Author's Note: Some of you might absolutely HATE this chapter, in which case I am sorry in advance.

I had a lot of fun writing it, but there is a lot of new info introduced, plus the SECOND most important plot-element in the entire series. The first is Cultivation itself, I'll let you guys guess what the second is after reading this chapter.

Again, sorry if it's confusing. Was challenging to write, and I just hope it turned out okay.

“Wait, so he kicked your ass, then bought you drinks?” Wolfram asked me, sitting cross legged on my new bed – all the new recruits had been given quarters here at the barracks of House Flameward, although most of them were still off with their families.

I laughed, “Actually, yeah, that about sums it up.” I smiled at Wolfram, still not quite used to his new appearance. He just looked so much like a human crossed with a monkey that it was sometimes hard to take him seriously, and the way his tail always seemed to move around on its own was even more distracting.

Wolfram rolled his eyes, “At least nobody else here knows what a beasting monkey is…” He muttered to himself.

Wait… did I say that… “Dude, what the fuck!” I yelled at him in English. It was the language we used over the soul-link, so I often found myself slipping into it when speaking with him. “Are you reading my mind again! Bloody beast, Wolfram!” I glared at him while frowning.

At least he had the grace to look guilty. “Sorry Heller, I actually forgot to stop the spell after Teleporting over here.” He made a gesture. “There, it’s cut. My bad.”

I couldn’t feel any difference… I sighed, shaking my head. I really needed better defense against that mind stuff. In fact, Wolfram’s entire power set was pretty amazing – just the way he got here today blew me away. About 5 minutes ago he had sent me a mental message, asking if I was free to chat. After I had said yes, he asked for permission to get the location from my mind so he could teleport over, and I had agreed. I mean, I guess he had asked, at least. And it’s not like I had anything to hide from him, but still…

“Sooo… you said he told you something interesting after he got drunk?” Wolfram asked me in a blatant attempt to change the subject.

I rolled my eyes, mimicking his earlier gesture. “Change of topic accepted.” I couldn’t help but grin. No point in staying mad, and anyway I suppose it helped me keep motivated to work out a way to block his powers. And maybe someday that would save my life, who knows?

Wolfram gave me a grateful smile, waiting for me to continue.

“Okay… where was I? Oh, right, the alchemy bar,” I said, remembering the strange place Firebrand had taken me after out duel, “anyway, yeah he told me that he didn’t want to talk about that stuff until tomorrow, but after he got wasted he just started jabbering away.” I couldn’t help but chuckle; Firebrand was an odd duck, to be sure. “He told me a bunch of things, like the fact that we are in the Nascent stage, and that he thinks that there are more stages. Apparently everyone here thinks that Nascent is the one and only stage above being a normal cultivator, because nobody has ever gone higher, but Firebrand figured out that powerful beasts have cores that can…”

“Wait, what? What the beast does that mean?” Wolfram interrupted, “Core? Like an apple?

I held up a hand, “No… like, a battery maybe. A soul battery, and Firebrand saw the Merrik eat one once, a long time ago. He got obsessed with it, thinking that beast cores were the secret to the Merrik’s power.” I took a deep breath, “But, of course thing’s aren’t that simple. Since then, Firebrand has eaten dozens of beast cores, and while he is sure they made him stronger, it’s nowhere near what he had hoped. And he thinks there is a downside as well, since it takes a long time to fully absorb a core, and during that time he isn’t able to cultivate…”

Wolfram raised an eyebrow, siting up straighter. His tail had sped up as well… “So what is the point of eating these beast cores, then?”

“Well, he was able to focus on other things while the energy absorbed, then once it was finished he could improve super-fast once he started cultivating again.” I paused for a moment, “Sound’s familiar, right?”

Monkey-boy nodded, looking thoughtful, “Yeah… that sounds like how we cultivate…” He looked at me, “So the beast’s energy gets absorbed, then once he starts cultivating it goes down the channels created by his technique from inside his body, like us, instead of having to be slowly absorbed from the world.”

“Pretty much, yeah. But it’s not all that fast; Firebrand figures that most beast cores have the same effect as a few years’ worth of cultivating, but they take him months to fully absorb. If I had to guess… maybe… somewhere between 4 to 6 of my CP, and 16 to 32 of your… uh… ksb?” Wolfram and I had worked together to guess the rate at which people here could cultivate, and estimated that it was around fifty times slower than the strange symbol the Celestial had given us.

