So, it turns out that when Grant falls asleep, I wake up more than normal. The “me” in this case being the version of Grant which exists inside the Mind Palace skill. Normally, I exist on the backburner and don’t get to stretch my legs. It was interesting that Grant’s mind wandering into the clutches of rest allowed me to act with a little more independence, but not too surprising.

  During Grant’s waking hours, it was possible for me to slip into Grant’s perception and “sleep” myself. The effect of this was that Grant’s own faculties were improved upon, but that was something I only really did for battles. By giving all of my processing power to Grant’s mind, I could passively increase our chances of survival by acting that way. In actual downtime, I preferred to stay awake and keep working on the grand designs around me. It seemed that Grant’s sleeping mind did a similar thing, and I quickly took advantage of the greater capability at my disposal.

  Grant didn’t want to neglect the intriguing effects of the magic within his core, but there was just not enough time in the day. To Grant, magic was a tool to survive the horrors around him and hopefully those beyond his sight right now. He constantly needed more power, yet never had the time to follow the magical paths opened up to him. That’s where I came in. I could take over that role completely, happily directing every thought I had around questions of magic, mana and Spirit.

  Sitting in the Observatory within the Mind Palace, I looked skyward and sighed. Everything here was a creation of imagination, mana and Spirit, but just because it was somewhat imaginary didn’t mean the effects of its appearance weren’t real. It was a strange balance keeping things cohesive whilst also trying to press against the boundaries of what was possible. With conscious effort, I returned the gleaming power of Perfected Strike to its correct position in the cosmos.

  With the stars settled, I looked upon the combined work of Grant and myself. Four constellations now rested in the sky, not quite ready to reach the next phase of their existence. The most powerful of them was made of Dragonburn, Spirit Well and the Mind Palace skill itself, the three stars dancing around each other in an unending competition for dominance which none would ever succeed at. Another skill or two added to the dance and the constellation would be completed. While Grant and myself didn’t have a guide, instincts told us that this was not wasted effort.

  Tag smiled. Grant still didn’t really understand skills, which was no surprise. None of this was a simple thing to wrap one’s head around. I would be lying if I said I understood much more about the world than Grant, but I could at least be certain I knew a lot more about magic and how it works than the main mind could wrap its head around. Part of that was from being a skill himself, and the rest was from spending a truly vast amount of time trying to comprehend them.

  For example, Grant thought that a skill was simply what it did, the effect it created in the real world. If a skill created fire, to Grant, that’s all the skill was. I had delved much deeper. While Grant’s level of understanding was fine for now, it was always better to set good foundations if possible.

  When Grant’s skills had been shattered in the unique events during the Claimant battle, he had been unable to create Mana Bolt. Since then, he had reformed the vestiges into a similar ability on his own which replicated the effect. Just like he if he had lost a skill which produce flames, and gained another one which creates massive amounts of heat. The effect was the same, so to Grant it was the same.

  Yet, Grant had owned more than just the effect of the skill. He had owned the names, too. Magic Missile might fill the place of the bolts when it came to Grant’s fighting, in fact they would likely surpass the more simple skill’s efficiency quickly… but they would never be Mana Bolts. Magic Missiles would never have the weight, or density of a Mana Bolt, even if they outperformed in other areas.

  Mana Manipulation was an incredibly potent skill which they had only started scratching the surface of… but it wasn’t Mana Savant. The essence of the Savant skill had been to learn without conscious thought. The intent and Spirit of the skill had been stripped away, and just like the chaotic mana channels which were now fixed, were also looking for a place to return within Grant’s existence.

  Looking into the confused and expectant nebula of power waiting for its moment, Tag’s smile widened. He had even recruited the help of the Aspect for this, though the Dragon was getting harder to hear by the day. That was something to figure out, but the Dragon itself said it was fine, so Tag didn’t worry. He just watched the glittering lights above for a while, waiting patiently for their foundation to form.

  Of course, that was Grant’s task. The actual control of the body and its faculties belong to Grant, and I had no intention of trying to tamper or push that idea. I was Grant, and he was me. As time passed, we diverged somewhat, but the core of us was never going to change. Just as I would destroy any ability which tried to actively control my actions, so would Grant. Even if that skill was Mind Palace and the most useful skill he had…

  I wasn’t worried. Even if I did more than I expected, Grant liked surprising people. As I was him, I enjoyed the action too. Unfortunately, my audience was a little restricted, so surprising Grant was my goal. It shouldn’t be too hard, if nothing else than because I was notoriously bad at expecting gifts. Knowing all of my own weaknesses, able to see them from an actual outside perspective, was definitely a cheat code when it came to the relationship.

