Jade Bot Core: Tier 8 gleams on the edge of a weathered workbench, its jade facets catching lamp light with a prismatic green sheen. The surface is cool and smooth, each face cut with tiny grooves that feel like the teeth of a gear under a careful touch. A delicate network of gold filaments threads through the seams, and a pulse of pale emerald light flickers along the core’s center, as if the machine is breathing in time with a distant heartbeat. The engraving around the rim looks like a map of rivers and roots, a nod to the jade ecology that grew up around the first automata—an echo of the old Jade forges where art and machine learned to speak the same language. In the stories the smiths tell, Tier 8 marks a turning point: the moment when a bot ceases to be a tool and becomes a keeper, a silent partner in explorers’ and guardians’ work. The core’s power is whispered through the workshop’s coal-smell and the wind outside the open window. It is said to grant the Jade Bot more than endurance—its sensors sharpen to a single purpose, its limbs respond with a glinting speed, and its climate-locked shell holds a steadier line against rain and dust. When the bot is fitted with this tier, it can adapt to new tasks: a swift scout that redraws a map with auto-markers, a guardian that flares a protective shield for allies, and a repair beacon that siphons nano-glue from its own core to mend a gear or hinge. It’s not just a buff—it’s a narrative shift: the bot moves from being a companion to being a participant in the story. Market talk is a quiet undertone to the workshop’s drumbeat, where the price of a Tier 8 core drifts with scarcity and demand. Traders speak in hushed tones of the core’s rarity, of the way a single piece can tilt a guild’s fortunes during retrofit seasons. The Saddlebag Exchange, a pocket of the market where crafters trade by voice and note, carries the core like a prized map, its listings spotted with green stamps and the occasional cry of “sold.” For those who barter with time and care, a Jade Bot Core: Tier 8 is less a mere component than a pledge—the promise of a working ally who remembers the forest’s name and the old rivers that powered the forges. And so the core glows on, not just as an artifact of engineering but as a link between memory and machine, between the jade forests that birthed the bot and the roads it now walks beside the living world.