I hadn’t a clue what it meant to look into myself—or anything about hypnosis, for that matter. Still, it sounded good on the surface. I climbed onto my bed and closed my eyes.

  Looking into myself was odd. If there had been anyone nearby to look at me, I would have died of embarrassment. They would have been able to see me making very silly faces. Thankfully, I was alone.

  Every time I wanted my mind to still and focus on the problem at hand, it would wriggle through my grip and wander off. I could have sworn it was taunting me when it did—winking at me and everything! I facepalmed to get my composure back. This wasn’t the time to let my mind wander free. I had an opponent to face—fears to defeat!

  But try as I might, I couldn’t figure it out. Frustrated, I got out of bed and went outside to chop wood. I was wary of the cat, so I kept my eyes and ears open at all times. Just in case. When the anxiety built up too much, I went back inside with an armful of wood and locked the door. I couldn’t go on like this. I had to try again.

  After eating some food—and catching my breath—I sat back on my bed and tried again. This time—instead of trying to empty my mind—I gave my mind something to focus on instead.

  Fear. It was eating me from the inside—I was jumping at every shadow. It was exhausting—I couldn’t sleep. It all came down to fear. I knew the cat was strong. That it was still stronger than me had thrown me for a loop. Well, maybe not stronger, but maybe evenly matched. I’d injured it as much as it had injured me.

  No, the problem was that it liked to hide and pounce when I would least expect it. That’s what scared me. It was why my hut felt—mostly—safe. Going outside was like going to war with an an assassin. I needed something for peace of mind. Yes, a skill might be able to help me, but it wouldn’t always be there. The last thing I needed was for skills to be a crutch I relied on too much.

  The solution was obvious. I needed to face the fear and overcome it. Otherwise I would always be looking over my shoulder wherever I went—even when I returned to the past and the safety of Dad’s house. I had to be stronger than the fear. If not completely master it, then at least have a mutual understanding with it. The fear shouldn’t be the one in control. It should be me. Fear was simply a warning and nothing more.

  With my mind’s eye, I glared at my imagined manifestation of fear. It took the shape of the cat. I glared at it. It was a warning and nothing more. The cat looked like it was ready to pounce at me. I felt a pang of fear but pushed it away. It was a warning. That was all. And that’s how it would remain, I decided.

  I felt a little better after doing that. I opened my eyes. For the first time in days, the rumbling fear was quiet. It wasn’t gone, but it was quiet for now. That held even when I went out to collect more wood. It put a smile on my face.

  As I walked into the hut, a thought struck me. It shocked me enough that I stopped right in the frame of the door. Only the door smacking me on the back reminded me of where I was. I came in, dropped off the wood, and closed the door.

  Part of what I’d thought about was not letting skills be a crutch. But more important than that, I wanted to be in control of the skills. The problem was that—while they worked—I didn’t know how they worked. If I could handle my own fear, why couldn’t I also gain better control over my skills? Perhaps that would be my way forward in getting the skills to do what I needed them to.

  I sat on my bed and closed my eyes. I thought—really thought—about what I needed the skills to do. Ideally, Toxin and Disease would work with Contagion to spread—and not just from the first animal, but all of them. Instead of casting one at a time, what I wanted to do was cast Contagion on one of the other two so the it was the skill that propagated continually.

  I needed to combine the skills together somehow. And I couldn’t use a feature to do it since I didn’t have enough experience to buy it. My task was to understand how skills worked on a fundamental level. The system was doing the heavy lifting, and I’d been using it as a crutch. It was time to take a peek under the hood and see how it all worked.

  Heal was the first skill I tried to use for many reasons. It was low cost and wouldn’t burn my hut down to use. I also didn’t need to find an unwilling participant every time I wanted to cast it as it worked on me even when I wasn’t injured.

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  The process was simple. First, I cast the skill. Then I tried to see how the process went when doing that casting. At first, it seemed impossible. Everything happened too quickly. Then, I got used to it after many casts of Heal. There was a delay between wanting to cast the skill and it actually activating. A very slight delay. It was so small that it had taken me a while to even pick up on it. Once I noticed it, I began to see it with all of my other skills when I used them.

