His face, covered with blisters, didn’t hurt anymore. Without Synergy, the organism of an ordinary person could not restore the original appearance. A burned face would turn into one huge scar. Any attention of the opposite sex would be out of the question forever. However, Synergy could easily fix everything. It guided the process of healing, returning his face to the original state, and maybe, making it even better than it was before. He would see the result in the evening. In the meantime, he was going to practice the elements he had recently received. The party would take part pretty soon. He didn’t have time to lie around. He had to enhance his energy. His main goal was to become super-talented in everyone’s eyes. Everything had to go smoothly, without accidents.

Kyon had studied electrical insulation. He was going to focus on the movement technique and the basic grade of all the elements.

He remembered the fact that the element was considered impure if it was hard to master. But in a certain sense, it was also more powerful. As he was the master of all the elements, it was beneficial for him to practice something complex, like heat / cold with complexity 3 and ideally darkness / light with complexity 5.

It would be quite convenient to send electric discharges with a single touch. Besides, the new knowledge would get him a variety of techniques and tricks. Kyon wondered what the most complex attributes were capable of?

Kyon decided to master the darkness as his next element. It had an aura of danger, and its properties were too mysterious. The darkness is the very embodiment of evil, and evil symbolizes unbridled power that can repress anyone. Kyon began to analyze the neural connections responsible for the darkness. He was going to decipher the element and make it his "hand."

It took him lots of time. It was already 6 pm, and he hadn’t finished yet.

The bright day had turned unnaturally quickly to a nasty one. Dense, gray clouds covered the clear sky. It wouldn’t rain, but everyone could feel the electricity in the air. It happens during a thunderstorm when the bolts of lightning subside for a while.

Kyоn frowned slightly. After he mastered the pure energy and the ether, he thought he could learn any other element within minutes, as he had understood the principle of decoding the information. However, the darkness was too mysterious. He released it from the key again and again. He changed the shape of the channel in different ways. All the same, it kept behaving chaotically and incomprehensibly, arousing gloomy feelings in him. The remaining layers of dead skin on his face made him look like an ugly maniac.

Suddenly, an idea flashed across his head. He tested it and… There it was, his first lead! He had found out the meaning of a small fragment of the neural connections. He had now to grow the tree of correct conclusions from the already existing seeds of guesswork!

The clouds over his head had darkened even more. The wind didn't look dangerous, but it sent a nasty shiver down the spine. All the Stones decided that they should not go for a walk today. It didn't look good outside.

Kyon's eyes sparkled. He set off a chain reaction. Synergy was about to recognize the element!

*snap*

The characteristic sound in Kyon’s heart let him know that from now on, the basic grade of the darkness was entirely under his control. He had mastered it.

*BANG*

Kyon had hardly raised his hands in triumph when a dazzling bolt of lightning struck from the sky. It hit the mansion barrier, created a hole in it and entered the enlightened guy directly in the head. Knowledge is power, after all.

Everything went white. A sharp, stabbing pain struck his body, like a hand of justice, and threw him a few meters away. His head was steaming. Kyon looked dead. His heart was not beating, his mind refused to work. He wasn’t breathing.

Synergy worked regardless of the owner’s state. It restarted his heart at once and brought the user back to consciousness. Numerous brain hemorrhages had been immediately stopped. Many vessels in his arms had burst. A burn pattern stretched from his feet to the waist. His ears were ringing, a cloudy veil covered his eyes. Kyon was in a completely understandable shock.

{What… the heck…}

The lightning that struck him was several times stronger than the usual one. If there was no barrier over the mansion, he would have turned into smoldering coals.

One thing was clear, he had to recover right away. With a lot of effort, he took out another tube of ointment and put it on his leg, his face and squeezed some in his ears.

The mansion guards arrived. They were checking the area in case of invasion. When they saw Kyon, they both looked at each other, exchanged a few phrases, and left. Burnt dead servants were not their concern. Nobody needs additional trouble.

Two hours later, the seemingly lifeless guy opened his watery eyes. He had stabilized all the injuries caused by the lightning and could even sit up. His mind was frantically searching for answers. Yesterday flash of lightning might have been a coincidence, but today, it was definitely not. The weather turned nasty within minutes, the electricity was too powerful. Besides, it struck him right in the head. It was fundamentally different from a natural phenomenon. The energy didn't come from the ground but from above. Otherwise, they wouldn’t need the barrier, it would have been torn to shreds.

Altogether it looked like heaven didn’t approve of mediocrities mastering more elements than their potential allowed them. What was so bad in bending lots of elements? Kyon could only imagine his enemies' reaction when he mastered all the nine elements. If only he could master them. Heaven didn't seem to favor his dreams.

