Congratulations, Gabriel Walker.

Epiphany reaches Tier 8.

New effect: Focus on the veil to gauge its secrets for 1 Mana point. Permanently increases Affinity by 80%.

Element alignment: Dark - Superior.

Current Synchronization 82.65%

"Almost there… we're almost there," he said to Liz, she was happily chewing on his dropped forearm.

This needs to end, though. Gabriel couldn't stand the sight of his Lizzy eating human meat, more precisely his arm. We're turning into monsters. I need to step this up.

A confident expression illuminated his gaze as Gabriel cleansed his body and leather suit with a perfectly balanced use of corruption. Even during the time he spent inside of The Memory, he did not waste the seemingly infinite Mana at his disposal.

Testing his control over Mana, checking for the limits of his abilities and the control he had over them, and, most importantly, battle training.

Yes, one would wonder why he needed to train when he was fresh out of a hellish training of consecutive battles. The answer was simple. Those were not battles; those were theatrics. Scenes repeated to memory, hoping for the best outcome.

He could not afford to have those experiences to be his only training.

Warriors inside of the Memory fought very differently. They relied not only on styles or martial arts. Gabriel noticed that the soldiers from the same houses or races or regiment developed and used as one with martial arts. Most of them had staple Skills, very much alike, though some were superiors to others, maybe more evolved. Their fighting was an intricate battle style weaved their whit their own Skills. Skills had been heavily ingrained in their combat until they became integral parts of it and not an addiction to it; in that regard, every single one of those soldiers far outdid Gabriel's battle style. Skills were part of the cycle; they were part of them. Instead, he barely had a whole Skill, and though practical, Gabriel Skills were basic, as their name suggested. To put it simply, he was a beginner, and he swiftly learned it the harsh way.

But Gabriel's phase one of the training hadn't been for nothing. Even though he had not really learned how to fight, he had the correct mindset for fighting, and he had done so exceptionally well.

Though most of the soldiers' personalities in The Memory were crude, the same couldn't be said about their abilities. Gabriel thought that the mayor had used an already existing frame to work with them. All in all, Gabriel realized that The Memory really was an extremely useful tool, and if only he managed to reach the place in which the Heralds fought without dying, he would have a great chance at understanding much more of this world and how to become invincible.

He decided that he would be learning more than just bending from his training, but he needed to speed it up.

The next day, Gabriel already had a new objective to aim at.

Studying the Vengeance of Fallen.

The banshee looking monster was it too, like the Glory; a creature of nightmare.

Its dark hair, long to its ankles, fluttered in the wind as if it had no weight at all to them. Even in the absence of wind, they floated.

Vengeance looked frail in their bony frame, their skin almost sticking to their big bones. The only thing they wore, the transparent robe, looked ethereal just like their body did when they phased out of the material realm.

Gabriel could swear that he had seen them evade near annihilation by merely turning into transparent phantoms, though their dress always was.

They were especially susceptible to spiritual attacks; however, the only ones who could do so were, once again, the white tunics.

Another enigma that came with The Memory were the white tunic healers, called 'The Priests' by the soldiers. They were almost the centerpiece of the defense against the monster, but their weird immunities were hard to explain. No matter how Gabriel focused on them, he could not see their souls. They clearly had one, but everything related to their spirit and spiritual power was hidden by something, Perks or Skills, maybe.

Though strong as the Glories, yet not as terrifying, or at least for him. Vengeances had many types of attacks, they were incredibly versatile, and even though they did not attack directly, they could not be underestimated.

Vengeance could cast disgusting hexes upon their targets. Most of them revolved around debilitation or diseases.

Debilitation types of attacks were much more direct, and their effect stronger. They could cripple their targets in many different ways, thus giving an automatic advantage to the caster. They had to barge through the target's defenses, which could resist them or cleanse them or outright ignore them. Nonetheless, they had to be dealt with.

Disease attacks were, though slower, much more threatening.

