My questions had only grown by the time I’d returned to my temporary lair. The city was waking up around me by the time I reached it. The food sellers had set up their carts on the street corners and the beggar’s were staking out the best spots ahead of the morning rush. I had to circle around the tenement block I called my own just to find a side without observers and climbing it was even worse. The building’s thin walls did little to dull the background noise of a hundred or more humans hauling themselves from their beds and readying for another day of thankless labor.

Some of the rooms had to have a dozen people in them. That might make a dozen sources of noise to mask mine, but it meant a dozen sets of eyes too, one of which was bound to be pointing at the outside wall. At another time I’d have laughed at this climb, but as tired as I was climbing up the winding path that avoided every window was a massive pain in the ass.

By the time I pulled myself over the edge and let myself fall on the ground I was as tired as if I’d spent the last ten minutes running from wolves rather than taking a fairly easy climb. Was this what growing old felt like?

I couldn’t hold back a bitter laugh as I realized the comparison was a little too close for comfort. Age made a traitor of the body, and wasn’t I in that condition already? Hardly a pleasant thought, but when had I ever had an abundance of those?

I got up off the floor, brushing the worst of the soot and ash from my back, and navigated the safe path to my room. It was time to check anyway, then I’d let myself rest. I sat down and took deep breaths, keeping my back ramrod straight to force me awake as I sought a more peaceful state of mind. The stress made it harder than it should have been, but I was no stranger to hardship.

The patches on my soul were straining as the strain grew greater. My once orderly soul bloated like a twisting tree warping itself around an obstacle over years of growth. The higher levels of my soul still grew straight as a healthy pine, but I could see evidence of that changing before my very eyes. The barrier between my original soul and my first Level was buckling beneath the pressure as well as the outside level. I turned my attention to where the outside barrier of my soul traveled upwards from my natural soul and across my Levels. What I found wasn’t encouraging.

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At first it looked perfectly intact, but the closer I looked the worse it got. As my natural soul grew within bounds too small to contain it it pressed against the outer barrier, stretching and cracking it. It couldn’t press as far into my first proper Level because the Level itself provided some structure, but that just redirected the pressure outward. That pressure put the wall between my natural soul and my first Level under tension instead. The pressure buckling my soul outward pulled at the join between the outer and inner walls.

There wasn’t any visible cracking there yet, but that was no reason to lack concern. It was a clear concentration of stress and there was no telling if that would out pace the more direct outward pressure. A race to see what could break me first and whoever won, I lost.

Could a Class solve this? The reinforcing energy would certainly delay the final collapse of my soul, but that was already a solution I’d dismissed. The internal pressures within my natural soul were already approaching dangerous levels. The soul I’d been born with was never designed to be put in a box and as dangerous as a Level collapse would be its growth wasn’t just a threat to the box. The forced confinement was already causing problems with my transformation, if it got any worse would it hurt my natural biological processes?

I didn’t want to wake up one day with my lungs inside out.

Unless it wasn’t the reinforcing properties of a Class that the tinker had thought would save me. The energies they ran on were supposed to boost certain processes in nebulous and poorly defined ways. I saw no reason why Classes would be limited to profession based ideas as most of the examples were. Perhaps if I took up a Goblin Class I would ease the transformation, or even make it so efficient it could fit in the alloted space.

But no, that couldn’t possibly be what that strange and suspicious man had meant. Strange and suspicious he may have been, but there was no doubt in my heart that if he’d known of my goblin nature I’d be dead.

That raised further questions about how applicable his advice even was. It had been given under false pretenses, leaving me with no choice but to hope my situation was as close to the human condition he’d described as possible.

Of course he’d mentioned “orthogonal multi-classing”, which implied the answer was not in some basic element of a Class, but in a far more advanced application of those principles.

Not for the first time it struck me how easy this could have been if I’d just had an expert I could trust. Of course, there was only one expert I’d ever trust and my mother had never spoken of classes to me. She’d probably assumed I couldn’t Level at all, and it was doubtful she could even have been called an expert on the subject at all.

As it was I was left to figure shit out on my own, as usual. Even that handful of offhand cryptic words from the tinker was uncharacteristically good luck. Orthogonal multi-classing implied a greater need to separate whatever the classes were, but it was difficult to do that without knowing what normal multi-classing was supposed to look like.

I was still pondering that as I drifted off towards a fitful and restless sleep.