Serenity’s appearance made integrating with the students more difficult than it had been in past Tutorials; then, he’d been different but interesting because he was a teacher. This time, it seemed like a different group found him interesting, and he ended up with several different adventurous groups running Trials with him.

Attendance at the Death magic training was higher than ever. Apparently some of his students had gone on talk shows and talked about the way magic worked, and credited him with it; people were coming for his general talks on magic instead of specifically to learn about Death magic. This seemed to help the attendance at the Death magic practice sessions as well; he suspected some people considered it less taboo than before.

Other than the people who avoided him or taunted him because they thought his appearance showed how evil he was, Serenity’s biggest problem was the people on the other side. Some of it seemed to be for fame while others simply seemed to be interested in his appearance, but Serenity found himself repeatedly having to tell people that he was in a relationship and no, he wasn’t interested. They weren’t all female.

None of them were interested because he was a friend. The fame-seekers were the worst; most of the others were willing to take no as an answer.

It wasn’t just the dryads that weren’t entirely human. Serenity kept smelling people with a noticeable nonhuman scent, but he was confident many of them didn’t know about their heritage. It made him wonder about Earth; was there more to everything that had happened than he knew?

It was roughly one person in ten that had enough of another heritage that he could smell it on them; most of the time, he also smelled that they were human.

Was Rissa actually human? He’d always thought she was, that she simply happened to have a strong tie to Time affinity, but he didn’t actually know if that was possible without the Voice’s help.

Was it possible that he himself had always been a bit inhuman?

Were the two people who’d had changes at the end of the Tutorial actually just starting to show their heritage? Was that an important part of the changes he knew were coming?

It was a few days before he realized he was missing a far more important question: how did he recognize so many scents? Didn’t animals normally have to learn what they meant?

Serenity didn’t have anyone to take his concerns to. Perhaps he could ask Althyr about the scent thing, the next time he saw him. That wouldn’t be until after the Tutorial, and Serenity suspected he needed to read the book on Void magic first as well.

Once the first few days of the Tutorial were past, Serenity felt he could relax enough to take some time that night to read the book on Void magic. He prepared himself to dreamwalk, concentrated on his hand, and felt himself shift into an altered state of awareness.

He opened the book he was somehow holding.

The Void is both a place and the space between places. It is nothing that can be reached normally; it can only be reached out to using the magic now known as Void magic. It is not truly the magic of the Void, however; it is Liminal magic, the magic of between. It is simply called the Void because we do not have eyes to see what is there, since there is no location in the liminality.

The next thing he knew, it was morning.

He would try reading the book each night for the rest of that Tutorial, and each time he would read a short paragraph and wake up in the morning. Some made sense and some did not; some seemed to fit with each other, while others were contradictory. The one thing he was certain he’d learned was how to start a dreamwalk.

After the Tutorial ended, Serenity looked around. He waited for a while, watching the night. He didn’t want to miss anything important, even though he wasn’t actually on watch. When he was confident it was safe, he went to another Tutorial. XP from the Tutorials was lower than it had been his first time; Serenity supposed that was probably because he was Tier 1 instead of Tier 0.

During the first three Tutorials he completed that night, Serenity completed the Duo Dungeon. Finishing the Duo Dungeon pushed him over the top of his Child of Time Path, and he chose Steadfast as his next Path. It turned out to be similar to the Path Kerr had mentioned when they originally discussed Paths, although it gained experience the best from continuing after a setback instead of from failure.

Steadfast

Level 10 - Basic Identify - Identify an object to gain basic information on it, such as its name, basic properties, materials, and/or minor enchantments.

Finally. Having to take things to others to get them identified was simply annoying. This was clearly not a skill particularly tied to the class, but utility skills often weren’t.

Level 25 - Scale Hardening - Use Essence or Mana to reinforce your scales, making them harder to damage and more protective. Costs Stamina to maintain.

A defensive skill made a lot of sense for a class based on persistence. Most of the time, Serenity favored offense, especially with the healing he had, but there was something to be said for having defences.

He hoped the other skills wouldn’t be purely defensive.

Level 50 - Wait for an Opening - Study an opponent’s actions in combat to gain an intuitive understanding of the right time to strike.

