I try to not poke anything else in Aster’s soul. My changes to the Aether construct are little more than painting their surface, but doing even this much called so much of the system’s attention to me.

I start to really feel my connection to her soul and even this far away from my body I can feel the other threads, weak connections to other people and seeds. And my connection to her is the strongest, even stronger than my connection to Pando and that is probably because I deliberately traveled to her soul.

Dreading what will happen when I step out, I weave through to the edge without delay while maintaining my soul projection as small as I can to not risk getting stuck.

Then as soon as I cross the thin boundary, I’m instantly booted back to my soul and a system prompt stares me in the face. Not a notification on the edge of my perception insistently calling my attention, but it’s actually shoved at my face.

Warning:

System user interfering with system constructs on another’s soul.

System user melding Aether with another creature of the system.

System user under protection….

Warning: Do not take any Aether from a living creature or interfere with essential system functionality.

Damn, the system really doesn’t want me messing with others people’s Aether or its constructs. I think this is the first time it explicitly mentioned Aether.

I take a deep breath and try to parse it out. Fear tries to overwell me but I pay close attention to the specific wording of the fading message, even with the system’s unprecedented actions.

A moment later I realize that only the last line is an actual warning. Though there might be other pitfalls, that is the main concern. The system may not like me messing with its constructs but it doesn’t directly forbid it. Still, just because I wouldn’t get punished by poking and even slightly interfering, that did not mean I should be altering the system constructs will nilly, lest I end up damaging essential system functionality.

And with that in mind I fill my nights developing my understanding of souls, skills and the system’s Aether constructs. That won’t directly let me help Aster, but it is a step to learning a way to help someone else alter the energy pools and maybe teach them to use their Aether. After all, I may be an Aether wielder, in a way a progenitor that was supposed to upset the balance of power and develop a lot faster than usual, but these days besides the occasional hint that I used, Aether tends to sit in the corner of my toolbox, an unsung hero. Always present and fairly helpful, creating a nice atmosphere and field around me, but nowhere near my focus. Though with a steady supply and some way to bypass the danger of overusing it, that might change in the future, even with my multidimensional path that threatened to tear any other Aether wielder apart if they tried to simply rush forward.

The days and weeks pass and the enemy’s occasional scouting efforts outside their little island had completely stopped as our patrols increased near the Elve’s encampment and even the other invasion points were now fully self contained.

Throughout this time, I explore thousands of souls, diving even into a few of our captive enemies trying to extract even the barest hit of knowledge from them, though I take care special to not damage anything, to avoid the system’s attention.

That is only on the back of my mind as the other half of my time goes to another avenue of development. Training my body in all the ways that I failed. My impossible body that broke all conventions on how physical training was supposed to work.

That coupled with perception and my intuition takes my efforts to a whole other level.

I don’t have to try once, twice or a hundred times while letting the insights accumulate and develop in my mind, before making a minute and pseudo random change to see if I improved or not. My perception stat coupled with one step towards connection and the perception field instantly give me deep feedback on everything I do. With that, any mistake or inefficiency, however minute, glows in the dark screaming for a solution.

I would have to make myself blind, deaf and senseless to overlook the flaws popping up right and left and each one that I fix only gives way to the slightly smaller one hiding just behind it.

In concrete terms, my stats don’t increase a whole lot, but I can actually make greater use of my current strength and the limits on my physical skills like running and Pole Mastery are being delineated even more clearly.

In the back of my mind something is warning me that almost any solution I found for my skill levels would be temporary. Sure, I would be able to cross this first boundary and with further work maybe another step or two, but even then I would get stuck again, which is in line with the advice that I had. The Automaton was open about the consequences of developing parallel to the system and through his warnings had been cryptic at the time, their wisdom is slowly being revealed in the light of reality.

Idly trying to finish the gift he had given me that resembled a wooden sliding Rubik’s cube, while purposefully turning off my perception field around my hands.

After hundreds of thousands of movements learning the rules that governed the limitations, I realize what I hold in my hand. It resembles a lock box and though I could ‘cheat’ and simply get a perfect representation of the insides which would help me know at any given moment what moves I could do, that was less of a help than one would expect. In that sense, it is closer to solving a Rubik’s cube blindfolded. Even with perfect memory, you just took longer paths to avoid losing track of the internal states.

As I approach a solution, a hint of excitement thumps in my heart. I get closer than any other time before using hundreds of algorithms to switch, rotate and position pieces each of the algotithms with dozens of variations to account for the internal state.

With that excitement, a familiar weight flares up stronger than a moment ago. A thread of Aether clings to my fingers as I spin this contraption, almost becoming a weave, a real construct, though it doesn’t seem to do anything.

That isn’t new, but each time the Aether constructs show up earlier and earlier in the solution and they persist for longer, and this time the complexity seems to be substantially higher, but it’s the third construct that showed up on this single solve. Another record. But while this isn’t some super mechanism filled with incomprehensible runes that let me directly alter Aether on the air. Getting my own nimble fingers and will to naturally move Aetehr and create these temporary constructs is a clever way of teaching.