“KMSB, kilo-magic-spell-bits! C’mon, I’ve told you like 100 times already!” Wolfram grinned impishly, falling back down on the bed with his arms thrown up in mock exasperation. “For the love of the spirits!”

I briefly contemplated grabbing him by his tail and pulling him off my bed, but I wasn’t sure how sensitive it was. It might really hurt if I tugged on it too hard. “Ok, KPSMB, or whatever.” Stupid acronyms. I hurried on before he tried to correct me again, “So that was one thing, but there are two more that are just as good, if not better. Do you remember how I told you he managed to escape my magnetism?” I paused, waiting for Wolfram to look up at me.

“Uhh, yeah, but didn’t you say he probably superheated his armor to make it less magnetic?”

“Well, that’s what I thought, but apparently, once you learn how, we can circulate ambient Qi through items!” I waited for him to jump off the bed in excitement.

“Well, that’s stupid. Why would we want to do that?”

I closed my eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath. Alright, I hadn’t explained it very well. Chuckling to myself, I tried again. “You remember how I could usually get past your guard, striking before you were able to remove the force?” Wolfram and I had tried sparring while using TR, and the results were conclusive: He was WAY weaker than I was when it came to physical combat. Which only made sense, really, considering that I had been training for years with Wulfric and Tetra, while Wolfram had yet to experience a serious fight in EITHER of his lives.

That made Wolfram sit up. “Yeah, because it’s so hard to get the timing right. Same with attacking, you have to time it exactly, or the Qi is wasted. Kind of a useless ability, I think. The only real use is in altering your time rate.”

Altered time rate was what Wolfram called it when we used ambient Qi to speed up our perceptions alongside our bodies – in essence, letting us experience two seconds for each one that a normal person went through.

“Well, I don’t find it that hard, but that’s only because I practiced a whole lot. Though I still get messed up sometimes, especially with multiple attackers, or strikes I don’t see coming. But that’s what I’m trying to say, Wolfram! If you circulate your Qi through your weapon, you don’t need to time it! It’s always on!” Personally, I found this to be a lot more exciting than the beast core thing.

Eyes wide, Wolfram said, “Oh, bloody beast, so you could turn leather armor harder than steel plate? Or a piece of paper into a sword?”

I… wasn’t actually sure about either of those, but both seemed more or less within the realm of possibility. “Probably, yeah, you could! But you would need a lot of practice. Firebrand says it took him years before he managed to do it, following a secret manual an ancestor of House Flameward had created with detailed instructions on how it was done. The biggest downside is that each item is different… so you have to start from scratch if you lose your gear. Though, he did say the whole process gets easier with time.” I shrugged, “I don’t really understand what he means by each item being different, but I did get him to agree to teach me the technique.” I smiled smugly and wiggled my eyebrows.

“And… that helped him escape your magnetism?”

“Pretty much, yeah. I don’t really understand it yet, but apparently he was able guard his armor from my power somehow. After he figured out what was holding him down, he just started circulating Qi through his armor and eventually managed to break my hold, though he said it was a struggle. I might have been able to stop him if I had known what he was doing.” I’d just have to test that later.

“I need to learn that, Heller! Right now I don’t really have any good passive defenses, but if I could wear super-Qi-armor all the time I’d be a total badass.” We both chuckled.

“Alright, what was the last part.” Wolfram asked me.

“Training limitations. After you become a Nascent Cultivator, your body isn’t normal anymore. We can train harder, and we don’t tend to lose ground even if we stop training later on!”

I was pretty excited by this, but Wolfram didn’t look impressed.

I tried a different tack, “Okay, so imagine that you go to the gym every day of your life. You will get pretty strong, right? But eventually you get diminishing returns, or your muscles get overly large so you lose mobility, or you tear your ligaments or whatever. Either way, once you reach a certain point, you hit your max potential and then have to train like mad just to maintain.” I paused, making sure Wolfram was still with me.

“So… being a Nascent Cultivator means you don’t lose gains?”

I nodded, “That’s what Firebrand said. He told me that he trains the same as he did before he passed his lightning-trial. Before the trial, he had already been training for a long time, but he had reached his limit on speed, dexterity and strength. But!” I held up a finger, “After his trial, not only did he stop having to maintain, he started improving again! Just from exercise he was able to get faster, strong, and better with his weapons – apparently without limit!” I was so excited by this point that I was pacing back and forth next to my bed, a big smile on my face.

