The world was on fire.
Flames surrounded him.
He moved, and only more flames appeared.
Like a wanderer, kept moving, kept lost.
Until something changed.
He felt himself lying on the ground. He looked to the left and found more fire. He looked to the right and found a person's silhouette.
They were lying so close to him, their body touched his. Their head was on his arm, which felt larger and longer than it should be. Yet, they were barely visible through the flames that were still everywhere.
"Do you know what I like the most about you?" a beautiful female voice came from the silhouette. It belonged to a woman in her late twenties or early thirties, maybe. He felt he should recognize her, but he just couldn't pinpoint exactly whom the voice belonged to.
"My dashing looks?" he heard himself asking playfully. His voice was deeper, older, calloused. He didn't recognize it.
She laughed. "Of course, which woman could resist the man voted as the most average looking of the top 100 Tower Climbers?"
"I'm telling you, being too handsome make beautiful women defensive. They wonder if you just want to use them, since you can have any woman you want. An average guy like me? You never even considered I would leave you. You always knew I would be grateful for a chance, so you graced it to me."
She chuckled. "I never heard something so stupid, and we've been together for what, thirteen years?"
"Are you suggesting I'm getting stupider the older I get? Didn't you hear people wise up as they age?"
"I missed the memo," she said with obvious disinterest in keeping that line of conversation. Indeed, she changed it back to their original line of questioning. "I meant something deeper, but we can do it in a more interesting way." She approached her mouth to his ear and whispered. "Do you know what I like to do with you the most?" she asked provocatively.
His skin crawled. He couldn't remember who she was, but he just knew she had always had that effect on him. "What?" he asked, a little breathless.
"Kissing," she said, then got on top of him, and they kissed for a very, very long time.
Luke paid attention to it. It felt wonderful. Not as wonderful as it had been with... someone else... recently. Maybe because this was... a dream? Yes... It was, wasn't it? But it was still good enough that he took notes of what they were doing in the kiss, including what they did with their hands.
When she was done, both were breathless, and that was a feat considering their high stats. "God, you're good," she said.
Prive filled him, and he smiled at her. "And you're perfect.”
The scene cleared a little. He saw two black eyes staring passionately at him before the flames consumed everything and his sleep turned back to normal.
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Luke woke up with a perfect memory of the dream and an icon on the edge of his vision. He checked it.
Eternal Phoenix's Heart
Powerful emotions have resonated with missing memories.
A relevant memory has been recovered.
He frowned. So he had recalled something that had either been removed by the people who sent him his memories or had been lost on the memory transfer. He believed the former, since he recalled no personal experiences at all, and it would be weird to just memories of the same kind to be lost. The description of his Eternal Phoenix's Heart also said that it couldn't forget anything it didn't want to.
It felt very awkward to realize he had invaded on someone's privacy like that. In fact, he was glad the memory didn't go all the way through, or he would be positively ashamed of spying on what they might do together a little after the kiss.
On the bright side, he remembered the notes he had taken. He didn't know when he would see Sakura again, or even if she would kiss him in the immediate future, but he would not forget those tricks.
He smiled as he realized that his feelings for her were strong enough to mess with something as powerful as the heart of an eternal phoenix. After all, there was no way in hell he wouldn't recognize who the eyes that appeared at the end of the memory belonged to: Sakura. However, there was also no way in hell Sakura would be in the tower beside another person—just the thought of that annoyed him, and to be honest, he worried he might be a little too jealous. Anyway, his own feelings for her had messed up the memory.
Checking the latest system icon reminded him of all the other icons already waiting for him to check on them, and he got right into it, starting with the one that had been there the longest.
Skill learned: Mana Crafting
Type: Magic
Rank: Arcane
Level: 25 / 30
You can use mana runes to produce magic effects.
Mana Crafting was the first arcane-rank skill he learned, and one of the most widespread in the tower. Just like humanity couldn't live without technology, tower denizens couldn't do without Mana Crafting and the items it let them build, much less the spells it let them cast. Their very survival depended on it. If mana runes were involved, that skill was involved too.
That the skill kept the arcane rank despite the many people who knew it was a proof of its usefulness and potential.
Still, the skill was very generalist. For instance, the specifics of casting a spell differed greatly from creating rune-enhanced wall around a town. Even the runes were only from the same "language," yet the individual runes being used would be usually be different.
The tower solved that by giving out related skills, which the tower denizens called skill specialization.
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Skill learned: Soul Crafting
Type: Magic
Rank: Epic
Level: 30 / 35
You can use Mana Crafting in the soul.
Getting a skill specialization was easy, but leveling them up was much harder. Luke had shown a lot of knowledge to get Soul Crafting to level 30.
To begin with, he had put his mana core in the place the tower considered the best. His memories contained the entire history of the evolution of core placement in the tower. It was huge and, honestly, quite dumb too. It could be shortened in: the tower races had created whole theories about it, but in the end, the tower gave extra levels in Soul Crafting for cores in the heart, so it was considered the best place by most. Divine beasts always had cores in their hearts too, and as they were the source of mana channels to begin with, it might be wise to copy them.
Unfortunately, when the Sentinel Tower was building a mana core in those that passed the Test Floor, it asked where they wanted the core rather than placing it straight in the heart. That was considered evidence that the tower just wanted them all to die rather than help.
Now that Luke thought about it, it probably had to do with demonic interference too, since the entire Test Floor shouldn't have even existed to begin with.
After core placement, the Mana Crafting skill had also leveled up by analyzing which runes he had inscribed on his mana core. There was also a long story there that could be shortened into: his memories gave him the optimal solution from a lot of experiments.
For instance, some people disregarded the permanence rune and depended only on the pull rune, which his memories told him was stupid for multiple reasons. Another example was the condensation rune, which very few knew could condense mana in the core like that, and was used mostly to produce ice instead.
