The tiny second hand of Albert’s metal watch, a metal circle with barely lines in place of the usual numbers to tell the time, inched closer and closer to twelve. The other hand was striking eleven. It was a morning without classes, but the relief that should have come with the knowledge that Albert was free to play with magic all morning didn’t come. It was the 20th of September, Saturday, the day of the club. There were ways to postpone the fatidic moment, namely one: the gem.

Yet he also wished to preserve today’s Hazegem activation, in case he needed to rewind time at the club later. Having never been to a club before, he anticipated many things that could go wrong there. Irrationally so, but being aware of one’s own rationality or lack thereof is not the cure for wrong logical thinking. Sometimes it is a way to relish in it instead, making the problem worse.

He did try to resist the urge to activate it. In fact, it was going quite well. He spent the whole morning experimenting with magic, and for instance he figured out that he could dismiss a fireball without throwing it, letting the mana go to waste in exchange for not blowing up his room. This led to him developing a way to gauge how much mana his mana pool had when he was full. Measured in FU, or Fireball Units where one FU was the same as casting a standard level one fireball, his total mana pool amounted to 15FU, with a recovery rate of around 20 per hour.

After he was done calculating his mana, another thought occurred to him. He thought about what happened with the Hazegem the other night, about how the gem sucked all the mana that it could from him and suddenly his mind was inflamed by the fact that he couldn’t accept defeat at the hands of a stupid purple gem. He was going to try again, this time only giving the gem the mana that he said the gem could take and not a drop more. All the while he was going to stare at a clock to figure out if there was a law the gem followed when it rewound time.

There was one, it turned out. 3 Fireball Units per hour of rewind and rewinding less than the full 5 hours meant less recharge time for the gem. Albert had fallen asleep the other night and found the gem usable when he woke up, which meant that it had a maximum of 7 hours 48 minutes of rechange time for a 5 hour rewind. He only needed to wait a bit and take note of how much time it took to recharge after the 1-hour rewind and he could begin to have an idea of the formula that surely was behind its functioning.

There was an assumption being made here, and he knew it. The assumption was that magic still respected math in the same way that physical phenomena did. Which wasn’t all that obvious, especially if one postulated the possible presence of intelligence or, god forbid, sentience behind the nature of mana. The scary prospect was that this theory wasn’t as far-fetched as it could have been not two days ago. Albert still remembered well the sensation that came with using the [Appraisal], and the missing memory of everything else related to its activation. Using it again in skill form didn’t produce anything of note, sadly, relegating the whole event as a one-time-only thing that did nothing but muddy the waters.

It turned out that the gem took exactly two hours to become once again usable after rewinding one hour of real-world time, which meant that he could effectively double the amount of hours that there were in a day. (Let’s say it’s 10 sharp. He rewinds it back to 9. He then waits until it’s 11 so that he can rewind back again, this time to 10. In total, by the time it’s 11 again, he will have lived 4 hours instead of 2).

With nothing else to do, Albert waited for a refill of his mana, rewound time back to 7AM and waited. To be honest, he could use some more sleep, since he was feeling a bit tired. He also wanted to do the daily challenge from the system but he didn’t want to go in without mana, with only hope that the system realized his lack of magic and refilled his mana pool for him. By his calculations, a 45-minute nap was all he needed to refill his magic.

[Transporting to Daily challenge – Day 04: Plasticity training]

The first thing that came to mind when Albert looked at the room was one of those ancient Mayan temples from Tomb Raider. There was the façade of granite, framing a grand entrance to the torch-lit ruins, overgrown with vegetation. There was the huge cave containing it all with barely a few beams of light coming from the cracks in the ceiling. There was the huge statue right above the steps leading to the entrance. There was the rushing river below.

The sight was majestic and beautiful. There was a great bronze door at the top of the huge staircase, shut close. On its surface was a mural of sorts, with scenes of battle and feats of war depicted on it in relief patterns and frescos, colors washed away by time and metals greening with oxidation. On the double doors were holes and circles, that upon prodding and poking proved to be moving parts that could be rotated, until they aligned with each other in particular ways. One of these patterns, most probably, was the correct combination to get the great door to finally open.

Now, this was a challenge called plasticity training. In his mind, this meant that Albert had to take his whole arsenal of magic and use it in novel ways, thinking outside the box to figure out what to do. The first thing to do was always going to be the same however: using [Appraisal].

[Great mausoleum of Toim’Ras.]

Aiming the spell at the door, rather than at the whole structure in the cave, yielded another result altogether.

[Bronze gates of Raa’s. Said to have never been opened in a thousand centuries, these gates bar the entry to the mausoleum where Toim’Ras rests.]

Now this was progress. There was more information, useless lore that didn’t mean much but that revealed a pattern: Albert could choose arbitrarily smaller objects to Appraise, and the skill followed his intent.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Which meant that the next experiment was going to be trying to appraise the circles and shapes on the doors themselves.

[A puzzle that needs to be solved to gain entry to the mausoleum of Toim’Ras.]

Okay. This is something but it’s not enough. What about the single symbols?

[Owl.]

[Cat.]

[Number 7.]

Still not the answer to the riddle. But, and this was a huge step forward, the skill was able to translate the symbol into its actual meaning in English! Which meant that it could be used to translate and gain information about things even if they were simple ideograms written in an alien tongue. Great progress.