Wolfram just stared at me. “That… sounds… really boring.”

I stopped short, staring at Wolfram for a moment, my mouth hanging open.

Wolfram shrugged, laughing at my expression. “I’m just kidding, that is pretty cool.” He said, but I knew he was half humoring me.

I sat down on the bed, giving him a defeated look. “Surpassing human limitations, man, and without having to spend points. How is that not awesome?”

Allowing himself to fall back down on the bed, Wolfram said, “Seriously it’s great… but…” He took a deep breath before letting out a sigh. “Well, with the way you are… it just means that you will get WAY stronger than me, like when we used to play games.”

I… hadn’t thought of that. Back on Earth I had been, sporadically, REALLY into training – both in roleplaying games, and in real life. I never had the drive to become a professional athlete (too unrealistic), but I was generally the most fit person in my social circle… and here, in a world where being strong actually mattered… well, my drive for self-improvement was even stronger than it had ever been in my past life. I mean, who cared if you could bench 250 pounds on Earth? Did it really matter? But here, where the sword ruled, every little bit helped.

It was the same for games: I could never allow myself to play most online games, for the simple reason that I hated not being the strongest. Meaning that once I got into a game, I spent way too much effort mastering it, not willing to stop until I was the best. In the end, it had come down to a choice: play a worthless game that didn’t matter, or keep my job make enough to suppory my child. I won’t say the choice had been easy, but it had been pretty clear which option was the better one.

But now… I hadn’t really even considered living a normal life, at least… not since I had seen my first beast attack. I mean, no way in hell was I going to leave my fate in the hands of a world as cruel as this one! It felt obvious to me that I had to get stronger, at the very least strong enough to take down the strongest beast without fear! Maybe after that I could relax, think about settling down again…

I came back from my thoughts with a start, suddenly realizing that Wolfram was silently laughing.

“By the spirits, Heller…” He sat up, placing a furry hand on my shoulder, “You might be a green skinned lizard boy, but you sure as hell haven’t changed.”

-------------------------

A few tendays later, Wolfram was back in my room helping me push all the furniture in the room against the door.

Wulfric and Tetra were still with their families, and I had been to visit them a few days before. Tetra’s father was interesting; a frantic seeming alchemist who was so enthusiastic and happy that I wondered if he had ingested the wrong potion. I hadn’t met her mother. Wulfric’s father was almost the exact opposite, the strong and silent type, while his mother was an outgoing woman who spent most of the visit prying into why House Flameward had accepted such a young boy. I had been happy to finally leave…

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Wolfram asked me, and not for the first time.

I smiled at him. Our conversation a while ago had helped me put together a bunch of ideas that had been floating though my head, half-finished thoughts and discarded ideas coming together to form an ability that allowed me to power-game at an epic level. I had figured out a way to achieve three of my top priority goals all in one go – and it was surprisingly cheap as well!

“It’s too late now, Wolfram, I already bought the ability last night. I just wanted you here when I test it out… you know… just in case.”

I knew that what I was going to try was a risk, but it was a calculated risk. I had gone over everything hundreds of times in the System before finalizing the power… but, so far, every ability that I have purchased has had at least a small quirk that was outside my expectations.

But there was another reason why I wanted Wolfram here: The ability would end up affecting him too, if indirectly. If I didn’t bring him in on the ground floor, I might risk freaking him out… maybe even damaging our friendship. I didn’t think that would happen, but… well… in a way what I was trying to do was pretty crazy.

“What If the other one is evil, Heller? What if it wants to kill you?”

I sighed… it was a good thing I brought him in on this now, if he was this paranoid before I even started. “I already told you, there is no ‘other one’. They will both be me, no difference.” I shoved my desk against the bed, standing back to examine the clear space in the middle of the room. All this was probably not necessary, but I wanted to play it safe the first time.

I looked over at Wolfram, trying for a reassuring smile. “Look… I based it on my TR power. If one of them wouldn’t be me, then I’m already not myself. I’ve had my head chopped off, Wolfram. I’ve regenerated pretty much every part of my body at least once.” I raised my eyebrows, giving him a long look.

Wolfram took a deep breath, steadily meeting my gaze. “Just… just be careful, alright?”

I winked at him, “That’s why I have you here to watch out for me.”

A few minutes later, everything was prepared. I sat down on the floor, closed my eyes… then stood back up and started to strip. I didn’t think clothes would get in the way (since they would just fall to the floor), but no point in taking chances. Wolfram didn’t say anything, but I could tell he was nervous.

