The System Assist kicked in as I activated [Sensor Eye]. The training room exploded in vibrant colours as I took in all the information that hadn't been available previously. [Sensor Eye] acted as a tool to parse all the new sensory information. The moment the Skill was activated, it was easy to pick out everything. The magnetic field surrounding the coils, the silvery haze was obvious. The air currents were even easier, color coded red or blue for hot and cold. Even the electricity that ran through wires embedded deep in the walls could escape my gaze, and I couldn't help the grin that spread across my face.

  Seeing everything at once was a bit much, though, and I found that I could flip between different 'modes' with ease. Switching between thermal and UV or EM spectrum was as simple as breathing. A flicker of thought was all that was required. This was exactly what I'd hoped for when I found the Skill buried in the database. It wasn't enough yet, though; there was still one more step to go, and if previous experience was anything to go by, it was going to be one hell of a doozy.

  I quickly jogged over to the control room, turning off all the adjustments I'd made took a couple of minutes. I didn't need them anymore; instead, I needed quiet and stillness. That done, I returned to the center of the training room and lay down flat on my back. The cool, ceramic like material felt nice against my back, the chill leaking through the thin clothes I wore. I closed my eyes and delved deep inside, into my mind, into node space.

  I felt several Skills activate as I did, chief among them [Mana Manipulation] and [Constellation of Soul].

  I dropped through the black, my consciousness floating over the strange constellation of light that made up my Bloodline, Class, and Skills within the larger groups of lights. I could see [Fell Gaze] and the Spells orbiting it. There was something there that I was missing, I was sure of it, but this wasn't the time for that particular problem; I had other goals in mind. As if summoned by my thoughts, three of the lights flared brighter, shifting away from the rest of the larger constellation as if called.

  I had no need to inspect the lights; I knew what they were already, but that didn't stop me from calling up their information on screens.

  Floating in the blackness that made up the majority of my inner space, I wondered how to go about this. I really only had the little experience I had with Spells to go off of. That result was more than suspect to begin with; I had more than just suspicion that what I had done with [Fell Gaze] wasn't normal at all, another result twisted and skewed by my Bloodline. Not that I was complaining, far from it. I had benefited immensely from my bloodline, but was it too much to ask for a damn user manual?

  With a sigh and a mental shrug, I reached out to the three glowing lights, willing them to come closer. They responded instantly, drifting towards my consciousness like fireflies drawn to a flame. As they neared, I could feel the distinct energies of each Skill pulsing in rhythm with my own mana. Skills and mana seemed like they were inextricably linked, which made sense to some degree, but felt incomplete. Like I was looking at one of those strange sculptures that were made of many different pieces, arranged so that you could only see the full picture when all the pieces were lined up. Except I felt like I was missing most of the damn pieces.

  I focused my will, imagining the three lights merging into one. At first, nothing happened. The lights simply hovered, maintaining their individual forms. I pushed harder, using a combination of my will and [Mana Manipulation] to drag the Skills closer together. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the lights began to blur at the edges, their boundaries becoming less distinct.

  I growled in frustration; the Skills hadn't even touched yet, and I was already feeling the strain. I could feel the mana boiling through my body as if it were water over a fire.

  Suddenly, a jolt of pain lanced through my head. I gritted my teeth, fighting the urge to break my concentration. The pain intensified, but pain was familiar to me by now. It was an old friend, one who told me I could still keep going. I activated [Constellation of Soul] in tandem with [Mana Manipulation], seizing the Skills in my mental grasp. With a titanic mental heave, I smashed the Skills together, and a clear note reverberated through my soul as if I had smashed two bells together.

  "Again!" I shouted in my mental space as the pain in my mind grew to the levels of an inferno. The Skills drew apart for a moment before crashing together, the ringing resounded through my core, and I felt almost as if I would be shaken to pieces by the reverberations.

  "Again!" I called out as my awareness spread down from my eyes, forming a body around me. Always before, I had been disembodied in this space. Never before had I formed something like this construct. The new shock of awareness caused me to lose my grip on the Skills, and they slipped from my grasp for a moment. Growling, my mental body responded, reaching out its hands through the ether and black towards the lights as they began to spread apart. I felt the Skills in my grip straining against me. Everything became mechanical as I slammed the glowing orbs together again and again. There was less and less conscious thought involved in the process as the pain sought to bury my mind. Over and over again, until there was little left but an unwillingness to bow to the pain, to give in. The same steel core that had been forged in me in the Soul-Sheer, the thing that had sustained me when I had nothing left.

