After some quick number crunching, Solace found that he had far less time to prepare than he thought.

The rift challenge had put him roughly ten percent of the way towards Tier 3. Meanwhile, his test run with the essence accumulators revealed that he was earning about one percent of that total each delve. It meant that he’d need to do another eighty-nine delves.

And I’ll only have six weeks if I want to get everything done in time.

Because Tier 3 was a watershed one. Upon hitting it, his Talent would expand to gain a new ability, one he would need to practice with. Thus, even though he would leave for the Exhibition in two months, it wasn’t actually the amount of time he had to get ready.

89 is about 90, and that means roughly 15 delves per week. Each delve is taking me about two hours, not including the time needed to recuperate.

With everything else he wanted to do, it was going to be tight, but he could do it. His first instinct was to start delving Tier 3 rifts, but he had to tamp down his eagerness. The threshold which dictated monster aggression were no longer existent after Tier 2, meaning that the rifts would be more functionally dangerous.

Before he could even think of tackling a Tier 3 rift, let alone carry other people through it, he needed to have a better understanding of his personal limits while also growing them.

“Do you know how to use the equipment?” An employee asked loudly over the din of clanging metal and the rhythmic pattering of footsteps. His bright blue uniform stood out against the dull gray walls.

Solace’s eyes briefly scanned the gym’s array of equipment. It all looked like stuff that he was familiar with.

“Yes,” he said.

“Are you sure? There’s no shame in admitting it—better than getting hurt,” the employee said while appearing to examine Solace’s physique.

“If I need help or instruction, I’ll ask,” he replied.

“Alright…” the man said doubtfully as he walked away.

For anyone else, the doubt wouldn’t have been misplaced. On the outside, Solace looked like a novice at weight training due to his lean frame and minimal muscle definition. In reality, Solace had to rebuild his body every reality he entered.

Up until this point, he had been doing basic calisthenics in his room. But now, he needed the tools to be at his optimal level of fitness while also measuring his current abilities.

He spent several minutes stretching, feeling the range of motion of his limbs, and then moved to a free weight rack to do some testing.

The first thing he found out was that, despite having zero allocation in anything that would help, he was still lifting above what he would expect a Tier 0 version of him could. Not by much, only a few extra pounds, but it was noteworthy. It confirmed that the Tier of the Spirit really did impact the body beyond essence allocations.

Next, he experimented with how strong he could be without tearing muscles. Solace quickly learned that he was just barely above what well built Tier 1 could do, by his estimation. Good, but not amazing as a Tier 2.

That would be quickly remedied.

He made alterations to his allocation in earnest now, a spread into flexibility, strength, and regeneration. But not durability. He wanted to tear his muscles faster, afterall. Safely, but rapidly.

As a bonus, the gym apparently offered weights not only of different masses, but of different Tiers. Metals grew far heavier in Tier compared to other materials, so he had to pick carefully. Solace moved down the rather extensive rack, testing them all until he found ones that were capable of simultaneously stretching his physical and spiritual limits. Growing better at handling spiritual strain was a much slower process and had minimal gains, but there was no reason not to do both at once.

He wanted to do a full body workout, hitting all of the large muscle groups and packing on as much as he could in the first three weeks or so. After that, he’d focus more on stamina and flexibility rather than strength.

But enough testing and planning, time to put the work in.

Solace moved to a bench and began his three hour session, the first of many to come. Afterwards, he would need to quickly eat the leftovers from last night and then go to his job at Edison’s. Today was the day he would begin his next step as a crafter’s assistant: putting all of the enchanting theory he’d been studying into practice.

—

The basics of enchanting runes weren’t actually hard for Solace to grasp, given his experience with magics across realities. Mana and other mystical equivalents all tended to have quite a few similarities in terms of properties. Paired with his ability to increase his learning speed at will with his Talent, he was able to apply what he was learning as Edison’s crafting assistant rather quickly.

Liner brush in hand, he began to painstakingly paint a rune of weight-reduction onto the last of the knives he had recently forged for his assignment. The paint itself was a viscous, special lacquer he had mixed himself which would be resistant to chipping, among other things. In order to paint the fine lines, he needed a level of precision only a heavy emphasis in durability and dexterity could give him at the moment.

The design he had settled on had several components, or modules, connected with each other. Runes could be a single piece of work, fluid lines and swirls with no discernable smaller components, but that made it much harder to make for a beginner.

The mana acceptors went onto the handle and were connected via several channels to a silicone polymer bead embedded in the hilt. The bead would serve as a cheap, artificial mana stone. It wasn’t a very good stone, since the mana leaked above a certain threshold and had a poor conversion, but he wasn’t intending to use the knife much anyways.

