Good morning! How are you feeling today?

I’m so tired this morning. My arms and legs ache – I think all the construction is catching up to me. It’s a good thing the house is done – I can afford to take a day or two of less strenuous activities.

I sit up in bed and stare at the dim lines of light filtering in through each window. There's something about waking up in a home you’ve built that hits different. Sliding both legs out of bed I walk to the shutters and throw them open.

Let there be light! Mwahahaha!

I lean into the window and use this moment to stare out at the view. From here I can just barely see the lake – Len seems to be pulling firefighter dive bomber duty already. I wonder what thefishyminer does while he’s not acting as a mobile crane? I hope he’s not bored.

Dairy is also out of sight. I should make sure he’s doing good – it's been a few days and I feel like I’m ignoring him.

Anyways!

What should be our plan for today? What do you want to start working on?

We need a goal.

…

…Honestly the more I try and come up with something just for the sake of coming up with something the more I drift to my real job.

I have to pay off my debt.

Ugg. Being responsible. Ugg.

At least with my new method it's less boring and the more I get into the flow of it the more I improve.

Okay!

My next construction project will probably be figuring out a shower or bath but…I’ve been stringing out this job for over a week now. Let's get into the proper grindset mindset.

Has dairy laid an egg? He has in fact laid an egg! I should probably sell it and try and get a more balanced meal…but nope I’ve already eaten it. I don’t know what happened to it but its gone now!

Stepping out into the morning sun I track Len down to give him a bright yellow coat of paint then begin the process of slowly filtering and sticking mana scraps to myself.

The environment seems to have healed slightly – I thought I extracted all the wood and plant mana from the forest but there’s a bit there once again. It's not quite as dense as it was before I started mining it but it's definitely less stripped. In hindsight, it doesn’t make sense for my world to have almost 8000 mana and only a few pearls worth of those mana types.

It would be nice to know the mechanics.

It’s not really important but I’m curious you know?

Slowly my multi tasking ability begins to improve and I think it's time to start increasing the difficulty.

This is the sort of repetitive task I’m hoping phantom breath can help me deal with. Press button, sleep walk, work is done!

Juggle half a dozen bits of mana. Press button, sleep mana crystal creation. Work is done!

They are the same picture.

As I walk and snatch scaps of mana out of nothing I begin to breathe deeper.

I breathe deeper and with more weight – something that should be relaxing becoming something my entire focus is held on.

Come on, please. For once please let things go well for me.

Maybe because of how much I’m hyper focusing but this time I notice the clouds of smoke billowing out of my mouth faster than normal. It was already billowing out slightly – trails of mist float around my body and the suroundings

Something clicks in my head.

Every single time I breathe the skill activates. It’s a breath skill. I breath to exist. The skill...is always on.

It's based on my lungs and air and the way I draw the environment into me and release it in each puff.

What I’m considering “activating” the skill – focusing and breathing deeply – is simply pushing the time dilation from 0.0000001 to something higher. It's not a linear increase either – it grows fast enough it's hard to track properly.

Am I making sense?

The deeper and longer I breathe the higher a dilation.

Maybe the trick to maintaining focus is not to push the skill. I’ve been pushing it so I can feel it stronger but as long as I can feel it I might as well try and dial it into a easier level.

I breathe deeply watching the world slip away and the way my breath fogs up the entire area. I slip into the skill and feel it deeply the way it clings to my body as if isolating me…as if my body is lost deep in the mist – as if my body and mind are lost to time.

Lost. That’s the overwhelming feedback the skill gives me. I’m losing my perception of time even as time is loosing track of me.

I then pull back.

I focus on breathing as normally as possible. Nice and normal. In and out. I over compensate a bit breathing quickly with short huffs but it works.

Slowly the lost feeling fades It takes a long time for the initial burst of breath to weaken – enough I almost think this won’t work.

It doesn’t help that my skill itself doesn’t seem to like this.

The mist wants me to stay lost. My breath wants to hide me from everything including myself. It wants me to breath deeper and deeper activating the skill to the point I’m labouring. It wants centuries to pass me by.

This time I don’t give in to my skill. I ignore it and continue breathing normally.

My awareness grows once again. The world stops looking like someone took a picture of my surroundings and painted a misty landscape with that picture.

It looks real. Dairy gloms past moving ever so slightly faster than normal.

