The first thing Hale felt was soul piercing pain. He slowly opened his eyes to see the dimly lit cave he had fallen asleep in, not having moved an inch, light illuminating from his flashlight that he dropped a few yards away. He looked to his chest and felt better seeing that his wounds weren’t open, but the pool of dried blood he sat in made it obvious where his lightheadedness came from.

With pained movements he pulled a water canteen and a small rations pack from his backpack. After drinking his fill of water he opened a military issue MRE, followed the directions to use the heat pack and was soon snacking on shredded beef with barbeque sauce. Hale had to admit, it was much better than he thought it would be.

After some strength came back to him he stood with shaky movements and made his back to the end of the cave. When he did he found what they were huddled around. It was a bound book with a black cover that seemed to shift unnaturally under the light with two words on the cover, First Shadow. Just reading it made Hale feel like he was being stared at from the darkness, like a god was gazing at him from some far off dimension.

But, when Hale flipped through the pages he was immediately baffled. He didn’t quite know what he was expecting but it wasn’t this. What filled the pages were highly detailed diagrams of the human body, oddly drawn pathways through the anatomical drawings. With no choice he went back to the very first page.

“Held within are the beginning levels of the techniques made by the First Shadow, the first assassin. As long as your concept shares the law of darkness then the techniques within will turn you to a shadow.”

Hale finally understood. This was exactly what he needed, a way to turn his conceptual energy into battle prowess. While Hale didn’t understand what the writer meant by a law, he did know that if any concept besides shadow was going to share this “darkness law” it was going to be hidden knowledge. What else is better at hiding things than the dark?

And to Hale’s delight the first chapter, while short, went into some explanation how to move conceptual energy around. This chapter seemed to exist to make sure the reader was doing it the correct way, not to teach them from scratch so Hale had to make a few deductions to make it all make sense. But even with this, it was a massive gain. What he learned was that to gain proper control of conceptual energy you first needed to push it into your blood, where it will stabilize as it's pushed through your body which should only take a few moments if proficient in the process. The next step was to guide the energy to circulate through the body in specific ways which will call out latent powers from your conceptual energy, which comes from your concept, and create phenomena that are called techniques.

The thing to note is that channeling abilities that are naturally granted by your concept will always pull from the reserves of energy in your mind before pulling from your body. That mind space that Hale had called it was actually named the mind palace in the book. The final thing he gleaned from this opening chapter was that only a person with the concept of the original creator of the technique could truly use it to its full ability. While others would be left with at max 50% of the original power of it. This is because when one with only a shared law used it, they were essentially only using a percentage of their concept instead of the whole thing, causing the potency to drop. Thankfully, this was universal to every technique, but that also meant that if someone had multiple self created techniques they would be beyond what Hale could imagine.

The final point that Hale learned was the difficulties of control. The reason someone couldn’t simply use more energy on a technique to make up for that 50% deficiency was because the more conceptual energy there is, the harder it is to control. And the consequences of not controlling your conceptual energy, especially if it's already circulating, wasn't low. At minimum you’ll end up with terrible radiation burns as the energy irradiates your flesh, at worst you could end up blowing up a limb or rupturing an organ.

Hale would be lying if he said he wasn’t severely off put by these possible outcomes, but he kept reading anyways. This only meant he couldn’t be rash. On the last page of the opening chapter was a detailed mental technique. At first it seemed a strange outlier in this book that looked much closer to a medical textbook but Hale wasn’t quick to dismiss it.

Since Hale was still recovering from his terrible wounds he had no wish to leave this cave so soon, so instead he would practice. Hale sat cross legged and began to go through the motions that the book detailed. He let out a very short but very powerful pulse of conceptual energy from his mind, and after a moment he tried to reel it back into his mind palace. He failed the first try, the concept simply too foreign to him, it was like trying to will something to move like when he pretended to wave open an automatic door like a jedi.

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But, on his fourth try he succeeded and what happened in his mind almost made his jaw drop. The pulse of energy, acting almost like a radar, had pinged his entire body, perfectly mapping his body, all the way down to the smallest nerves. Of course, this didn’t all of the sudden give him perfect knowledge or control of his body, but what it did do was make moving energy through his body much easier since he at least had a map of it.

In his first attempt of circulation he let out a small amount of energy from his mind palace, but it quickly dissipated out of his body and into the atmosphere. On his second and third try the same thing happened. So, Hale stopped and thought about it for a while. Even if the mind palace wasn’t physically in the brain, when he pushed energy from his palace into the real world it always originated from his brain, and so how then would he acclimate that energy into his blood quickly?

