Learning more about his Talent was like a game of hide and seek. An ever-elusive sensation of ‘getting it’ stubbornly stayed out of Keynes’s reach. It was too ambitious to hope to learn anything at Level 1 in the first place. He wouldn’t have fallen into the trap if not for the personality instability. The curiosity that took him didn’t let go until Keynes fell asleep from exhaustion.

Being woken by Kaito Ren the first thing in the morning was not pleasant. Where did the specialist get his energy from?

“It’s time.”

“Gym?” he asked with a touch of fear and resignation in his voice.

“No.” NO? God, am I saved? “We do gym only in the morning.”

Now was time to get confused.

Wait a second, what was the time?

Crestfallen, Keynes glanced at the clock and struggled with a surprise. He slept through a day. He’d actually lied to Murphy Polloc about being indifferent to staying underground, he wasn’t. It messed with his circadian rhythms. Rift excursions didn’t help either. The rift never changed, giving him a false idea of noon when there was an evening in Jamaica.

I fell asleep and wasted the entire day in a bed. Is it me or is my exhaustion getting out of control?

“Let’s go into the rift,” Kaito Ren said, oblivious to a debate in Keynes’s head.

***

The same rift welcomed them, common rarity and full of wargs. Kaito Ren mentioned that the rift was classified as permanent and stable and wouldn’t change. How he knew that Keynes could only guess. Perhaps, the researchers figured out a way to access more detailed information? That got Keynes excited.

Shooting started then.

A few seconds later the rift essence reached Keynes and this damned burning feeling started! Remembering his conversation with Kaito Ren about the training of one’s body and its effect on the absorption of the essence, Keynes pushed his attention inward. It was not easy by any stretch of the imagination. The burning sensation was strong and if given too much thought it threatened to overwhelm Keynes’s senses.

Though if not for the curiosity that awoke at the right time—as they entered the rift—Keynes wouldn’t be able to push himself even to this point. It’d have taken a truly masochistic mind to endure the torture. He seized the opportunity—and a brief period of laser-focus—and felt something remarkable. The essence not only entered his body but flowed through it.

IT FLOWED!

The realization was like an emotional nuclear blast, swaying his mood too far in another direction. NO! No, no, no, no…

Anger came to life.

The timing was ridiculously poor. Was the Universe messing with him? It dropped him hints only to snatch the carpet from beneath his feet.

Seeing red made Keynes lose the track of the essence’s flow and charged the wargs.

He didn’t get far. Always vigilant Kaito Ren moved with inhuman speed and intercepted him.

“Get your hands off me!” Keynes roared. “I am going to KILL them!”

Even though the wargs and soldiers were loud, his words cut through it. Some soldiers glanced back, startled by the unexpected noise. It almost cost the life of one of them as a warg emerged from a hole in a small mound and pounced on the soldier.

They rolled on the ground until someone shot the warg in the head. Blood sprayed on the soldier underneath the dead warg. A gruesome picture that only fuelled Keynes’s anger. He didn’t even mind the stronger burning sensation that came with closer proximity to the killed warg.

“Specialist, what’s the matter?”

“It’s nothing, sergeant. Just keep the perimeter secured.”

Keynes trashed and growled as his mind twisted by a never-ending torrent of hatred and anger. It was directed at everything and nothing at the same time.

Kaito Ren’s hold on Keynes was titan-like and lasted until Keynes started running out of gas. It didn’t mean the anger receded, only his stamina did.

Wargs weren’t prone to wait though and rushed the group. Soldiers answered their charge with bullets.

“Let me fight!” Keynes barred his teeth.

“You will die. Your Strength and Dexterity are too weak to match a single warg and there are tens of them.”

“I don’t care!”

“If you won’t fight the anger inside you, I will remove you from the rift. Do you want to lose the essence?”

That made him stop, his body slumped. Keynes didn’t have much strength left in the tank anyway. Slowly, anger eased until Keynes was empty of emotions. Kaito Ren’s iron grip relaxed and he pulled Keynes up.

“Are you better now?”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Keynes said, abashed. There was something about anger that made its withdrawal effect very unpleasant.

Kaito Ren nodded to him then ordered the soldiers to push forward again.

Without anger besieging Keynes’s mind, the painful sensation returned.

Argh!

