After the fight, they left the area and didn't look back.

Since the warning appeared on his level, he had a lot of time to think about himself. He got irrationally mad when they hurt Edel, and even now when he saw her limping he felt like cutting them to pieces all over again.

Back then, he touched on his ether unintentionally and with every part of his intent hell-bent on destruction, he lost control. His ether vanished in fractions of a second and to complete the skill he took energy from somewhere else.

The system called that 'True Casting', so intuitively the conclusion he reached was that using ether was false casting. What that entailed he didn't know, but he was dying to find out.

Why did he receive a title named 'Ritualist' when he used true casting for the first time? The most logical conclusion was the way he accessed that power, but the system message didn't make that distinction. Still, if true casting relied on the same source levels were based on, he could see how it might not be too favorable.

Then there was the sudden rush of ether when he tore the space apart and the weird alien tentacle he had no idea what to do about.

He was afraid to touch it, but if he didn't want to leave it back there he had to get inventive. In the end he used a large leaf to carry it back to their home, which was easier said than done when you lacked nimble fingers to grab onto stuff. The tentacle was longer than him and Edel which didn't really help. At least it wasn't larger because then it would have been impossible to carry.

Of course just staring at the tentacle he wouldn't learn anything.

If he wasn't scared of accidentally gaining experience he would have hunted a small lizard and thrown it on top of the tentacle to find out if it was safe to touch. But if he accidentally killed it, or it died upon touching the tentacle, he would get experience and he wasn't keen on taking a risk like that for no reason.

In the end he decided to bury it up to some point a bit further away from the tree he usually slept in. Edel was only too excited to help him dig a hole big enough for the tentacle. Wasn't as excited to put the dirt back inside, however.

After that was done, he searched for something to do... and came up with nothing. Hoping whatever was wrong with him would be over when he woke up next, he went to sleep early.

Edel was surprised by her friend's strength. She wasn't sure what he wanted to do with the tentacle of that weird squid, nor why he waited so long to get rid of the goblins, but so long as the job was done, she couldn't care less. She realized something was wrong, however, when the very next day when the usual fur ball of excitement didn't lift his head from the ground once. He seemed deep in thought throughout the entire day, and that followed on the next one too. He seemed scared, and she didn't know what to do.

When he came to the hunts, he didn't do anything but watch, but she couldn't care less about that.

She even tried to find the biggest and juiciest lizard to cheer him up, but he barely even touched it. That was when she knew something was seriously wrong. She was trying to find ways to cheer him up, but when nothing seemed to work, on the third day of moping around he followed her in the hunt with more vigor than before.

That was a mistake. She should have stopped him... done anything to prevent what followed.

Unable to hunt for food, he relied on the kindness of Edel each day. Should she decide she didn't want to help him, there was nothing he could do without taking a risk. Still when the days passed and there were no improvements to be seen, he decided that he would help her on the next hunt. Should be fine so long as I don't kill anything.

In the end, he assisted her in catching one of those larger lizards. He didn't even deal the final blow, just a slash to its legs to lower its mobility, and Edel finished it off a few seconds later. She looked particularly happy about that, and it brought a smile to his face. More competition for lizard tails, but if Ed-

His thoughts were cut off by a spike of pain that brought him to his knees. It felt like his heart was going to tear itself out of his ribcage, but that wasn't too bad. He'd gotten hurt before, it was nothing. The pain that came after, however, was different. It felt like his soul was tearing itself apart, like there were tiny maggots inside his head eating his brain from the inside and he could feel their every movement.

Unable to bear it, he screamed, his eyes growing teary.

He felt his consciousness dim, but the pain never stopped. The last thing he could feel was Edel grabbing him by the scruff of his neck and carrying him back to the river in a hurry.

When he woke up again, the pain was there waiting for him, the nausea; the world felt wrong. Colors didn't match what he remembered them to be, and he couldn't move at all. All he wanted was to lose his consciousness again to escape his suffering, but life wasn't so kind this time.

He spent hours in agony, so much so that when the pain stopped the numbness felt alien to him. By his side was a worried Edel, his friend not leaving his side once during this entire time.

