Taking a breath in the least painful way he could manage; Alex suppressed his nervous energy as he activated his upgraded skill for the first time. He’d expected to be instantly transported to some sort of mental construct, the meditation factor of the skill more of a token addition, but that turned out not to be the case. Alex instead slipped into the smooth state of tranquility he’d come to associate with the first layer of Meditation. When he’d initially acquired the skill after an impromptu training session with Janet, it had been one dimensional, an ability with an on and off switch. By the time it was ready to evolve to E-Grade, there had been already been two significant changes.
For one, there were now multiple stages, or layers, as he’d come to designate them. In the first, he remained fully aware of his surroundings, but could use the mental clarity the ability offered to master his emotions. He didn’t find himself using it too often, since its functions were similar to one of Battle Trance’s, though it had proved useful back when he couldn’t access his mana. The second layer was what Alex had thought of as true meditation before the system, and where he’d spent the most time while using the skill. He would focus on his breathing, clear his mind best he could, and try to reach a level of mindfulness.
Learning to manage the second layer had bit a bit tricky, but Alex had found it suited him, and as its description suggested, had been a lifesaver when coping with how much his life had changed these last few weeks. The third layer was something he was decidedly not a fan of. It had randomly appeared a few skill levels ago, and the near complete dissociation it caused had freaked him out enough to avoid it ever since. Now he was forced to endure as he fell through each level of meditation towards his destination.
First, he was calm, then he was still, and finally he was nothing, or everything. The third layer was one of silence, where thoughts were as slow as molasses and personal identity went to die. It was then, after a time period that could have lasted a heartbeat, or an hour, that he found the new, fourth layer.
***
Welcome to Mind’s Eye Meditation. Please decide your environment:
|
***
Alex came to like he’d been slapped. For a moment he thought a random bug had managed to slip through his defenses, but as he took a look around, he found his entire environment had shifted. No longer did he sit in the dimly lit cave, its walls painted green with the blood of his fallen adversaries. There was no horrid stench overpowering his senses, nor any pain that wracked his body. Now he stood in a room of light, the entire space so bright Alex found he was seeing the outlines of walls more than the walls themselves. Shaking away the lingering discomfort that came with being immersed in the third layer, Alex realized where he was and took a moment to read over the prompt.
It was different from all others he’d received. If those read like the correspondence of an early 2000s chatroom bot, where a bunch of fixed responses with yes or no inputs acted as his only means of response. This one had a cursor, the white bar blinking in and out of existence like the waiting animation of a text editor.
“Can it be anything?” Alex asked verbally, seeing nowhere to manually input his question. In something of a response, the state of the place immediately began to change. The walls darkened to the color of carbon fiber, the sudden shift a juxtaposition to its formerly blinding appearance. The black was then covered by hundreds, or even thousands, of questions marks, their colors and sizes all differing. Truly committed to the bit, the skill didn’t stop there. Furniture in the shape of question marks began to appear, couches with circular ottoman’s punctuating them forming near tables and chairs of the same design.
They filled the space seemingly at random, and Alex let the process finish before he began experimenting with the generator. It didn’t take long for him to figure out why the room could only be edited yearly. Well, he wasn’t certain of the reasoning, but after a half an hour of switching from environment to environment, he was glad the caveat existed.
The process had been just been amusing initially, if Alex could adequately describe a place, he could make it appear, sans any other people. That last bit was the only limitation. He could create items from the real world while ignoring the previously listed limit, though he’d need to describe what they would look like and how they would function for them to be of any use. After a half an hour he’d been to Paris and Tokyo, the lava spewing entrance of an imaginary dragon’s lair, and even a nostalgia filled recreation of his childhood bedroom. His throat grew tired from the constant speech, even in this purely mental state, and Alex offhandedly wished he could just transfer imagined thoughts of what he wanted the place to look like, to which he immediately learned he could.
It only took five more minutes and a countless number of random settings before Alex realized how endless the potential of this place truly was. There might be limited space, but his imagination was the only true limit, he could create anything. Deciding he would need time to pick out the best environment, Alex tried to leave, but was met with another prompt.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
***
You are attempting to leave Mind’s Eye Meditation with unsaved changes. Please confirm your environment before exiting.
