Ray took a look through his new options a few times. The choices he had been offered were pretty different.

[Spell Selection]

True Void [Barrier] [Tier 4]

A barrier spell that blocks any magic used against the caster. Gather primal energy into a depthless orb and set it above yourself. Condense the Mana used to craft it to imbue it with magical gravitas, which then inexorably pulls all nearby energy into it. At Tier 4, this spell costs 80 Mana, lasts 2 minutes, and blocks up to Tier 6 Mana-based abilities.

True Enhancement [Utility] [Tier 5]

A self-cast spell that converts any selected spell from using regular Mana to True Mana. This temporarily evolves the selected spell into an enhanced version with advanced capabilities. At Tier 5, this spell converts the selected spell’s cost to two-and-a-half times as much as the unenhanced version and lasts 2 minutes and 30 seconds.

True Mark [Offensive] [Tier 5]

An offensive spell that marks any selected target with True Mana. The marked target will automatically channel True Mana with any attempt to channel regular Mana, leading to devastating spiritual damage for those unprepared. At Tier 5, this spell’s effect lasts 5 minutes and costs 100 Mana.

Well. Ray laughed. Weren’t those some rather interesting choices for him.

Since he still wasn’t anywhere close to feeling well enough to get out of this dungeon and go about his business, Ray took some time pondering the choices he had been offered. It was nice that the System was once again offering a wide array of options to round himself out. It wasn’t just a list of offensive spells. There was a barrier and a utility spell as well.

Even better, Ray couldn’t just neglect the non-offensive options and go with more firepower. Not when they looked pretty damn useful.

True Void blocking attacks up to Tier 6 would be incredibly helpful. His defence against any non-physical attack would essentially be guaranteed then.

Ray could already imagine a dark blot floating over his head, eating up anything rushing his way, while he laughed maniacally under its baleful gaze directed at his enemies. Yes, that painted quite the picture, didn’t it?

True Enhancement appeared ridiculously good too. Converting any of his spells into their True Mana version made Ray salivate at the prospect of seeing their “enhanced capabilities”. What would something like Primal Summons be able to do with Ture Mana? What about Chaos Chymify, or even Shatterclaw?

Then there was True Mark. So far, his offensive options had all been about dealing damage. But this new spell was a completely different ballgame.

Essentially, with True Mark, Ray would turn off his opponent’s ability to use Mana at all. The pain of the dungeon’s last challenge flashed across his mind, distant but still distinct enough to recall how horrific it was. He still hadn’t recovered from it. Inflicting something like that on an opponent would surely spell his victory.

Except, True Mark wasn’t going to force them to use True Mana. Not really.

It would only ensure that, if they did decide to use an ability that required Mana, they would only have access to True Mana instead. For regular, run-of-the-mill opponents, Ray saw how useful this could be. They would be locked out of using any of their Mana-based spells, skills, whatever.

But was Mana the only thing needed for abilities? What if there were skills and abilities that didn’t need Mana like his spells did? Not just passive abilities, but active ones that used a different source. What if some abilities consumed Recovery instead of Mana?

He had proof, thanks to Gritty, that not everyone needed Mana at all times to use their spells and skills.

That was, ultimately, the thing that kept Ray from picking True Mark. Useful as it sounded, there was just too much risk associated with it. When it worked, it would basically guarantee his victory.

When it didn’t, it would be a waste of an enormous amount of Mana.

Fast and furious though his fighting style had become, Ray wasn’t ready to take that sort of risk with anything. Besides, he had other options that could be just as good, if not better.

Ray couldn’t see any negatives to True Void in the same way he had with True Mark, but in the end, True Enhancement won out. The prospect of seeing advanced versions of the spells he already had was just too intriguing. Look, if Primal Summons actually called upon a full-on amalgamation of the Soul Aspects in Lifeblood Crucible, he wanted to see it.

With his new spell selected, Ray next had to wait until he felt decent enough to get out of the dungeon. Soon as he healed up and the pain stopped being debilitating.

Anytime now…

It turned out anytime now actually took several more hours. Ray even fell asleep after a while, when he realized movement was just not possible. Especially not if he had to get through a courtyard filled with murderous magic statues.

Ray groaned as he got up. How long had it been? Hopefully, he hadn’t wasted an entire night inside the dungeon. Or, whatever passed for night in the Tower.

He moved gingerly. Even now, any motion made his muscles tense and jitter like there was an undercurrent of electricity driving through him, tearing off a certain something that had grounded him before that he had never realized was there. He still felt raw. Like he was a plucked chicken waiting to be cooked on MasterChef.

Grunting mostly to himself, Ray headed out. At least he could move better with his wings active. He considered testing the True Enhancement just then, to see how it affected Primal Summons, but Ray decided not to mess around with those statues nearby.

He zipped through them without trouble. The statues were still active, still hunting him, but the Mana Veils were down. They hadn’t barged through the door to the last chamber, though.

