Training for the rest of the day was not very effective. He'd bought the most extensive primers on halberds, axes and spears, which were hella expensive and not even that good, mostly trying to memorize what katas he should practice for better conditioning himself, but Aki had a hard time complaining about the lack of skill gains as his soul had fully healed before the beast horde could come.

Normally this would take anywhere between a week to a month for an injury like his, but he was just crazy enough to be able to shove loads of Aether at the reconstruction process to speed it up.

While he was unable to directly manipulate his soul still, Aki actually had enough willpower to stop most mutations from occurring, so now he had a few bumps and bruises in his soul space, but those would go away as long as he had a significant increase in mental stats.

Which he fully intended to get after that beast horde.

It seemed that after five days of regular assaults people were finally falling into form with proper strategy. With the increase of skill levels caused by his own presence basically radiating aether and the opportunity to actually train, confused refugees became warriors, nurses, crafters and commanders. Those trying to do otherwise had already been squashed, and now only the more missguided people who actually had a brain and backbone were left to impact their progress.

They would bend the knee or bend in ways that their bodies were simply not meant to until they signed a contract. At this point, there was simply no one remaining who wasn’t of use, and he wasn’t too keen on figuring out more training when there was already a proper option even if it was to make would-be-people into tools.

Slavery was, unfortunetely, something he did have a use for withing the current situation as it turned out.

[You have reached a branching path!]

At the rather surprising notification however, Aki could not help but grin. He did not immediately get transported to dreamland though, his notion that he was not safe was more than enough to stave off the sudden choice. Only when he entered his room in the lodge did he dive in.

This time there was no path to be walked, but instead a great stone door forward and the feeling of several eyes staring at his back. There were symbols he could read engraved on the stone instead of a notification even.

To sum up all the bullshit flavor, he needed to open or destroy the doors on the way to claim his prize to the best of his abilities. It was a test of control and power, his abilities likely influencing the rewards of the trial.

Either way, the first door was far too simple, his own mana simply infusing into a specific spot and the lock shattering inside of the structure, the lightest of pushes making the thing collapse.

The second had two spots he needed to hit slightly harder, the third four, the fifth was timed, the seventh started with the screeching echoes trying to confuse him, but the spots he needed to hit stopped duplicating, and finally the ninth needed him to hit everything at the same time.

The tenth door, whose materials he could not actually determine due to the sheer amount of glowing enchantments making him unable to actually 'see' the thing, had none of the other distractions, not even an old wizard trying to tell him to ignore the suspicious clocks and the less attention grabbing door.

Instead, runes formed words that seemed to resonate in his mind rather than be perceived through light, which really helped considering the only other feature of the large-ish room.

'What is power? What is control?'

"Power is the capability of creating change, which in itself is created by the accumulation of potential energy such as belief, kinetics and caos itself. Control is the capability of doing with power what you will, turning it into a precise application, a soon to blow bomb, a moving limb or even a thinking mind, though it is something much simpler in a realm of existence than one of possibilities instead."

Reading the question, Aki quickly spilled his understanding in the most broad terms possible, adding his willpower behind the important parts and hoping the door would understand.

His worries were for naught however, as the thing disappeared completely from his perception before a purple-ish glow shone from an orb held in a pedestal right behind where the door had been, the thing basically shooting for his head at a speed that would put a bullet to shame. After a momentary scare, he took the thing head on as he couldn't dodge it anyway.

It hit him, and suddenly everything was clearer. There was some flavor text praising him for his great power and control, but he could tell the changes were a bit different than normal even without his notifications.

[Congratulations! You have completed the Mana Lich path (1000/1000)! +20 Wisdom. +15 Focus and Control. +10% spell efficiency. Skills related to mana receive 1.25 times more XP.]

While one could point out that Aki already had some growth and learning modifiers,

this felt a lot more physical, as if something inside of him was refined instead of some soul or system program giving him more resources to burn.

Perhaps…

Sitting on his bed, Aki focused inward. There was nothing new in his perception, but to begin with he had never thought of relying on it. His energy flowed more smoothly through the paths they usually took, which were basically his blood and muscles as he understood them to exist.

