Master Reggie burst through the door, carrying bags over one shoulder. He glanced at me, then at the clean table.

  “HEY KID! You did it!”

  “Master Reggie, what’s going on?” I asked. “The second area is supposed to be the region on the mind. Whatever power this is…it’s really weird.”

  “Not at all,” Reggie said, clicking his tongue. “Silly humans making silly categories. It sounds nice to say ’Power, mind, body, and spirit,’ as the four factors of the first four regions, but that is woefully inaccurate.” He grinned. “I’m surprised you noticed. It’s one of those things that becomes more obvious the further you go.”

  “I don’t just use my mind,” I started. “There has to be a connection to both my body and my powers, or I’d be able to summon the core of a black hole—”

  Reggie chuckled. “Why can’t you?”

  “Because I don’t have access to the core of a black hole,” I sighed. “And I wouldn’t have the power to retrieve it and move it back here. Nor do I have the mental energy to create a black hole from nothing, and there’s no way of buying a black hole. It’s unattainable no matter what way I put it.”

  “Very good,” Master Reggie said, setting the plastic sacks on the table. “The exact wording is a ‘conservation of effort’ within the game, rather than relying on mass or energy. Now, as for the systems themselves, there are four. Humans would say power, mind, body, and spirit. But monsters know better than humans. The first area is power, obviously. It’s nice, simple, and straightforward. From there it gets more complicated.”

  He dug into his bag of supplies and got out a blue can, followed by a red can. “These are two enchanted relics.”

  I blinked. “Okay…”

  “If you exert enough power into a command with the right base, you can imbue power into an object, just like all the items in the game,” Reggie stated. “Not the point. Right now, what do you notice about these two cans?”

  The first was red with a blue stripe, and with ‘Cola’ in big white letters all over the front. The second was blue with a red stripe, and ‘Aloc’ in black letters over the front.

  I turned one over, running my hands along the sides. There was a dent on one, with an identical dent on the other. “Are they mirrored?”

  “Close,” Reggie said. “They’re inverses.”

  “And what does that have to do with the power system of the game?” I asked.

  “Plenty.” He took one can and bonked me on the head. The other shuddered in response. “The red can is the second area, and the blue is the third. The second area is the original, and the third is a copy, where all of the second’s elements have been flipped. The third area is also larger, but that’s beside the point. Practically speaking, all elements in the third area are in the second, just in a different order.”

  It took me a second to process through it all, but when I got it, my eyes went wide.

  “The second area is the region of the body and the mind?”

  “Body, mind, and power,” Reggie stated. “But that is also woefully inaccurate. Really I wonder how any of you make it through the second area. This place is the region of the power mindbody.”

  He sat himself down next to me at the table, slinging an arm around my neck. “Monsters know that this area is the easiest out of all the five, so long as you understand the simplest mechanics. If you don’t, then the entire system this world runs on seems entirely useless.”

  “Does the union know about all this?” I asked.

  “Have you ever heard the expression trial and error?” Reggie asked. “Of course you have. Basically, humans have been in this place so long, and have tried so many things that their courses can actually train a player through the second area with a decent grasp on the power. But that player won’t understand it. They’ll understand only the itty-bitty widdle baby explanation. They assume that you exert your mind over the region, while a monster is born with the understanding that you are reordering the logic of the region, not making changes.”

  “That still doesn’t make much sense,” I sighed. “If monsters know about all of this, and if their methods are better than the player’s, why hasn’t anybody asked?”

  “Three issues,” Reggie said. “First, the vast majority of monsters are idiot killing machines. Second, the monsters that can talk can talk because they’re exceptional killing machines, which makes them targets for humans, and third, because most of this information becomes borderline useless in the third area.”

  I huffed. “So when I enter, I’ll be going in blind and helpless all over again?”

  Reggie cackled, grabbing the two cans and ramming them into one another. Rather than crumpling, there was a flash of light, and they fused together, into one, normal can.

  This can had a greyish black color, with a white stripe, and blue font with a red shadow.

  “Do you get my meaning, kid?” Master Reggie asked. “Yes, most of this knowledge is useless in the third area, so nobody bothers to learn it right. But once you enter the fourth area, all of this is suddenly very, very important. The first area teaches you to what the game is. The second and third teach you ways to play it, and the fourth tests how well you can do either.”

  “You’ve been in the fourth area?”

  Reggie blinked. “Of course not.”

  “But—”

  He rolled his eyes. “Monsters know only what is relevant. I know a ton about the second area but little of the third and fourth. Take this blessing of knowledge and be happy about it.”

  “Thank you,” I said. "What about the fifth area?"

  Master Reggie scoffed. "There's no way that exists." He upended all of the bags on the table, revealing a wide assortment of items. Each had wildly unnatural colors, and seemed to shift back and forth around each other. “Let's start practicing, shall we?”

  “What is all this?” I asked, picking up a golden banana peel with glass spots. “Did you root through someone’s garbage?”

  “Several people’s,” Master Reggie chuckled. “And I made it all into a whole lot of really different things. Now, how would you go about fixing that banana peel?”

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “I’m not really fixing anything,” I said. “And I’m not changing matters either. I’m merely replacing it. Banana.”

  The gold dimmed, and the spots turned sickly black, flapping down over my hand.

  “You say it outloud?” Master Reggie asked.

  “It helps.”

  He gave me a look.

  “It makes me feel cooler.”

  “Fair.”

  I issued another command, and the banana peel knit itself together, fading the spots, and growing in size as a new banana sprouted within it. This took substantially more effort than the first, since I had to account for the monetary cost of a banana and my current ability to make more money.