Serenity did that - any even vaguely decent combatant did - but having it as a passive ability would make it easier. Some ability like it was eventually necessary for anyone who wanted to fight at a high level. Serenity - no, Vengeance had met people who claimed they did it with training and practice rather than with the help of the Voice. That was certainly possible, but it was better to have the training and practice to go with the Voice’s help.

Level 75 - Second Wind - Convert some of a more filled resource pool (Mana, Stamina, or Essence) into an empty one. Consumes some of the converted resource.

Serenity could see how that could be useful; it would definitely extend the time he could stay in Adept Aspect Form while on Tzintkra.

The odd thing was …. He didn’t have an Essence pool, but the skill seemed to imply he did. Maybe he did and it was invisible to him? He could only find Essence in monsters and dungeons, other than when he’d used that Filter ability, and Essence that wasn’t tied up in something just seemed to dissipate.

Was the Voice preparing for the future, or did it know something about Essence that he didn’t yet?

Probably both.

Level 100 - Stand Tall - Whether you are the last wall between your loved ones and your enemies or you simply love to fight, your ability to take a beating is exceptional. Blood loss, bruises, injuries, and even broken bones will not stop you. You can fight at the full effectiveness your body is capable of despite your injuries.

As capstone abilities went, that was a sneaky one. It was one you simply wouldn’t notice. Unlike Adept Aspect Form, it wasn’t a powerful active ability; instead, it was a passive that simply meant he could keep going when others couldn’t.

It was an ability that most undead simply had; they didn’t have to worry about things like bleeding out, and the pain of using an arm with a cracked bone simply didn’t matter because most undead would barely feel it.

It probably wasn’t as good as the Aspect Form - but on the other hand, it also wouldn’t knock him out, potentially while combat was going on. It wouldn’t stop that, since that was part of the skill, but it probably would let him function when he was out of stamina or mana.

When he next went into a Trial, he was saddened to see that the rest of Kerr’s prediction was correct: it was a very bad Path for gaining experience from anything other than working through difficulties. It was still not bad for training in a safe place, better than he understood noncombat Paths to be, but it was painful after the extremely fast leveling he’d seen with his other Paths.

It was easy enough for him to find the training he needed, at least; all he had to do was train with the other instructors. They were all significantly higher Tier and had higher attributes. He mostly worked with Kerr and Sillon, but he made sure to practice with everyone; the more people you trained with, the better.

Serenity was happy with the choice of Steadfast, even though it was not a good class for anything but the Tutorial. He made sure to complete enough Tutorials to finish it, even though that was significantly more than he’d planned on. Unfortunately, the sheer amount of time he had to spend practicing to level Steadfast meant that he didn’t have time for other training. All he managed to do was read sections of the book on Void magic.

When he went through the Duo Dungeon, he received some Etherium, but instead of the items he’d received from the original dungeon, each chest contained at least one token. He was only able to identify them after he completed Child of Time and moved on to Steadfast. Unfortunately, the item description wasn’t very helpful.

Favor of

You have caught the attention of . He will redeem these from you once you return to Earth in exchange for talking to him, even if you decline his offer.

Who could that possibly be, and how was he even going to find someone whose name he didn’t know?

Serenity had the sinking feeling that was probably a deity, and would probably find him. Serenity wanted to avoid getting involved with gods; they were nothing but trouble. He’d gone through that.

Inside the Tutorial, the Heart barely made any progress, but it added up with each Tutorial he completed. By the end of the night on Tzintkra, Death mana from the Heart had spread to his left lung. Unless he wanted to complete all of the Tutorials now, he wouldn’t be able to get the Death mana to spread as far as the quest seemed to indicate in the Tutorial - and he was already very, very tired of the Tutorials.

He planned to use one to reach the one week goal mentioned at the end, but other than that he wasn’t sure how many more Tutorials he’d do before he was back on Earth. He knew he needed to do some to keep the plan they’d come up with alive, and he wanted to sleep in the Tutorial instead of on Tzintkra so that he could avoid shapeshifting at a bad time. He settled on one or two a night; he was never going to do this many in a row again if he could avoid it.

The Heart wasn’t quite working the way he’d expected; he’d expected to be partially undead, but he didn’t feel any different and everything seemed to work the same as it had before; it was simply using Death mana instead of Life mana.

Outside of visiting the Tutorial, nothing happened that night.

[Tutorials Completed as Instructor: 42/180]