The effect module was then painted onto the blade itself, just above the bead and close to the center of mass. He ended up painting parts of this complex portion on each side of the metal, allowing him to reduce the distance the mana had to move to reach everything and thus increasing efficiency.

When he was done, he moved to a nearby box with a cloth covering on the side. He lifted a corner of the cloth and laid the knife inside, beside two blades he had enchanted just before. He then dropped the cover and flicked a switch to turn on the UV lamp within so that the paint would cure as it dried.

Using paint as an enchantment vector was rather interesting, Solace mused. Technically, the dried paint itself was what was actually “enchanted” since it was what contained the shapes and lines of the rune. But the paint’s spirit could also fuse with the item’s rather easily and quickly, with a little help from the environment and the ingredients within the paint itself. That was how the item became “enchanted.”

All he had to do now was wait. There were no timekeeping devices in the workshop since Edison relied on her AI, so Solace just set an internal timer.

The wait gave him a chance to stretch his muscles anyways, which were rather sore from the gym session this morning. He saw it as a good time to test something he had forgotten to do earlier anyways: move all of his essence into regeneration and see how quickly he could recover. So, he began to do just that, shunting everything from mind, dexterity, senses, and durability—

Pain wracked his body as every muscle within it seized up. He clattered to the floor, a pile of cramps.

Solace struggled to stand up, but no amount of will was able to conquer the physiological response. He had to force some essence allocation back into flexibility and durability before he was able to haltingly, shakingly get back onto his feet.

“Are you alright?” Edison asked, walking into the room with something clutched to her chest.

“Yes,” Solace said, though his leg spasmed otherwise. He had definitely pushed himself at the gym, but he hadn’t expected such a visceral reaction.

“Are you sure?” She asked, eyeing him.

“Yes,” he said again.

And he would be. Allocating all—most of his essence into regeneration meant that he would be recovering at more than double the rate of a Tier 0 person. Technically, it meant that he’d be fine enough by evening to carry people through some delves.

Which he would, of course. He was on a clock afterall.

“Okay…” Edison said, sounding unconvinced. She looked around the workshop, taking in the scattered tools from Solace’s fall. “Have you finished?”

“Painting the runes? Yes,” Solace said. He gestured to the box with the UV lamp and knives within. “In there.”

Edison put the item in her hand, a large book of some sort, onto a table to the side before stepping towards the box. She flipped back the cover to look at them.

“They’re not done curing yet,” Solace said.

“That’s fine.” With a flick of her hand, one of the blades flew into it. She inspected it. “Durability rune, one piece, no ambient mana absorption materials or modules?”

“Yes,” Solace confirmed.

“Rather poor battery,” she noted.

“It meets the assignment,” he said.

“Doesn’t mean you get to do a sloppy job,” she said in admonishment. “What kind of paint did you use? This isn’t the standard. The colouration is different.”

“I added in an etching compound,” he replied. “It becomes acidic when wet and exposed to UV light. Since the rune is painted on, if it gets chipped the mana channels could destabilize enough to shatter the whole knife. So I thought that—”

“If the rune was also present as an etching, it’d still have some functionality and stability,” Edison finished. “Yeah, it’s a good idea. I like it.”

She passed a hand over the blade, emitting a light so bright that Solace had to look away from it. When Edison was done, the paint was completely dry.

“We could have waited instead,” Solace said. Drying the special lacquer like that was certainly mana extensive, and mana was effectively money, he had come to learn.

“Time is money,” she said simply.

The rune on the blade began to glow blue as she channeled mana from her hand into the knife. Then, she flicked it, the sound ringing out as she listened intently.

“There’s a flaw in the steel, right about… here,” Edison said. She turned the knife over and indicated the length and width of the supposed flaw. It was a very short line.

“That’s within the margin of error you gave me,” Solace said.

“For normal knives, sure, but not ones that will be enchanted. At the very least, you should factor it into runes that affect the internal stresses of the material.”

She set the knife aside as she continued.

“Study up on runic channel waverings, it’s on page 813 of the textbook I sent you.”

“Alright,” Solace replied.

Edison then went on to look at the remaining two knives to give similar critiques, curing them with [Skills] like the first rather than waiting. The first was a sharpness rune, essentially a durability rune except that it only affected the edge of the blade, allowing a lot of the innate flexibility to remain intact. The second and final one was the weight reduction one.