Keynes struggled just to stay on his feet while his body felt like on fire.

In short, the second rift excursion was a disaster. Keynes suffered through it to the end, barely lucid. Kaito Ren picked a fist-size slab of metal from the reward chest then they returned to the base, where Keynes had to go through the tests again. He lied about the severity of burning. He feared, despite the words of Lord Earl, that they would deny him entry if they knew how bad it was.

***

A blast of spiritual energy during a dream wasn’t anything a sane person could expect. Keynes awoke with a scream, clutching his chest. Kaito Ren stood in his room, staring at his watch.

“You didn’t set your alarm.”

Keynes groaned, his lids were so heavy! Kaito Ren didn’t show a sliver of remorse. The specialist waited patiently as Keynes dragged himself out of the bed. He was lucky his laziness didn’t seize him because there wouldn’t be training today. But he imagined that the specialist was capable of dragging Keynes through the corridors to the gym.

Brr. A chilling prospect.

The gym was empty like a day before.

“Every second day, I will train you in martial arts. Because I have some say in your training, we will do it my way.”

Eh, what? You are my trainer now?

What followed wasn’t a fight, it was a sadistic beating that didn’t manage to bring anger to the surface, annoyingly for a change. After Keynes was turned to a pulp, Kaito Ren started showing him moves.

NOW? Now, when I can’t lift a finger? Seriously, where does his idea of training come from? Hostel?

“It disturbingly makes sense why he wants to train at this hour,” Keynes murmured as he crawled to the bench. “No witnesses.”

“Are you aware I can hear you?”

Keynes climbed onto the bench and closed his eyes. His shirt and trousers were soaked with sweat. Repeating the same move a hundred times after his body had been beaten was pure sadism. Keynes refused to believe there was any scientific evidence that this method of training worked. If there was one. Please, someone, burn it!

“I feel like dying, I can very well say my piece and let my soul go.” It was a jest but Kaito Ren, like Murphy Polloc, didn’t treat it as such. These people were all business.

The specialist sat down next to Keynes’s head. Keynes opened his eyes and sighed seeing that the other man didn’t show any signs of exhaustion.

“May I ask a question, sir?” Keynes asked, the specialist was formally above Keynes in the chain of command and he felt that he should employ formality now.

“You may but make sure the question is within a reason.”

“You have gone through the same training.” This was an educated guess, which was followed by the question. “How much stronger are you from other Level 3s?”

Kaito Ren straightened, holding his hands on his knees. He took his time answering but in the end, he did and Keynes didn’t regret asking or waiting because what the specialist told him was simply shocking.

“My training was harder, many times harder than this. My parents were members of the Oriental League.” I have heard about the League. They are traditionalists to the fault, following the philosophy of their ancestors. Their teaching encompassed: martial arts, philosophy and the system. They are also very secretive and hence not much information is available about them. “This alone was enough to make my life hard. It certainly didn’t help—back then—that our house entered a challenge with a rival house. My parents pushed me to absolute limits, I guess. I trained until my HP dipped dangerously, then was healed up to full and then the process was repeated until I dropped unconscious.”

“Horrible.” Sounds like someone took the hardest iteration of a SAS fitness test and added the Carolina Reaper to the mix.

“Maybe, but at the same time, I received more than I dared to hope for. I defeated my rival and my family gained honour. But this wasn’t what made me glee with abandon. There is a system of evaluation that will tell you the approximate strength of your attributes, it isn’t a perfect system but some of its parts don’t need to be complex to reveal the truth. I’ve gained, on average, 22% of the Strength attribute whereas the standard gain was 10% during level up. It shows that the system rewards hard work. And there is a world of possibilities ahead of you. Don’t squander them.”

There was a moment of awkward silence when Keynes wondered what he should say. He was thankful to the specialist for sharing personal bits. Something Keynes didn’t expect. Especially, the part about the Oriental League. Eventually, Keynes thanked his superior for the training and the answer and ‘returned’ to his room, where he took a shower and welcomed the bed with open arms.

He fell asleep tired and woke tired. Nothing has changed! Shouldn’t his stamina already recover? His HP seemed to be back to full after the murderous training. So what was the deal with his stamina? Without anyone to clear his confusion, Keynes focused on the rift essence.