I sat back down, closed my eyes, and focused on my ability. The first part was the only part I was really worried about... or, I should say, the end of the first part. When the ability activated the first thing that happened was that a modified version of TR took a ‘snapshot’ of me… and I mean all of me, my entire corporeal form.

Next came a sense of weightlessness, as my sense of self… thinned.

“OH fuck, oh fuck oh fuck fuck fuck.” I ‘heard’ Wolfram mutter, but I couldn’t really focus on anything.

If everything was going well, at the end of the first stage my body should have combined with my soul, turning into… well… turning into a kind of blood mist, I suppose. That wasn’t actually the case, of course, but since I had more or less atomized my body into a gaseous state, I had hypothesized that I would look like a reddish mist.

“Shit shit shit shit shit…”

Now the second stage, where every part of my body should split after having combined with my soul. It took longer than I expected, and I felt an odd sense of resistance, but I wasn’t all that worried – I had a lot of faith in TR after all the times it had saved me, and worst case scenario I should just snap back to normal.

But I felt it working… one cloud moving off to the left of me, and the other moving to my right…

------------------

Heller Right

… I felt a subtle push, nudging me towards the right, so I just went along with it. This was my first time using this power, so I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. On my left side I could sense the cloud of ‘blood mist’ that had separated from me, but I didn’t know if the power was working properly or not.

“fukkidyfukkidyfukfukfukwhatthefuckhelleryouretardshitshit…”

Wolfram was still muttering to himself. I would have sighed, but my lungs hadn’t reformed yet… ohhh there we go, I felt the tingle as I came back together. Well… I didn’t really feel anything, aside from going into the blood mist. Did it fail? I turned to look at where the other blood mist had gone, WOAHHHH!

There was another Heller sitting there, looking at me with wide eyes. Oh man, my Horns were kind of intimidating! They went well with my green skin though… Wait, now is not the time.

“Hello?”

“Hello?”

It took me a moment to realize that we had both spoken at the exact same time. I let out a chuckle that was also exactly mirrored, causing me to look at the other Heller just as he looked at me.

“This is totally weird.”

“This is totally weird.”

I looked at the other Heller again, both of us raising our left hands at exactly the same time as we smiled and stepped backwards one step.

“Wolfram, the other Heller and I are stuck in sync I think.”

“Wolfram, the other Heller and I are stuck in sync I think.”

Wolfram just stared at us with wide eyes, looking back and forth between us.

“So am I Right Heller, then?”

“So am I Left Heller, then?”

We both said with a chuckle, pausing in surprise as our words finally went out of sync, but just by a tiny amount. Wait… did it take longer to say ‘Left’ then to say ‘Right’? The other Heller’s chuckle had lagged just a hair behind mine.

Wolfram finally spoke, “Left Heller, come with me to look out the window. Right Heller, stay here.”

I nearly opened my mouth to protest before snapping it shut, my mind racing. Was I seriously jealous of MYSELF for a moment there? I couldn’t help but smile. After thinking about it for a moment, I was actually glad that Wolfram had spoken to the other Heller first, because I knew that I would feel guilty if I had been the one chosen. I did my best not to listen to their conversation as I checked my information through the System, checking what powers I had been allocated. Ooo, ice AND most of the healing package!

------------------------

Heller Left

… I felt a subtle push, nudging me towards the left, so I just went along with it. This was my first time using this power, so I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. On my right side I could sense the cloud of ‘blood mist’ that had separated from me, but I didn’t know if the power was working properly or not.

“fukkidyfukkidyfukfukfukwhatthefuckhelleryouretardshitshit…”

Wolfram was still muttering to himself. I would have sighed, but my lungs hadn’t reformed yet… ohhh there we go, I felt the tingle as I came back together. Well… I didn’t really feel anything, aside from going into the blood mist. Did it fail? I turned to look at where the other blood mist had gone, WOAHHHH!

There was another Heller sitting there, looking at me with wide eyes. Oh man, my Horns were kind of intimidating! They went well with my green skin though… Wait, now is not the time.

“Hello?”

“Hello?”

It took me a moment to realize that we had both spoken at the exact same time. I let out a chuckle that was also exactly mirrored, causing me to look at the other Heller just as he looked at me.

“This is totally weird.”

“This is totally weird.”

I looked at the other Heller again, both of us raising our left hands at exactly the same time as we smiled and stepped backwards one step.