Some types affected only their direct targets, stacking damage on top of damage over the receiver during a long period of time and directly crippling their bodies and, at the same time, their Life points. But that wasn't all there was to it; the real danger was in its ability to spread over the battlefield like a real chemical weapon, propagating the disease over to even different squadrons, and, most importantly, ignoring the difference in power.

A Tier 3 could spread it to a Tier 4, which would, of course, receive less damage and last longer against it, but without cleansing abilities, he too would eventually fall to it.

Another weapon the Vengeance had was the ability to seal. The ability which the Tyrant was looking for Gabriel to gain the most was indeed the most difficult of them in his opinion; sadly, it was as well, the one required for him to be freed of his constraints.

Sealing was rarely used by the Vengeances. Most of the time, they used it as soon as they arrived on the battlefield.

Gabriel had been waiting for that moment.

He stared over the green portal, waiting for the next wave of Plague monsters to reach the dry-red earth.

The biggest monsters among the defenders, always taking the front, were an immense slab of stone with a demonic face sculpted inside it. All around the face were sticking out real body parts whose blood dripped down over the stone, giving it its dark red color. Though the first monster was getting entirely destroyed, given its size, the sight was not at all pleasant to look at.

Among the first to descent was the Vengeance, his ability to phase made it almost invulnerable. As soon as the creature dropped on the ground, it stretched its arm out, palms on the ground without bending. A white wave of energy pulsed from the center of his body toward the palms then expanded to the ground; after that, an enormous magic circle with an infinity of transparent runes inscription sprouted from the ground, under everyone's feet. After flashing once or twice and pulsing some more, the magic circle turned into a web of Mana and Spirit, which then disappeared in thin air.

Seeing the requirements for the use of Magic Circles, Gabriel raged.

Oh, why did I choose Skill Trap!? Why!? What passed in my head to get such a stupid idea!?

Had he been precluded from learning any sort of seal, he hoped not, and for that very reason, he continued to observe the Vengeances and their abilities.

Gabriel had no idea what it was that they did when they cast their seals, nor about their effects, but he had seen it multiple times and built some sort of understanding of the whole process.

Luckily for him, he soon discovered that not always did their seals require Magic Circles or Spirit manipulation, things which he both lacked.

After witnessing the events a couple of times, he understood that there were a couple of important examples in which the Vengeance acted without Magic Circles, and one of those examples only needed Mana to be used; both were extremely useful to him.

Thank the god, there's at least something I can gain from this. He thought.

When Gabriel discovered the one type of seal he could successfully recreate even in his current state, the Vengeance was in particular danger of being terminated.

It was the middle of the battle, and the flares had already been cast once, empowering the monsters left alive even further.

Still, the Vengeance was fighting someone strong enough to be successfully handling the monster on his own.

The Champion, cause he understood the fighter was one.

He was a blue-skinned man with a bald head and digitigrade legs.

If Gabriel had to guess, his class would be that of some sort of paladin. He fought with valor and had quite a few 'sacred-looking' Skills in his possession.

The Vengeance fought as its own abilities allowed, casting debilitation over debilitation and curses to slowly damage its enemy. Though not very useful against its target, which could cleanse them, they were both starting to grow low on reserves.

The Champion was slowly gaining on the monster. Blow, after sacred blow, after blow with some shield bashing which cracked like thunder, cast in the middle.

The Vengeance was at death's door once the paladin grew close to end it.

It was at that point that, even though it had to sacrifice an arm, the Vengeance enacted its plan, reaching with its long arm and its oblong fingers and gripping the paladin's abdomen.

As it seemed, its seals required physical contact, so it needed to create a bridge from which directly apply it to its enemy's body.

Gabriel could visibly see the ripple of distorted space, which signaled the use of a large quantity of Mana, passed through the Vengeance arm, and came out of its hand, spreading like a web around the paladin's core muscles. The Mana then anchored inside of its victim's front and back.