  “What you’re doing is basically magic,” Master Reggie stated. “While you are mentally picturing a replacement of an object, you aren’t actually taking anything from anywhere. All pretty weird, isn’t it?”

  He handed me a diamond blue and black vegetable, with spots and holes in its side, each filled with crystal. The shape distorted even as he held it, flowing over his fingers. “Now, how would you fix this?”

  “I don’t know what it is,” I admitted. “And I don’t know where I would get a new one of those.”

  “You’re thinking like a scholar,” Master Reggie growled. “Think like an idiot. BE THE IDIOT.”

  He snatched the fruit from my hands. “This is a flower, it’s blue and black, and it’s pretty common around town. At most, it sells for a single tin, or about zero point zero one credits.”

  He handed it back to me. “Now you try.”

  A common flower. Blue and black.

  “Heal,” I said.

  The folded hunk of garbage bloomed outward, puffing up and out as the holes closed up, one after the other. There was a bit of a fizzle as the flower finished, and I felt a sudden spiking pain in my head. Thankfully, it went away after a couple seconds, leaving behind a large blue and black flower the size of my hand.

  “See?” Master Reggie asked. “Be an idiot.”

  “I’m not sure I follow,” I grunted. “All you’ve done is prove that I need prior knowledge about the item in order to fix it.”

  Master Reggie planted his sickly white hands on my shoulders. “Kid. I made all that up.”

  “You made all that up?”

  “Every last word. That is a month-old piece of cabbage, not a rotten flower.”

  I glanced down at the blossom in my hand. “So…what is this?”

  “That is a flower that you convinced yourself existed.”

  “I convinced myself that a flower existed, and then I turned a moldy piece of cabbage into that flower? And that works?”

  “Yes.” He grinned wider. “You’re not actually taking an item from the game’s directory. You are taking your perception and forcing it into the game. The less flexible what you ‘can’ and ‘can’t’ do, the less you can actually do.”

  But how do you make all of this into jewels and gold?” I asked, holding up a rotten apple, somehow turned into red crystal. “Any system you use would’ve made it difficult to—”

  “There are no such things as flesh apples,” Master Reggie started, with an indignant scoff. “All apples are grown between rocks as a result of volcanic pressure, before a tree grabs the minerals and grows a bud. These apples are then carved by ravens into desirable shapes, before being presented in a mating ritual, after which the apple becomes worthless.”

  I gagged. “That works?”

  “There’s a fine line,” Master Reggie stated. “Remember. Conservation of effort. If you convince yourself that a black hole is in your pocket, then you could theoretically pull out in the middle of combat. But the cost of effort for that interaction would be higher than a human or monster could ever manage, and your brain would blow out the sides of your ears. What I just did allowed me to use more effort to change the rules for the value of an item. But it is not a loophole. Everything that seems overpowering has a drawback to make up for it. For instance, this method is far more dangerous. If you realize, even for a second, that what you’re doing isn’t making sense, you will suddenly be performing a task using orders of magnitude more energy than you actually have.”

  He chuckled to himself, opening his hand to reveal a small pebble that wasn’t there before. “Now, this is a mystic relic, which will instantly kill literally anything you touch with it. Would you like to have it?”

  “That’s a rock,” I stated. “And based on what you said, about conservation of effort, making that work would definitely kill me.

  “Yeah it’s just a rock,” Master Reggie stated. “But I will give it to you later. Rocks are rather useful things. First, we need to sharpen your focus. Focus is the method by which you make any of this flowery nonsense into something you can use in a practical way.”

  One of the discarded glass and wax tissue papers floated up into his hand.

  “Now, Grindy boy, I want you to turn this into paper.”

  It took a couple seconds to think it through, but paper was cheap and if Master Reggie really found all this in the garbage, then it would be easy.

  Except.

  Except…

  Nothing was happening.

  My head exploded in pain, and I dropped back into my seat, clutching my head. Despite my best efforts, the tissue papers remained as it was, without so much as a blemish.

  “What’s going on?” I groaned.

  “That’s just me,” Master Reggie stated. “Because I’m stupid, my focus is incredibly sharp. I have less going on in the back of my mind, you see. And because of that, I can bend the blunt of my meager will onto this napkin, and I have decided not to let you turn it back into paper.”

  “So you convince yourself that it is wax and glass, while I’m convincing myself that it is paper,” I said. At the Union, attendees could resist my will. But that only made sense when my will was basically a projectile. Something you could both visualize and visualize stopping.

  Wouldn’t have thought you’d be able to resist a perspective.

  Master Reggie grinned. “If you perceive a man as being split in half, you could convince yourself and the universe it would happen. And yet, it wouldn’t work, because that man is picturing to himself that he would, of course, not be split in half, and he’ll undoubtedly be believing that with zero effort and a whole lot more will than anything you’ve got.”

  His smile split wider, revealing teeth.

  “Follow my logic, kiddo.”

  “If I could convince myself that someone would die, with more conviction than they have, I could kill them. In fact, I could do it from any distance, at any time.”

  “I call this technique ‘Supreme Orbital Death Cannon Rupture,’” Master Reggie hissed. “I…still don’t know how to do it yet.”

  I started rubbing my forehead. “How would I even do that? And that’d use so much effort…”

  “And you’ve got to have the power to actually make it happen, given the time,” Reggie stated. “Without blowing your brains over the sidewalk, that is. So it’s less effective on stronger enemies.”

  “This is so, so confusing,” I muttered.

  “Then practice,” Reggie huffed, shoving another object toward me. “Stop thinking and do it already. Now, turn this apple into a ball of yarn.”

  His hand was resting on a large sock.

  “That apple?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  Master Reggie brought the sock to his mouth and took a bite, crunching on the tender pale fruit inside.

  “Begin.”

  // {Notice} //

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