In all honesty, Solace had no idea how the weight reduction rune functioned on a fundamental level. Whereas the durability and sharpness runes were compact things that messed with atomic density and spreading out or reducing stresses, the reduction rune was affecting the sway of gravity on the object. It was so complicated that Solace had practically copied the effect module in its totality from the textbook onto the knife itself, rather than risking any true modifications.

“Do you know how it functions?” Solace asked when she began to inspect the final knife.

“Well…” She began uncertainly.

“Really?” He was surprised. He had expected her to know.

Edison held her hands up, knife in one of them. “Runes, like [Skills], are complicated things. That’s why, even after millennia of study across an entire realm’s worth of people, we still are moving at a relatively slow pace in terms of research breakthroughs; we can’t even replicate every enchantment made by rifts right now! Sometimes, the only thing we can do is test something for its characteristics and use it.”

She gave a pointed look, emphasized by the knife in hand.

“Which is why you need to study every facet you can change to be able to tackle something really complex,” Edison concluded.

“I understand,” Solace said.

“Good.”

Edison scooped up the three knives, flicked off the UV lamp, and handed the blades to Solace handles first. “You can keep these then, maybe sell them—though you’ll be hard pressed to find a buyer with the current quality. I’m going to give you a pass on this so you can begin the next assignment I have for you: make an automatically refilling water bottle.”

Solace paused. “What?”

“Ever seen those canteens they sell at a delver’s convenience store? Make something like that. I don’t care how you do it, so long as it produces enough water a day to sustain you.”

“I don’t know where to begin with that,” he said as he took the knives from her. He’d find some use for them later.

“Well, that’s what this is for… here you go!”

“What’s what—”

In one fluid motion, Edison plucked the large book from the table and shoved it into Solace’s arms. He spent several moments trying to juggle the knives and the tome.

“Since you don’t have an AI, this is the next best thing,” Edison said as Solace struggled to not drop everything. “It’ll help you with really seeing the runes in three-dimensional space.”

“So,” he said once he had everything handed to him in hand, “I’m not going to be studying two-dimensional runes anymore?”

It’s what she had made him start on. He was surprised they were moving from it so soon.

“Well, you could,” Edison replied. “But it honestly wouldn’t be that helpful relative to the time that you put into them. While two-dimensional runes can be simpler, they’re actually designs extrapolated from their three-dimensional forms. And you’ll find that trying to enchant something in only two-dimensions can quickly become a logistical nightmare of inefficiencies. After a point, it’s better to just use runes with depth even if there’s a slightly steeper learning curve initially.”

“I see,” Solace said. He looked at the book in his arms. “And how will this help?”

“Open it.”

He did so, haphazardly turning to a random page within. Immediately, an image of a rune construct appeared, supported by little beams of string and paper. It honestly looked like…

“Is this a pop-up book?” Solace asked.

“Yep!” Edison said with a smile. “It’s a bit low-tech, I know, but I think it’s a fun alternative to the textbooks when you don’t have an AI. It was gathering dust, so I figured I’d let you borrow it.”

“Thank you,” Solace said. He closed the book and tucked it underneath an arm.

“Of course, now, put everything away and meet me back here. We still have to do today’s commission.”

“Alright.”

He moved to do just that, placing the book and knives into his locker in the staff room. When he returned, he found that the tools scattered on the floor were now back on their respective racks and something new was on the center-table of the room.

It was a large metal spoon.

“We’ll be doing something different today,” Edison said. “A client came in with a job that I think nicely contributes to your education.”

“How so?”

“Take a look at it yourself,” Edison gestured.

Solace complied, moving towards the table to pick up the object. He gingerly allocated some essence into mind from regeneration in order to bolster his spiritual senses. What he saw was… odd.

A Tier 4 item with an enchantment more complex than any he’d physically seen before, including the scabbard commission that Edison had first shown him. The rune permeated the entirety of the spoon, the channels often needle-thin and set at angles and widths that he wasn’t sure any tool in the workshop could accomplish. To put this much effort into a spoon seemed like a waste, he couldn’t imagine anyone doing it.

Unless no one did.

He turned to Edison. “Is this a rift made enchanted item?”

“Yep! And the client wants the enchantment transferred onto a baking tray.”

“...Why?”

She gestured again, and he sighed.

Solace moved towards the workshop’s spiritual scanner, which looked like a pedestal with concentric rings around the capital. He laid the spoon onto the surface and turned the machine on. Immediately, the rings began to spin around the object to scan it. He knew from past experience that it would record the rune’s channels and then simulate how it interacted with mana, reporting the results. When it was finished, the information was sent to its monitor attached to the wall.

Texture alteration. Any object handled by the item can have its texture changed to be perfectly crunchy.

