I stare at the stone sitting in my hand. My own creation. After breaking from my fixation and looking at the rest of what happened, I notice the hole in my hand. Directly in the center of my palm, a small centimeter-by-centimeter square of flesh has been neatly cut out of my hand. Blood begins to quietly bubble out of it.

The wound is in the exact place I specified when I was ‘asked’ to name a spot on my body. Well, I say ‘asked’ because I’m really not sure what to call it. It’s not like someone is literally in my head asking me questions. It’s more like if you spontaneously grew a new limb and you started moving it, you’d be ‘asked’ to give a direction.

I wasn’t really asked at all, it’s more like the nature of creating a material implicitly requires me to also name a location on my body, in the same way that the nature of moving a limb requires you to choose a direction to move it in.

I look at Itor, who is looking at me with fascination. He breaks out of his stupor when he sees my wound, though. He nods at me and rummages through his pockets until he pulls out a small roll of green cloth. He tears some from the roll and wraps it around my hand. A small amount of blood soaks through and slightly discolors the bandage.

Itor stands up, smiling. He quickly walks over to Magna, who is still asleep in the bed. He gently shakes her, speaking to her excitedly. I hear him mention my name a few times in his rant.

I leave the room. He doesn’t notice.

It isn’t until I fully get out of the building that it fully hits me.

Holy. Shit.

I got it! I can use it! I got the creation ability! My face breaks out into the most genuine smile I’ve had in years. I mean, yeah, obviously there’s still some work to be done on it. If I can find a way to mitigate the damage done to my body, that would be ideal. And I’m also not sure how to propel the created objects like Itor and Magna have done, and I also need to figure out how to create objects other than stone. I mean, I should be able to do that if my theories are correct.

And then there’s the question of how I even came to acquire this ability in the first place, and what that drug did to me...

But fuck! I got it! Holy shit!

Damn. The level of excitement I feel over this is almost unrecognizable in me. I don’t like it. Emotions can really mess with your decision-making. I need to remember what happened to get me kicked out of the orphanage. I need to remember how to be cold. I need to calm down.

I walk over to the side of the building and sit on the ground, leaning against its smooth stone wall. The ground is covered in that moss-like plant that seems to take the role of grass here, covering most open dirt, so it’s honestly pretty comfortable to sit on.

I open up my hand and close my eyes. Now is the time for experimentation.

Hello. A sphere of basalt one millimeter in diameter again.

I envision my request. It takes some time to get the detail to the point where I am prompted to select a body part, but eventually I get there. It’s honestly very impressive that Itor and Magna could summon something in a split second while also in the middle of a fight.

The ‘auto-select’ has pre-chosen my thigh this time, instead of my bicep. Strange, I didn’t change my request at all, maybe it just starts at a random point before you select any sort of area?

This time, instead of picking a small point on my palm, I select my entire hand. It takes some time to do so. It was easy to just imagine a small dot on my palm, but to select my whole hand, I have to envision the whole of my palm, my fingers, the back of my hand, all the little bumps and creases and indentations. I have to imagine each and every one one of these details while keeping all of the ones I’ve already imagined in the forefront of my mind. It really is an exercise in multitasking, strangely.

Eventually, I think I have it. If I understand this correctly, I am being prompted to select the area from which my flesh is taken away. So if I select something with a larger surface area, then taking away such a small amount of flesh would be almost unnoticeable.

The sphere appears in my hand again, but this time, there is no hole. I feel a slight sting across my whole hand, like if I stuck it in a cup of too-hot water. It fades in time, though, and it isn’t even close to when the actual wound appeared on my hand before.

I open my bandage and look at my wound. A centimeter-wide square, maybe two millimeters deep, using the measurements of my sphere, which I know to be exactly one millimeter. That would be a fifth of a cubic centimeter. As for the sphere’s volume, that’s a bit of trouble to calculate, but rounding pi to three, and rounding four thirds to one-point-three, we can say it’s around half a cubic centimeter.

So, I ‘sacrificed’ some amount of flesh, and received two-and-a-half times more stone. Well, that’s what happened this one time. I wonder if the ratio of flesh-to-stone stays at two-and-a-half, or if it changes due to certain circumstances?

I decide to test that theory. I repeat my creation of those stone spheres, this time creating one that’s half a millimeter wide, and another that’s two millimeters wide. I also don’t do that trick of spreading the sacrifice of flesh to the whole of my hand. I need the removed flesh to be measurable.

Both drop into my hand. I selected areas around my original wound so that I can use my bandage for all of them.

I look at the wounds. Hm. They’re both the exact same depth, which is comforting. It doesn’t seem like I’ll have to deal with any extremely deep wounds, even if I make something bigger than a small sphere.

I examine the size of the wounds. Yep, looks like as my sphere size increased and decreased, the size of the wounds followed. My main worry is that of material. I’m not sure if it’s safe to experiment with creating objects of differing materials, judging from what I know so far.

Back when I was ‘created,’ I saw people with pretty severe wounds surrounding me. Everyone was bloodsoaked, and there were over a dozen people in the corners with severed limbs. The amount of flesh lost greatly outweighed the amount of material created, that’s for sure.

So I can already make a pretty solid conclusion: the material something is created in will change the amount of flesh lost to create it. And it seems that ratio can vary wildly. I assume just about everything is created in stone because it’s the ‘cheapest’ to make compared to everything else.

So, if different materials have effectively random costs, what’s to say something doesn’t have a cost of one-thousand times the weight of the material in flesh? Even if I made a sphere barely large enough for me to see, it would still cause quite a bit of damage to me. And if It was any smaller, it would be too small to confirm I made anything at all.

If I want to further experiment with this ability, I can’t use my own body, that’s for sure. I could somehow find information understandable by me - someone who doesn’t speak the language - or I could use someone else.

I mean, I saw those builders collaborating to create the one piece of stone, so I can assume that multiple people can all work to create the same object. In that case, if I find a few people willing to help me experiment, we could all use our bodies to make one small piece of material, I would note the combined amount of flesh taken, and find the ratio of flesh to material that way.

Doing it like that is probably my best bet. It would greatly reduce the risk to us - I doubt the amount of flesh taken by a material could ever approach an amount that could severely harm multiple people when only a tiny marble of it is created. And, while there is technically still a risk there, I have to take some amount of risk if I ever want to get anywhere.

And I want to go places.

If I’m doing this, then I have to leave the town. Right now, I’m safe - Itor and Magna are protecting me. By all means, if my only goal here is survival, then I should stay. I’m solidly confident at this point that Itor and Magna are not here to hurt me, considering Itor’s attitude of teaching me how to use this ability that they clearly already know can be weaponized. This town is the safest place for me to currently be.

But I don’t want to be safe. I want to succeed. My life as a homeless man was ‘safe.’ I mean, homelessness in general isn’t safe for people, but I’m good enough at the things you have to be good at to know that I was never truly in danger. It was awful. I was a husk.

If I’ve really been given a chance to do all this over, I want to succeed.

I want to win.

It’s time to put my plan into action.