  “We’d have loved a few cheat codes for our other relationships, though,” I joked to the empty room. My own words echoed back at me a little and I frowned. There were a lot of expectations on Grant growing up. He was no genius, by any means, but he was someone who refused to quit when his mind was set. He was never put off the job simply because the task required hard work or routine to complete it. Grant would toil long into the night to create impressive pranks, and my mind was separate enough from the main man himself to analyse why.

  The truth, as for most humans, was that most of his trauma started and ended with his parents. Grant’s parents never really showed pride in Grant’s capabilities. Oh, they certainly did when it came to the praise of others, claiming that it made sense Grant was so intelligent with all the assistance he received from them and his siblings. I actually resisted the urge to spit on the floor. There was a bad energy to spitting in the actualisation of one's own mind, I expected.

  So, the A’s were expected grades, and there was no praise there. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there was a hefty amount of attention paid to Grant, it was just mostly negative. The slipping of those grades when Grant had thought no one cared showed him exactly how much his parents cared. The punishment for a slipped grade was harsh enough Grant hadn’t taken his foot off the neck of the education system since.

  Educational trauma aside, this turned Grant into a dedicated student. When it came to learning about a new subject or practising a new skill, Grant was truly diligent. So long as he himself was interested, he would focus on whatever task had been set to him and complete it before the deadline. That was just the kind of person he had become.

  However, eliciting emotion was something Grant needed to know he could do. With his two mostly ignorant parents more interested in the sporting events of his siblings, Grant learned to hunt for shock instead. He began to subconsciously see surprise as the more genuine emotion. There was a moment which could be captured in the memory, an expression of confusion, disbelief and wonder, which Grant craved.

  I didn’t have much of an opinion on the action or desire which brought Grant’s mind there. Each day which passed I became slightly less Grant and slightly more “Tag”. Of course, Tag was also Grant, just one which didn’t exist in the physical world. Tag was a being of pure magic, both less than a full person and capable of more at the same time. It was all a little confusing when you tried to articulate it but the result was a freer personality which was not bound to the life it had led before.

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  So, I would leave Grant to his slight neurosis when it came to family and feelings of success and take only the impish playfulness of a prankster from my progenitor. For granting me life, I would repay him… with a prank all of my own. There was a rumble from the world beneath my feet. “Okay, okay,” I admitted, “not all on my own.”

  I looked up from the floor, away from the world of the Dragon and into the distance above where the Spirit Well undulated and wiggled with flares of power. Much of my strength was currently being used to contain the resources I had gathered, holding them in a dark space on the other side of the draconic planet. When Grant awoke, he would get to work crafting, and the final constellation could be placed in the sky.

  Grant was going to be soooo surprised when he saw what I had created for us.

  ————————

  I woke up feeling surprisingly rested. My muscles didn’t creak, but instead happily flexed and twisted as I rolled around in the bed. I was grateful there were no dreams the night before, just darkness as I slept. Despite that, I had been able to track the passage of time just a little, enough to make the sleep completely comfortable. As I was clearly trapped in the confines of the furniture, I scanned the room I hadn’t had the energy to see last night.

  It had become a truly lovely place, with soft cream coloured walls with exposed wood banding on the inside. The large bed I fell into was also made of wood, a soft mattress on top with blankets and pillows. It wasn’t a plain bed though, despite being made by the System. With four smooth bedknobs at the corners and an impressive headboard shaped a little like a fleur de-lis, the king sized resting spot was fancier than any I had slept on before, most likely.

  The design of the room around me and its furnishing were reminiscent of a house which might have been built around five hundred years prior, yet the freshness of the construction and the openness of the space were more like a modern hotel’s premium room. An east-facing window greeted the sun generally, though its rays were on the other side of the workshop for now. It was technically the afternoon, though when an evening lasted for about fifty hours, such terms hardly mattered.

  I had little to do here, and lots of things to be getting on with, but the bed called for me and I couldn’t resist its sultry advances. I crawled back into the soft sheets for another few minutes of stretching and lazing about, simply feeling my body. My theory on the System dealing with mental illnesses as well as physical ones kept getting more evidence as I truly relaxed. After my ordeal in the poison, it wouldn’t be surprising if I wanted to just stop. It was possible that would be the worst torture of my life, but patterns didn’t suggest that things were necessarily going to get easier from here.

  Yet, lying in the bed, I never considered giving up. A vague suggestion from some insidious part of my brain said I should just stay in the warmth and avoid the dungeon outside. I didn’t listen to that instinct, not even for a moment. Even when the destruction of my soul was nigh and all of my existence had been blanketed in agonising pain, there was a drive within me which kept me going.