{Am I so incompetent that in any other situation, I wouldn’t have mastered the second element? As far as I know, the element could be acquired through enlightenment, but I had never found it... However, Synergy doesn’t need luck, fate, or approval of any higher power. Heaven clearly did not like it, did it?} - The former ruler of humankind had come with these insane ideas for the first time in his life. He could never imagine that heaven had a mind of its own! That’s absurd. But he did not see another explanation. This world as well as its laws was enigmatic. The local energy had an internal memory.

{Does it mean that even more terrible lightning will strike me and tear me apart when I am working on the 4th element? Fuck...} - Kyon cursed angrily to himself. He wasn’t destined to become infinitely talented, was he? He wasn’t going to give up, anyway.

Kyon caught himself thinking that he didn’t know a thing about the world he was living in. What if he might do something that would finally destroy him? The library! He urgently needed to study that hidden library and find out everything that he should know. He might find out lots of useful things. At the same time, he would understand how to develop himself further and which unique body to choose.

Another two hours later, Kyon stood up half-dead and walked back to his room. Late at night, neither the servants nor the maids scurried about. There would be no extra witnesses to his miserable waddling to the chambers.

Punished by heaven, the poor fellow slept for about 20 hours. The whole day had been erased from his life because he needed to restore the internal injuries from the lightning strike. But something pleasant had happened, too. His Synergy had finally completed upgrading his eyes.

What benefits did it give to him?

* It fixed the blind spot, inherent in everyone, which means, the defect of the inverted retina was eliminated.

* It increased the sensitivity of the side view. His pupil now seemed to be everywhere. The Synergy owner had enough computational power for image processing.

* It added the night vision, the analogue of the cat’s one, but without illumination in the dark.

* It widened the range of electromagnetic waves he could perceive to infrared and ultraviolet.

* It added the lensing effect of decent binoculars and ordinary microscope.

* It created pigment glands. Now he could change the color of his iris in a couple of seconds.

* Among other things, he could quickly repair any eye injury.

His eyesight had become so sharp that he could see a needle hundreds of meters away in the dark of the night. The sensitivity was so high that he began to distinguish not only tones but many thousands of shades.

The quality of his vision and perception had increased, mainly due to the inverted retina.

All people have an inverted eye. The light goes through many tissues till it finally reaches the photoreceptors cells, upside down. Animals like octopus and squid have no such thing. Their vision, respectively, is much better and more sensitive than that of people.

Kyon went to the window and looked around. He had really opened his eyes for the first time in this world. He was no blind chicken now. His new vision was an indisputable advantage in the battle. He could easily see the sudden attack in the blind zone, the spread of poisonous gas, aircraft, and other possible enemy tricks.

His Synergy had nothing to do at the moment. It was time to give it a new task. Kyon decided to modernize his hearing, that is, his ears.

He stretched his back and left his room. He was in great shape. His face had already recovered, his pretty looks restored. He tore off his dead skin like a dried rind from a tangerine. The burns on his leg had almost healed. It was no problem to restore his brain and nerves because his nervous system had been modernized. Without it, even wonderful Synergy would not have saved him.

And yet, he was shaking with pent-up anger. The “gift” from heaven was unexpected and very unpleasant. Anyone else in his place would have died. Was it a failure, or did the higher ban really exist? It was time to find it out. He left his room and went straight to the storeroom, heading for the hidden library.

Kyon was so eager to find out what had happened to him that he completely discarded experimenting with the darkness. He had plenty of time for that.

Kyon approached the Social Science section. All he needed was to leaf through the book and it got imprinted in his mind with no mistake. Then Synergy would absorb the information and sort it out in his mind.

Sometime later, Kyon got hungry. He hadn’t eaten all day and now needed a good meal. He called Juno and gave her an order to tell the servants to bring him dinner to the “secret” library. There was nothing secret about it. He could get knowledge in any other library, and yet, it was hidden behind a special mechanism. Anyone could find it with usual scanning, though.

He could hear someone coming quietly downstairs.

Kyon put down the book. Was Anna so impressed by her defeat the day before yesterday that she decided to visit him herself? Maybe, she wanted a rematch.

When Kyon turned around, to his utter bewilderment, he saw Dinah, the tall, slim maid who radiated the assassin's chilling aura so familiar to him. Her sexy, relaxed gait could charm any man. Add to that her charming face and the cold gaze of her bewitching gray eyes... How could he stop staring at her in most indecently?