Kal suddenly found himself back within his own mind, dazed with the vividness of the vision. This vision had shown him how the skill was created but he could still feel the power of its inspiration rushing through his mind.

He didn’t dare delay in diving into his core space and preparing to weave his next skill. The starting process was much the same as the rest of his skills. Weaving the framework of the spherical containment construct was now second nature but like all constructs forging or weaving it took time. Time that he wished he could have spent crafting the skill’s more important components.

Kal promised himself that next time he would prepare his core space more thoroughly. When the containment construct was finally finished he began the truly important components. He created a sort of placeholder for the link before moving up the line skipping ahead a bit knowing the system’s guidance would falter the moment it got to a part where he needed to use wrath instead of mana.

So he quickly threw together a quick wrath to will conversion construct in the hopes it was enough for the inspiration to remain at its peak before moving on to the first new construct.

Its function was a surprise. It was a conversion construct but of a type that Kal wasn’t aware even existed. Well, that wasn’t exactly true but it did something Kal hadn’t thought of. Now that he was thinking about it, it wasn’t really a conversion construct, it was more of an imprinting construct.

A will conduit feeds the construct will, but instead of outputting a different resource or attribute it outputs altered will. Kind of like how the Wrathful Regeneration had guide constructs but this was more like a change base state more than a strict layout for the output. It that way is more like that wisdom “messy bits” guide than the intellect one.

Its function was to make the output will act as if it was him manually using his will to fight external effects. It didn’t have any kind of form after the imprinting process but it did have a will of its own.

Making it work was strange. He had to will the threads of the construct to will the will flowing through it to behave in a specific way.

It was a bit of a mouthful to say out loud but that’s what it did.

Next was a construct more in line with what Kal already knew but different all the same. It was a guide construct along the lines of the ones in Wrathful Regeneration but this one functioned more like a list of things to ignore rather than what to repair.

It had knots along its threads just like the others he had seen but each of them described a specific resource. Most of them were confusing to Kal but he assumed they were important to keeping alive since they were all allowed to leave the barrier. There were several that were allowed to his surprise, all likely equally important to the ones allowed to leave.

Out of all those, there were only two he could recognize, vital energy, and physical energy. Mana was not included for obvious reasons. That is what was affecting Kal’s mind when the seeker shadow was using its illusions. It is also what Kal suspected was being used against the young man in his vision.

The only problem with completely blocking mana was that he wasn’t sure what the symbol on the back of his neck was actually doing. It didn’t seem to be leaking shadow mana into his mind since the shadow was killed but he still had no confidence in just completely cutting it out.

He was pretty sure it would break the symbol so if it was supposed to help him it should reactivate once he deactivated his variant of Mental Fortress. There was also the problem of his wrath affecting his mind while the skill was active. Would the fact that it wasn’t on the list of allowed interactions prevent it from doing so?

It would be convenient but Kal doubted it. It just couldn’t be that easy. Every skill he had was either painful or affected his mind. Flames of Wrath had the least effect but that was probably because the effect was external for the most part.

Finishing the white list construct, Kal let himself be guided to the next portion. Now this construct was quite a bit different, it was surprisingly complex for what Kal expected to be a fairly easy guide construct to form the shape of the barrier. It required a few things he wasn’t expecting at all, it made him wish he had seen the man use the skill he apparently created.

First, it needed input from his eyes like Slayer’s Intent, but why would it need to see something to protect him from mental attacks? It didn’t make sense to him at all but he went with it for now. He could also try and reverse engineer it later. He wove together the will channel to his eyes and found it annoyingly difficult to connect them as the system guided him to.

The channels for Slayer’s Intent were in the way. Apparently, he hadn’t made efficient use of the space around his eyes when weaving that skill. This is probably part of how his class calculated how many skills he could integrate. Kal was forced to spend time trying to squeeze in the channels for Mental Fortress alongside Slayer’s Intents. It was annoying but manageable, just.

Now that he had the input from his eyes he started on the second thing the new construct required, a separate guide construct. Easy enough but the knots involved were quite interesting in the implication of this guide's function. It had several knots but they all had things in common, they were all parts of his brain.

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He didn’t look into it too far for now but he was sure it would be useful information later. Once he was done there Kal moved on to the strange new construct. Now, if he hadn’t seen the mind-numbingly complicated constructs forged by the arcane forger or the ones in Soul Forge, looking at this construct would have blown Kal’s mind.

