It sounded pompous, but I loved the name. Being a nerd all my life grants me certain liberties in my own head, especially since there’s barely anyone around to object. I looked in Norn’s plate sized eye. “Don’t fuck with me,” I said, my hands on his beak, “Now, I want you to make a nice nest in this tree behind you, and patrol the skies, alerting me if goblins or humans or any kind of monster comes near. Got it bird brain?”

A sense of warm affection and understanding gently flowed from Norn to me, to my mind. Awesome, a telepathic eagle-crow the size of a bus. Look out Blue Angels, there’s a new man in town. I stepped back, Norn doing the same, then with one flap of his wings, took off. I watched him for a minute, feeling out the new mental connection I had. His thoughts were primitive, almost infantile in nature, obsessed with ‘food, prey, nest, watch, master/mother, tree, home, safe, food’, and it went round and round. This mind muscle is not something I started with, or had ever considered even dreaming that it existed. Telepathy is not one of my strengths, but the bird bonding experience awakened a tiny kernel of my brain that would have any nerd drooling over it, the doorway was opened for new things. Again, I did not have time for this either, but having a dragon sized eye in the sky keeping watch for me does mean that I get to try out one of my crazier experiments.

Follow me here. Human bodies are frail, weak, but apparently, we can be better, and supposedly were much more robust before the Rending. If I could somehow fix my genetics, I could get there too. The problem is, I don’t know shit about genetics,or the hows and whys and differences between me and the other-than-this-earth humans. And since my flesh sorcery branched off of my own understanding of the human body, which might be more than the average dude, but nowhere near close to what a doctor would know, I couldn’t just wave my hand and fix it. So part of the idea would have to wait till those arrogant assholes returned, but the other part remained possible. I could probably raise up the base level of my body, as it does somehow contain the fragmented potential of giants. The only thing I could think of that would bring that out would be a combination of ridiculous stress and flesh sorcery. The key to this, would be a tiny fragment of sorcery that came with the earth based sorcery, gravity.

I went to the basement, ignoring the sleeping lizard sprawled on my dining room table snoring like a chainsaw. Sitting on a conjured stone bench in my basement in front of the generators, I conjured stone one piece at a time, carefully enchanted it, and then laid it out like disassembled medieval plate armor. A chest and back plate underneath a stone helmet with holes for straps in it, gauntlets for my forearms and pauldrons for shoulders, then finished off leg coverings and curved stone plates for my boots. It was almost dark, so I wanted to get this done before tomorrow morning so that a day of hell could begin. Each piece of the stone armor had an enchantment on it with several conditional factors. First, the enchantment would increase its own personal gravity/weight when I activated it. Second, the weight would evenly distribute across my body so that no muscle would be missed. Third, all of the enchantments were linked so that when I turned it on and off, it would apply to each piece.

My main pocket generator would be powering the entire suit as it had more than enough output for it, which then lead to me making a second pocket generator. This one had two different healing enchantments on it. The first one’s focus would be to wipe away fatigue and banish lactic acid and carbon dioxide so that I would not get tired, instant marathon runner enchantment. The focus of the second was to rebuild my body from the cellular level up. It would make my bones denser, my muscles repair so that they grew in strength, both fast and slow twitch muscles, and the ligaments and tendons would repair themselves, but not with scar tissue, replace any lost blood, and also slowly banish old cells bit by bit so that new fresh ones could take their place. When everything was laid out perfectly for tomorrow, I decided to do the last experiment for the night. With my flesh magic, I wanted to see if I could reverse my age.