“Wolfram, the other Heller and I are stuck in sync I think.”

“Wolfram, the other Heller and I are stuck in sync I think.”

Wolfram just stared at us with wide eyes, looking back and forth between us.

“So am I Left Heller, then?”

“So am I Right Heller, then?”

We both said with a chuckle, pausing in surprise as our words finally went out of sync, but just a tiny amount. Wait… did it take longer to say ‘Left’ then to say ‘Right’? The other Heller’s chuckle had been just a hair ahead of mine.

Wolfram finally spoke, “Left Heller, come with me to look out the window. Right Heller, stay here.”

I nearly opened my mouth to protest before snapping it shut, my mind racing. Why should I go first, and not the other Heller? I nearly frowned, almost wishing that Wolfram had spoken to the other Heller first... I felt a bit guilty, wondering how it must feel being left behind. Well… then again, maybe he had it better… Oh crap, I am supposed to be following Wolfram!

I moved towards the window, looking outside at the courtyard below. I wondered were Firebrand was right now… I looked at Wolfram, raising an eyebrow in question. He was studying me deeply enough that I felt a bit uncomfortable…

“Alright, go back and talk to the other you.”

I blinked at Wolfram, somewhat mystified by his actions. But… I did ask him to be here for a reason, so I shrugged and turned to do as he said.

------------------------

Wolfram’s heart had been beating fast as hell when Heller first turned into an eerie pink-white mist. Then when the mist suddenly started to grow he decided it was worth the risk; Wolfram activated a silent spell that caused any sound to repeat on a loop, muttered a few choice curse words, then used the aural illusion to cover up another spell.

It was easy enough to break into Heller’s mind, since he was already familiar with it, and the second Heller was just as easy. So Wolfram started monitoring their thoughts, confused at first… they were… they were exactly the same, down to the smallest detail!

Even when they started speaking they had exactly the same thoughts, until, finally, one said ‘left’ while the other said ‘right’. And suddenly they weren’t quite in sync any more… Wolfram’s eyes widened slightly. He decided to widen the gulf between the two Heller’s and see what happened. Since he was already in their minds, Wolfram felt pretty confident he could restrain them if something went wrong…

----------------------

One of the most important part of this new power of mine was the ability to recombine. I had it setup so that, when we came back together, the System would combine our memories as separate linear events, making me feel like I had lived both lives. Then the System would then examine both physical bodies and compile a list of differences, from which I could choose the best of each! I could even combine similar gains, so if both had spent a few doing endurance training, I could get the combined benefit all in one go.

In essence, it let me cheat. I could double my training time and speed, focusing on either the same thing or entirely different fields. But even this wasn’t the main motivation for this power: The true goal was to provide a backup.

The idea was that I could split myself before a dangerous encounter, so that even if one of me died all I would lose would be anything that happened after the split… which would still suck, of course. Or, more importantly, I could leave a backup Heller behind when I tried to cross the mountains. Everything I had ever heard told me that crossing the mountains was simply impossible, and I would feel a lot better about attempting it if I knew that part of me would live on… literally.

I looked over at the far side of the room, where the other me was explaining how this power worked to Wolfram again.

Wolfram nodded to him, “Ok, so you can be in two places at once, train at twice the speed as before, and even if one of you die the other one can carry on?”

The other Heller nodded, “Yep, pretty much.” He looked over at me, and I couldn’t help but give him an exaggerated conspiratorial wink. The other Heller laughed and rolled his eyes, putting his finger on his lips and making a ‘shhhh’ sound as he nodded his head at Wolfram.

After about half an hour we were almost completely out of sync, although we would occasionally respond to Wolfram with the same answer at the same time. It was pretty clear that having different experiences caused us to diverge, while having similar experiences caused us to start synching back up again.

I walked over to Wolfram and the other Heller, wanting to get in on the conversation. “We are both connected to the same soul, though, or… at least, we both contain parts of the same soul.” Heller shrugged at me and nodded, not sure either. “If one of us dies, there is almost certainly going to be a backlash of some kind. Most likely, I won’t have access to whatever powers the dead Heller had been outfitted with for a while; could be seconds, could be days.”

I had to decide which powers are going where when I split, otherwise they will just be assigned randomly (a feature I built into the duplication ability to make sure I don’t temporarily loose access to a power if I forgot to set who it was going to).

Wolfram looked over at me, “Can you make another clone if one dies?”

