As soon as I arrive in this black void, I feel the exhaustion hitting me with even more strength. I know I should be tired after all that, but this feels external. As I pay close attention to the feedback my body is providing me, I become certain that it's not natural. My vigor pool is pretty close to full. This feeling is slightly different. It’s different from anything I have felt before, even the closest association I can make. Having exhausted myself multiple times while keeping a full vigor pool, I’m intimately familiar with that sensation.

This new exhaustion tries to imitate something between the need to sleep and wanting to drop because you just finished something like a marathon. I harden my expression and I ignore it. I have long accustomed myself to the occasional need to spend a few sleepless nights. I don’t recommend it to anyone else, but this was a tolerance I have developed over the years, something that set me apart from everyone else. This will be added as another aspect to that.

I also could ignore the exhaustion in my body. I transported thousands of tons of stuff transported on my back, some of that from 5 miles away. That doesn’t even count what I brought by pickup or truck to my house. I was well used to being tired, in its many facets.

I ignore all that and pulled my stat sheet up. Again I’m interrupted by notifications.

You have a new skill: Mana manipulation Allows for the manipulation of mana. Increase flow and improves control as the skill levels You have a new skill: Free-form magic

Both the most common and rarest of magic schools, it is simply wielding Mana without any form based only on what the wielder desires. A slightly unfocussed mind when performing such magic will usually severely injure or kill the practitioner of this school. Many consider the mildest of injuries to be mana backlash. A typical injury would be to use a spell that pulls more mana than the wielder has available. Failing, the person suffers a backlash and loses access to mana for months or years.

You have upgraded the skill Meditation to Kinetic Meditation Kinetic Meditation Lv.15 – Allows for movement while benefiting from some of the increased effects of meditation. Higher levels allow a better resource regeneration multiplier. You have a new skill: Mana Infusion Allows the user to infuse his own body with mana to perform for longer and at an increased physical level You have increased your Endurance by 2 You have increased your Willpower by 1

I read over the messages and thank god that I was focused when I used free-form magic. I have no idea what I did, but it doesn’t matter at the moment. Reading over it again, l find that to have such a long description, it might have been messed with by the council.

It doesn’t mean they were lying. A skilled manipulator can deceive people by choosing how to tell the truth. Given all I learned, I suspected the Council spend a long time learning how to deceive people.

After dismissing each of those screens, I finally see my character sheet.

Name:Nash Level:0 Titles:2 Class: None 0/1000 EXP Strength 15 Soul 3 Constitution 10 Agility 10 Dexterity 11 Endurance 21 Perception 13 Intelligence 17 Willpower 22 Health 202/205 128 /day Mana 0/280 26,25 /hour Stamina 146/148 2,35 /min

Damn, now those are amazing stats. The human peak before this would be assumed to be around 10 for every stat. People like Usain Bolt would trade a couple of points on less desired traits such as endurance, maybe strength, and pile on Dexterity and specially Agility.

It was absurdly rare to have an average even slightly higher than 10. Still, the System is only a tool. It cannot measure everything. It can’t convey all that it measures with a few lines of text and a couple of numbers.

While analyzing my stats I also remember something else I read. No two systems are alike. They do tend to follow similar lines, more so if you only compare people from the same race. Most people on Earth should have gotten a blue screen. But a few might have gotten something else. It also grows and adapts to the person over time, though the results are more subtle.

Even the skill names and descriptions aren’t universal. Some people have thousands of skills that do almost the same thing, others have one skill and nothing else.

The variations were endless and philosophers have debated it as far back as time itself. This variation sometimes does interesting things to the first’s titles. Like the one, I got for being the first to have so many skills.

This is is one of the more debated titles, given it is so common for the holder of the title to hold fewer skills than other people in their world. There are other aspects of the system that are more uniform, like the stats and stat achievements. All of that is something I should keep in the back of my mind. After a few moments, I see my mana tick up by one. This allows me to feel a wave of relief. I was not even mildly impaired by my use of Free-form magic.

I look at the void around and the skill Inspect activates. This skill is a staple of the system, not an acquired skill. The amount of information and success rate is tied to the power and knowledge of the user. Stoping my wandering thoughts, I read through it.