Eventually, after some tries and using his phone to take notes, Albert came to the conclusion that there was no logic behind how the glyphs were placed on the circles. He managed to translate them with ease, and it turned out that the outer circle was made of symbols that represented animals while the inner was numbers, but there was no correlation between the numbers and the meaning. Furthermore, the circles could be rotated independently without any indication that a particular configuration was the correct one.

There had to be some other way to progress beyond the doors. Taking stock of the alternatives, Albert went over his skill list.

[Perception] gave him the shape of the cave, and not much more. He could see well in the dark when using it, but that was it. He could also hear some sort of rhythmic beating sound coming from somewhere in the depths of the mountain he was in, but he couldn’t make anything of it. If it was a solution or even a hint, he didn’t know how to interpret it.

The other skills were [Healing] and [Fireball], plus the time traveling gemstone in his pocket. That was it.

Finally, he decided that he had enough of it. There was always the brute force way, he thought, like using the fireball to superheat the metal of the door until he could be let through. He knew he could somewhat do this, even though it meant abusing the skill, by not throwing the fireball and letting his defensive ring ward him from the excess heat. He went at it by seting up some rocks he found on the ground so that his hand was in some sort of furnace, shielding his body and directing all the heat to a singular point in the doors. Right where the lock and its mechanisms were supposed to be.

Once they were heated up to melting point… he paused. There was a problem with his plan. Melting point for brass was close to a thousand degrees Celsius, and he doubted that his fireball could ever reach that temperature and even if it did, that his ring could protect him from that kind of heat. But! It didn’t need to! He didn’t need to melt the door open, he only needed to weaken the mechanisms until he could finally force it open. He had a skill to help him with that, didn’t he? [Strengthening III] gave him superhuman explosive power as well as a maximum output of force up to three times his normal strength.

As far as plans went, it was not the most conventional one but it seemed to fit right in with the plasticity theme, especially because it used most of his arsenal of skills to accomplish the task. He doubted that the trial would be over just with him opening the door, but it was a start. He also foresaw one possible problem that might arise once the doors were finally forced open, and he prepared for it. As he slid his hand in the makeshift furnace, he also clutched the gem in his pocket with the other hand. Better be safe than sorry.

The door began to redden around the point of contact. The greenish tint of the oxidized metal began to change color around in a halo, while specks of something on the surface of the metal burned and filled the air with the smell of coal. There was no pain coming from the hand stuck in the furnace, meaning that the smell must have come from some sort of residue. Once it was hot enough, the door was easy to break with a firm shoulder slam.

Too bad the ring had exhausted its charge. Albert recoiled in pain, massaging the area where his arm touched the heated metal. It was going to blister, but he could spare the mana to supercharge the healing process while he explored. Speaking of exploring: now that the door was finally open he could take a look at what was inside. Or that was the plan, because as soon as he took one single step beyond the threshold the whole place began to shake.

The quake was quickly strong enough to make Albert lose his footing, and large sections of the walls and ceiling were beginning to show cracks and sings of irreparable damage. There was a gamble to make, a bet Albert was counting on winning. He clutched the gem and slid one single FU of mana in it. Immediately time reversed its flow. The cracks disappeared, crawling back to where they originated, the doors behind him slammed close and the red glow around the height of the lock quickly grew dim and disappeared.

A fireball held above his palm lit the darkness he found himself submerged in. He was inside. His gamble worked. The security system of this place was tied to the door, and opening it without the right combination was what triggered it. Now that he was inside there was no danger, no detectors that could spot him. There were bound to be traps around, of course, but the first hurdle was—

The soft texture of his bed accompanied the sensation of pressure on his legs and back, telling him that he was back to his cross-legged position on the bed.

[Daily Challenge Complete.]

* Reward: 100$

“That’s it?”

The whole plasticity trial only consisted in opening a door and surviving?

At least he now had 200$ in his pocket to spend however he liked. That was a good thing for sure, although he was a bit disappointed. Perhaps at the lack of an adventure, or perhaps because he had hoped to gain some more magical stuff from the trial. Perhaps he shouldn’t get his hopes up too much or he was going to get spoiled by the system, used to getting too much stuff too easily. But, at the same time, wasn’t that the very purpose of the system?

There was other stuff to consider though, for instance how the trial went well only thanks to his wit and his preparations. Only because he was overly distrustful of what lied beyond the door did he save himself from a big emergency situation. It might not seem like it because it went well, flawlessly even, but his life had been at stake. Make no mistake there. He was taking it all too lightly, treating the system like a game, and his life like it didn’t matter.

The sensation of paralyzing fear seemed to settle in, taking over his body. Deciding that he didn’t like it, he went back to his mindset of desiring more power, seizing the thought that fanned his ego. The system was surely going to come to his rescue.

[New quest]

* You have undoubtedly realized the advantages associated with mastery of time. From escaping tough situations, to being able to have more time to do the things that matter, being a master of the flow of entropy has obvious advantages. Your creative use of it also gave you insight.

* Quest: Train [Perception] until you become able to perceive entropy gradients.

* Reward: Bullet Time skill video.

See? Just like he hoped. And it was still early morning, he had plenty of time.

There was a wide grin on Albert’s face as he read through the quest instructions and rewards.

“Bullet Time sounds very Matrix-y. I’m excited.”