When I woke, I had rolled out from my lean-to, and my left hand was in the fire, holding onto a coal. I knew from past dreams that it was something that wild humans could do, but I had never tried it. I had no desire to hurt myself. However, after that last dream, I had a feeling that these dreams were something more.

I let go of the coal and looked at my hand. There was no burn, no marks at all. It was still dark, so I went to get back on my bed to see that Blink was in the middle of my sleeping fur. There would be no way of getting back in bed without waking her up, and I was sure that it wasn’t something that I wanted to do.

I rekindled my fire and sat for a while just looking at it. I knew that something odd was going on. Not just that I was brought to a new world but that something else was happening. I felt like I always had but fitter. I interacted with the world from the same perspective I remembered, so I felt like I was in the same body. Yet, things like this hand that can’t burn and now a feeling of warmth in my chest was odd.

The emotions from the dream flowed into me. I was having a hard time remembering that the dream was just a dream. It hit harder than any movie or book ever did. The more I thought about the goblins I saw yesterday and the ones that I saw in my dream, the more I got choked up. I started to cry as I looked at the fire. The tears I was shedding were for the girl I had never met and for the man whose life seemed to be filling my dreams. There was a rawness to the feeling like I knew her myself and had just lost her.

“Lorrie,” I choked out in my sobs.

The dream me had so much love for Lorrie, the joy he had looking at her as she raced ahead. His peaceful life was shattered. I hadn’t witnessed the death of his parents but the empty feeling he had when thinking about having nothing. His whole world crashed down when that monster attacked with no warning.

I spent another hour or so with the fire until I was able to think again. I got my emotions in check, and things put where they should be. I needed to think if I was going to live.

The active skills I saw in my dream were something that I wanted to know more about. They seemed like skills that would be part of a video game or an RPG, almost like magic but not. The class skills appeared to be powerful things that all classes had but not the same as magical attacks, just almost. Yet, I had no idea how to get to them. Perhaps that was something that I needed to ask Sam. That is, if I could trust asking him about something like this. If these dreams were something that they thought I didn’t have but that I should’ve, then me letting him know might get me entirely cut off.

I was sure that he would take me asking how do I use an active skill as me showing that I remembered everything, and he no longer needed to answer questions, not that I’d gotten much out of him at all, but there was a chance that I’d get something out of him. Also, if things like active skills were real, then not remembering how the world worked might be part of why I was given this necklace which might mean it was worth more than I first thought.

Those little green monsters from the start of my dream seemed like what I’d have called a gremlin or a goblin. They were the same thing that I found yesterday. I was sure there might have been a difference, but they were about the same to me right now. In my dream, they didn’t seem all that smart, using their spears as javelins and then attacking with clawed fingers and teeth. It didn’t surprise me that so many of them would be dead to an unnt.

Judging from how they fought in my dream and how quickly they died, I shouldn’t have to worry too much unless there was a horde. They died about as fast as the gesons did and weren’t much bigger. Now, the guy that was on the boar would be something I didn’t want to face as I didn’t have a shield and active skill to take the hit. Caution would be best, so I needed to figure things out before wandering off from my ledge. I also needed to be better prepared than I was if something was coming after me.

I watch the fire for about another hour, stirring it with my hand every so often. It was odd, I could feel the heat on my arm, and there was some pain if my arm got in the fire, but my hand I could just pass through the flame or pick up something on fire. The other odd thing was as I held a flame, my chest would warm up a little, not much but just enough to let me know something else was going on.

As the sun came up, I made breakfast and got into my morning exercises. As I started to make noise, Blink came to watch and play. It was soon time for me to work on figuring more out. I needed power if there were monsters like my dream showed. I needed power if there were active skills. If I wanted to find people, then I would need to figure out my skills better. So this meant it was time for me to work on some of my skills that I hadn’t trained.

Power Imbuing Skill Grouping Magical Craft:

You can imbue your Mana into items. This will grant the item power for the action that you want it to take. Also you can imbue your Mana into items to hold your Mana for later use.

Take care you don’t over imbue.

Having had some luck with getting a spell to work, I figured that I’d try to see if I could get power imbuing to work for me. So I sat down with a fist-sized stone, and I wanted to know if I could put my mana into the rock. If I could, I might have a way not to pass out.

I started to work on imbuing. After what seemed like hours but was only a few minutes of thinking about passing power into the rock, I felt like I knew what I should do. I closed my eyes and started to breathe deeply, and as I did, I thought of my power coming from my heart and out of my hand.

In fact, it felt much like how I learned to use Ki when punching. I worked my breath and pulsed my energy into the stone. After a few minutes, I opened my eyes, and the stone had a slight blue glow to it with a pulse at the speed at which I was putting energy in.

I set the stone down and took a few steps back, and started again trying to push energy into the same stone. I felt like there was a thin line from me to the rock, and it was just a trickle where before it was much more substantial. So I stepped back again and kept going, and the line didn’t fade. I ended up going about 40 feet away before I ran out of line-of-sight, which was when the thread broke. I walked back to the rock and saw that it was still pulsing.

I checked up and saw that my pool just about full. I thought that I took maybe one or two points off of my total while filling up the rock. So I took the stone again and started to push more energy in. I ramped up the speed I was pushing in and began to see if I could use both hands. The pulsing stopped, and it turned to more of a humming glow. Then the rock started to pop and then smoke.

I had this feeling that now would be an excellent time to toss the rock. So I did, and it exploded. I wouldn’t say like a grenade as that is a bit too powerful, but I did see bits of the rock go about 15 feet.

I checked my mana and saw that I knocked off about 10% of the total while filling up the rock. The thing was, I wasn’t sure if I’d put all the mana in the rock or only a percentage. It was something that I would have to figure out how to find. So I guessed the next set of questions I asked needed to be about using this system once I found out about the cores.

I picked up another small river rock and started to think about what I had been doing. The way the power flowed through my body felt natural, almost like I was watching blood pump, and the rock had become a bag. I set a small trickle in again and then started to speed it up. Once again, I felt the rock start to give way like it was unable to handle what I was giving it, and I threw the stone as far as I could.

I picked up another rock and started to work on seeing how fast I could push it before it was ready to go pop. It took me about thirty seconds before it blew up over the cliff. It seemed like it would take about three seconds from when the rock started to smoke before it would explode. I did that about eight times before I saw that my mana was low. I felt like I was getting close to finding a way to store the mana without it exploding.

I worked on one last one. I wanted to push my mana out as much as I could. I had read so many novels about expanding your channels that I wanted to see if that was something I could do. If that was the case, it would be good to know. If I didn’t, then I might end up like that guy I read about that didn’t work his magic and ended up only being able to explode himself.

I focused hard on the rock and felt the last of my mana drain out and go into the stone. I saw it do the smoking thing before it would explode, and so I threw it. The rock made it about twenty feet away from me and another twenty below as it fell from my ledge before it exploded. I watched segments of the rock go flying around. One of them almost hit a hawk that was fishing the river.

The hawk saw it coming and quickly banked so that the rock shrapnel missed. It let out one of its piercing screams. I watched it bank around until it saw me. Then I got a bad feeling like it knew that I had almost hit it. That feeling got worse as I heard several reply screams and saw the close one drop towards me.