Increasing the amount of conversion construct was pretty easy, it just took time. Kal had decided to make three extra conversion constructs, thinking four was probably a safe place to start. He could always add a few more if needed. Once that was done he got to work on the sphere where he stuck to what he knew and built from mostly will.

When he was done he decided to give it a test run and carefully watch it activate. So he gave himself a shallow wound with the dark serpent fang, just deep enough to require more than a single tick of his Wrathful Regeneration.

He activated the skill and saw immediately that his guess had ultimately been correct. This time it only used three wrath instead of four per tick. He began to grin but it immediately fled as the intellect and wisdom strands and their housed constructs immediately began to glow. He deactivated the skill just before the brightness began to hurt his eyes, despite his lack of them when with his core space.

Even though he deactivated the skill the two threads continued to burn bright for several seconds, and he could even see that it had begun to leech back down the line toward the conversion constructs. It was only then Kal actually realized how dangerous that was. From the look of it, feeding too much of any particular energy or resource through a construct not prepared for it could possibly overload it.

Overloading at the guide construct probably wouldn’t kill him or anything but it would probably break the whole skill and depending on the strength of the sphere around it, could possibly leak a heap of vital energy throughout his body and core space.

Vital energy was probably fine since it was supposed to be there anyway. But from what Kal had seen he suspected it wouldn’t just be the intellect and wisdom strands failing, no, it would be a full-skill fracture. Just like what was mentioned in Wrath Incarnate.

Kal sighed as he leaned back on his arms. It looked like he would need to do a full skill upgrade. There were going to be no quick enhancements. At least when it came to Wrathful Regeneration. All he could do then was see about how he could duplicate the guide construct and then move on to toughening the whole skill up.

Copying all of the individual knots from the intellect took a while but it was simple enough. It quickly became apparent however that creating a perfect duplicate of the first was not as easy as he first thought it would be.

With each knot he created he found that creating the same instruction was easy enough but no matter what he did the knot itself felt different somehow, like they were created from the same base but using two different molds. There were tiny discrepancies that didn’t alter the end result of the instruction but how they got there might be different enough to matter.

Kal may just be being paranoid but he felt that even the slightest change in the instructions might be a major problem. Either way, he finished up the intellect strand and connected it in parallel to the original strand. He also decided to split the output of each conversion construct so that only two fed each of the guide constructs. He figured it might be less aggressive one each of the guide constructs that way.

He finished up by copying the wisdom strand construct and adding it to the lone guide construct. Kal also made the effort to mess around with his status and add the changes he had made to the skill description. It wasn’t a great description but it might help him see similarities in the future.

image [https://i.imgur.com/SJxf0op.png]

“Ok, next step. Try it again,” Kal was pretty confident this time it would start to melt before his eyes but he still took precautions. He threw a few wrath-infused rocks to burn off everything but six points of wrath to hopefully force the skill to deactivate on its own.

Kal once again stabbed the back of his left hand with the dark serpent fang and activated Wrathful Regeneration. It began its work immediately and quickly regenerated the small wound on his hand. This time the guide and messy bits constructs glowed but remained a dull red as it spent the supplied vital energy.

“That’s a relief. Looks like I’ll have to be careful with how much of a resource I feed into constructs.” It all made sense really but he luckily hadn’t come across any issues so far. But it was possible something like this was the reason why Wrath Incarnate had a wrath cap. He would have to look into that at some point as well.

Kal was about to move on to selecting his next skill to be guided in but then he noticed his hand. Instead of there being no sign of the healed injury, there was now a faint scar. Kal frowned as he inspected it. A small scar wasn’t a big deal, honestly, Kal didn’t care about the possibility of gaining a few scars but it made him concerned about other hidden issues with his skill upgrade.

Would his organs receive similar scarring? If so, would it hamper their functionality? For example, if he lost an eye or if his lung was pierced would he be able to see correctly or breathe after he had regenerated?

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

Kal wasn’t about to stab himself in the eye to try it out but he still felt the need to be proactive here. He didn’t want to find out that his regeneration was actually worse now after being run through by some lucky demon. But Kal also didn’t want to spend too much time working on Wrathful Regeneration in case the system’s guidance took longer than he expected.

The question was, what is the simplest way to control the amount of wrath being spent? He imagined that he could perhaps use the new faster and cheaper version for emergencies or simple muscle and skin wounds and use the original version to then go back over the quickly healed portions and heal them properly.

