Artificer karma and Five Pebbles (spoilers)

[RefugeZero]

I completed the normal (probably bad?) ending with Artificer, and so I restarted the game to try to find a different ending. In my first run I visited Six Grains of Gravel at the top of the wall first, which gave me Karma level 2, and then I visited Five Pebbles which gave me Karma level 3. Am I just remembering wrong?

In my second run I visited Five Pebbles first, so that I could understand whatever message the Echo said to me, but this time Five Pebbles gave me no Karma, and so after visiting the Echo now I'm only at Karma level 2.

Is this a bug, or did I majorly screw things up and should restart my run?

[RCMidas]

Yes, Five Pebbles doesn't increase the Artificer's karma. Matter of fact, the only two slugcats he does this for are Survivor and Monk, explicitly because he is absolutely infuriated with their species showing up all the time and just wants them to get PERMANENTLY lost.

[Kligan]

5P specifically states that there's no point in him helping Arti, because she's too far gone with her hatred and wouldn't be able to let it go. So instead he pointed her toward her goal, which would help him get rid of "parasites" in his city as well.

It is possible for Arti to gain up to 9 karma and try to ascend, bringing along scavenger corpse for the ride. But even after all the effort she still cannot let go of her anger and loss (hence she never can get 10 Karma), and in the end she gets dissolved into the void, becoming an echo. Much like the ancients who couldn't ascend properly.