As important, Luke knew a lot of runes, and almost all of them were at least prime runes.
To research runes, people drew random forms on materials with high mana conductivity and waited to see how mana would react to them, simple as that. However, not all random forms were mana runes, and most of the time, the reaction was minor.
Minor reactions led to further research to improve the form, which could take quite a while. For instance, you might have a square react to mana, and the researchers would then try different things to improve on it: make it more circular, add different forms to it, and so on. Most attempts failed, and the ones that worked took a long time to be properly measured, as the improvement might be ridiculously small. Learning new mana runes and improving them into a usable form required a very long time.
Once a mana rune could be used in actual items or spells, it was considered a basic rune. Once even minor improvements took longer than ten years to happen, it was considered a higher rune. Longer than twenty-five years, superior rune. Over fifty years, it became a prime rune. Prime runes were just below master runes, which only saw tiny improvements every hundred years, most of them much longer than that.
Luke had inscribed four master runes and a prime one in his core.
The four master runes were the four the tower gave in the Test Floor, pull, ownership, purity, and permanence. The tower gave them at the prime level thought. As they were the most widespread runes, they had had the most research on them until they were mastered.
His smart addition, the condensation rune, wasn't as researched upon because people definitely didn't care about ice as much as growing stronger, so it was the only at the prime level. Yet, it was only at the prime level that it became able to condense mana too, which was one reason few people knew about it.
Sometimes, as a rune got improved upon, its effects started affecting the world in new ways like that.
The last point that made him deserving of the 30 levels in Soul Crafting was that he had done a great job at inscribing the runes. It required a lot of patience to chisel away such tiny bits repeatedly until the rune would come out perfect. It had also required him to resist the pain while doing it, a factor that made many people mess up.
Level 30 would be the max for now though. Only by using his Soul Crafting skill in other people or in different ways would it level up again.
He checked the next system message.
Missed Alerts
You've missed the following notifications:
Mana Sense 10 → 11 / 10
Mana Sense 11 → 12 / 10
Mana Sense 12 → 13 / 10
Sometimes, a person missed notifications because of being unconscious at the time they came—sleeping or even knocked out, for instance—or simply distracted. Luke, for instance, had been putting all his focus on his mana core. When that happened, the system stored them for later in a system message.
However, if he had checked the Mana Sense skill first, that message would disappear, and he would only see the new level on the skill.
By feeling mana constantly, he had gotten to the point he only needed to think about it for a few seconds to sense it. Level 9 would come when he managed to feel mana with a single thought.
The second to last message was for another specialization of the Mana Crafting skill.
Skill learned: Spell Crafting
Type: Magic
Rank: Runic
Level: 23 / 25
You can use Mana Crafting to cast spells.
Spells were magic skills that used mana and were cast with mana runes and intent.
Mana obeyed someone's will, and even just pushing mana into someone while willing it to heal worked, aka reiki. One could theoretically cast any spell with sheer willpower, and indeed, once Luke's mana got pure enough, he would be able to do minor tricks like igniting candles with a thought. However, the stronger, more complex, and more detailed an effect, the less likely it was for one to have enough willpower to achieve it. That's the reason mana runes were required for spell-casting.
On the other hand, mana runes alone couldn't produce complex and specific meaning either, not unless a lot of them were used. It was just like writing in any language, really. However, no one had either the time or the focus to write entire essays with mana runes in the middle of a battle.
The solution was having a foundation of runes with the meanings that were the strongest and hardest to focus on, or maybe easiest to write, and using one's will to funnel their power into doing something more precise.
His Flame spell was a splendid example of that.
It only used the fire rune, but could float around at a thought's command thanks to Luke's will having added those effects to the spell. It was also his will that even kept the flame from using all his mana at once into a big, instantaneous combustion, but used it as slowly as possible to achieve a flame of the desired size and power.
But that wasn't the only reason runes were used. They also increased a spell's range. The more runes, the further a spell could reach. The runes served as a kind of anchor for mana and will that prevented the spell from getting out of the caster's control.
Speaking of caster control, mana was energy, and whatever law of nature that governed it made it turn into thermal energy when it was shaped like a functioning rune. The longer the rune was in place, the stronger it tried to become thermal energy. Therefore, the slower the mage was to draw other runes, the harder it became to prevent their spell from turning into simple heat.
Casting spells was an exercise of willpower and finding the perfect spot between speed and precision to make the rune as good as it could be without dissipating into nothingness.
He had done everything right when casting his spells. Thanks to his memories, the common pitfall for initiates were completely avoided, and he cast his spells like a true expert. The skill level reflected that.
He wasn't a true master though. Level 24 would come when he could form a spell within a couple seconds, and 25 when he could do it almost instantly. He was a long way from it.
He checked the very last system message.
Skill learned: Flame
Type: Magic
Rank: Uncommon
You can create a flame and move it around at will.
The first thing he confirmed was that the flame spell had no levels. Spells were like that, they either worked or didn't. Things like effectiveness and power depended on how much mana the mana spell caster pumped into the spell, or how powerful the mana was, or even how they cast the spell in the first place.
Most people in the tower believed the system just couldn't be bothered to take every minor detail of spell casting into account. Others, who suspected the tower, believed it didn't want to teach everyone the right way to improve their magic, which would happen if they could spend SP to level up some spells. Finally, a few believed the system was just bugged.
Knowing what Luke now did about demonic interference, the last two theories were more likely than most suspected.
Spells were always at least at the uncommon rank, which made sense, as not everyone could cast spells.
And that was it for system messages.
Now, it was time to get back to cycling his mana, to grow stronger enough to cast the healing spells on his grandfather.