To find myself was hard in more than a few ways, every one of my teachers attempts drifting off.

At first, he tried to analyze the sheet he had given me, cleansing it with a thought and barely a minute of work after reading through it.

“You can refine your mind, though I am unsure of the correct path.”

He admitted, beginning to wonder.

“You said that you got the first mind refinement so far, so most of the possible damage is already done. I formed my mind space as a pond at the start, expanding with the knowledge I gain and refining into ever more direct paths, may I know what your Idea has been?”

He was a teacher I considered as someone I could trust, his control over me not extending past the lessons, which I chose to participate in on my own accord.

Thus, it was easy for me to tell him.

“It’s a library, a place filled with books that each hold all my memories on a particular topic.”

He nodded, thinking and gnawing on the herbal roll he held in his mouth at all times, occasionally using a rune of fire to make it burn.

“To refine your mind, you need a better way of storing this information, more compact than any library you can think of, but not by a lot, there are many refinement levels, and you have to proceed quickly.”

It was hard to suppress the headache building inside me. I should have started this with parchment and pigeonhole libraries, instead of the big books.

I had wasted two levels of refinement by being rash, and I quickly came to many conclusions how to better my mind fortress, though I had to file most of them away because they would lose me too many refinements.

File? Files might be the right direction, maybe I could exchange the different books for folders filled with thin slips of paper organized within a file cabinet.

I probably lost something on the way, but this type of information storing was the simplest upgrade to my mind space I could think of, and thus came the part that held many off of refining their mind.

After discussing what I wanted with my teacher and drawing a picture of it, he handed me a concoction that smelled like a mixture of coffee and alcohol.

“This one will make time pass much faster than it originally does, probably making you experience the world at three times the speed, trust me, you will need it. And I recommend getting the alchemy skill, it helps find the right mixture in these concoctions, the discipline might be for you even if you don’t hold the pyro affinity.”

I took his wise words to heart as I swallowed the substance, the extremely bitter taste making it hard to stop the bile rising in my throat, especially as I suddenly felt like the world was spinning around me and my chest began to hurt.

Then, he gave me a stick that smelled sickly sweet.

“Take regular breaths of this to stop your heart from exploding and focusing your mind.”

I was not the smartest person, but if years of watching movies and reading novels had thought the author part of me anything about life, it was to trust weirdly reptilian mentors with a drug problem.

Thus, I took a deep breath of the smoking stick, my eyes focusing on his snout as the vitality within myself began exploding in every direction, fighting the effects of the drugs as he finally took a blindfold soaked in a mildly suspicious black goo and told me to put it around my head.

When I no longer saw anything, my mind raced and the cigarette in my mouth calmed me, it finally happened.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Others in my situation would have barfed or seen god or whatever, but I did the fourth thing he told me to do instead, focusing entirely on creating the new mind place from the remnants of the old one.

It hurt to focus like this, my brain cooking and my limbs losing feeling until I was merely a body less consciousness in an endless void, the library I knew to be my mind before my eyes.

The rearranging of the walls was easy enough, simply thinking of an office building.

When the new mind place was constructed, all my knowledge pushed against my head, and I finally understood the first drugs effect.

Information flooded quickly, and yet I could easily understand and organize it, the knowledge rushing through my head like sand through a sieve, only the right corns of knowledge streaming further while others were held back, the strain on my awareness rising as I took another puff of smoke.

I had started with the ritual folder, pushing it into a drawer I labeled magic.

Then, I took my knowledge on runes and pushed them in a folder right behind the previous one, this one comparatively empty due to my lack of knowledge about that specific topic.

After came a particularly difficult choice on how to proceed, which prompted me to label this specific file cabinet as ‘supernatural’.

The next drawer to be created would be creatures, which would again hold folders filled with any information I had about the monsters and magical creatures I had encountered so far. ‘Beasts’ were animals with magical parts, like the glowing buck or a particularly fast fish. ‘Monsters’ held creatures like the wyvern, which looked to have mutated beyond what they were originally. ‘Undead’ would be a file that my future would fill extensively, if my encounters and personal development were any indication. ‘Demons’ were living beings made to follow another beings commands, at least according to my own understanding. That left the classification of ‘Elemental’ as a list of manifested Arcana, like the slimes I fought to prove myself, ‘Eldritch’ for anything that was naturally at home between the worlds, ‘Enigma’ for creatures I didn’t understand and ‘God’ for the strongest of enigmas.

Did I plan on changing these? Absolutely, I had learned about the limits of my own knowledge at this point, and was ready to accept and improve upon them.

Every information I had about creatures was filed within, counting most people as beasts, even as it felt wrong for some reason.

When I added my knowledge on alchemy and herbology to another drawer, this cabinet was complete, and I went to the next, which I labeled Social.

It was something that had never interested me much, and yet the drawers ‘Linguistic’, ‘Behavior guidelines‘ and ‘Morality’ were filled with enough folders that I made one at the very front detailing the most important parts of said memories, which meant the origin language I had pierced together, a folder on personal space and a breakdown of how to be a good person lining the front most part of these memories.

Next came many other memories, like an entire cabinet of survival stuff, from cooking to building things, which was probably the most fun I ever had organizing anything.

The more information ran through my mind, the lighter the burden upon me became, until it came to science, which I made a file cabinet a bit away from the others for, with a map hung on the wall holding all areas I knew the location of.

It felt like an eternity inside, and when I finally had all my knowledge stored, including a book on every one of my previous lives, I took a simple collection of files and put it on a desk, a file I had started working on shortly before my birth, and one that would probably come to help me in the future. The very book you are currently reading does a lot of heavy lifting in regard to my emotions and thoughts.

As the world comes together, and my mind feels so much more free than ever before, I get a feeling that there are two folders I could order. Alchemy was an easy one, now that I had seen its effect, though the other would be difficult. In the end, the choice was easier than expected, with a sudden realization towards all the information that flooded my mind every day, most of it discarded as unimportant.

Skill:

Description

Spellcraft 3

This skill guides you in the art of Spellcraft, granting you knowledge to create better spells.

Meditation 3

This skill guides you in the art of meditation, helping the user relief the pressure spells put on your soul, supports the refinement of the soul.

Learning 2

Learn to learn! Fills your head with knowledge on how to better learn new things so they stay in your memory longer.

Rituals 3

Grants access to knowledge on how rituals work and what sygils mean.

Alchemy 1

Grants access to knowledge on the way magical substances react with one another.

Analyze 1

The knowledge on how to passively extend your knowledge based on all your available senses.

I would have more senses now than I could actually take care of, and I needed to learn how to control them.