This was of course assuming he could even heal a scar. Looking over the guide construct again Kal found everything he would expect in regards to healing scars and even more vital organs like his heart and brain. But something told him that his regeneration, despite knowing how to fix those things, wouldn’t be fast enough to save him.

He still had nearly twenty hours so it was worth the extra effort in finding a solution now. Even if all he got out of it was some more practice with custom constructs.

First Kal tried a kind of restriction construct. Since it was solely affecting things with the skill Kal constructed it completely out of will. He was really sure where to start so he went with the “wish really hard while throwing will at it” method to get off the ground. It gave him a construct that seemed to do what he had imagined but its ultimate effect wasn’t what he was after for a couple of reasons. First, it was hard to control. He almost had to tell it how much wrath to accept for every moment he kept the skill active. He even found that he could dump more wrath than normal into the skill.

Which of course was not ideal, it not only was way less efficient it also threatened to overload the guide constructs again. Second, it didn’t fix the scarring issue which helped Kal figure out why it was happening. The speed was likely a factor in the production of the scars but now that he had managed to restrict the amount of vital energy produced and fed to the guide constructs it basically left only one thing. The slight differences between the guide constructs.

Kal thought about trying to remake another guide construct but he knew that he would end up with the same result. He just couldn’t copy it close enough at his current skill level. He was sure that in the future he could probably replicate it perfectly if what he saw of the creator of Arcane Hunter’s Mark was anything to go by. But right now Kal would have to find a way around it.

His first attempt also helped him come to his next idea. If using two guide constructs at the same time was the problem couldn’t he just set up a kind of switch to prevent one from being used?

It turns out yes, it really was that simple. Kal butchered his first attempt at restricting the flow of vital energy for ideas and put together a smaller and simpler construct which to his surprise seemed to work as intended. Without actually activating the skill he was able to will the switch to activate or deactivate easily. Now he just needed to test it for real then hopefully he could move on to his new skill.

image [https://i.imgur.com/SJxf0op.png]

First Kal tried the skill with the switch open so that it would run at its cheapest and fastest. He felt the switch open and allow the skill to activate as he intended. Now he had another small scar on his hand. Next Kal willed the switch closed to prevent wrath from reaching the last two conversion constructs. He watched the skill carefully but it seemed to work just like it had before besides now being housed with a sphere, using four wrath per health compared to three.

Happy to see his idea work Kal exited his core space to look over his scars. He couldn’t hold back the grin at seeing the scars slowly fade as the skill could be concentrated on one guide construct. It was definitely slower than if he had just healed it normally but it was a worthwhile sacrifice. He wouldn’t bother healing most scars unless, of course, the scar hampered his movement or senses somehow.

It wasn’t the easy upgrade he had hoped for but either way, it would be a great boon. Fast average healing was certainly better than dying. Soon he would come back to improve upon it but for now, it would do.

Wrathful Regeneration [Uncommon]

A Slayer never stops until the last enemy is dead. Use your accumulated Wrath to heal your wounds. May the blood of your foes fuel you. Amount healed per Wrath spent scales with rarity. Speed of healing scales with Vitality. May switch between two modes of regeneration. One is cheap but less accurate, leaving scars and other imperfections. The other leaves no imperfections but is more expensive.

Kal was happy to see that the skill’s rarity had increased to uncommon. He thought it should honestly have a higher rarity but the fact that it didn’t just tell Kal there was far more room for improvement than he could understand at this point.

The skill’s description was mostly unchanged except for the addition of a short description of the switch he had set up. The ability to add additional modes to his skills gave Kal several ideas but some were potentially more potent than others. One was what was stopping him from simply forging another series of constructs to output another skill effect. For example, why couldn’t he just move all of the constructs from Wrath Incarnate into Wrathful Regeneration and just use a simple switch like the one he had just made to pick which one to activate?

Kal was sure something would prevent him from doing that. He wanted to try anyway since he already had several ideas about its possible limitations. Maybe the skills components had to be leading towards a specific goal. That would require more testing, testing that would have to come later. Now was the time to get his next skill and if he had time then he would look over his older skills again. He just hoped his increased intellect would help him learn more from the visions as they came.

Choose a skill to be instructed in its creation.