A jolt shot through Jace’s elbows. His shoulders protested, and the palms of his hands stung.

And that was only the physical pain. The half-finished technique card sent bolts of spiritual pain racing through his channels and core-cloud again.

When the flash faded, he realized that he was hanging from the spear. Its tip had embedded in the giant beast’s throat. Jace let go and jumped down to the ground. The beast screeched with its crystalline voice, then toppled forwards. It hit the ground and kicked up a small cloud of dust.

He ejected the technique card so Lessa could keep working on it and maintained his cycling pattern.

Jace waved the cloud of dust out of his face. The beast’s body melted away into dust, and he sighed with relief. With the elite-rated darkling defeated, the Vault began to crumble around him. The Split pulled him back across space, returning his consciousness to his physical body.

The void encased him, hugging his limbs and holding him still. His hands stopped quivering, and only then did he realize that the spear he had fashioned had also disappeared—leaving only Lessa’s fabric floating in the darkness. He snatched it up.

Golden sparks poured out of the void and rushed towards his chest. They bled into his skin and fed into his bones, and his flesh burnt with a faint spiritual ache—but it was nothing in comparison to using a half-upgraded technique card. It was his Aes reward.

Soon, the muddy plain returned, appearing beneath his feet. He sighed, then pressed his fingers down into the dirt. The sapling was just ahead. He approached it.

He sat still, hands folded, trying to calm himself. He had earned plenty of cuts and scrapes. His shoulders and forearm leaked blood, and the sharp crystals had shredded his heels.

He ripped the bottom halfs of his pants off—what remained of them—and wrapped them around his feet. It’d slow the bleeding, but hopefully it’d also help keep his feet from shredding so badly in the next Vault.

There was no way he was done.

While he was finishing, Lessa proclaimed, Alright, I’ve finished the card, according to the enhancement instructions of the first branch!

She must have pressed the card back into Jace’s hand, because it appeared in the dreamspace plane as well. The engraved runes still glowed red-hot, and Lessa had dragged a few wires into different places across the plastic-y surface of the card, and where there were no wires, she had melted some of the excess metal at the edge of the card and used it to write intricate calligraphy circles.

The sapling shook and shuddered, and when Jace looked back at it, a second bud was glowing now.

Jace socketed the card, then called up the golden sheets to view the description:

[Once every one hundred and fifteen (115) seconds, allows the caster to trigger a hyperspace jump in a chosen direction. Caster will interact with solid objects. Distance limited by fuel cell Aes output.]

It had worked. They had enhanced it once. He sighed, then leaned back. It had been about a half-hour, he guessed, and he’d better report his progress to Kinfild and Lessa. He forced his eyes open and his mind to wake up.

He was still in the cell, laying at the edge between his cell and Lessa’s. Rubbing his eyes, he sat up.

“One Vault down, and one partial enhancement!” Lessa cheered softly. “And, of course, much Aes acquired from hunting!”

“What is the enhancement?” Kinfild asked. “Specifically?”

Lessa read out the same description Jace had viewed earlier, then added, “I specified that he’d interact with solid objects for now, as the skill tree suggested. The implication might have been there from the start—”

“That is how all starships behave,” Kinfild said.

“—but I figured I would add it so that later on, we have a foundation principle of the card to adjust.”

Jace sat up. His scrapes were still bleeding, and though they weren’t deep or life-threatening, they still stung.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“We should still have a few hours until we reach the Wall.” Kinfild was sitting now, but he inched closer to the side of his cell. “We still have time to keep going and keep enhancing the card.”

Jace lifted a hand, then pressed his palms against his pants. They hurt, but luckily, none of the crystal debris had left the Vault with him. It would’ve been such a hassle to pick out, like crystal splinters. “Just a moment.”

A moment became a minute, then two minutes. He caught his breath and wiped the blood off his hands and body. He’d need to do better next time, otherwise he’d shred himself in no time.

He decided, after the third minute, that he was ready. Before he laid down, though, he turned to Lessa and held out the length of orange fabric. She had ripped it off the bottom of her dress’ skirt. “Do…do you want this back?”

“Not at all.” She snickered. “It’s been inside one of those nasty beasts, and now you’ve bled all over it.”