  On and on I continued, losing all track of time and space. It could have been mere moments, or it could have been days. I had no way of knowing. Pain and System notifications went completely ignored in pursuit of my goal. Until something changed. It drew me from the trance-like state I'd existed in for however long. It was somehow easier to grip the glowing orbs that represented my disparate Skills now.

  I wasn't about to question it as my mind spun back up to full awareness. I brought the orbs of light crashing together one more time. This time I wasn't greeted with the ringing of the last couple of strikes, but a sickening crunch that reminded me of nothing so much as glass being crushed, bones breaking.

  My inner world exploded in a cacophony of light and sound. My mental construct was blown apart, and I found myself hurtling through the darkness of node space. The cacophony in my soul grew to a deafening crescendo, threatening to tear me apart from the inside out. The pain flared to new heights, as if someone had rammed a bottle of napalm into my chest cavity and set it off. I was a blaze of little more than pain, pain with a core of defiance. Even through the storm of pain and light, that core was unshakable.

  My will crashed down on the shattered Skills with the weight of a mountain. This was My Soul, these were My Skills, they were a part of Me. They would bow to my Will. The avatar of my consciousness followed suit, reforming from nothing as the light began to fade, or at least not be completely overwhelming. Hands out stretched towards the source of the light, grasping onto something that should have escaped my grip like a person trying to capture smoke with their bare hands. Instead, my grip settled onto the Skills, and their fragments crashed together. For a moment, they fought my control, but slowly they began to settle. It started as a slow draining for tension, a loss of vibration. Some indeterminable time later, I released the single Skill that was left from my grip, and it shot off. It trailed light behind it like a shooting star crossing the night sky, to take its place in my constellation.

  Abruptly, I was ejected from my inner space, and I found myself on my back, staring up at the ceiling of the training room. There was a blaring in my ears. I raised a heavy, leaden hand to rub at my right ear. It took a moment for my brain to catch up to what was going on and realize the blaring sound was an alarm. Groaning, I rolled first to my stomach and then slowly dragged myself to my feet. My body felt like someone had been beating me with something heavy while I'd been in node space.

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  "Note to self, there are still consequences in there," I muttered to myself as I headed from the control room at a slow shuffle. Everything hurt; it was like the worst combination of catching a full-body beating and having done a full-body workout at the gym, that went way, way too far.

  Groaning, I slapped a hand to the control console.

  "Stop, just stop? Please?" I spoke to the console in my groggy state as if it were some thinking living being that might listen. "Oh, just shut up." I only barely knew what half of the controls did. I gave up and started slapping buttons at random, just wanting the noise to stop. I must have eventually hit the right one because a few moments later, the alarm stopped sounding. "Thank fuck for that," I grunted, holding a hand to my face and letting out a deep breath. My head was still throbbing, though it was fading.

  Now that I could hear myself think, there was a new sound in what should have been the silent soundscape of the training room. The sound of a fist pounding against metal. I heaved a heavy sigh, "Suppose I should get that." I began trudging out of the control room towards the door that led out into the hall. As I approached the door, the pounding intensified. Whoever was on the other side was clearly agitated. I took a deep breath, steeling myself for whatever awaited me, and pressed the release.

  The door slid open with a soft hiss, revealing Sean and Uncle Wolf. Both had worried looks on their faces. "What the hell have you been doing in here, Aiden? You set off half a dozen different alarms for mana levels in the training rooms." Uncle Wolf glared at him; underneath the glare, he had clearly been worried.

  "What the hell happened? We've been trying to reach you for hours!" Sean chimed in.

  I blinked, trying to process his words. Hours? It hadn't felt that long.

  "I was... training," I managed, my voice still rough.

  Sean's expression shifted from concern to exasperation. "Training? The alarms have been blaring for the past three hours! We thought you were dying in here!"

  I winced, both at the volume of his voice and the realization of how long I'd been out. "Sorry, didn't mean to worry you. I was working on something."

  My brother's eyes narrowed, scrutinizing me. Uncle Wolf shared a similar look. "You look like hell. What exactly were you doing?"

  “Working on a new Skill.” I shrugged, then winced as my body protested the movement.