And the feedback from my skill remains.

Even though I’m breathing mostly normally and time isn’t rushing past I can still see a thin wisp of purple tinged mist being released with each breath. I can still see the way it floats down my body.

As always I stopped making pearls as soon as I focused on this skill but this time I don’t keep pushing. I don’t try to turn my mist into a pearl…although I do rub my hands down my body attempting to glue the mist to my skin and feel a nice comfy feeling coat my body.

I start making pearls once again.

My hands begin to move and I’m very careful to glue scraps to the outside of my phantom breath shell.

Lines of wispy mana grow faster than before – at least according to my perception?

I forgot to grab a bucket or bag today so my finished pearls are glued directly to my waist.

They too seem to be growing faster than normal.

As soon as I feel like I’m getting into the swing of things I breathe a bit deeper. Just a bit. That teensy tiny bit bumps my speed from something like 1.5x to 2.5x but it's maintainable.

Pearls begin to pile up. Two becomes four becomes twenty.

The longer I grind the more everything begins to fit together. My skills don’t give nearly enough feedback – they aren’t living creatures able to tell me in great detail what they want from me – but…what they do give is enough.

Phantom breath’s main effect is fueled by my physical breaths obviously, but its main effect is actually linked to how it coats me. The way its mana swirls about my body as if hiding me from time.

It feels almost like if I were to use this skill inside a small room the effect would grow stronger as the chamber filled with smoke without a way to dissipate.

Time dilation chamber much? Monk vibing in a cave for centuries?

I’m not intrested in skipping years of time yet – not without good reason – so listening to the skill like that is not productive.

Maintaining a link to the real world involves poking a hole in that shell…but as soon as I poke a hole in it the effect weakens even if I’m breathing deeply and covered in as dense a cloud as any.

I think…I think if I had gained a skill to make eyes outside of my body I could probably maintain a link even without poking a hole in the shell. That’s fine.

A similar weakened effect can be made by weird layering.

It's like as if I made a plastic bag, poked a hole in the side, covered it in another plastic bag. Poked a hole in that bag but made it so they don’t overlap perfectly. Made another bag…

The more confused and lost I get the more effective the skill becomes.

My mana pearl creation also improves. I already have a technique, so the main improvement is in muscle memory. Both for my body and the way my body activates my skill.

It also becomes more and more profitable the longer I grind at it and the more partial scraps I coat myself in and reuse. This technique is really not made for short grind stints – I feel like it only has time to shine when I do something like this for hours at a time.

Efficiency is 100% lower with my attention held up in phantom breath but even that is a minor boon. Without using my brain to filter scraps my autopilot body seems to work even more based on feel.

This job is a teensy tiny bit too involved to fully timeskip properly. It's evident in the way my body makes mistakes – combining similar scraps that I would have noticed were different had I been focusing harder.

I wouldn’t do this for anything important and yet mistakes are fine. A mistake for pearl creation just involves an unpure pearl – they work for my debt all the same.

This is the part where you probably think I stay at a comfortable level and keep grinding but no. I keep pushing myself.

Bit by bit my breaths become heavier. I sink deeper into a labyrinth of misty cloth designed to confuse and trap times perception while leaving small gaps for my perception to slip out.

I make more mistakes – batches upon batches of pearls forming wrong or being missed but dozens of bad pearls every few seconds feels like a minor sacrifice. Soon I’m making proper pearls again even at this increased speed and I can see the sky darken as night hits.

Phantom breath is weird. Despite my maze of gaps and tenous link to my actions I’m mostly lost to the skill once again. I can tell its night time and yet tons of the surroundings look like they are still lit by the light of day. My surroundings look bright as long as I don’t stare at them too hard.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Pearls shift slightly at night – the average mana shifts slightly and the environment starts spitting out more night themed pearls.

I continue.

…

This is my second time lapping two days into one but this time I feel more in control. Instead of fumbling along through my skill I’m using my skill as a tool – perhaps properly for the very first time.

I blow through the second day and night and roll into the third.

My body is sore – each hole I poked in my shroud of phantom breath a way for the outside world to sneak exhaustion and achy muscles into my body.

What happened to taking a break from physical exertion? That lasted all of a morning.

