For the briefest moment, when he first opened his eyes, only to see the blank void surrounding him on all sides, he worried that he’d somehow wound up right back in the middle of that unreal space between restarts.

The spike of fear he felt at the thought he’d be forced to do all of that again nearly sent him into paroxysms of petulant rage and despair.

Then, the simple fact that he could feel his eyes in the first place sank in, and the barrage of purple system messages that bombarded him shortly after, set all those worries to rights once and for all.

“Huh. Holy shit. I actually did it. Was not expecting that.”

And yet, as he poured over the system messages, he began to question just what it was he’d actually done in the first place. Well, he knew what he’d done, naturally. He’d made himself a wealthy and powerful enemy. What he didn’t understand was why he was effectively being penalized, and quite harshly at that, for ostensibly doing the right thing.

“I mean, they were the underdogs right? Everyone loves an underdog. So why does it feel like I would’ve been vastly better off had I sold them out to the highest bidder instead? Also, isn’t it kind of fucked up that I had the option to kill both the rebel general and the grand duke? Would I have been better rewarded had I killed both of them, or merely made myself even more enemies? I mean, how do I win in this scenario? Seems a bit unfair, don’t you think?”

The trial worlds were not created with the concept of “fairness” in mind. They were developed to accurately simulate martial challenge, stressful circumstance, and nuanced social dynamics with real world consequences. With the end goal being to test how the participant responds accordingly.

“But… what does that have to do with acquiring power? I mean, I’d been under the impression this was all just some big excuse to make crazy weapons and test them on people without having to worry about being labeled, you know, a mass murderer.”

That is not incorrect.

“Yeah yeah. But it’s not the full truth either, right?”

Correct.

“Enlightening…” Jun growled. “Hey. You’re feeling rather chatty today. Could’ve used some of this transparency earlier when I was basically ramming my head against the whole iterative process thing. What changed?”

I did not have anything interesting to say then.

“That sounds suspiciously like an excuse. Didn’t? Or didn’t feel like trying?”

They are one and the same.

“Oh great. That’s just peachy. So, might I assume I can rely on your timely intervention going forward?”

You cannot.

“Figures. By the way, these titles are kind of… I don’t know, weirdly specific? You wouldn’t happen to have a hand in their generation by any chance, would you?”

The assessment, creation, and distribution of temporary titles is under the select and direct purview of my person. That is correct.

“Well then, fuck you very much for that free thinker perk. I mean, I’d thought it read as overly passive aggressive, and I’d fixed you as an asshole from the get go, but wow. I’m glad to see my intuition for these sorts of things hasn’t dulled in my time here.”

*Ding!*

Your temporary title has been manually evolved. Rewards may vary, but any and all stat gains will remain the same.

|Free Thinker| (Limited)

Earned by iterating in a direction previously unexplored in all the multiverse. Unstable, malfunctional, and more likely to harm your person than the enemy, let it never be said a free thinker does not deserve points for originality.

+1 celestial essence to all stats.

There is now a one hundred percent chance for you to receive a “Great Job!” sticker, and a fifty percent chance to receive a “Boo Hoo! Poor You! Cry About it Why Don’t You!” sticker upon awakening.

“That just-! I don’t even-! You…!”

My gods, did I just get demolished by a billion year old knockoff system interface?

“I don’t have time for this… this… childish…. This is childish! I don’t need to take this! Leave me alone already, I need to think. I have grown up thoughts to think about. You wouldn’t understand!”

Yeah, that’ll show her.

Ears burning, he turned his attention inward. Because he really did have important things to think about, and not at all because he was searching for the perfect comeback. After a full minute spent frowning in vain, he gave up on his dreams of a witty rebuttal and turned to the actual business at hand.

Silently he pulled over his “Super Ultimate Awesome Never Going to Fail Defensive Technique,” blew apart the mess of poorly connected ideas, and began to start again from the beginning. To build up a base that would be the bedrock for any alterations he wanted to make moving forward.

It was a technique he’d developed and subsequently refined in the three weeks following his initial revelation—that to make sweeping alterations, first there had to be a place of common ground.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Effectively, where he’d previously been attacking the problem from the outside going in—forming the idea of what he wanted from the get go, and trying to force that shape into something the patron would appreciate—he now came at the problem from the inside going out.

Starting with a cluster of image threads the patron ideal already agreed with wholeheartedly, and slowly carving his way outward from there. It was a delicate dance. One where he had to keep in mind the temperament, nature, and always, always, the inherent vanity of the patron ideal in question.

It was sometimes easy to forget, caught up in the nitty gritty details as he so often was, that intention mattered here above all else.

Finding that groove, that special sweet spot, that invisible resonance which practically hummed with the patron ideals implicit approval, and riding that wave into uncharted waters.

It was as exhilarating an experience as it was terrifying.

A constant process of careful addition and subtraction. Adding a little here, shaving away a little there, and all done with the ever present need to flatter and appease. No matter what changes he wanted to make, maintaining that constant line of approval remained paramount.