Jace nodded. He clasped it tight in his hand—he’d need to fashion new weapons when he entered the Vaults, and it wouldn’t hurt to keep handy.

Inching back to the edge of the cell, Jace laid down and ejected the card from his core. He engaged his cycling pattern, then grabbed the Vault Core again. It was warm, but not painful to the touch. He flooded it with Aes, and a prompt appeared. He accepted it.

It took a few more minutes of emptying his mind before he slipped into the dreamspace plane. The shuddering of the starship, the inconsistent whir of its thrusters, and the bright light didn’t help at all.

As soon as he arrived on the plane of dirt, he walked toward the sapling. He wrapped his fingers around the next bud down the branch, urging a vision to appear. It showed him whispers of the card, still—of him flashing through hyperspace. This time, it planted knowledge deep in the back of his mind, assuring him that the cooldown had reduced.

And so, the grind begins, Lessa said jokingly, her voice seeping across the plane. Good luck.

“Thanks,” he muttered.

But she was right. For the next hour and a half, he challenged Vaults while she adjusted the technique card—according to the routes the branches provided. As he used the Vaults, she explained a little more. She, being a candlefolk, saw most of the dreamspace in sets of runes and calligraphy circles, and she could copy them. The branches manifested in her mind as trails of golden text for her to copy.

The first vault was a simple autumn forest—with standard, earth-coloured leaves. A horde of darklings poured out of the forest. They were almost the exact same kind of simple, decaying beasts that he found on Lyvarion. For a weapon, he fashioned another spear with a branch and the sharpest stone he could find.

Without the Whistling Blade, he couldn’t kill the darklings as quickly. He ran fast and didn’t relent, and while he had to cut through some darklings or hyperspace jump around others, he didn’t ever face an accumulated, impassable horde.

When he reached the temporary sanctuary of a clearing, he stayed near the edge and used the reprieve to remake his spear—the branch had cracked.

An elite darkling, a ram-wolf double the size of the others, leapt from the trees and attacked. It snapped its jaw and slashed with its claws, and its strikes were far more precise. Jace sprinted around behind it and slashed its calves with the extra speed of a hyperspace jump. Once it was reeling, he thrust the spear through its spine, paralyzing from the hips down. It fell and thrashed, and Jace jabbed his spear through its neck.

When he returned to the muddy plain, another surge of Aes poured into him. He cycled it around his hypercore, bending its aspect closer toward blue-tinged hyperspace-Aes.

Your Aes gets more…violent and energetic when you aspect-bend it to hyperspace, Lessa said. I’ll make the card’s runes more robust and specifically add a few extra circles to accommodate it, but that means it won’t work with pure-aspect Aes anymore.

He challenged two more Vaults, which both played out very similarly, while Lessa adjusted the card. Even though she made the odd comment now and again, he didn’t keep up the conversation.

One was a simple forest, though this time, it was late summer and the leaves were green. Another was a different crystalline planet with sapphire shards. But, in the sky, an amethyst orb hovered—a moon, maybe, or a binary planet system, because it reminded him very much of the amethyst vault, and the Split listed the darklings as karstwalkers still (even though these ones were a deep blue colour).

After the two vaults, he distributed the Aes shards that he had condensed—eight in total. He placed four on the upper body of the root-made anatomy chart, enhancing Strength. Then, he placed three more on the head, enhancing Resistance. The last one, he placed on the gut, enhancing Vitality.

Now begins the fun part, Lessa said. I finished the next enhancement—the next step of little adjustments. Take a look for yourself.

The card appeared in his hand, and he socketed it so he could read the description again. First, he noted that the name had changed to something more fitting: [Technique Card: Trigger Hyperjump (Common) (Utility) (Compatible Class: Hunter) (Compatible Aspects: Hyperspace)]

The description read:

[Once every one hundred (100) seconds, allows the caster to trigger a hyperdash in a chosen direction. Caster will interact in a limited manner with solid objects. Distance limited by fuel cell Aes output and scales with caster’s Resistance rating.]

Jace smiled. “Thanks.” He looked back at the sapling, and sure enough, another bud had lit up. “Scales with Resistance?”

Ah, now we’ll have some explaining to do, Lessa said. Uh…at least, I’ll try explain it as Kinfild did. Listen close, ‘cause this sounds important...