Travel Void - The most common transportation method of the system for people between worlds. Only people of a sufficiently high level or with a sufficiently high Soul-stat can remain awake in the void.

This means everyone else will just wake up on the other side. I don’t have much to do here. But it gives me time to think and maybe run some experiments. I try a few things like breathing. While the results are interesting, it does nothing but sating my curiosity.

I start to try analyzing the void. I’m not successful at first, but after an hour or so when I start to use both Aether and Mana I feel the void become rainbow-colored close to the points all three come together.

As I feel a tug at my Aether and Mana I quietly separate them and pull the Aether back into my body. Aether is a precious resource and unlike Mana or Health, it has to be painstakingly harvested. I also assume when we come back to earth the Aether levels will be significantly lower, as most of Earth’s Aether will likely have been used to transform it.

There are only two mentions of Aether in the book, so there is still much in the air. But I do know it is precious and I will hoard it like a dragon hoards shiny things. Spreading out my senses, I try to find any indications of Aether around, but fail miserably.

Thinking over what I should do, I draw a tiny amount of mana and stretch it into the thinnest line I can. The ends touch each other forming a circle. I spin the whole thing and let inertia expand it until the mana is almost escaping my grasp.

With everything in place, I send another stream of Aether towards the mana circle.

I’m much more accustomed to Aether, so this is an almost imperceptible stream. Slowly a strand thinner than a strand of hair heads for the mana circle. I observe the result closely. Doing that for a second or so and repeating it a couple of times, I get a prompt:

You have a new skill: Space/time interaction

You have repeatedly observed one of the strongest and most powerful events in the universe. Achieve a high mastery in this skill to have a chance to unlock Space/time Manipulation. This skill will assist in your studies of spacial or temporal phenomena.

Security analyst for Milkway galaxy

I hear a loud buzzing in my ear.

What is wrong now? Let me see. Quasars are randomly popping off in the middle of nowhere. Let me check: size, placement, spectral shifting.

Ok, very small, only in the kiloton mass range. That means they are not natural. Somebody has been messing in the void.

It could be somebody taking their disciples around. One of them could have unlocked a higher stat. That is the only way I see for these quasars to be formed. Nobody else would have the mana and Aether control required.

There were not enough monitoring platforms in the region. That means it will be almost impossible to determine who did it. Nobody would be paying a fine for this. So I’m making an executive decision.

I filed it as a random phenomenon. Why lower the case-solving stats and cause all kinds of problems to the guys across the hall. They were good guys. Always keeping their heads down. They didn’t deserve something like this dropped on their heads.

I just hope somebody would return the favor if it ever came to it.

Getting up, I head for the table.

So many forms and reports to fill out now. Why did I take this job? I hate it.

==========

I reabsorb the mana not used. Finding something is not quite right, I circulate one more time my Aether. I use the thinnest stream I can and move it around me in varying patterns and speeds. I notice a very slight resistance that was not there before, it was so subtle that I didn’t notice anything before.

When handling larger amounts of Aether, I had no chance to detect this. But after noticing it, I could ignore it anymore. Like putting a dark shade of brown-black besides actual black, the difference is stark and difficult to ignore. I wonder if the cause of this resistance is the void or the system. I put it off thinking about it for later.

A couple of hours have passed and I’m starting to get very tired. While mana is now full, my stamina gauge is at half. If I conserve my strength, I might be able to keep awake for another 8 hours. And that is what I decide to do, keep awake as long as I can. Remembering my book I pull it from dimensional storage.

Another two pages filled. I start to read them and all of it, I assume, is relatively common knowledge. Most of it is stuff you might learn at school. A the end half a page is about magical theory, runes, and initial approaches to magic. Which seems to be something people care about a lot.

In short, the normal path was to go for one or two closely related schools of magic. There were thousands of types like elemental, runic, tattoos. An extension of that is the wizard approach, the mage approach, the arcane approach. And each of those could be mish-mashed into your way of doing magic.

If all that wasn’t enough, each of those were unique to the individual. Once in a while, a new world would show up with an entirely new type. Sometimes it could be replicated, sometimes it couldn’t. It was all a question of mindset, and there were mindsets too alien to even contemplate.