As of now, he found that the part below his cerebrum, was suddenly working a whole lot better, which influenced the overall speed and somehow seemed to reduce waste, the latter property something he’d been intellectually aware of rather than actually perceived till now, but with the sudden increase in energy flowing there it just seemed to be impossible to consider it anything else.

Except maybe gaining a new organ, but the change has been almost immediate and he had no real change to his balance, vision or the such.

Unfortunately he could not actually tell what had been modified, the process simply too fast and complex for the mere glimpse he'd caught to offer anything at all.

He could speculate the correct answer easily enough however, as both the cerebellum and pineal gland seemed immediately relevant targets for a magical change like that.

Noting a 10% change in magical qualities had been rather easy considering his stat discrepancy, but properly telling a small physical change was simply not something he was used to doing.

He knew about the two brain parts well enough, so while one might think of the pineal gland as something not actually related to the situation, he knew that it had plenty of people calling it as the 'third eye' and such, it's decalcification allowing for some better life quality even.

More importantly though, he could already go full avatar mode and destroy a lot of shit with his mind, so he would obviously not begin doubting weird shit as plausible explanations now.

The abrahamic god, deifical entities with humane characteristics, heaven and hell… having hidden potential in the human body would honestly not be the weirdest thing ever, nevermind that perhaps the mittos might be the reason for the existence of such fantastical characteristics instead of the other way around.

He honestly didn't care.

…….

After several tests, Aki was pretty sure that his cerebellum remained unchanged in the physical sense, and considering it's functions had been improved on with his Control he had been paying some attention to his reflexes and motor skills, so he'd been able to tell rather quickly that he'd only gotten better due to the stat increase.

That ment there was a good chance that his pineal gland had been partially decalcified, meaning that physical improvement was not necessarily a waste of time even without skills such as 'fitness'. As long as he could incorporate a better version of his current organs or even add new ones into the mix, his stats would theoretically have something better to work with.

Bone, flesh and skin density for endurance, cell division and energy storage for vitality, muscle density and volume for strength, synapses and burst power for agility, receptor capacity, nerve amount and power for perception.

There would be plenty of synergy in between the stats that way, obviously, but even now there was also an obvious cascate on numbers he just could not see. Case in point would be how increasing his Wisdom and Focus allowed him to make better use of his meager Perception, latching onto the slightest hints that something was there.

"...By that same logic doesn't it also mean that I still have the same eyes with the same fucked vision but that now they need a lesser quality input to properly convey images to my brain, so then if I manage to fix them my vision will be even better?" He muttered out loud, grimacing at the mental image of prying his eyes and optical channels open one at a time so he could fix them with precise laser surgery or some such.

Just as he was about to go and question those more experienced with the system's working on how he could possibly go about this body refining project of his though, an unexpected message came from Robert.

Someone had come out of the tutorial despite the fact that a few hours before the last beast horde he had received a notification saying that there were no more humans inside his area's tutorial.

Really, the only reason he hadn't cashed in on the XP boosting aura for the town was that he'd been expecting someone to come out regardless of what the system told him. The strange part was that this person was a well mannered asiatic young man who thanked him for keeping the portal open. There was also the part that he was half dead and apparently even at negative health thanks to some skill of his keeping him alive, but that'd been such a normal occurrence that there was a whole medic team at the ready there.

Not everyone completed their trial objectives in a way that allowed for them to rest for enough time so as to prepare for whatever may be outside the tutorial, but it wasn't like the system actually explained to them that he had set up a teleportation hub for tutorial goers, so the numbers on either occurrence were varied enough he'd need a deeper analysis than what he cared to do.

Aki had honestly been expecting a life or death battle from a cringy shounen protagonist with a couple of cheats, one where he would either die, kill them or pursue the fucker through the zone till they either died completely or escaped somewhere else.

He even had a whole speech ready for when he had to comfort the people about the many dead and injured during his battle, but perhaps befriending the would-be human hero would not be so bad. He just hoped they were not north korean or japanese. The first because of some personal bias really, but the latter would cause him some problems in the mental department as perhaps this man could have spawned in Osaka instead and…

He should just go and ask.