  "Uh huh." The dripping sarcasm was a solid indicator that Sean didn't believe me at all. Uncle Wolf just fixed me with the same steady gaze he'd used on all of us Kaesor kids since the dawn of time. Unfortunately for him, I was long since immune to that particular tactic.

  "Now, if you don't mind, I've still got some things to figure out here," I said, stepping back and closing the door. My patience was virtually nonexistent right now. I was exhausted, and I felt like hell warmed over. I hadn't even looked at the new Skill or the other System notifications I'd felt while I'd been working away in my inner space. There was at least one to look at, at any rate.

  The 'something' clicked in my brain, "What the hell was Sean doing here?" I grumbled out loud. I'd never brought him over to the Banner facility; I'd been holding off until he got a little stronger first. "Whatever, Uncle Wolf can look after him," I grunted as I stumbled back to the center of the training room, my body protesting every step. The cool floor beckoned me once again, and I sank down gratefully, lying flat on my back. With a deep breath, I closed my eyes and focused inward, calling up my status screen. Everything felt heavy right now, even my eyes; thankfully, my eyes didn't have to be open to see my Status sheet and system log. Glancing at my Status, everything looked normal, so I turned my attention to the backlog of notifications.

  That notification repeated itself dozens of times, and I had to flick through them until I found the end of that chain of screens.

  I blinked in surprise, staring at the notification. A Unique Class Skill? I had one other Unique Skill, but I didn't know anything about Class Skills having a rarity, let alone being unique. There hadn't been anything similar in the Banner's archive either. Class Skills were supposed to be fixed, unchanging for the most part. Yet here I was, with a brand new one that had overwritten my original [Auric Vision]. Shaking my head, I dismissed the notification and moved on to the next.

  Well, that made sense. During the entire fusion process, I'd been immersed in what was a form of unending agony. So much so, it had driven most of my mind to shut down to cope with the pain that had pushed me beyond the limits of my mental endurance. A quick glance at the Skill itself told me it did what it said on the tin and would certainly be helpful down the line. I could still starkly remember the pain of losing limbs to the Royal guard ants back in the Soul-Sheer. The pain had been nearly debilitating at the time. If the pain had overwhelmed me for even a moment back then, I would have died.

  I moved on to the next notification, or rather notifications. The string of them, all the same, made my blood run cold. Damaging my soul was not a possibility I had considered when I'd set out to fuse my Skills. It wasn't something I could be sure of the consequences of. For all I knew, taking too much soul damage might kill me outright. Obviously, that wasn't the case at the moment, considering I was still breathing, but still. It was a point of concern.

  Over a dozen of the same message repeated itself. That was not good. It wasn't all bad news, however, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I reached the second last notification screen.

  I grinned, looking over my new gains. It still hurt like hell all over, but so far it seemed to have been worth the ordeal I'd put myself through. On a whim, a flicker of thought caused [All-Seeing Eye] to activate, and a new lens dropped over my sight. One that wasn't familiar. Unlike when I had used [Sensor Eye] to look at the room, the energy I was seeing now seemed more ordered, planned. It clung to the walls and floor in specific patterns. It didn't flow the way heat and cold did, nor was it emitted like EM waves. It didn't follow the ray and wave-like patterns of light either. I stared hard at the patterns for several minutes, trying to puzzle out what they might be, until my gaze caught my hand, and the bright blue lines running down my arm.

  My breath caught as I realized what I was seeing.

  Mana.

  Magic itself.

  The vibrant blue lines coursing through my body were mana channels; they had to be, pulsing with energy. What I was seeing covering the walls and floor were the magical wards and reinforcements that allowed this space to be used as a training room. Fascinated, I let my gaze wander, taking in the complex tapestry of magical energy surrounding me. The air itself seemed alive with faint, shimmering threads of mana, twisting and coiling like gossamer in a breeze. I grinned. This had possibilities, endless possibilities. If I could see magic itself, I could copy it, could learn it. Make my own.

  I activated [Mana Manipulation] and watched as the mana inside my body swirled to my will, followed by the uncontested mana that floated around the room. It was so much easier now that I could actually See what I was doing. It wasn't all visualization anymore; there was an actual physical-ish component I could watch and measure a response from.

  I laughed, radiating joy as the mana that filled the room danced around me like clouds and stars of blue.