There were several highlighted points, indicating areas that could have been modules if they weren’t combined together at certain points. Solace noted that there was one for ambient mana absorption.

“What was the quote for this?” Solace asked, curious.

“Tier 5 mana stone.”

He wheeled around. “Really?”

Paying a whole Tier higher for an item like a baking sheet seemed insane.

Edison shrugged. “Rush job, and the tray needs to hit certain specifications like being able to withstand the strain of additional enchantments. Transferring is a new technique for you, so I’ll be doing most of the heavy lifting today.”

And then she set about accomplishing the task, explaining as she did so.

Transferring an enchantment was rather tricky. One couldn’t simply melt down the item and use the material, that would destroy the rune. In addition, they couldn’t just weld or attach the item and whatever else together, since that had a high chance of muddling or outright erasing the enchantment. Instead, there were a few consistent techniques which could be used, depending on the material.

“The one we’re going to use today is assisted fusion,” Edison said.

It essentially boiled down to creating the real item, the baking sheet, in such a way that the composition of the spoon and the tray matched perfectly, reducing the chances of any enchantment warping or changes.

Edison had Solace run the spoon through the x-ray fluorescence machine that she had in the shop. It was used to determine the chemical composition of the item's metal. When she confirmed his readings, she had him put together a blend which would match the seemingly steel-alloy’s contents.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

“The closer it is, the better,” she reminded him.

When he was finished, she went about explaining how to do miniscule modifications to the spoon’s enchantment.

“Here, here, here, and here,” she said, indicating several areas of the rune on the spiritual scanner’s monitor. “We need to flatten the spoon to make it into a baking tray, and those are the flexible, tamperable bits.”

“How can you tell?” Solace asked.

“Experience, mostly. I’ll send a copy of this enchantment to your electronic mail with annotations so you can look at it later.”

“Alright,” he said.

With her enchanting stylus, she made certain incisions or expansions in the spoon’s spirit around those areas. Then, she undid or altered those changes physically, using a die and a punch to carefully flatten the spoon.

The process took twenty minutes, and during that time she had him heat up the forge to create the metal by hand rather than her [Skills].

“It’s good practice for you,” Edison said.

While he was waiting for everything to heat up and melt, a thought occurred to him. The spoon’s enchantments were complex, and actually resembled the [Skill] currently in his spirit in a way that the previous runes had not. It made him wonder…

“Edison?”

“Yeah?”

“All of these modifications to runes, can they be done to [Skills]?”

She stopped what she was working on, giving him a long hard stare. “If I said ‘yes,’ would you immediately go off and try your luck with that create air [Skill] of yours?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I can see it, Solace! You’re not exactly veiling your spirit.”

Solace frowned. He had suspected higher Tiers could look at the inner workings of a lower Tiered spirit, this confirmed it.

“I’m warning you right now,” Edison said, her tone taking a hard edge. “If I see that your [Skill] has any unnatural alterations after this, well, there’s nothing I could do that would be worse than what you could do to yourself. Incorrectly modifying a [Skill] can destroy it, causing near irreparable harm to your spirit. It’d be like a glass bead was suddenly and violently shattered inside your innards, only worse.”

“I see,” Solace said.

Edison scanned his face, probably to see if he was being genuine, which he was. The early interaction with that one commander had shown that there was a possible link between his Spirit and his soul, making him wary of causing any sort of damage to his Spirit in this reality.

The idea that it could impact his soul was terrifying. There was a reason why he either avoided necromancers in every reality he entered or made sure to handle them with extreme prejudice.

“I’m going to send you the relevant information to start learning about [Skill] modification, because I know you’re still probably going to look into it,” Edison continued, “but you better not make any attempts until after you buy a tool to help you practice and show me that you can do it on the practice tool.”

Solace nodded. “Could you also send information on how to veil?”

Another hard look, then a sigh. “Fine, it’s something everyone should learn anyways.”

There was a long pause as she stared into the air, using her AI. Then she said, “Now let’s get back to work, we have to finish this within a couple of hours.”

And that’s exactly what they did. In order to fuse the metal and the spoon, Edison used her [Skills] to painstakingly heat up the metal on the fringes of the spoon and the hole in the tray. The end product was a seamless Tier 4 baking with near-perfect homogeneity in material. The enchantment was completely intact and even successfully modified slightly to extend its effect to the entire surface area of the item.

“Would you like to test it?” Edison asked, her normal attitude reasserting itself. “We can call it quality control, and I can bake some cookies with some leftover stuff in the back.”