It's not the only thing that is teaching me, but it is an important part of the puzzle.

My years playing with it in the void paid off. A nice puzzle that I slowly understood and could move more quickly and more reliably, something that strained all my capabilities, contrary to what something simpler that was entertaining when I had human levels of intelligence, but now became simply a kid’s toy in my hands.

With hundreds of intelligence points, chess became checkers and if compounded by the experience of a grandmaster, it would be closer to tic tac toe. Something that simple might have been fun when I was ten and the concept was fun to teach, as I broke down the basic algorithms, but the fact that you just had to play perfectly to guarantee a draw sucked the fun out of it.

Still, even if my intelligence and tangentially my willpower let me hold more pieces of information simultaneously in my head, even if I could now mentally do algorithms in seconds that would taken me hours with pen and paper, even as I recognize patterns orders of magnitude faster and instantly extrapolate the subtle differences that were valid states, it is simply expanding my capabilities, not creating new ones out of whole cloth.

And now I use my entire brain to solve this cursed puzzle. This lovely and intriguing interlocking, sliding and rotating puzzle is helping me to understand Aether just as much as observing and reinforcing the constructs on the rabbit’s souls did.

My mind draws from the little puzzle in my hand and I compare my creation to their constructs. There I could easily, make out all the ‘runes’ in the Aether, though I still didn’t know what 99 percent of them did. That is half the reason that I spend so long exploring this cube.

The way to generate and help unconsciously guide Aether into a facsimile of constructs seem my best bet for now, though the lines made rarely resemble either runes or the symbols on the system’s constructs that it alluded.

Or maybe I was seeing too much. Regardless of the automaton’s actual intentions, the time was well spent.

Coming back to my memories of the souls, something still bothers me about the constructs in the rabbit’s souls.

They were too simple. The average stat construct that entered my soul was a few inches across with hundreds of thousands or even millions of symbols making its tridimensional shape. Constructs with each line thinner than a human hair filled with inscrutable meaning that I would need an eternity to parse out.

Aster’s soul doesn’t have as many symbols as a single construct that came to me. Although touching the Aether doesn’t directly let me intuit what each piece does, I slowly learn about their nature.

My mind is taken out of my musings, even as I get stuck on an illegal move midway through an algorithm and to leave it, I would need one out of half dozen that all bumped against either this very move or another that I also couldn’t do. Without a path out of this dead end, I try a few random things with the expected result. My cube goes back nearly to the starting point.

That’s ok, it is what eventually happens and I discovered one more illegal move.

Idly spinning it, I let my perception field travel the root network.

The number of enemies swells until their encampment reaches nearly 40 thousand. The elves don’t all come at once as our population did at the start of the month, nor do they leave their camp, but I can see the thousands of craftsmen working diligently on their defenses beyond what the system has to offer.

This supposed dark spot where the system fights Pando’s encroachment and we kept poking. But my attention goes to the true dark spots. This a true void so wide that I couldn’t peek inside. There were about a hundred of these around the world that didn’t seem to be either a landmark, system icon or a potential spot for an enemy’s encampment. They had no ‘significance’ to them, as we considered such things, new places without the Aether of past Ages or a place in our culture.

These black boxes needed exploration and the few scouts that passed nearby felt an uncontrollable desire to flee.

All aerial surveillance needed to take a wider path and higher path, and didn’t reveal anything interesting.

The only other action that I could take that had a higher chance of a payoff would be my class trial. Allowing me to reach level 150, increasing my class multipliers, stats gained and likely an increase in even class and skill rarity amidst other opportunities.

Hell, going over this threshold with my class might not let me instantly break through to level 100+ skills, but it will certainly be helpful, whatever path I decided to take.

But without proper preparation, going away for months was dangerous, especially without Aspen and at least a few dozen of my seeds with the slowly returning power grabbing people trying to rise to prominence.

I could always rush to the finish and this time around, skip the time to extract every advantage that I could and potentially get a more common class upgrade or something of the sort, but if I fail and my rush causes me to miss something obvious, I might be stuck there not for weeks but months or even longer.

Though I shouldn’t put too much stock on the motto: more time equals more better.

On the last two trials, part of the equation had been the fact that drove that mentality sat around the fact that months inside were only days in the instance, which helped the people inside the inner world and furthered my exploration of my own resources: Qi and Life. This time around I had other tricks up my sleeve and I wouldn’t be purposefully trying to extend my stay because by itself wouldn’t be beneficial. And if even one of my ideas on how to access the inner world, or at least expending the pocket of space to hide my food, I wouldn’t even have to worry about being efficient, I could just run from place to place at a near full sprint.

Now regardless of how long the class trial would last, this exploration is an entirely different matter. It might be dangerous and achieving anything useful might take me quite a while, but I wouldn’t be stuck there for an undetermined length of time.

With a greater understanding of myself, my stats and my limitations, I take the to the skies. I have a couple of days before we attack the enemy’s encampment, that should be enough to do something.

Definitely.