Something else that picked my interest and partially confirmed one of my suspicions.

The distribution of stats was something to pay close attention to. At the start putting 50 points into strength is a good way to break your bones as soon as you try to flex your arm. There were whole fields of study dedicated to the proper balancing of stats.

That was not a hard rule, however, a couple of very strong warriors that focused mostly on strength, with over 5 to 1 ratios, were just fine. The book is very vague about anything concerning age and levels. It didn’t provide any reference to what the oldest/strongest/richest meant. That must be because of the council’s actions.

I file the whole matter away for when I have more information and continue to read every single word in the book again. It may not be gospel, only common knowledge, but it was the only source of knowledge I knew about.

I feel something strange, and looking down, I finally notice what has been bugging me, everything I’m carrying is slowly disappearing. Holes have formed in my clothes, and as I pull on my shirt. With almost no strength my shirt begins to come apart.

Concern fills me as I think of the seed. I don’t sense anything at first, but when I connect with it using Aether, I feel it struggling. I can’t sense against what, but there is something wrong. I think for a few moments, I don’t know what I should do. I’m not feeling any effect, could I…?

Raising my eyelid and I stick the seed in there, and even in the very simplistic connection I can hold with such a young life, the relief is instantaneous.

I feel it hurting my eye slightly, but not nearly enough I consider taking it out. Let’s just hope it doesn’t start to grow while in my eye socket.

Who am I kidding? Around the seed, there is the stuff of life, water. It will do as all seeds do when planted. It will attempt to grow.

With that taken care of, the knot I was holding in my throat relaxes.

Turning to my next goal, my heart begins to thump with more vigor.

Finally, it’s time for magic. Visible and demonstrable magic. I think it over and settle on a combination to try first. I carefully draw a rune tracing it with mana in the air. The choice is obvious, fire. The human wonder people with fire is old and even I, guardian of Pando am not immune to it.

I use my will to create a flame in the middle of the drawing. It takes me a couple of tries, but when I succeed, it almost seems too easy. A small puff of flame costs me a couple of mana points.

I repeat the experiment again and again until I start to get control.

Twenty tries in, what I can do looks to be candle’s flame. It burns for about two seconds but as it disrupts the rune and I scramble to reabsorb any of the mana not used.

The farthest distance the flame holds steady is about 5 inches from the rune. On the other side of the spectrum, it needs at least 1 inch to not disrupt the very rune that gives it life.

So far it’s not very useful, and I’m already starting to dip heavily on my mana pool. A flame one inch high uses about 1.5 mana/sec. So I start to experiment with smaller and smaller sizes.

I test increasing and lowering the mana cost. Different shapes, colors, timings, and I even try to modify the rune. I spend hours using unique approaches to magic. And I learned I lot.

My Lv. 14 Kinetic Meditation saves a bit of time given I’m regenerating resources 14% faster. Mana is the limiting factor in my experimentation speed, as I grow closer and closer to running out of mana I start to get more and more conservative with its use.

In the end, I learned my initial idea was the best for the moment.

Using runes and will, I waste less mana and have precise control over the final product. As long as I don’t go overboard with the runes, I will have pretty liberal control over my magic even after drawing the runes. It does resemble Free-form Magic, but as the will and the runes are not tied to my mana, I can sever any connection and cancel the spell anytime.

I even take into consideration the expected progression as I grow into the system. That means all I need to do, is to be careful and I not get myself killed while getting a hold of all this stuff. I can always change later if it doesn’t work out.

Almost 12 hours later, with my stamina hitting 0, I go to sleep with a smile on my face.

You have a new skill: Fire manipulation Lv.1– Allows you to control Fire in its various forms. A staple skill of many a Elementalist. You have a new skill: Water manipulation – Allows you to control Water in its various forms. A staple skill of many a Elementalist. You have a new skill: Earth manipulation – Allows you to control Earth in its various forms. A staple skill of many a Elementalist. You have a new skill: Wind manipulation – Allows you to control Wind in its various forms. A staple skill of many a Elementalist. You have gained a level in the skill Kinetic Meditation. Skill is now Lv. 16 You have gained a level in the skill Mana Manipulation. Skill is now Lv. 1