He wanted to hug her, to thank her, to brush against her face and show her that he was alright. His body didn't move.

He wanted to cry.

The next day wasn't any better, nor was the one after that. Almost a week later when he managed to make his body move again, he wanted to laugh in relief, but it felt wrong. Half his body didn't obey his commands, and the other half couldn't understand them.

It felt scary, like he was a stranger in someone else's body. Sometimes he moved opposite to where he wanted to, his eyes couldn't focus or his entire body twitched involuntarily with enough force to bring him to the ground. Those things more than anything scared him the most.

As for Edel, she was the only reason he was alive after being unable to hunt for his own food. She didn't always bring back lizards, but he couldn't complain. He saved her once or twice, but she stayed with him after every near death situation he found himself in. Hell, she must find me the most annoying cat in existence.

Going into a fight with no regard for your safety was reckless, not heroic. Staying to take care of him when he could barely move was... he didn't know what to call it.

The days while he was recovering from what was most likely a soul injury passed in a blur. A physical injury healed unfairly fast in comparison.

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He had a lot of assumptions about how the system worked, why his body recovered so fast but his soul didn't. The only problem was that he had no way to prove them, no way to experiment with the system or himself. If he was stupid a second time, there might not be a third.

He began thinking about the system to distract himself.

Was all essence the same? The system clarified that the essence he'd used was converted. There had to be unconverted essence, and there had to be more than one way of using True Casting.

Thinking about the term, a ritualist probably used other humans or animals to cover the cost of converted essence in place of themselves. But it was impossible for something called 'True Casting' to be usable only through ritualism; the name was just too grand.

For starters, he had to know if leveling up his skills gave him essence and if he could start on feeling that essence. There was a sense skill for everything, so there probably was one for essence too.

Maybe essence manipulation too? No- that was a bit too dangerous even as an idea. He lost two levels before he realized it and he doubted the next time he would manage to get away that easily.

As the days passed, his control over his own body recovered enough that he was able to do most activities without a problem, though he was still having nightmares about it almost every night. Better control of your own body didn't mean anything compared to a single moment of not having any.

Still, that meant he was recovering.

Edel was relieved to see him doing better. She was terrified of losing her family... losing them once was enough. Seeing him on his feet, she decided that she should get on her feet as well.

Looking back at her friend walking with some difficulty still, she made sure there were no monsters nearby and left the river area. It wouldn't take long, she needed to become stronger, and the goblins needed to die.

As for Kiel, he decided that since he could walk, he could train.

If he had to spend one more second pitying himself he would go mad. After he recovered somewhat he started practicing in skills that had already reached their max level.

He didn't expect to get any better at sensing either the spatial or the normal ether around him, but contrary to his beliefs that wasn't the case. After a week of constantly straining his will to sense further and with more detail, he noticed improvement. It was a slow and agonizingly boring effort, but... max level wasn't the end.

It took another month of that before he touched on the idea of training his non-maxed skills. The mere thought that he could end up paralyzed in a body that was not his own, more than anything, terrified him the most. Every time he thought about doing something that might have the slightest relation to essence his heart started beating erratically and he had to sit down before he fell to the ground.

After some point, however, it began to irk him more than it scared him to try. For the entire month after he made the mistake of assisting Edel with a kill and gaining essence, he was a shell of himself.

He didn't want that, he didn't want to be the image of his father.

So... skills it was. When he was focused on raising his level and admittedly the levels of his skills, he wasn't really trying to find out more about them, just trying to use them 'better'.

For starters, he noticed that while he had Spatial Manipulation, he didn't have the ether equivalent. In all honesty, it wasn't that weird. He never really tried to manipulate ether inside the quiet zones, and he barely did inside his body, all of which was attuned to space.

Before he went on getting the Ether Manipulation skill, however, he had to make more of his tools usable and that meant messing with space. Hopefully somewhere along the line he would get the skill.

He started with a hypothesis, all affinities could affect the world around them. He took control of his ether, forcing it outside his body. Unfortunately, the ether dissipated not long after it left his body. Well, that didn't work.

