Michael walked out of the dungeon, a permanent shield surrounding him now. The sole act of keeping it up–while moving and acting normally–for several hours had already pushed it to level 2, with the fractal showing no signs of wanting to stop evolving. For now, at least.

  However, keeping the shield up had drained him of most of his Qi, which was much slower to recharge than the lower-Tiered energies like mana.

  “Now I want to see what happens when I run out,” muttered Michael.

  The shield, which had gained the ability to become almost totally transparent when it got to level two, regained its original opacity at Michael’s command. Leaning closer, he focused on the small lines of runescript that crisscrossed the shield–where the Qi was.

  Then he counted down the last seconds before his mind dantian emptied.

  “Nothing?” he grumbled, “ah right, some Qi is stored in the meridians. Should be any moment… now.”

  The shield dimmed. The runescript lost some of its luster, and the whole magical construct went from feeling like solid glass to feeling like a thin film of water. Some of the sensations of the outside world returned, but not all of them. Most importantly, “it didn’t collapse?”

  Long hours of study followed, until Michael finally decided that it was time to return to the real world.

  “What day is it?”

  “Today is August 22nd, Michael,” said Icarus patiently, answering Michael’s question even though he had asked in a not-so-mild-mannered tone.

  The man in question frowned. Getting out of the dungeon after a long time spent inside was always jarring, and he could swear that he could feel Earth’s magnetic field somehow, and it was the source of a whole new sort of headache. Also a convenient scapegoat to justify his temper, anger, and a whole set of emotions on an increasingly short fuse.

  There were just too many things to do, and that was the source of it, he decided in the end. He could do them all, but doing so would mean that he would either lose his humanity or come out at the other end of the list so burned out that he would raze society just so he could start again from tabula rasa.

  He looked around, then nodded at the single guard standing by the steel door that protected Site 00’s most precious asset. A whole antechamber had been built around the dungeon’s entrance, circumventing the magical protection on the stone of the cave itself by building around it.

  The guard nodded back. There were several other guards hidden, but the single man alone was among the most powerful people at the Site. He had earned his right to protect the entrance by his lonesome. He was the same guard who had withstood Michael’s altered state back when he first emerged from the dungeon with a mind dantian and an altered perception of the world. After what Michael had done to him, he had been offered a choice: leave with an oath of secrecy that would kill him if he talked, or a promotion. The guard chose the latter option, and that had been what upgraded his station. Other than protecting the dungeon, he could now choose to delve whenever he wished, and was mostly exempt from the normal hierarchy of Site 00–and Travis’ whims by extension.

  Michael thought about promotions and other things on the way back to the Site proper. Perhaps one day they were going to have teleportation portals to move around, and this little free time he could spend thinking would vanish with the shrinking distances.

  If people wanted to move up in the world like the guard did, he thought, then why was he limiting himself so much? Why had he spent days trying and failing to make the shield skill work with only mana? Qi had been the answer, but even now the idea of having to use a higher energy to do what someone else had managed to do with only Tier 1 stuff left a bitter taste in his mouth.

  He kept telling himself that he was doing it because he wanted to have a rock-solid foundation. The problem was that, if one wanted to be objective, his foundation was already rock-solid, and his efforts were only succeeding in limiting his growth.

  It was definitely pride, then. Fortunately, back at his container-house there was a bottle of very nice whiskey that he could use to pretend to forget about these things.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  He didn’t manage to reach it. On the way there, he overheard Travis talking to someone, one of his goons he used to run errands all over the States these days.

  “How are we on the lobbying?” Travis asked the man, very nonchalant about it.

  “A few big companies just announced that they will cut back funding on AI safety and alignment,” replied the other person. Michael was one action away–be it a query to Icarus, or just lowering the shield for a moment to sweep the area with his senses–from knowing who it was, and the knowledge of the possibility made him not care about it.

  “Good,” Travis nodded smugly, the action evident even just by listening, “it’s finally time to gut our competition. Release a few malicious models, let the Russians or what have you play with them for a while. Then have our team mop the mess up through official channels. Use the Congress connection. After that’s done, we come out of hiding with a new super-powerful model ourselves, backed by the government.”