Brain blood vessels. That was what Hale had decided, instead of trying to shift the energy to his heart first, the moment he released some conceptual energy he immediately pushed it into the blood vessels that were all over and in his brain. And almost like it was always meant to work that way, the energy melded into his blood, circulating through his body without his guidance. It now simply moved along with his blood, slowly spreading out until all of his blood had a tiny bit of conceptual energy attached to it.

Hale immediately felt lighter, stronger, higher endurance, and more flexible. It felt like he had just taken a performance enhancer. Of course it wasn’t as exaggerated as doing anything superhuman, but it did feel quite good. It was then that he continued to read and was enlightened. That technique of coating your skin in conceptual energy was the most basic and ubiquitous technique, called Conceptual Coating, but it wasn’t just for skin, it could be any part of your body. Conceptual energy was highly resistant to anything without it, and this came to the second part of this technique. With some skill you can even coat objects in contact with you, so coating a weapon in conceptual coating will negate an opponent's coating while making normal objects as easy to cut as air.

If this was all he had gained Hale would have been happy, but this was just the first chapter. One could say that while this excursion put Hale into a bind as he was now badly injured, it could also be said that this book had given him a total rebirth.

Hale read on, the first true technique of this book was called Shadow Gait, and it was a complex diagram of circulation paths and conceptual coatings to certain muscles and bones. Being slightly daunted by the complexity of it Hale skipped to another technique but was appalled to see the pathways double in complexity, and the next was even more complex than that. He didn’t even have confidence in using the first technique with enough proficiency to not blow himself up. Hale only now realized that it would be a good amount of time before he ever used these.

Refocusing his efforts on Shadow Gait, he took it slow as he practiced coating the specific muscles and bones in his legs and ankles, this was meant to take the strain off the body while performing the technique. Hale took to that rather quickly since he could take advantage of the mental map of his body he had.

Then when he felt confident he moved onto the circulation method, it took him an entire day but he eventually got it down to a point where he didn’t need every ounce of his focus to do it correctly. And by this point three days had passed since he woke up and he would soon need to find fresh water as his canteen had run out.

After practicing the actual application of it for another half day in the cave, he finally decided to return to the surface. What met him was a black sky devoid of stars or a moon.

“Perfect” Hale’s smile grew.

Using Acquisition he now knew where a small spring stream was, and with that he put his foot out like was going to step on a stair and used Shadow Gait, a small dark disc appearing under his foot as he stepped into the air and springing off it with more force than he could ever create on the ground.

What Shadow Gait did was two-fold. The first was to condense shadow under your foot to allow one to step into the air, and the other was to use that condensed shadow to spring yourself forward. But, how could such a powerful and, all things considered, simple technique be without drawbacks? Shadow Gait was completely unusable in the light. But even with that Hale was more than happy as he shot through the air at least 10 feet up at this point, his black hair fluttering behind him. Taking long strides he put the physical effort of a slow jog yet moved with the speed of the average person’s full sprint.

With every circulation of a technique some of the conceptual energy was lost, or all of it depending on the technique but what made Hale quite happy was that the drain in this case was very reasonable. With his reserves full he could probably run like this for an hour. In the end his stamina gave out long before his energy, especially since he was still injured.

As he walked the rest of the way he was stuck in his thoughts. Instead of lasting an hour he should be able to use that technique for at least 6 hours. The book was very clear about that. In the end Hale had to chalk it up to efficiency and proficiency. About twenty minutes later he found himself at a small trickling stream. He drank straight from it, feeling refreshed.

He uncapped his military canteen but before he could begin to fill it up he saw shadows shift in his peripheral vision. Fear gripped his heart, he quickly formed a coating over every inch of his skin without thoughts of waste. A thin hand made of long claws slammed into his chest, only pushing a half inch in before Hale rocketed backwards from the force. If Hale didn’t have Conceptual Coating he was sure he would have been bisected. The wind was knocked out of his lungs but after his second near death experience he seemed to be getting used to reacting on the fly.

Using Shadow Gait to control his fall and land on his feet he pulled out his knife, but as he looked back to the stream there was nothing there. His heart could only sink further as felt something slam into his back as he now flew forward. Twisting in the air he watched as the lanky 9 foot tall creature made of black nothingness melted into the darkness of the night only to reappear where Hale’s momentum was taking him.