He considered moving to training up his teleportation, but held himself back. He managed to get a hold of teleportation easily enough, but knowing absolutely nothing about his affinity made it dangerous and impossible to predict.

Also, he wanted to observe how the skill would change as he leveled it up, something that would be clearer with Spatial Manipulation.

Not discouraged, he used a combination of his connection to the ether along with his Spatial Manipulation to condense the cloud of spatial ether. Forcing it to condense, he ended up enhancing the properties of spatial mana. That took more willpower than he'd been expecting, and more than half of the ether was lost in the attempt... but he had results.

Perhaps the problem is with its density... I mean, putting more space on top of more space would be like blowing more wind into the atmosphere.

A small black sphere the size of a needle's point formed in front of him. In the end he managed to replicate what the earth affinity goblins could do and created space. Only his wasn't as impressive... or deadly.

It's not the size that matters anyway...

To test it, he pushed the small sphere against the ground where it... did absolutely nothing. Moving it in space was very, very slow, and apparently it couldn't pass through rocks.

Well, what can it do then?

The next obvious thing was teleporting it around.

He pushed dirt over the small sphere, but that didn't accomplish much other than making him lose track of it. He could still feel it, but it was like looking for a needle in a haystack with a metal detector. Using that connection, he willed it to move through space and appear in front of him.

Unfortunately, it seemed like his control was still too weak to manage that, though it certainly felt possible.

Letting his control fade from the sphere of space, the sphere as well as his connection with it disappeared.

Manipulating the small sphere next time around, he pushed a few grains of sand towards it. To his surprise, the sphere ate them right up. He then took a few moments pushing individual grains of dirt inside it until it couldn't hold any more dirt.

Removing that dirt was unsuccessful, but he was learning!

Edel arrived to see him play with the dirt, and couldn't help but jump and join in. Her pure white fur became almost completely brown after digging a hole large enough to bury Kiel a few times over. She looked at him with a telling gaze, How did I do?

His response was to drag her to the river to take a bath.

After making sure to help fill up the massive hole she dug up, and chasing her halfway around the river for her mischievousness, he got back to his experiments.

When he let the sphere vanish and remade it, he could fill it up all over again. In total it would take twelve grains of dirt before stopping. That was interesting, because a few tests later, his skill leveled up and that number changed.

Spatial Manipulation reached level 5, and for a moment he forgot he had been expecting debilitating pain to follow. Nothing happened. That was good... right?

He couldn't help but feel relieved and stupid for letting so much time go by without training his most important skills all this while. He let fear take hold of him for so long. He felt like he should be better than that.

His claws dug deep into the earth, and he didn't realize how angry he was until he noticed the sound of his own breathing.

He focused on clearing his mind and his breathing. It took a while to calm down and stop blaming himself, but he was getting better at it. Honestly, he should be given a Meditation skill already for all he had to deal with in recent days.

It hadn't resulted in a skill or anything yet, but it did help him keep his wits when the intrusive thoughts hit.

When he managed to calm down enough, he went back to Spatial Manipulation and remembered about the odd increase in power.

He formed the sphere again, noticing that it took less effort and lost less energy in its formation. Counting the grains then, the increase was bigger than he was expecting.

It made very little sense until he remembered how his attributes worked. There was probably acclimatization for skills too. It made a certain amount of sense, but he wanted more data to make sure of it.

It was at this moment that Edel chose to appear with a massive lizard in her jaws. It was like she knew whenever he was in a bad mood, even though he was supposed to be pretty happy given his recent discoveries.

If he were a wolf, he would have proposed to her already.

He didn't forget how she had taken care of him all these days. Originally, he had been planning on going their separate ways after killing all the goblins, but now he wasn't so sure. The idea of leaving her behind hurt him physically.

Eating the lizard's tail and resting against Edel's back restored his mental sanity enough to get back to training. It was already late, so he wouldn't be training for long anyway.

He had a lot of ideas, and while he couldn't take back the time that he lost, he could make sure he used it wisely from here on out. His level might not change for a while, but he would be damned if his strength didn't.