“Unfortunately,” Solace said, “I have some obligations immediately after this. Though I will take whatever you’re willing to leave for me.”

“Oh, alright, then meet me back here at the same time tomorrow. And don’t you dare modify that [Skill].”

“I won’t,” Solace promised. And then he was off to the next thing on his packed schedule.

—

After getting a meal, of course. He had learned about a diner recently that served average cooking but large portions, which was fine by him. The whole dish was something bland and relatively flavorless but he shoveled it all down anyways. Increased healing from his Talent meant an increased appetite.

When he finished eating, he paid and made his way back to the Tier 2 spider rift. Gao Xieren had managed to recruit more people for him to carry and, for the foreseeable future, he would have two back-to-back instances every day save for the day where he’d delve a Tier 3 rift by himself.

By his estimations, and with some research and careful planning, that day would be his recovery day.

“Follow,” He ordered the young woman whose name he had already forgotten and Xu Wei, entering the spider rift as soon as the fifteen minutes needed for a new rift instance to generate expired.

Rather than his glaive and shield, he held a sword in each hand. It made clearing the rift a bit more dangerous, of course, but so much faster. By the time the boss, another Hybrid, was left bleeding on the floors, only a bit more than an hour had expired. It was so quick, that the person scheduled for the next delve wouldn’t arrive for a while, allowing Solace to have a short rest with Xu Wei on a nearby bench.

“When’s our next session?” Xu Wei asked.

“In a bit,” Solace replied.

The boy shook his head. “I meant our language lessons,”

“Oh, right.”

In truth, the arrangement had briefly slipped his mind. He did some mental arithmetic to find out where he could squeeze Xu Wei in, and came up mostly empty. The only time would be breaks like this.

“Actually, Xu Wei, I think we might need to put any longer sessions on hold for a while,” Solace said.

There was an unexpectedly long pause, then the boy mumbled out a single word.

“Why?”

“There’s a competition in about two months that allows people to become the Corporation’s equivalent of the Young Masters, if you’ve heard of those. I need to spend as much time as possible preparing for it, and I won’t be able to commit to any more lessons until it’s over.”

Another long pause, and then a shaky reply.

“Oh, I see.”

Solace turned to look at Xu Wei’s face, but the boy was staring far away, expressionless. It felt… uncomfortable for some reason.

“We can resume when I get back,” Solace said.

“But you won’t be,” the boy replied.

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

“You’ll be Chosen, obviously,” Xu Wei said.

That statement, bland and yet confident, as if it was a fact, unsettled Solace. There really was no guarantee, no knowing how it would all turn out, and yet the boy seemed to have some preconception of Solace that differed from who he truly was. He opened his mouth to correct it, to explain the facts, and then stopped himself.

In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter either way. Regardless of the Selection, Solace would eventually leave this planet, and people like Xu Wei and Gao Xieren behind. People came and went, he showed up, tried and died, that was the nature of things.

But that didn’t stop Solace from feeling bad, for some reason.

“Well, there’s no guarantee,” he said eventually. “And we can still have some smaller lessons in between the delves, like right now.”

“I guess,” Xu Wei said.

“... I’ll also give you something right now, if it will make you feel better. A gift to help you delve when I’m gone.”

That made the boy perk up, and he turned to face Solace. “What is it?”

“Something I made myself.”

Solace pulled one of his enchanted knives out at random, holding the scabbard to offer the blade handle first to Xu Wei.

“Tier 3 alloy, but light enough that even a Tier 1 like you can wield it. It should be better than what you have right now,” Solace said. “And if you push mana into it, the enchantment will activate.”

Xu Wei took it with a bit too much reverence. “Thank you, Solace.”

“No problem.”

He didn’t need three extra knives anyways.

After that, the two waited in less awkward silence for the next person to show up. Then, it was back to delving.

—

The next five days passed quickly, gym, work, delving, studying, sleep, repeat. Even with the extra regeneration and essence from the delves, Solace’s body was beginning to grow weary just a little bit, which was why today would hopefully be his less strenuous day.

After a hearty breakfast and light calisthenics in his room, he made his way to the train station in order to go somewhere he had never been before.

A Tier 3 rift.

He had carefully decided on which he would register for and attempt. It needed to be doable by one person, and also possible for a lower Tiered person be ensconced somewhere safely and still escape if need be.

That was how he found himself in another quadrant of the city, in front of another dome, and signing another waiver to enter the jagged tear in reality. There were a few pointed stares at his strange getup that he had made for this rift, but he ignored them.

And then he was through.

Immediately, he was met with the sound of a siren blaring. He was in what looked to be a tiny spaceship, crashed into the hull of another, larger spaceship.