He figured it was a lot like walking a tightrope, except that, all throughout the creation process, he had to be sure that any changes he made were balanced out by an equal and opposite appeal to the patrons vanity—it's over inflated opinion of itself.

Where slipping up and falling short not only meant he had to start the process all over again, from the very beginning, but that the patron would also be less inclined to give him any such creative leeway moving forward—at least insofar as those particular aspects and imageries were concerned.

Ultimately forcing him to come up with new images, and new sensations that were still relevant to his initial idea. New leads with which to ply the patron—entice them to once more venture into the direction he was aiming for.

Thankfully, the actual process of sculpting wasn’t nearly so involved as he’d feared it might be.

As mentioned, intent was paramount, and so just willing something to be a certain way convincingly enough—even if the actual design of the thing was vague in his mind at best—very quickly had the finer details filling themselves in without further need of his input.

The visual manifestation of the mantra shifting its form to accommodate his intentions. Although, and again he couldn’t stress this enough, every choice, even the design of the thing, had to be measured against the possible disinterest, or worse, disapproval of the ideal.

Even if it was basically automatic, it didn’t mean he could afford to slip up in the way he thought about things, if not the particulars in general. A tricky thing to manage, in other words, though it did mean that the complicated lines of geometry, which had so intimidated him in the very beginning, never actually became an issue.

Meaning that whatever sacred geometry actually made his mantras tick generally saw to themselves, just so long as his proposal held.

And it was a proposal, an appeal to higher power, or at least that was how he thought of it. Presenting studied forethought, good will, and an even greater track record in exchange for power. Throw in a studiously unhelpful desk clerk and an ostentatious sudo-cathedral and he might have been applying for a bank loan.

To touch briefly on specifics, one of the most prominent, and, in his opinion, one of the more inspired ideas he’d come up with—with regards to the careful balancing of creative divergence, against patronly approval—had come about when he’d thought to introduce clauses into his conceptual proposals.

Concessions made directly to the patron at large, which effectively balanced out the many unsavory changes he wanted to make to his… let’s call it his unique interpretation of its nature. Given the exact nature of the changes he wanted to make, he’d quickly found that these concessions needed to be rather extreme in order to meet the conceptual deficit his willful bouts of creativity often saddled him with.

For instance, when he’d wanted to shoot cool laser beams from his eyes, something for which the patron of piercing wasn’t exactly enamored, he’d been forced to implement, not one, but two concessions. “Hypertension” and “Stand Your Ground.” Both of which played off of and highlighted a key aspect inherent to the concept of piercing.

Focus.

Through Hypertension, he forcefully set the whole of his mind to something.

Narrowing his thoughts to such an insane degree, that it actually had the effect of giving him severe migraines if he was careful, and, on the far end, fatal brain hemorrhages when he was not.

Stand Your Ground, meanwhile, operated on a very similar principle. Constricting his movements utterly and completely, and thereby leaving no room for anything but his total absorption in the task at hand.

He suspected he could’ve gone even further than that, cutting off all sensations he deemed non-critical—when it came to punching holes in ne’er-do-well’s at range, that is—but he’d already found equilibrium by the time he’d thought to try it, and didn’t relish the idea of being deaf and mute on top of being totally inert.

Essentially, by restricting parts of himself to appease patronly sensibilities—sort of like sneaking a bitter, though necessary, dollop of medicine through a big spoonful of honey—he was not only able to take the application of a concept into interesting and unexplored directions, but he suspected he was also able to get more out of the concept than he had any right to at such low stability thresholds.

Cool Shooty Laser Eyes, or as he’s so recently renamed it, “Piercing Gaze,” was only a poor grade mantra after all, and yet it had been able to best the elite of a city whose technology far eclipsed his own.

Nearly finished with the base structure for the mantra he had in mind, Jun incorporated some last minute aspects into the mix. Sprinkling them on like the finishing touches.

The icing on the cake for instance. The cherry on top you might say.

He pictured the tiny scratches, the miniature grooves which marred its blocky surface. Felt the comforting heft, the feel of its leather wrapped hilt in his hands. And, taking one last minute to crystallize the many impressions in his mind, he promptly opened his eyes to see what he’d wrought.

He greeted by a very welcome notification.

Basic Mantra: [Hammer Blow] (1st Aspected)

Grade: (Excellent Quality)

Conceptual Stability: 60%

Before him rotated a well used war hammer.

It was chipped, malformed, and noticeably rusted in places. And yet, it was undoubtedly the most real thing he’d seen in his entire life. It was hard to describe, this certainty that the mere projection floating in front of him likely held more universal weight than he did, but, this close, the truth of the matter was undeniable.

Jun, in awe of his own creation, simply admired the purple projection for a time. Then, with a roll of his neck to work out the nonexistent kinks, he began with the painstaking modification process, a grim smile tugging at the corners of his lips.