  I had struggled all my life. The scholarship I had quietly received to assist me in leaving my dull hometown and let me see a small portion of the world was only one of a thousand little ways I had rebelled against my lot in life. The world had always been against me. Now it had turned all of those amorphous and shadowy insecurities into literal monsters. Right when I believed freedom was on my horizon, I was thrown into a literal dungeon.

  So, giving up was out of the question. Just like staying in the nice fluffy bed was out of the question no matter how much I equivocated and assured myself I was not caught in its trap. “Alright,” I told myself, not moving, “I’m getting up.”

  Another twenty minutes of this passed before I finally removed the sinister claws of comfort from my back and got to my feet. At some point in my sleep, I had torn my clothes from myself.

  Literally.

  My new shoes had been thrown to the side, and my comfortable trousers had been left alone, but the shift I was wearing had been physically ripped apart in the night. My Strength attribute meant that anything not made magically was likely to be destroyed if I wasn’t paying attention. An interesting problem, and one I could probably work on alongside my real mission today. Replacing the destroyed clothing with a duplicate green “Clive’s” employee shirt, I tapped my waist. The waiting Xaverweave Pouch hopped on and I made my way downstairs.

  Stretching away the final dregs of sleep from my relaxed body as I descended into the workshop, my eyes widened at the full scope of the room. In my exhaustion the night before, I hadn’t truly recognised how much it had changed. I thought back to the flimsy shack I had first created while I looked around at the lacquered wood and fine equipment available to me now.

  The System had not held back, and I was incredibly grateful. There were areas for any kind of intricate craft I could picture, with the tools to perform them at a high quality. The workbench in the far left corner, for example, was as fine a woodworking station as I had ever seen. Alongside the saws and hammers were more specialised equipment like scalpels and chisels. A quick inspection told me the implements themselves were of a similar high quality.

  It was in looking at these tools that I felt a twinge of pain which had set my impetus in regards to crafting. The lost crafting skills were skill causing discomfort as they attempted to activate. Simply by being in the room, Construction and Tailoring were buzzing. My magic wanted to do what it remembered, but that wasn’t my plan.

  Honestly, though I couldn’t explain why, the thought of simply regrowing the same skills made me feel nauseous. With a tap of the pouch, a small glass container was belched into the air. I caught it and made a place for myself on one of the fresh tables on the right side of the room. The corner I chose to work at had the materials for art and painting, which I expected would be important. The fact was that I didn’t know for sure how to do this, only that it could be done.

  Item - Endless Inkwell (Grade Zero) (Uncommon)

  The ink of the Spatiarium Squid self replicates at an impressive rate even when removed from the cephalopods themselves. For this reason, it is a desired material for artisans the whole Tree wide. This particular inkwell has been charged with potent mana for an indeterminate amount of time. As such, the ink inside carries a magical signature and has improved mana conductivity with the user.

  Shrugging, I grabbed a piece of paper and a brush. It was a good job that the inkwell was infinite, I thought to myself. “This is going to take a lot of trial and error,” I told myself.

  “Nah, I don’t think it will,” the other version of me said in response. The instant the ink touched the paper, I felt a clicking in my mind and an immensely powerful vacuum open up in my core. Using the senses of my Spirit Well, I could feel an absolute ocean of the stuff descending upon me from the dungeon above.

  “What the fuck did you do?” I demanded, understanding immediately that this was something Tag had initiated. I trusted that it wasn’t negative, but I was still frozen in shock as the tidal wave of spirit ploughed into me. My mind was filled with information, more than with any single skill before. Information, and the excited giggling of a voice which sounded exactly like my own.

  Patterns exploded behind my closed eyes, a splitting headache growing. My mana channels were gripped by System control and then guided by both my own instincts and Tag’s intentions. In the spots where the old crafting skills had rotted, a new shining beacon of complexity and potential was being written. It was a lot at once, and thanks to Mana Manipulation, I felt every moment of it.

  I groaned, furious at Tag. I had just woken up feeling good, and I would make him pay for this somehow. Thankfully, the painful part was short lived and didn’t grow into a true migraine. After I regained my composure, what was left of the latest ordeal was simply an overwhelming amount of new knowledge. Seeing my chance to get my revenge quickly, I foisted all of this information right onto Tag. “You sort this out,” I said through gritted teeth.

  Tag didn’t reply, as I locked the skill down a little tighter than before. If he could, he would likely have said “you’ll thank me later,” because it's what I would have said. That smug prick was right, too. When I opened the new skill page, I almost rolled my eyes at how good the ability sounded. I didn’t loosen the cage around Mind Palace, but I did have to begrudgingly admit that whatever Tag had done was above and beyond my expectations.

  Skill Unlocked - Crafting Savant (Dragon)

  Rather than limited to one single pursuit like others, or even constrained by the time it normally takes to learn a skill, the Crafting Savant takes to new interests like a fish to water.