It was exactly what he had expected based on the information packet for the rift. All rifts, for some reason, stuck to a theme, and this one was space-sword-and-boarding. He quickly found and pressed the button in his “ship” to open the hatch and let him out before the denizens of the rift arrived and surrounded him. Though the initial spawning site was always a safezone or sorts, the lack of thresholds starting at Tier 3 meant that anything could and would move to reach him.

His “ship,” had conveniently wedged itself perfectly into the wall such that there was no chance for a vacuum—in fact, if one inspected it closer, they would find the ship fused to the hull. There was no real “space” in this rift, just a themed environment.

Solace looked around, counting the number of corridors available to him. Four. He adjusted his newest pieces of gear prepared for the occasion: a stout Tier 4 steel bat with a weight reduction rune tied to his waist, his altered set of armor, and a cloak made of light, highly reflective Tier 3 metal fibers spiritually enchanted with a variant of the durability rune.

Then he made his way down the hallway furthest to his right. Though the rift never generated the exact same thing every instance, there were patterns. Four corridors at the start meant that there was an exploitable location early on.

But before he could get there, he was met with three of the monsters within the rift. Chest height, green skinned, each wore smooth gray armor which gleamed in the light. They were something akin to orcs, though more intelligent and orderly than the stereotypical ones.

Two unsheathed their swords while the third stayed behind, pulling out a blaster. Solace met them with one of his own blades, parrying the first strike and delivering a fatal slash of his own through a chink in the gear; his blade nearly caught but he was able to pull it out. The monsters were faster than him, but not as skilled.

The blaster fired, a laser shooting out at the same time as the second orc swung its weapon. Rather than block, Solace stepped into it to dodge both attacks. With his other arm, he delivered a gauntleted blow to the jaw of the orc in front of him, stunning it. The laser grazed him, but was reflected by his new shiny cloak.

It works!

Solace allocated some essence into strength from flexibility and shoved his shoulder into the monster before him. It gave a grunt as it folded, and he used it as a shield to charge the ranged orc behind.

More lasers flew, the orc panicking, but Solace’s impromptu shield blocked it all. He bowled over the creature while slamming the one in his arms to the ground. With several stabs of his sword into chinks in their sides, he killed the remaining two.

There was no time to celebrate, however, as he could make out the sound of footsteps coming in from all directions with his enhanced senses. He charged forward, one sword in hand while the other free. He didn’t bother to collect the swords or the blaster. The first two were inferior to his own and could be collected after while the blaster didn’t work against the armor and also wasn’t functional outside the rift.

As he turned a corner, he came face to face with a bigger version of the orcs, a hulking thing which stood a head taller than him. The brute came bearing down with a swing of its club, as if expecting him.

Solace was unsurprised, converting the momentum of the turn into a roll forwards and to the side. The club came crashing down, denting the metal that composed the hallway.

Altering allocations from senses and durability into dexterity and flexibility, Solace dropped his sword and withdrew his bat in one fluid motion, smashing into the armor on its leg, kneecapping it.

The monster began to buckle under its own weight, and Solace capitalized on the involuntary movement to try to cave its skull in. But while the Tier 4 bat easily smashed into the joint, it bounced off of the helmet with only a bit of fractured material.

With a shake of his head, Solace drew a knife to finish it off, the rush of essence confirming its death.

He retrieved his sword, and then he was on the move again, working his way towards his goal. It took three more encounters, a various mix and number of the three types of monsters he had already fought, before he was able to reach a room marked with a glowing rune above its doorway.

With a swing of his bat at the rune, shattering it, the door opened to reveal two orcs waiting on the other side, blasters in hand. The cloak shielded him as he charged in low, smashing into the first, throwing it into the second, and then killing them both with precise stabs of his knife.

When he was done, he stood up to examine the room. It was as the information packet described, two desks with fake computers fused to the wall. They didn’t actually work, these rift imitations, since a Tier 3 rift was still not complex enough to manage it, but the rift acted like they did. While they were still existent, all orcs would be able to know his location. A pretend communications room that could be sabotaged and make his future combats easier.

Why was it here and not in the boss’ room? Why did the rift adhere to an arbitrary rule? Who knew. He just knew it worked.

Solace took a bat to the “computers,” shattering the monitors and the chassis which held their inner workings. Then he exited the room to continue the delve.

As he reentered the hallway, his spiritual senses, flared to as far as his mind allocation would allow without over stimulation, detected a physical object flying at immense speeds at him. There was no time for his Tier 2 body to react, to move, but he didn’t have to. He immediately sent mana into his cloak with a thought, causing the modified durability rune to contract the material, turning the cloak into a rigid sheet of material between him and the attack.