The other Heller and I had the same reaction as we tilted our heads to the side and winced. Heller gave me a small nod, gesturing his head towards Wolfram.

“Not clones, Wolfram. Neither of us was ‘grown’ from a sample of DNA. We are duplicates, created by a process similar to regeneration.” I waited for a moment, wanting to see if he would get the difference. It was pretty important to me (and the other Heller, I could see), but Wolfram didn’t seem to get the difference. “So yes, after the effects of the backlash fades, either one of us can use this power again to DUPLICATE. Since both of us are literally still the original, it doesn’t matter which one carries on. That was why I designed the power specifically to DUPLICATE, and not to clone.”

Wolfram shrugged, raising an eyebrow. “Alright… duplicates then.”

Heller and I both sighed, shaking our heads, clear that monkey-butt didn’t get our point. We could discuss it with him again later, for now I wanted to recombine and finish this test.

--------------------------

The recombination was going well, and I could clearly remember what it had felt like to be both Right and Left Heller; it was pretty cool. I was now working on the physical aspect of the recombination, going through the information the System had provided me. Unsurprisingly, both versions showed to be identical, so it didn’t matter if I swapped things around – after all, we had been split for less than an hour.

The process of recombining was a lot more involved than the original split, taking about twenty seconds compared to the original five. I slowly opened my eyes, ready to be only a single person again and quite happy with how well things had gone.

“Uhhhh… Heller… didn’t you say the test was over?” Wolfram asked me, a strange catch in his voice.

“Yep, all done! I can remember both versions of myself perfectly… wait…” “Yep, all done! I can remember both versions of myself perfectly… wait…”

I whipped my head around, nearly knocking my horns against the Heller beside me.

“What the fuck!” “What the fuck!”

-----------------------

A few hours later the three of us were sitting in a circle on the floor, trying to finalize our plan. Since the other Heller and I almost always had the same thoughts, we had agreed to take turns speaking. At least we were able to recombine and share memories, able to re-sync at will if we didn’t want our personalities to diverge too much.

“It’s just a simple mistake, Wolfram, not such a huge deal. I just didn’t think about the fact that I would have the mass of two separate bodies when I recombined… so when we split, it had to be back into the same number of me that made up the combined blood-mist…”

Wolfram shook his head. “And the only way to become a single person again now… is to kill one of you? What the beast is that, Heller! Are you insane!”

Heller and I looked at each other. Wolfram had a point, and we both knew it.

I remained silent as the other Heller spoke, “Pretty much… yeah. Yes, I am a retard.” We both chuckled.

“And you refuse to kill yourself?” He asked us.

I looked at the other me, “There is no way I can kill myself, Wolfram. Even if I know it’s not suicide, still… knowing that I’d have to do that every time I used this power? That would make it useless.” I stopped speaking, waiting for the other Heller to take his turn.

“At least this way I can get some benefit from it, as long as nobody freaks out. One of us will take the electricity and magnetism powers and go and stay with Jaws in North Stone village. I’ll tell Froggy that I’m hiding out in order to train, and ask him to keep my presence there a secret.” Said the other Heller.

I nodded, “We just have to recombine again and setup the ability distribution, and we are all set. The question is, can you smuggle me out of The City without anyone noticing? An illusion or something”

Wolfram sighed, closing his eyes and reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose. I felt bad for him; it wasn’t cool to put your friends in a positon like this, especially when the whole thing freaked him out in the first place. I’d definitely have to find a way to make it up to him.

“Which Heller do I chat with? Which one do I visit?” He asked, his eyes still closed.

“The one who stays here to train, of course.” Said the other Heller, “We can both access the soul-link, so all I have to do is remember to upload a summary of the day’s events there for the other me to check out.”

“And if the Blacksmith-Heller gets lonely, we can just meet up to sync our memories again; problem solved.” I added, knowing that Blacksmith-Heller was in no way going to get lonely or miss the city. In fact, I was super excited to get back to blacksmithing, and this was a golden opportunity that I hadn’t expected to fall on my lap like this.

The other Heller smiled over at me, knowing exactly what I was thinking. The only thing I hated was missing opportunities: If I stayed here I’d miss out on blacksmith training and spending time with my family; and if I left I’d miss out on learning more from Firebrand and the other weapons instructors here in the Flameward Barracks. This way, I got the best of both worlds!

Wolfram sighed, massaging his temples now. “Yeah, I can get you out of The City. Just… send me a message once you get home, alright?”