Zoe sat on the floor, with Fennel laying next to her, thinking about her skills. According to Eliza, trying to improve her stats directly, without the systems help would be akin to suicide. But many of Zoe’s skills felt somewhat similar in nature — her Enchanted Mirrors, for instance. There didn’t seem to be any mana necessarily, it was just a part of her essence. The very fabric of her being stored a copy of whatever combination of enchantments she wanted.

  Would trying to replicate that skill be a death sentence as well, Zoe wondered? It would be mighty convenient if she could replicate it. Without a question, it was the most powerful skill Zoe had at her disposal. Even if she could enchant a frost projectile in about half a second on her own, thanks to her higher level Enchanting skill, that was far longer than it took with the help of an Enchanted Mirror.

  And in the middle of a fight, when she was summoning hundreds of those projectiles? That small difference added up, a lot. Not to mention the amount of focus that was taken to build up the enchantment each and every time she wanted to manually enchant one of her projectiles. A lapse in judgment for just a moment would be enough if something went wrong, and that was a risk Zoe didn’t want to take if she could avoid it.

  Of course, she had the skill. She could just continue using the skill. But an enchanting class didn’t seem like a great option — unless she considered some of its skills to be worthy enough replacements for the missing class effect. The only question was whether or not she did.

  Zoe turned her focus inwards, peering into her soul at the mirrors reflecting her various combinations of enchantments. There was no mana, as far as Zoe could tell. There was some power, some energy that seemed to cover everything. Something that gave her skills a form to be able to interact with. Was that mana? Or was that something else?

  How would she even begin to try and recreate the Enchanted Mirrors? Every other skill she’d replicated had been done through recreating the mana patterns, so when there weren’t any mana patterns to be seen, what could she even do?

  “They could’ve given us an instruction manual, at least.” Zoe rubbed Fennel behind the ears. “Pretty scary stuff, buddy. If I mess up, you might be eating my body, you know?”

  Fennel meowed.

  “Yeah. I agree. It’s probably stupid, right? But I do it all the time anyway, right? Kind of, at least. Enchanting is kind of like messing with my soul, just temporarily. If I did that but tried to make it permanent, would I give myself a copy of the skill?” Zoe asked Fennel.

  Fennel meowed.

  “I’d die, you say? Probably, huh?” Zoe chuckled.

  Something about Zoe’s soul always terrified her. It was beautiful, it was powerful, but the thought of trying to change anything about it? She couldn’t even understand what any of it was, how could she begin to try and add anything to it?

  But bit by bit as Zoe accumulated skills and spent more and more time looking through her own being, things began to make more sense. Most of her soul was empty, she’d noticed. If that was what she was even seeing — it was hard to be sure, and less of a visual experience than it was like trying to feel precisely where a swallowed coin was as it passed through her body.

  If her soul was empty, and the skills were just structures floating somewhere within her, then it stood to reason that they would be connected to something. Some tendrils of power that tied those structures in to the rest of her being, how she interacted with them. But as far as Zoe could tell, they weren’t attached to anything. They were just lonesome structures representing everything that made her what she was.

  So her next assumption was that if those structures weren’t attached to anything, then there might be some other structure somewhere within her that stores all of the locations of her skills. So when she draws on their power, it can find the skills and activate them. But even that proved to be a fruitless search.

  Which left Zoe with three options that she could think of and not find any way to disprove. The first was that they could just work as they were, floating through the endless expanse of her soul and called on whenever she needed their power. They didn’t need to be found because they were already a part of her, eager to listen to her needs.

  The second was that they were a part of the system — shortcuts for her to use, as it were. Skills were a part of the system of course. If Zoe created Frost with her mana, then that wasn’t a skill. That was herself understanding mana itself, the underlying power of the world, and then using it to create the effects she wanted. Stats, skills, feats, all of it were just parts of the system. Assistance for the people using the system, but ultimately only acting as a middleman between Zoe and the mana around her.

  And the last was the everything she saw, her soul, the very essence of her being, was fake. There was just as much a chance that it was entirely created by the system, every sensation she felt, every structure she thought she was aware of, given to her by the system to help understand what she was wanting from it.

  Although, now that she thought about it, those were rather conflicting. If skills were a system’s creation, then her first option wouldn’t make any sense. Why would she have the structures of skills floating around in her and just working on their own if the skills were only a part of the system?

  And for that matter, how would enchanting work without the system? If she didn’t have the system to help her, to give her skills to use, how would she enchant a piece of wood with a light effect? If she didn’t have the light skill because the system was gone, would she still be able to create the same structure and push it into whatever she was enchanting? Or did the system wrap its ugly mitts around the mana as she enchanted objects, twisting the structures she provided into the proper shapes to give the effect she was hoping for?

  Something didn’t quite make sense to Zoe. Enchanting didn’t require the system. She’d done it before she got the skill — that was how she got it in the first place. And she even had to do it quite a few times before she got the skill, so it wasn’t just the system giving her the skill right as she did it. Which meant that enchanting should be possible even without the system’s assistance.

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  But if skills were just a part of the system, then how would enchanting work? She’d still have to form structures that caused the effects she wanted, and push those structures into her objects. Even if the system was twisting her mana as it was pushed into the objects, there was still ultimately a structure that was causing the effect.

  What would that mean for the structures in her soul, then? Was she, herself, just a glorified enchantment? Was the system just somebody enchanting her with new effects?