***
Well that sucked. Not only was Alex being forced to make a choice now, he was trapped in his skill, completely disconnected to the outside world, until he did so. The skill wasn’t like Soul Sight, where his senses were divided between an ability and his physical form. When he was in Mind’s Eye Meditation, it was as if his entire body had been transported elsewhere. Sixth Sense could only show the space in his mind, the sensory skills range ending at the border walls of the mental ability. The dynamics of the skill might have interested him if he hadn’t been sitting defenseless, miles deep into hostile tunneling, but he didn’t have that luxury.
Doing his best to keep his mind focused, Alex tried to consider all his options. Leaving immediately was the safest, but wasteful, though the other extreme was also impossible due to the timer he was on. Switching gears, Alex opened his interface and checked the health value. A quick calculation estimated it would take another fifty minutes for him to fully recover with all the buffs he had active. That meant, assuming the tunnels were actually safe which they had been thus far, he had almost an hour to figure this out, so he got to work in earnest.
***
Are you certain this is your desired environment?
(Y/N)
Warning: Once selected, your environment will be unable to be changed for an entire year.
***
Unwilling to allow indecision to sway him any further, Alex selected yes, the confirmation causing the faint echo of a lock to emanate through the space.
In the end, it had only taken him another half an hour to settle on the design of his mental home. He’d gone a bit wild trying to find space for everything, interrupting his own progress to tweak one aspect or add another, but the final result was something he was satisfied with. For the layout he’d opted to go with a loft style duplex, both because he liked the design, and it had seemed like the best way to make use of the space. The ground floor, if it could be referred to as such, held an old school style martial arts dojo that wouldn’t have been out of place in a 1980s martial arts movie.
Polished wood floors matted over by stuffed cloth covered the majority of the space, topped by dummies of straw and plastic. The walls were obscured by floor to ceiling shoji screens, behind which held closet space he’d filled with weapons. It was constructed like the stacks of a library, with the highest placed weapons requiring a ladder for him to reach. He’d done his best to fill the walls with every unique weapon variation he could think of, which was quite a few, but had also made duplicates of others when he eventually ran out.
Off to one corner, near the staircase to the raised second layer, Alex had converted the space into a miniature shooting and archery range. The square nature of his environment meant Alex could have left the targets to the side, making it so they could be mounted in either direction as needed, but he’d decided against that. Instead Alex left them fixed opposite the wall of his raised platform, so he could place a mini sauna and jacuzzi right of his ranging space.
He had chosen this specific layout, save the hot tub, in the hopes that he could level skills in the area. The idea hadn’t been his own, but one that spawned from Lord’s Confidence when he’d consulted the skill on how to best use his cube of space. It had only been in a few of the proposed scenarios, but the ability speculated that since he maintained full use of his senses in this place, he should be able to level certain skills. Specifically his weapon abilities, since they used a combination of in combat and out of combat training. The idea had seemed sound, or at least worthy of giving it a try, though Alex had added the second level just in case it didn’t work out.
Up a well-polished wooden set of stairs was a near scale recreation of his college dorm room. There was a bed, computer, bookcase, phone; not the one in his inventory; and little in the way of vertical clearance. It had been a bit tricky to manage, but books had been refilled with their original words, and the computer was on and powered. All this was only possible due to the seemingly limitless nature of the skills inputs. If he could imagine it, he could create and refine it with enough time. That realization had hit him even harder after he hit the confirm button, but Alex just promised to make the first renovation even better.
Withdrawing from the skill, he felt a bit of relief upon finding everything was as he’d left it. That much had been obvious based on the fact that he was still alive, but a pulse of Sixth Sense showing no ants nearby was reassuring. He waited out the last twenty minutes in the real world, working with Lord’s Confidence to pick his best path to victory.
The logistics weren’t difficult, Alex would aim to clear at least one more general and their contingent before he headed to sleep and fully recover. That meant he’d need to spend the night in the tunnels if he wanted to assure that this quest was completed before the mandatory one appeared. Pushing things to the wire would just result in him fighting the beast wave soon after the ant queen, which sounded like a recipe for disaster.
It wasn’t necessarily an issue since Alex had suspected as much after seeing the timer, but he wasn’t happy about it. To put it simply, the tunnels stunk, even more so now that he’d painted the walls green with the ant’s blood. He could only imagine how bad it would be if he was forced to come back here to sleep, but that was a problem for future Alex.
Standing as his health recovered to full, he began to lean side to side, stretching his now stiff body. As much as he’d been healed recently, including an entire hand, Alex felt he might never get used to how tight the muscles felt from regenerating. Warm-ups complete once more, Alex pulled a couple pieces of dried meat from his inventory and began nibbling at the food as he walked. It was time to squash some more bugs.