  To complicate everything, I had two power sources to work with—faith and blood. They worked on different principles, and yet each was able to produce the same result. Blood was more of a renewable resource, so that is what I used more often. Still, faith was useful as another data point to compare with. Every time I had an idea of how it might be working, I used faith to check if I was on the right track. Most of the time, it tore apart my hypothesis, this was incredibly frustrating!

  Slowly but surely, I felt something important. It wasn’t the skills—it was something much more fundamental. I felt how energy moved when I was using skills. Blood and faith were different enough that it had taken me a while to pick up on—and the limited time between starting the cast and it activating made learning slower, too.

  I was beginning to understand that no matter which option I used, the energy powering skills flowed in a cycle. Blood used my circulatory system. It originated from my heart before flowing outwards to my extremities and back again. The power kept to its channels unless it was being used—which I was able to feel once I knew what, and where, to look.

  Faith worked a little differently. It didn’t have a particular origin that I could locate—at least not on my body. It had its own channels that filled with power when I used a skill. Unlike blood, they didn’t contain or cycle power through them at all times. If I had to put it into words, it was like I was asking for energy from somewhere else and being granted it—for a cost. Given what I understood of faith, this made sense to me.

  Whether I went with chi or mana, I assumed the effect would be similar to blood—albeit with less of a disgusting feeling. Neither of those borrowed power from another, and they would be simpler than blood as well. Probably. I still had time to choose one or the other, so I put that out of my mind for the moment.

  Getting an understanding of the flows felt important. It felt right somehow. There was a resonance that sang to me when I watched the power of my blood flow through my heart, to my fingers, and back to my heart. I tried pushing the blood forward along its path, only to feel an intense pain upon doing so. That wasn’t the right way to go about it—and it was dangerous!

  The only way I found to make it flow faster was to raise my heart rate. Pushing it, pulling it, twisting it, filling it with more power… all of those were painful and a bad idea. Making my heart work harder had an effect. This had an effect. It made me stronger! It was a small effect, but it was noticeable.

  The joy I felt upon figuring that out was tremendous. For months, I’d been stuck with the problem of my skills not doing what I wanted. I still had that problem, but I felt like I was getting closer to a solution. I also felt like I’d discovered a bit about how the system operated under the hood.

  Thus far, I’d been building the system without that knowledge. I knew that magic was coming to the world, bringing monsters and a whole host of other nasty things. But that was all I’d had to go on. Now, I understood that wasn’t entirely true. How else was I able to work on the system, time travel, or have skills? Magic was already here. It had always been here, too. I just hadn’t realized it—no one had.

  This system I was creating? It was really just an organized method of processing that magic into a usable form for everyone. It balanced power with action—the more someone did things, the more magic they would get in them. That’s what leveling was. Experience was the unused magic belonging to me. The system did what it was designed to do and turned that magic into whatever I needed. All I was doing was setting the rules by which that happened.

  As a test, I leveled up once. I watched carefully as the experience was turned into blood and soaked into my body in a way that was far too complicated for me to comprehend the first time. It was fast, too. The boost in power was small but noticeable—similar to the effect from increasing my heart rate, but permanent. It also meant that it should be possible to level up without the system’s assistance. That said, it was really dangerous—if the pain I’d felt from trying to move my blood around was anything to go on.

  I smiled. Then I laughed. I’d uncovered something amazing! The system thought the same. It gave me a sizable amount of experience for the discovery. I made a note to watch level-ups in the future very carefully. This was doubly so of the power increase I’d felt when I jumped up a tier. There was something special that occurred, and I’d been unaware of it before.

  Now that I understood—vaguely—what was going on behind the curtain, I set my sights on understanding how my skills operated. That was the only way I would get what I wanted. The skills needed to be modified in some way—joined together perhaps—so that they would propagate without my intervention.

  With the understanding of the cycle of energy inside of me, I began casting skills again every day. The goal was to understand how they worked—just as I’d understood how energy worked. Except, I needed a much better understanding. It needed to be as perfect as it could be. Heal had brought me to the door. The key—I felt—was Flight.

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