  Zoe took a step back, mentally. Without the system — or before the system, mana probably existed. So somebody would have taken an incredible amount of it and created the system. Were they still maintaining it, Zoe wondered? Somebody out there, somewhere in the universe just writing new skills and classes for people to find? Maybe there was a group of people, or maybe even somebody monitoring each planet and trying to come up with new feats and monsters.

  She shook her head, none of that was important right now. Whether or not her Enchanted Mirrors skill was safe to replicate wouldn’t change anything for her right now. She’d already put in an enormous amount of time to get to where she was, and replacing her enchanting class with a more powerful class would just postpone her seventh class that much more. It wasn’t worth it.

  Instead, Zoe decide to try and work on her other enchanting class skills. Unlike with Unseen Archer, she would be keeping the class for years to come so she didn’t have to take all of them. She just needed to steal enough that she no longer had to choose which skills to keep in her class skills.

  She’d lose all the levels she had in the skills she kept in the class whenever she did get around to replacing it, so Zoe decided to try and recreate the skills she cared about levels in the most. Unfortunately, Enchanted Mirrors was also at the top of that list and too complicated to think about for the time being so it would be relegated to the back burner until she’d learned some more.

  Mana Affinity and Enchanted Mirrors were both skills she would be keeping in her class list for the time being, which left her with three other skills to pick. Mana Manipulation didn’t benefit much from levels, as far as Zoe could tell. At least for her use cases — it had quite an effect on how much mana she could manipulate at once but even at level one it was more than enough for her needs. As an enchantment, it did benefit quite a bit from having more levels but she had other skills to help with sustaining enchantments now anyway.

  Enchantment Bestowal did benefit quite a bit from some extra levels, but even at level one it was enough to be useful. And for her last skill slot, Zoe decided on Mana Storage. She’d never really used the skill before since her regeneration was so potent, but it seemed like it shared many of the same problems her Enchanted Mirrors skill had when it came to recreating the skill and she wasn’t even sure if she cared about it at all.

  Zoe replaced her Mana Projection skill with Enchantment Amplifier and started studying the patterns as she amplified a simple Vampyric Regeneration enchantment on a piece of wood she summoned. The mana was complicated, but moved slowly, flowing around the piece of wood she held as the mana seemed to pierce into it thousands of times.

  The days passed as Zoe studied her skill — and more often than not getting distracted chatting with Emma or playing with the cats. She expected the skill to be more complicated than it was, if she were being honest. Something about amplifying the enchantment just sounded like it would be a mess to handle, with so many different variations of skills and objects to work with.

  But it was pretty simple, at least relative to some of the shadow skills she’d worked on recently. The way it worked, from what Zoe could see, was by tugging at the internal structure of the enchantment, damaging it and mending it tens of thousands of times in a very short time. In the end, the structure was left stronger — kind of like a mechanical meat tenderizer that glued it back together stronger after it pierced the meat.

  Regardless of what the object she was enchanting was, or what skills were in the enchantment, the skill worked much the same way. Destroy the enchantment bit by bit, and rebuild it stronger than ever before.

  *Ding* You have unlocked the Enchantment Amplifier skill.

  Zoe smiled. “Got it, buddy. Which next?" She asked Fennel across the room, rolling around in a pile of green leaves and small wooden balls.

  Fennel meowed.

  Zoe snapped her fingers and pushed the system to replace her now redundant Enchantment Amplifier with Mana Projection. “Great idea. I agree. Erupted Enchantments would be dangerous here anyway probably.”

  Mana Projection was a much more complicated skill than Enchanted Amplifier, just due to the sheer size of the area the skill affected. The entire distance between herself and whatever she was projecting her mana to was filled with a dense structure of mana that funnelled even more mana straight to its destination. It wasn’t quite as incredible as when she tried to study her Nature’s Clearing skill, but it was rather daunting.

  Another week flew by as Zoe’s mana raced around her home, flooding everything within reach with her mana before she was rewarded with another system message.

  *Ding* You have unlocked the Mana Projection skill.

  The last skill Zoe wanted was her Erupted Enchantments skill. It wasn’t one that she too often found useful, but if she was going to commit to stealing more skills then this was at least one that wasn’t completely useless. Zoe took a trip outside the city and sat in the forest for a few days as she cast the skill over and over, filling the dozens of mundane twigs and rocks that surrounded her with mana.

  Erupted Enchantments was a very simple skill. It almost didn’t even seem like a skill at all, as far as Zoe could tell. The mana that erupted from her seemed to be just that at first glance — plain mana that erupted from her body, and seeped into the objects around her.

  But on a closer inspection, some of the mana that flooded the area around her did seem to follow certain patterns, shifting as they impacted objects and pulling the surrounding mana in with them. It was difficult to study since no matter where she looked, there was an abundance of just plain mana — the power source for the skill itself, she supposed.

  It took just over two weeks before Zoe managed to figure out the skill and recreate it for herself.

  *Ding* You have unlocked the Erupted Enchantments skill.

  Zoe smiled and made her way back home. There wasn’t much left to do before she ran out of ideas to help her get her sixth class. At some point, she had to realize she was just stalling and get on to the rather daunting task of resetting for her seventh class. It would probably be several resets before she even got her seventh class, and maybe she’d have a better sixth class by then anyways. And if she didn’t? Well, she’d have her seventh class, and that would more than make up for it.

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