  Michael waltzed in right as the goon made himself scarce. “What,” he said playfully, “making big moves? People won’t buy government-backed stuff, not in this day and age.”

  “Pff,” Travis shrugged, “that’s just for official business. We have plenty of other… products. What’s with the glass around you?”

  “Every day is a busy day here,” Michael looked around, ignoring the question. The skeletons of the skyscrapers and the labs were growing closer to completion, “but that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. I changed my mind about my skills. It’s time to sunder some skills that are a bit redundant in my kit.”

  Travis frowned. “You preached a whole sermon about it just the other day, what’s up?”

  “I developed the shield skill.”

  “That’s good.” the man beamed. Michael could see the dollar signs in his eyes. “Does this mean that–”

  “Hold your horses. Let me play with it for a while first.”

  “Alright, alright. Did the new skill make you think about life or something?”

  Michael started walking, with Travis in tow, “I thought about stuff. Came to some conclusions. In the end, the path of magic is very personal, with so many avenues. The only thing that’s set in stone is what Tier you end up being, and Tier is absolute. Everything else is… fluid.”

  “I see,” Travis said. Michael doubted the man really did see. Hell, he himself doubted that what he had just said was the whole truth.

  “Rarer skills can do everything lower rarity skills of the same type do,” he continued. “Incorporating and surpassing anything a lower rarity skill could ever do.”

  This confused the hell out of Travis, “well, we pretty much knew that already.”

  “True,” Michael retorted, “what we didn’t know is that even if someone runs out of higher tier energy, as long as you have a magic manipulation ability and you’re somewhat good at it, a higher tier skill can still function. I made the shield skill with Qi, but even after running out I can keep it up and somewhat functional thanks to my high manipulation ability and my aura.”

  “Is that why the shield looks like a strange bubble around you?” Travis poked at it. “It ripples like water, but it’s mostly solid.”

  He poked at it again, with more strength now and even a little bit of aura. The mana drain on Michael’s pool increased, and the shield deformed a little bit, but it successfully repelled Travis’ hand.

  “Hm,” the man hummed, “not bad. I want it.”

  “You already said that, and I already told you to wait.”

  “Alright. So, hit me with the new knowledge. Say for instance I got a rare water skill. It can do anything a common or uncommon skill does, plus some more, right?”

  Michael shrugged, “depends on how broad the skill is, and how good you are at bending the rules. But within its scope and the limits of your ability, yes, a higher rarity skill is always better.”

  “Let’s stick to the rare skill example. If you run out of Intent to sustain it but still have Qi, what happens?”

  “It gets downgraded to what Qi can do, which is a lot but also less than what it can do together with Intent. Did you notice how high rarity skills always use all the tiers of energy below them as well? You never see Qi or Intent alone.”

  “Interesting. I suppose the same applies to other magic systems?”

  “We’d have to test it.”

  Travis thought about it, “and to do so… How hard is it to sustain a downgraded skill, in practice?”

  “Pretty hard,” Michael said, scratching his head.

  “Which, given your monstrous talent, means it’s almost impossible for the average person to pull it off, isn’t it?”

  Michael was silent for a moment, “almost, yeah. Listen, magic is hard, what can I say? We have the dungeon and its time dilation, though, plus the advantage of a whole organization and research branch. You will figure it out.”

  “Of course,” said Travis. “And those who can’t do it, well… the wheat has to be separated from the chaff, after all.”

  Michael smiled. “That’s very you of you.”

  “I think I spent too much time in that gods-damned village of Redbud, I’m beginning to sound like a country bumpkin. Between that, and our compact hydroponics experiments, I’m all agriculture these days. Ah, but the yields! Soon we will branch out in food production, and it’s going to be a massacre. For everybody else.”

  “Wipe that grin off your face, Travis. It’s time to sunder skills, do you want to come and see how it’s done or not?”

  The future ruin