He knew the essence flowed inside his body now. The question was, what was he going to do with this knowledge and how could it benefit him? He still hesitated to reveal it to Kaito Ren or the researchers. What if he wasn’t supposed to feel the flow? Perhaps, it wasn’t likely but the possibility existed. Keynes didn’t want to take the risk right now.

His good mood was shattered by laziness. It crept so slowly that Keynes didn’t notice it until its tentacles were wrapped around him and he stopped caring about everything. A faint voice nagged somewhere at the back of his head about visiting Sakura but what did Keynes care about the nurse? Then the voice changed the tune and warned him about losing the essence. So what? He didn’t mind losing some essence. The voice grew frustrated by its own impotency while Keynes lay relaxed in his bed.

The next argument the voice came up with was food. True, Keynes was starving and hunger was a considerable issue. Keynes pushed his will in that direction, thinking only about eating. His current mood tried to deny him. Is my own brain trying to kill me? The more Keynes poured his will into the task, the more he was aware of his state and this awareness fuelled his will further.

He struggled for control and eventually…

Switch.

He was himself again.

“Those blasted personality shifts.” They were becoming more dangerous than annoying at this point. Each time one of ‘the personalities’ took over him, it felt like a powerful filter was being wrapped around his mind and his perception and thoughts changed drastically.

He needed to rest again… and food. Yes, food was the priority.

In the evening, Kaito Ren found him and they ventured into the rift for the third time. No anger this time but neither curiosity, which meant a hard time ahead for Keynes. Focusing on the flow of essence was a daunting task. He couldn’t maintain it for longer than a few seconds every few minutes.

This time Kaito Ren found a dagger and a Scroll of Identification in the reward chest. Surprisingly he didn’t mind showing the scroll and dagger to Keynes.

Scroll of Identification

(Common)

Level 1

Short Dagger (Common)

???

Level 1

“What do you do with these items?”

“I believe they test them.”

“Shouldn’t they be used?”

What else these items could be for? No chance they appeared in the rift just to be tested. But as with many things in this base, straightforward answers were hard to find.

After leaving the test room, Keynes didn’t return to his quarters but went to the medical ward instead, finding this section quiet. Keynes wondered what the medical staff did when there was no one to care for. He asked for Sakura.

“Her shift’s over. Return tomorrow morning unless there is something we can help you with,” a doctor said.

Keynes shook his head and returned to his room not understanding what he started.

***

Even with his alarm set at an ungodly hour, Kaito Ren still managed to be there before the alarm woke Keynes up.

“I need a break.”

“You don’t. The issue is the lack of synchronisation between your mind and body. You’re Level 1 and your body doesn’t work the same as before the ceremony.”

Kaito Ren continued the explanation while Keynes was dressing up.

“Once your HP and stamina have recovered, you’re good to go and stamina never takes longer than a day to recover.”

“Why then I am exhausted and my muscles feel as if they were wrung by a giant’s hands?”

“Because your brain is confused. For 16 years it was exposed to different mechanisms of biology. And according to them, if you run yourself to the ground, you shouldn’t be able to recover in a day. But they no longer apply and so you’re good to go.”

“My parents never told me about this.”

“Were they exposed to this kind of training regime?” Imagining his father training was a bizarre impression. It begged the question where did Harter pick up his love of sport? Both of their parents were averse to physical activity.

“No.”

“Then most likely they don’t know about it.”

“Okay, but how is knowing this going to help me?”

“It won’t.”

And it didn’t.

Even without martial art training today, weight-lifting proved terrifyingly draining, with numbers only climbing up. What added a tiny bit of motivation was the fact that Kaito Ren also pushed himself until his body started showing signs of fatigue.

True to his superior’s words, Keynes's body actually went farther than he thought it could. His mind demanded a rest but when it was denied, nothing happened. Keynes didn’t collapse in a puddle as he expected.

Once again, they trained until Keynes’s body shut down. Kaito Ren explained to him why they didn’t collapse at the same time while pushing their bodies to the brink. The first reason was a greater stamina pool. From there it narrowed down to muscle endurance and efficiency. In other words, doing more with less stamina. But Kaito Ren left the most important reason for the end.

The specialist didn’t train with the maximum load he could carry because the base didn’t have it here.

