Revivify didn’t fix Rube’s arms; it didn’t have any visible effect at all. Rube told Serenity that his arms felt less like foreign blobs of flesh he had to manage and more like arms; he was very pleased with the effect, even though it wasn’t obvious what it did. Serenity had to accept that.

Summoning was a whole different ball game. Unlike Rift Control, Serenity didn’t have a long history with a similar skill to fall back on. All he had was a little training and the Skill itself.

Call on the Origin

The Origin is just that: the beginning of all things. Bring something temporarily into the real world, limited only by your imagination and power. Variable Cost.

The first time he used it, he didn’t end up with anything; just a splash of power and Potential that had Aki shouting at him to warn her first.

It wasn’t hard to figure out that using Call required Rift Control, but figuring out how to use it felt like learning spellforms again. He had the advantage of having used spellforms and the guidance of the Skill, but at the same time he didn’t have anyone he could ask for help. It was frustrating.

It took him a week to successfully summon something, and when he did it was a shadowkitten modeled after Curio. For some reason, the shadowkitten seemed significantly simpler than anything else he’d tried. Was it because he’d been trying to summon “real” creatures which were complex while the shadowkitten was basically just a mana construct, or was it because he had an example in front of him?

Serenity wasn’t sure. It was something he’d have to test.

He was sure that it had given him another significant bump in XP. Five levels was a lot; it gave him hope that he’d actually finish the Path and have time to visit the Tutorial, rather than having to come up with another disguise method. He’d also like to visit once or twice a day over several days instead of having to go to every possible one near the end, so the sooner he got there the better.

His next few tests took less time - only a few hours each - but they confirmed the theory: if he tried to make something real, he didn’t have the control. When he tried to make something that was essentially an elemental (as a shadowkitten was more or less a shadow or darkness elemental), he could.

More than that, his Affinities seemed to matter. The higher his Affinity was for something, the easier it was to summon, the more like its true form it ended up, and the cheaper it was. The one time he tried to summon a wraith, it was simple. Serenity wasn’t certain if that was just the fact that it was Death Affinity or if the fact that he knew wraiths very well affected it. He suspected both played a role.

The other thing he found out fairly quickly was that the more ‘pure’ the Affinity was, the easier it Summoned. He could make a Water Elemental more easily than a clay mug with water in it, even though the clay mug and water were each relatively simple and the Elemental was far harder than the same amount of water.

Size mattered a little, but not as much as purity; complexity was in between.

Nearly every successful summoning gave him a level, and he felt like he learned something important with each one, usually something about both the summoning Skill and Rift Control. That had to be why they were giving so much experience.

By the time the two weeks had passed, he’d made it to Level 91. That was excellent progress, but probably not sustainable. He certainly felt completely burnt out; he had no idea what to try next and his last several summons hadn’t really taught him anything or helped move his Path forward at all. He needed a break.

As he thought that, he realized that should probably warn his Tutorial instructor friends not to react if they saw someone who looked sort of like him as a student. He should go ahead and take care of that while he was thinking of it; it would also give him the break he badly needed. Perhaps one of them would know something about summoning?

Both Ekari and Honoria had some pointers for summoning; Honoria occasionally made limited summoning trinkets, while Ekari actually had three summoning Paths.

Serenity hadn’t known that about Ekari; her explanation that “summoning doesn’t work in the Tutorial” made all too much sense when he considered what he’d found when he tried to access the Rift. It explained why there were no dedicated summoning classes; he’d assumed that it was simply that it wasn’t expected to be a Tier One Path, but that was completely incorrect.

They’d each had some interesting insights. Strangely, even though Honoria’s method was crafting focused and Ekari’s was casting-focused, Serenity found that Honoria’s method was closer to his own, with a shape that defined the spell and the creature being summoned. Even so, it wasn’t all that close; each could only summon from a known list of creatures.

There was an entire tradition behind each of their Paths, telling them how to summon each known creature. Honoria worked almost entirely off of that information, with it telling her what shape to use for each enchanted summons, while Ekari mostly referred to information in her Skill. Serenity didn’t have that information in his Skill.

Towards the end of that Tutorial, Honoria and Ekari cornered Serenity. They were convinced that Serenity had found an unknown Summoning Path, because if it were known there would be some guidance. They wanted to know everything he was willing to share about how he’d found it and how it worked.

Serenity got the feeling that Honoria wanted to know more about magic in general and felt that the lowered guidance meant she could learn something about how it worked without the Voice’s help. Ekari seemed to simply want to know how to get a different sort of Path; she seemed desperate to increase her Tier.