The projectile struck his cloak, knocking him back with the force but not penetrating his protection. As he flew through the air, he could make out another type of orc found in the rift he had only read about until that moment. Rather than a blaster or a sword, it had a heavy crossbow attached to one arm that auto-ratched on reload.

Solace landed on his back and jumped to his feet. He rushed at the orc, throwing one of his knives at the creature right as it finished reloading, causing its aim to be knocked askew. A bat to the side with his bat to stun it, then another knife to finish it. He tried to pry the crossbow from the monster’s corpse, but it was fused to the armor itself.

Eventually, he gave up and continued on his way, retrieving his thrown weapon. With the “communications” down, he was now able to engage in a bit of stealth and surprise around corners with the help of his Talent to bolster his senses, turning the encounters into ambushes.

There were a lot of orcs, some fifty in all just in the back half away from the front of the “ship” where the boss resided. It took him an hour and a half or so to clean them all out. Then, he made his way towards the front.

It was at this point that Solace began to notice a gradual increase in difficulty. Groups of six or seven started appearing, often including what the information packet had dubbed an elite. They were variants of the other orcs, but cybernetically enhanced so that they could strike hard and jump further.

He never fought them head on, of course. Solace always tried to ambush and cut down the numbers before fighting a defensive battle in the hallways and giving ground if he needed to instead of allowing himself to be flanked. His cloak and [Skill] allowed him to use his mana to block or avoid any hits that his abilities could not.

Solace had also altered his armor to be a bit lighter, stealther, removing a few of the plates in less necessary areas to make it possible. The end result allowed him a greater range of motion that he could abuse with flexibility allocations.

At one point, when he was fighting an elite brute, he was able to fall over backwards into a roll to dodge its grab, something he could have never done before. Fortunately, the enhancements involved a metal that were still inferior to his bat, so he could inflict blunt force trauma to anything that he hit with it.

And then, after a brisk two hours cleaning up the front half, he found himself standing before the boss’ room.

There was no threshold here, the monster within simply did not like to leave, another reason why Solace had picked out this rift in particular.

He took quick sips of water at his side and bites of a protein bar he had bought for delves like this where real, long breaks were unsafe. He allowed himself five minutes to catch his breath, double check his gear, and then stepped to the side while activating the runic formation which would open the door.

Immediately, bolts and lasers flew out from beyond, hitting nothing as Solace had taken cover. He used his bat to extend the cloak out a bit, its reflective properties allowing him to see what lay within without poking his head out.

The boss, clad in a full body armor which hid every inch of its flesh, was a creature heads and shoulders bigger than Solace, giant even when compared to the two brutes which stood beside it. There were also two pairs of ranged attackers, blasters and crossbows trained at the door.

Solace really, really did not want to go in there, but each of the creatures were intelligent and seemingly disciplined enough to stay inside rather than chase after him and allow him to employ his usual tactics. He spent several moments mapping the inside, seeing where he could take cover in the rather sparsely decorated dome of a room.

Then an idea struck him.

Carefully, silently, he backed away from the door and down the hallways. He began to collect the weapons from fallen orcs that he found. Swords which could be sold later went into a bag, blasters which could be melted or turned into scrap as well, but the crossbows fused to the arm? He lopped those right off of the corpses.

After several minutes of careful study of its mechanisms, keeping his Talent enhanced ears trained for any possible movement so that he wouldn’t be surprised, Solace was able to understand how the machine worked. The interior of each held simple circuitry that resembled modules that he was familiar with, channels and gates that determined whether a crossbow was to reload or release. With a bit of testing, he was able to throw mana into certain regions and make it begin reloading a bolt he had looted.

With a smile, he began to gather all of the crossbows he could find that weren’t broken from his fights with the orcs. When he was done, he had roughly a dozen or so arms with weapons on them.

Solace made his way back to the boss room, setting all of the weapons right outside so he could collect them later before he left. Then, all crossbow-ed limbs within easy reach on the floor, he tossed a free arm cut from an orc into the room before stepping out just a bit with a crossbow of his own.

The lasers and bolts flew towards the decoy, thankfully, and Solace was able to peek his head and half his body through the doorway unharmed. From that angle, he aimed and fired the crossbow at one of the crossbow users by sending a rush of mana into the mechanism in his hands.

The projectile whistled through the air until it hit the creature in its gut, punching through the armor and tossing it backwards to the ground.