Thankfully, they also didn’t follow him outside the dungeon.

“Alright,” he said. “Time to find and plunder more dungeons.” He paused, then grimaced. “Did I just say plunder?”

Ray took a few moments to let his next steps settle in his head. His goal was to find the next Tower Node. The Marauder had said there was another somewhere nearby, if he could be trusted. Since the last one Ray had found was from his tutorial zone, it stood to reason that he might find another in a local dungeon.

Well, one dungeon down. Several others to check.

As Ray surveyed the surrounding area to find the next dungeon, he found another small grove of the sinuous dark trees. Here was even a Mana fruit on one of them. How lucky.

Ray picked it up and gobbled it whole. No Brighthorns around, and no sign of the Duskshell rising either. Good. He would deal with the latter in time. First, he had a Tower Node to locate.

The first dungeon he came across after he left the Novitiate Academy was already cleared.

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

[Warning!]

The dungeon you are about to enter has been cleared recently. It is still in a cooldown period where it resets its challenges and is repopulated with monsters. You will earn no reward for reaching the end of the dungeon.

The warning made him wonder who had been in the area to have cleared it. Just out of curiosity, Ray let Presence of the Primordial grant him more information.

[Presence of the Primordial—Dungeon]

Everair Scholar’s Dissemination Library [Tier 3]

Knowledge is power. The Everair were well aware of this. As such, they constructed great establishments for both the storage and dissemination of all the knowledge they could gather. Treatises and scrolls on every topic imaginable populate their vaunted libraries. But beware, knowledge can be a curse as well. Be prepared to handle the burden.

How ominous. Ray let the description dissipate to nothing before heading in.

The structure of the dungeon did have the air of some kind of school or library, kind of like the last one he had been in. Big main building, with smaller buildings on the side. The interior was a gigantic hall, lined with rows upon rows of stone shelves filled to the brim with old scrolls. That they were still intact and not disintegrated to dust surprised him.

Something groaned metallically as Ray reached for the nearest scroll. It looked like a… suit of armour?

The disparate pieces, knocked to the floor somehow, were joining back together, slowly getting to its feet. Hmm, must have been the people who had cleared the dungeon before him.

Ray didn’t bother letting the thing annoy him. The dungeon wasn’t even active. Why was it acting up? He blasted it with a quick Shatterclaw and it shattered into a bunch of pieces again, this time with extra scratches and metal splinters.

Ah, oops. He had forgotten to test True Enhancement. Maybe the next guardian that showed up would get a taste of it.

The scroll was indecipherable. For all that the System boasted a universal comprehension mechanic that allowed various alien races to interact with each other seamlessly, it apparently decided the limit was text from the ancient civilization it had co-opted to create its Tower. Fabulous.

Ray put it away and focused on his real objective. He had to find wherever the Tower Node was, if it was even inside this dungeon.

There were no challenges, no real danger associated with anything he did. Ray didn’t even meet another suit of armour for a long while. When he did, he finally got to test his True Enhancement for Shatterclaw.

Activating True Enhancement needed True Mana, which Ray didn’t have. However, he could condense his regular Mana into True Mana.

Which was… a process. Not only was Ray using a ton of his Mana, he also began to feel quite strange. It was like he was transforming into some kind of generator. His body vibrated the more he condensed his Mana, his teeth chattering and his skin shivering.

It was worth it, at least. The surprise at the new form of his spell burst out him of him vocally. “Woah!”

Shatterclaw wasn’t just a series of slashes of black-red energy in the air any longer. With True Enhancement, using True Mana, it changed into an actual limb.

Black-and-white energy created an oversized bony arm stretching off his shoulder with an actual hand tipped with burning red claws at the end. The whole contraption was tied together with threads and motes of shining gold.

True Mana.

Wow. This was an actual arm he could move around, like he had grown a gigantic limb. As the suit of Everair armour charged at him, Ray willed his new magic arm to reach forward. It grabbed the armour long before the guardian could reach him.

The power within the limb was incredible, though not surprising. Ray just grinned in satisfaction as, with a little push of his intention, the enhanced Shatterclaw’s arm threw the suit of armour to make it crash against the distant wall. Not only that, the suit was also burning with the same chaotic energy that built the arm too.

Of course, the energy didn’t affect it much, just as the case had been for the statues in the previous dungeon. Lifeblood Chaos really needed living matter to show its full colours.

Interestingly, using True Mana hadn’t hurt. Quite the opposite. Ray was more alive. He definitely didn’t feel like he had damaged his Mana conduits. It seemed that Attunement truly had made him compatible with True Mana.

If only it didn’t cost so much Mana to use…

In the end, after trawling the whole dungeon for at least two hours straight, Ray found nothing. Neither hide nor hair of any Tower Node. No matter which room and hall he peeked into, even after checking the smaller side buildings, Ray found nothing.

It wasn’t an impossibility that the Tower Node just wasn’t here. After all, he hadn’t found it in the previous dungeon either.