Five minutes and a few seconds or a month after he initiated the Tutorial, depending on perspective, Serenity stood back where he’d started, feeling far more fresh than he had when he entered. He disappeared into his workroom for another three days, emerging only to sleep and when Rissa or Aki called him out for a meal.

They had to nag to get him to leave; once, he even fell asleep inside the workroom.

At the end of those three days, Serenity had gained another seven levels and was very close to finishing his Path. He’d also run through the inspiration from the tips Ekari and Honoria shared. He’d built himself a handful of standardized templates for elementals, but that was all he’d really accomplished. They were crude and completely unsuitable for combat; a stiff breeze would disperse most of them, never mind being hit with anything substantial.

At the same time, he’d managed to figure out how to better shape and combine his summoning. That cup of water now looked like a modern mug instead of a lump of dried clay, and he could summon it with or without the water. The trick turned out to be using a separate spell for each Affinity, unfortunately, so he still had trouble with anything that wasn’t pure.

It was definitely a utility Skill, and what it made only lasted as long as he supplied the mana and essence. Despite that, it was likely to be useful.

Unfortunately, that didn’t get him the rest of the way through the Path, and time was growing short.

Voice? How much longer will the Tutorial run?

[Approximately three weeks]

I thought it was only going to last six months?

[Six months was an estimate based on the expected number of deaths during the Tutorial period, not a firm schedule. The Tutorial will run until all eligible participants have completed it]

Both the extra time and the lower than expected death rate were good news. Unfortunately, they didn’t mean he could skip finishing out his level.

He didn’t think practicing Call on the Origin was the way to do it; not at this point. He either needed to understand Revivify more or he needed to practice Rift Control. The choice between a healing-like skill and better control of what he was doing was easy: he’d practice Rift Control.

The last two levels took him another week, but he was able to spend a good bit of that time with Rissa. He knew it was the last time he’d be able to spend with her for a while.

Only a few hours of the delay were looking at the images from the ultrasound. Rissa laughed to Serenity about being told that she’d “obviously” guessed wrong about when she’d gotten pregnant, because the child was definitely not more than three months along, and was probably closer to two. At that age, there were no apparent signs of any nonhuman heritage; Rissa had been less than pleased when the doctor asked her if she was really certain Serenity was the father, since she was so obviously wrong about the child’s age.

Serenity started to get upset, but calmed down when Rissa told him that she was already planning to find a different doctor.

When he completed the Path, Serenity had a choice to make: did he want to immediately move on to a new Path or not? It wasn’t like advancing a Core Tier, he could simply wait. He’d lose any progress he might have gotten, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Serenity decided to hold off until he was in the Tutorial. That way, he could “look” more like a normal student, learning a new Path. He’d also have to limit which Path he chose, but as long as he picked something that more or less aligned with the overall Path he was taking in life, it wouldn’t limit him afterwards. A combat Path was always an option.

Serenity was about to start working on Realize Potential, his new Skill for Level 100, when Aki interrupted him.

:Congratulations. Now you need to rest and recover, then set up the Portal system and taxation. You need to do that before you end up back in the Tutorial and shipped off to some other world.: Aki sounded amused but firm.

She probably had a point. Serenity knew he did tend to become absorbed in whatever he was working on. He paused, then turned to look towards the door of his workroom. That was more or less the direction of Aki’s core, wasn’t it? “Wait, you can tell when someone levels?”

:If I’m paying attention, usually, but it’s fairly subtle. Finishing a Path isn’t subtle.:

Serenity had never paid enough attention to know. The person he’d seen level and complete Paths the most was himself, of course, and that was definitely obvious. He’d have to watch in the future to see if he could also sense it in others.

Serenity headed to Aki’s core and took care of the chores he’d been putting off for entirely too long.

Portal Management (Planetary) had a lot of different options for both on-planet and off-planet travel. Serenity decided that (at least for now), on-planet travel would be limited. It would cost Etherium, but only slightly more than what it actually took to power the Portal. Even so, almost any trip on the planet would cost ten or twenty Etherium; he suspected that Etherium was about to see a significant increase in value, even with the limits he placed on it.

In order for any Portal to be open, the City Lord would have to agree to open it for each destination. Serenity expected that most would only open to destinations in the same country, since building in a Customs infrastructure near a City Crystal would take time. He enabled the City Portal Management menu as well; eventually, cities would be able to buy additional Nodes and Portal locations, but it would take time.

The additional Portal locations might well go in airports, since airports were already set up to deal with significant numbers of people passing through. It wasn’t something Serenity planned to worry about.

He made sure to tell Gaia about it so that she could tell the dungeons who were talking to her that Etherium was suddenly going to become a valued reward.