighters made their second pass. Six days of tea instead of meals, formation diagrams instead of sleep, and a growing pile of failed prototypes shoved into the corner of her bench like a graveyard.
The qi pump idea had survived contact with reality for about forty-eight hours before the secondary loop started destabilizing in ways Katarina hadn't predicted. She'd torn it down, started again with a different ratio, torn it down, tried a buffer layer, and torn it down again.
The bleed wanted to go somewhere. She just couldn't figure out where.
---