Overall it looked like one strong type seal. It could stop the target in an uncomfortable position, immobile, and making it lose access to the muscles around which the sealing had anchored.

The destiny of the paladin was clear after that. Even chopping off the Vengeance arm had become useless.

In the end, after the monster cast his sealing on the creature. After that, Gabriel witnessed many similar fights.

He noticed that the sealing could affect muscles, bones, organs, or even the nerves; its effect was that of making the receiver lose the body parts' function instead of sealing them in a position.

The web anchored itself in such a way that it formed a permanent cast around the targeted part that the hapless receiver's Soul would recognize it as part of its host and start feeding Mana into it too.

Thus, the seal became part of the victim, which was continuously sustained by the Mana, released by the affected's soul-bar-core.

At first, the process was baffling to him, but during the long days of staying and planning and training in The Memory, he had intelligently managed to gain the trust of a human mage which had explained the process to him, though sipping to him information during the battle did not make for the best kind of explanation.

Fortunately, Gabriel was not as dumb as he tried with all his might to show and could connect many dots.

In fact, he had no idea that the source of Mana was the fiery liquid core, which was called Soul, inside of every thinking being.

Yeah, I should have kind of understood it, by the looks of it, but…

The Soul's surface was where Mana rested, while at its center, inside of it, rested something, a core, in which rested the Spirit. The mage did not know more than that because it was taboo knowledge, and by his words, only a heretic would study it. Learning about the Soul's intimate parts was taboo, and everyone who tried to study it more in-depth would be treated as a heretic should, with death.

I wonder if there are still such rules hovering over Alter. What do you say, Liz? Will they hunt us down too? Because I'm growing kind of interested in the whole process.

Liz, as always, shrugged. This time she put on a mocking expression though as if she would mean: 'Let them try.'

The second type of seal, which the Vengeance could swiftly manage, was different.

It required the use of Spirit Manipulation and direct access to the enemy's Spirit source.

For some reason, the Vengeance could connect directly to their target's Spirit, if they had been wounded by them. If that was the case and if the Vengeance felt too threatened by its opponent, he would cast the seal.

It was a kill me and die type of seal.

The thing stole Gabriel's interest for days.

The young man started obsessing over the process, even though he had no way of reproducing it, he wanted to know how to use it, how to replicate it one day.

For more than ten soulscape days, Gabriel hunted for Vengeances to catch them in the act of recreating the process.

Luckily he had Spirit Sight, though his lack of any form of Mana visualization. After observing the Vengeance's many uses of its sealings, he grew to have an almost detailed understanding of how the creature used its Mana, shaped it, and moved it around.

The process was simple yet needed access to intense preparation and a considerable amount of Mana.

The Vengeance could link his Spirit to that of its target. It did so by using the target's blood, or Mana, which had an 'imprint' that made it unique for each individual. Once it had that, it would cast a net of Mana, probably tainted with some ideal, of which Gabriel had no knowledge of, yet that would then envelope the target's Soul, linking the Vengeance's own Soul to that of its target, making them one sole individual.

If one of them died, so did the other.

Liz… with something like that, if we ever had the chance, we could solve our big and armored problem. Thought Gabriel when he realized the uses of such a technique.

Of course, the unifying process would create many problems for them both, but the Vengeance, unlike his victim, had the ability to rescind the seal whenever it wanted.

It was easy, almost as easy as cutting the link.

As long as one was the original caster of the sealing in general, it could always be as easy as wishing for it to end by injecting Mana tainted with the ideal of origin into it. The thing was entirely different if somebody else, different from the caster, wanted to change or affect a sealing. The process required immense amounts of Mana and deep knowledge over the original caster to simulate, since recreating it was impossible, the original Mana imprint.

All the additional information Gabriel had to ask the many mages on the battlefield. At some point, he even found a sealing specialist, but finding out much about her teaching had been slow coming and overall really stressful, requiring many, many deaths for resetting The Memory.

The person, if it could be called as such, Gabriel had explicitly asked for help in the art of sealing, was a grizzled old human woman.