It had hundreds of knots connecting the two input constructs into an absolute mess of will threads each carrying their own portions of the final function. Kal was immediately glad he had chosen Mental Fortress as the system’s inspiration guided him through the mess of a construct.

He couldn’t say he was excited about reengineering that mess but he could say that he desperately wanted to know more about how it went together, especially once he knew what the finished construct did. It was essentially a calculator, it processed the input from the two inputs and output a specific framework that could be fed into the next construct.

The implication was obvious. He should be able to use a mental fortress on somebody else. Preventing them from all mental attacks, or at least the ones accounted for.

Now Kal had two outputs that would be fed into one final construct which at first Kal suspected would just send the new outputs back through his eyes and into the target, but that would mean he couldn’t use it on himself. No, it went into yet another unknown construct that Kal had seen before.

He could feel the accelerating force of the system’s inspiration beginning to slow so he didn’t slow to inspect it as his cloud forms hands wove the threads together. Then it was over and what lay before Kal surrounded by its containment structure was the most complicated skill he had forged so far.

Kal didn’t stop immediately though. He knew from experience that if he just started feeding wrath into the skill it would likely overload or at the very least leak out into the sphere, becoming far less efficient and risking breaking the skill.

But putting the final touches wasn’t too bad for the most part, it was just thickening the channels between the linking construct and the first converter since the rest of the skill mostly revolved around manipulating the output will.

Once that was done Kal finished the link construct and smiled as the notification he had been waiting for appeared.

Slayer’s Apathy [Rare] [Soul Forged]

Mere illusions are nothing to the will of your wrath. Resist the effects of mental attacks or manipulation and all unnecessary emotions while this skill is active. Wrath cost is minimal until under strain. This skill can be applied to another within field of view at an increased cost. Strength and the maximum amount additional targets scales with will.

image [https://imgur.com/u8HoimP]image [https://i.imgur.com/u8HoimP.png]

Again the skills description was clearly different, even though he followed the guidance to the best of his ability except for the use of his wrath. And like he expected his wrath had themed the new skill. He was happy to see that the description had already included his bare-bones skill diagram. It wasn’t perfect but if he thought of a better way to put it in easy terms he would update it later.

For the most part, the skill did exactly what Kal had hoped for and even better it was possible to apply to others. Not that he had anyone else to do it to but if he ever got home it would doubtless be useful.

The all-unnecessary emotion part was honestly to be expected. It would seem that anything that affected his mental capabilities at all would have that effect. He would need to test it out some more to be sure though. Physical boosting or healing skills hurt and mental boosting skills affect him mentally. It made sense to him.

He couldn’t complain though. If he didn’t have wrath he would still be without mana and would not have been able to grow as he did.

Still in his meditative position, Kal prepared to activate his new skill. He kept a careful eye on the symbol to make sure he spotted any kind of change when he activated the skill. When he was ready Kal activated Slayer’s Apathy.

It was like he had thrown an ungodly weight from his shoulders. A headache he hadn’t realized he had vanished without a trace and the worries of his family that were constantly in the pack of his mind went with it.

Throughout it all, he could feel the burning of his birthright but it did not reach him as before. His heart did not race, and neither did he feel the need to charge off to the next closest walking corpse and see to its end. All he felt was a sense of superiority and disdain for the world around him.

The symbol did nothing but flare up slightly as Slayer’s Apathy activated, so he moved on.

He glanced at his status to see the efficiency of the skill.

Health:

2230

Stamina:

4760

Wrath:

13

After a minute of watching his wrath, Kal dismissed his status. It would do. His wrath had only diminished one point in that time so he saw no need to deactivate the skill just yet and moved his perception inwards to inspect the barrier it created. He found it immediately, it clung to the folds of his brain like a second skin, shining the pearlescent white of will.

All along its surface the shine was marred by myriad flashes of crimson, likely the visual artifacts of his wrath affecting the skill's original purpose. The original purpose was irrelevant. It would be sufficient to help bring about his goals.

He glanced at the timer until the haven was destroyed. He had taken longer than he had expected to accept the system’s guidance and forge his new skill but if he was efficient perhaps he would be able to forge his next skill.

Without a wasted thought, Kal moved back to his core space and began the formation of his containment construct and the beginnings of a link. With the additional knowledge he had learned from Slayer’s Apathy and Slayer’s Intent a skill more aligned with his purpose would be possible.

For what was a slayer without his weapon? How could one make it end without the proper tools?