Sighing, Ray made his exit and headed to the next dungeon.

This one wasn’t cleared like the last had been.

[Presence of the Primordial—Dungeon]

Stoutmen Centre of Everair [Tier 4]

A body of hale health has passed the first main obstacle of being a useful citizen. No one can serve their best if they aren’t in tip-top shape, after all. Thus, the stoutmen of Everair have taken it upon themselves to ensure that the citizens of Everair are at their peak fitness to contribute as well as they can to their society.

Hold on. Was Ray about to enter an ancient alien civilization’s gym? Wack as it sounded, that was what the description suggested.

Shaking his head, Ray entered the long, narrow building.

The first room he entered was bare, save for a humongous boulder blocking what had to be the only exit—save for the entrance he had come through—in the room. Oh. Of course. Ray didn’t even need to look at Presence of the Primordial to understand what was being asked of him. He was in an alien gym, for crying out loud.

Ray pulled his arm back. “Sorry, but this bro doesn’t even lift.”

He slashed his arm, a regular old Shatterclaw appearing and mimicking his motion. The boulder broke under this spell’s might. It was too big to destroy with one hit, so Ray had to use a couple more to reduce it to enough rubble to keep moving forward.

The room afterward was bare and unassuming, which immediately made Ray tense. What now?

As soon as he stepped in, the ceiling began descending. Ah. Hold up the roof or be crushed. That was the challenge. Ray dashed back, but the door he had entered through had slammed close. It appeared he had no other option.

He used True Enhancement on his Shatterclaw again, summoning up a whole arm constructed with his dark energy.

True Mana blitzed through him again, making him feel like a livewire but not unpleasantly so. It was as though he was unlocking a secret source of boundless power whenever he used it.

The arm of chaotic energy was easily strong enough to hold up the roof while he reached the door at the other end of the chamber. Thankfully, the door didn’t need any effort other than a proper shove. Ray was through.

He had a feeling the last challenge was supposed to have taken a lot more struggle to get through. It probably would have, for someone relying purely on their natural physical strength, even after serious strength training. Unless the people of the Everair empire had access to the System too.

The last room was a gravity test. Ray’s first step was greeted with a sharp increase in strength of the gravitational field, which immediately brought him to the ground. He managed to drag himself back against the door, whereupon gravity returned to normal.

Interesting how he always took things like gravity or the oxygen level in the air for granted. The Tower could have welcomed in the new Denizens in a realm with significantly higher—or lower—gravity than Earth. The same went for the air content. Wasn’t it a huge boon that the planetary conditions had more or less approximated what they were used to?

Or maybe these were just the conditions needed to foster life.

Ray focused on his objective. There was a dais in the middle, and it was pretty obvious he had to reach it. But he wasn’t inclined to struggle through a silly gravitational field.

Instead, he crushed another Mana crystal to top up his Mana, then used True Enhancement on Lifeblood Crucible this time. He figured that was what he had to upgrade with True Mana, to see the actual changes to the Soul Aspects stored within. His body surged with renewed vigour. Next came Primal Summons to actually bring up his wings.

They were huge now, the tips of their leg-length feathers burning with crimson energy, lines of gold outlining the whole set of wings. When he flapped them, the world blurred with how fast everything moved.

The heightened gravitational pull acted instantaneously, of course. Despite the power of his wings—and he was sure there was more to them he had to explore later—Ray was still inexorably dragged to the ground.

But not before he nearly reached the dais.

With an effortful grunt, Ray reached forward and slapped his hand against the dais. Immediately, gravity returned to normal. He got to his feet as the rewards materialized.

[Dungeon Cleared— Stoutmen Centre of Everair]

Rewards

* 1 [Selectable] Skill Manual

* 1 Tier Point

* +600 Essence

* Reputation: +10 Indomitable

Huh. Fewer rewards compared to what he had received in the Novitiate Academy Dungeon. Probably because the dungeon itself was a lower Tier than the last one.

That did remind Ray, though, that he was receiving more Essence than the first time he had cleared a dungeon with Maya’s group. Was it because of being part of a group that he had received less Essence back then? That traversal dungeon had been the same Tier as this dungeon, but he had received twice as much Essence here than in that one, if he remembered right.

Ray tried to plug the Tier point into True Enhancement, but it didn’t work.

[Warning!]

True Mana abilities can only be upgraded with True Mana Tier points.

“Oh, of course,” he said. “Fancy True Mana needs its own fancy Tier points.”

The System didn’t respond. Ray sighed. Fine. He was going to have to find a way to acquire these True Mana Tier points from somewhere.

Maybe he could ask Virko. Although, the way the Halftyr merchant was talking with Sylvans certainly disquieted Ray a bit. Even if he had promised Ray that he never gave up any vital information, it was safest to assume others knew about Ray to some degree.

Ray decided he’d peek into the Skill Manual first before assigning his Tier points anywhere. Time to see what new skill he could earn.