When Keynes collapsed, Kaito Ren urged him to allow his stamina to recover. Stamina behaved strangely at low levels. It was best to let it get back to at least 5%. How to know when stamina reached 5%? A body would be able to move again. That was the first strangeness of stamina. During activities, it could reach dangerously low points and a body was still able to keep going, but once a person stopped the activity, the body would shut itself down until stamina the recovery point of 5%.

“At higher Levels, there is more leeway… and more strangeness.”

But Keynes was far away from the next Level. After three days of doing rifts, his essence gain stood at 2%, a long way ahead of him.

Later that day, Sakura visited Keynes in his room. It was awkward, to say the least. And Keynes discovered another destructive emotion. Luckily for him, it came after Sakura had left.

“Hey Keynes, you were looking for me.”

Keynes froze with a protein bar in his mouth.

“Sakula,” he mumbled, twisting her name. “H-hey.”

And that was where Keynes started losing the solid ground beneath his feet. He didn’t expect Sakura to visit him. It couldn’t end up well.

“So? Can I come in?”

“Yyyy… ye, sure.”

Sakura’s smile was deceptively delicate. Keynes had no idea how to interpret it. Being completely at loss, Keynes reverted to his mom’s method.

“Would you like something to drink?”

Sakura gave him a strange look, one brow a little lifted.

“Sorry, I am on my break right now and don’t have much time. Just heard from doctor Glen that you asked for me yesterday and decided to check on you.”

“Oh.” But that was exactly what Keynes wanted. Strictly professional relationship. Why am I feeling disappointed then? “Sure. I have a question.”

“Please ask.”

“Could you tell me more about the personality instability?”

That gave Sakura pause. A long one. She stood just a few feet from the door and rubbed her cheek. Did she expect a different question? Keynes sighed internally. His social skills were piss poor. And when it came to pretty girls, he turned into a dumb ape.

“I…” she opened her mouth a few more times without saying anything. “I think I have some information but I’d have to consult doctors about this. Wh-why?” Her voice regained composure.

This wasn’t like Sakura. She never stuttered in Keynes’s presence. For once, her timidity gave him confidence. He gave her a long look. She was shorter than him, by a hand, while her figure seemed fragile, Keynes knew Levels made appearance deceptive. Her violet eyes shone with that crystalline shine. Her appearance was captivating and more Keynes spent looking at her, harder it was to peel his eyes from her.

“Why?” she repeated after Keynes failed to answer. She was accustomed to his antics by now and there wasn’t any anger in her voice.

“I found these ailments beneficial. Sometimes.”

“Did you? How?”

For the second time, he hesitated to reveal more. He already kept to himself the fact that he could feel the essence flowing through his body and to a tiny degree push it. He feared to reveal that knowledge because it could be a dangerous or unwanted effect and they might decide to pull out of the deal. After only three visits to the rift, Keynes yearned for more. There was something addictive about the essence. He didn’t want to lose it.

On the other hand, benefiting from personality instability was different. He already suffered from it. What else could happen to him? It was a positive thing, right… And I am the one who asked for advice. I owe her this much.

“It depends on the prevalent emotion. If I am driven by curiosity, I can grind… my training to an absurd level. I could use this emotion more often but I don’t know how to manually activate it. Sometimes it just comes out of nowhere while other times, it comes alongside my ordinary curiosity.”

Sakura became serious. Any signs of her timidness evaporated. In an instant, a business-like nurse was back.

“This is very dangerous,” she said, her voice was so grave that Keynes almost backtracked on his idea. But deep inside he knew he couldn’t do this. The personality instability was too handy to ignore. He was being pragmatic.

“I know.”

“No, I don’t think you understand the severity. If you mess up with it and end up with a single emotion for one full day, what do you think would happen to you?”

“I will be in trouble?”

She huffed, her professional posturing wavering. That was the first time Keynes saw Sakura like this, disturbed and flustered. She didn’t let him explain himself as she launched into an angry monologue.

“Trouble? If you call dying trouble then sure, trouble. These instabilities aren’t set in stone and they can be so strong that you will stop breathing because your mind will decide it is too much hassle. These emotions are like laser-focus to a single detail but taken to the absolute extreme and they are like holes. Do not meddle with them. I will have a word with doctor Glen about this.”

She slammed the door, leaving him speechless.

“What the hell just happened?”