He had no idea how to correctly approach such a person for her secrets. Nobody would give lessons to someone in the middle of a storm of monsters in the real world.

However, when he thought that this knowledge all stemmed from the same source, and the people in there were all creations of a single mind, he knew he had nothing to worry about.

He would receive the answers he needed. The Memory had been probably modified for that very reason, teaching him the way of Dark magic.

And though with a grumpy attitude, the old woman helped him, every time.

"Without your runic base, you would never manage to understand even the ABC of sealing, boya!" In an almost comical way, she had said as she cast shield after shield in mid-air to absorb a barrage of skillshots.

Gabriel tried to learn runes at first, but it was a mess…

She had no way in which to stop and teach them to him. So she told him to learn them from the shield she cast. The problem being that the runes inside of the circles rotated to empower the shield.

He already had to fight against a lack of enough Alacrity induced headache, and now he had to study, memorize, and manually recreate runes that, like pinwheels, continuously moved round and round…

Gabriel abandoned the thought right away, concentrating instead on the bases of the art of sealing.

Other than the old woman's occasional bouts of extreme grumpiness, the only other trouble was in the shortness of the lessons since she… kept dying.

Going back to the chambers, Gabriel leveled up Epiphany to Tier 9, hoping to better use Mana.

The learning process was extremely complex, but it required a perfect use of Mana's complex shapes and control of multiple strings of it.

Returning to The Memory, Gabriel kept training and fulfilling his obsession with mastering the body-seal while also taking to memory the second one.

Epiphany kept guiding him in the correct way of reproducing the seal, though many times, even the Skill, basing on his Synchronization to the Dark element, failed, leaving him alone in figuring out how to work the way.

By the time Gabriel managed to recreate the first and easier of the two sealings, he was mentally spent. He had lost count of how many days had gone by in The Memory. Only having Mana regeneration to account for some of the time.

In the end, he had to correctly recreate the seal while tainting his Mana with the idea of sealing, he had been able to not only cast a perfect body sealing, but he received a new notification from the Anchor.

Element alignment: Dark - Perfect.

Current synchronization 98.65%

Perfect? Perfect!

Are we ready or something? Well, it doesn't look like it, the mayor would have come already, so maybe this is not the last stage of the Synchronization, he thought.

Gabriel was at roughly three real days from maxing his first Skill, at last. But he had no idea how to successfully reproduce the mind and soul-bending.

Sealing had not been easy to train, but at least he now understood that it was doable. However, he would have to study runes, which was something that couldn't but come later and surely out of the damn place in which he was confined.

So he analyzed what would be their next moves.

And the answer came easy to him.

He was starting to learn about the four monsters' abilities, which always stood alive at the end of each battle. The monsters that remained standing the first time he successfully managed to see the battle to its complexion. After the first, there had been only a couple more times in which, mostly faking death, he had managed to stay alive until the end of the fight, until The Memory reset by itself.

The winners and survivors were always those four monsters.

He had now studied one of them and felt that the scariest among them was the key to learning how to correctly do mind and spirit-bending. So he would leave it for last.

The giant creature half-lion, half weird stag, was excluded. Its power was about corruption. Gabriel had already reached a good level in that, and anyway, standing near it to study was impossible. The monster was too big, and unlike both the Vengeance of Fallen and the Glory of Kings being both single targets focused, the Fury of Saints had an extremely vast attack range and could cover enormous distances with its immense body.

For someone of his level, being near such a wild being, which sprouted forth corruption-tainted Mana like a fountain, equivalent to instant death.

Though probably even less useful than the Fury of Saints, the one remaining was the Dream of Slaves. Though possessing an extremely wide range of attacks and a weird fighting style, the creature was manageable to study.

"Why do I feel that I need to prepare for a lot of death? Do you feel it too, Lizzy?"

Comping on his severed forearm, Lizzy looked at him and nodded.

Gabriel sighed. When is this nightmare gonna end?