Solace immediately dropped the now spent crossbow to shoot with another in quick succession. That orc fell too, but then he had to duck back behind the wall to avoid the returning fire.

With all of the crossbows preloaded beside him, Solace was content with playing mind games with the two remaining ranged monsters to find windows in which he could shoot them, but it seemed like the other orcs had other ideas.

Now that it was evident that he could fire back at them at his leisure, the creatures changed their tactics. He could hear the sounds of footsteps rapidly approaching from the room, and hastily grabbed the bat at his side. He quickly changed some of his allocations from flexibility and mind in order to increase his reaction speed.

The moment the first creature emerged, a brute, he swung with the bat at its kneecap. The weapon, lighter than the Tier 4 metal that comprised it but still with the same amount of mass, met the metal joint with a clang that rang out through the hallways. Even with some allocations into durability, Solace’s hands still went numb.

But at least it wasn’t mangled like the brute’s limb was. With such a huge dent in it, the monster was no longer able to properly walk, hobbling towards him as Solace retreated backwards, rearing back his bat for another strike.

That was when all the remaining monsters, the boss, the second brute, and the two blaster bearing orcs, appeared through the door. There was no real chance for Solace to outrun them, so he didn’t.

Another bat swing to the other knee, and then the boss and second brute beared down upon him.

He dodged, ducked, and dove under their swings and grabs, moving most of his allocation out of durability and into everything else. The difference in cultivation and their numbers meant that getting hit even once was too much. Solace made sure to abuse the size of the corridors, which would have been big enough for two brutes to pass without issue but too small for the boss and a pair of brutes to attack him.

All the lasers were easily avoided due to the monsters blocking the shots. Any grabs at his cloak met a rigid material that allowed for no purchase, and any strike was avoided with skill and [Skills]. The fact that spiritual senses encompassed a radius around him in all directions helped immensely.

He aimed to land impactful but not necessarily debilitating attacks in order to keep the situation manageable. And it was in this way that Solace gradually, painstakingly, wore down two elites and a peak Tier 3 boss.

At some point he had to let go of the bat to pull himself up and over an arm that was attacking, but that was fine by him. The sword at his side was more than enough to deal the final blows through the chinks in the armor caused by overlapping pieces or outright crushed regions from his bat.

The brute with the damaged knee went down first, then the other. Solace used that moment to slip past a swing from the boss in order to rush the orcs holding blasters behind. His cloak blocked the lasers while his sword cut through them.

By the time the boss caught up to him, it was just the two of them, and Solace maneuvered himself such that he was back near one end of the doorway into the boss’ room. There, he managed to scoop up a crossbow and aim it upwards, shooting it point blank into the boss’ head. Even with the excellent armor, the terrifying weapon was still able to punch through it.

And then it was over.

With heavy breaths, Solace checked himself over. He was bruised again from all of the glancing blows and grabs turned into less effective strikes, but that wasn’t that bad. His mana was nearly out, but that just meant that he had made sure to use every resource available to him to the utmost limit.

Though, after evaluating the state of the rift and his abilities, he genuinely didn’t believe that he could safely carry anyone through it or any Tier 3 rift at this point since this was supposed to be the best option. The starting point, the ship, was relatively secure, but anyone staying in there would be out of range of his essence accumulator in short order. And trying to have them move with him was out of the question when orcs could appear in any of the branching corridors.

If he wanted to carry someone in this rift with the things he had or could feasibly get, he’d need to be Tier 3 himself, which defeated the whole point of the consideration.

After another quick reprieve where he drank some water and ate another protein bar, he shouldered his loot and made his way back into the boss room. The reward distortion, green to his spiritual senses, yielded seven Tier 3 mana stones. It was a completely average haul, but that was more than fine with Solace since it would cover the cost of his newly acquired gear.

He left the rift without glancing back. It was the one he’d be delving for the next six weeks or so, afterall. He’d be spending many more hours inside of it.

—

Time passed in a blur after that, a routine that made every day predictable such that the next five weeks seemed to occur in the blink of an eye.

Solace was back in his room, drinking from the automatically refilling canteen he had made himself. The runes on it, designed to cause and collect condensation, were spiritually enchanted, something he had managed to do without Edison’s help over the span of the weeks.

But that accomplishment wasn’t relevant to him at the moment. Instead, he was staring at the words on the private message sent to his electronic mail from a spiritual scanner. They would be ones that defined the rest of his time in this reality.

Tier 3 Talent:

Primary Effect: All aspects of cultivation now have a minimum baseline of ability regardless of allocated essence. Baseline grows with Tier.

Secondary Effect: Can heal when exposed to flame. Healing grows with stored memories.