The outside world pushes its unwanted facts towards me – I’ve been standing for 3 days, I should be in unbearable pain…and I try and hide deeper in my skill. I try and let the mist sink into my skin instead of just rest upon it. I try and breathe in the smoke from previous phantom breaths and imagine it sinking into my bloodstream and flowing throughout my body.

I take one final breath.

And collapse.

…

Good morning!

…hello Dairy.

Hi.

Yes Hi. I’m okay. Don’t worry. Yes Hi I can see you. Okay thats enough now. Yes I love you too.

Dairy finishes headbutting my chin and retreats back to laying on my belly. I have to carefully pick his form up and lay him on my side to sit up properly.

My chest is wet and smells vaguely like milk. Daily reminder I want to set up a shower.

Did you know I slept on the grass last night? It’s news to me but I just woke up lying in the middle of nowhere. Did you notice that happening? Why didn't I sleep in my nice comfy house?

Memories of my grind session take a while to start filtering back to me like a migrane after a day of binge drinking.

I suddenly notice the pile of pearls beside me.

They became unglued when I stopped focusing on them but theres…a lot.

Enough I’m surprised I could even carry this many.

I’m going to try and find Len and see if he’ll help me carry them to the sign.

…

Enlisting the help of Mr Bucket and spending far too long tracking down all the little pearls laying about the grass I head to the system sign and list everything in a massive dump. The 100 initial debt. The 300 more I took on. The tons of small pearl here and there purchases I hadn’t paid off yet.

Gone.

Wiped.

I’m free!

It feels so good washing my hands of everything all at once.

As soon as my debt disappears I realize I’m smiling. It's been weighting on my harder than I was expecting.

And now it's gone.

A few days of dedicated concentrated effort and… it's gone. I had to have been making 10-20 an hour and some portions of that grind.

I’m impressed with myself.

Time for another self reward! I’m going to swap out my clothing skill and try for another gatcha pull. I’ve decided!

Navigating to the skill removal section I submit the request and receive my response.

I can do it now for free as a thank you for paying off your debt! Give me a moment and I can set you up with your first proper quest as well.

even as I’m reading the goddesses message I feel her presence decend. Mentally inviting her in I watch as the core of my clothing skill is popped out of my inner self and tossed into the air in front of me.

Mine!

I reach out and focus on grabbing the dissipating skill before it disappears.

The air seems to buckle slightly. My hands vibrate and struggle to grab onto this.

Slowly I envelope it in my hands and begin to pull it towards me.

The nonsense in front of me pauses and begins to gather into a pearl but this pearl is different.

Instead of grabbing a wisp of mana I’m grabbing something that was already made of mana.

Its like inside of me the mana had formed a shape. A machine, a tool – it had formed a structure within me. That structure had begun to melt but as soon as I grabbed it the melting stopped.

I’m not able to put it back together but I’m definitely able to stabilize it.

The outside seems damaged slightly…I’ve let it melt In the seconds of exposure and crudely smoothed it back together.

…but the insides? The inner workings of this pearl? They look like they were kept.

A calidascope of colours seem to break away from this pearl as I form it. It’s a super prism and more – light refracting inside of it and bouncing around countless miniscule tunnels and refractive sheets.

The shapes inside of the pearl hurt to look at – they twist as if moving despite being still and loop in shapes my brain is confident are impossible.

I suddenly realize I’ve dropped to my knees.

My breath is short and laboured and my chest aches. Actual pain – removing this skill is giving me actual pain unlike the last time. The skill itself had reached T5 before I tossed it so it's over double the tier of anything I’ve tossed before…but still.

I wasn’t expecting the pain. I can definitely handle it. I’ve dealt with worse before but it’s a shock.

The depressing feeling of loss is even worse.

It feels like someone performed surgery on me and pulled out some key part of my body.

I feel my stomach but cannot feel the concave portion I’m sure should be there hiding the hole that was just cut out of me.

This sucks.

…

Instead of waiting for the feeling to fade, I move to the wizard.

I feel like I need a new skill to land in the missing portion of my body. I need to shove something into the gap – maybe then I’ll be whole again!

It's not a logical thought but I find myself grasping for a solution to the side effects. I barely even put in any effort towards influencing the skill.

The wizard's touch is light this time. It's definitely filling the hole in my body – no need to press on my whole body where there's a happy little hole there to be filled.

I’m aware my thoughts are scattered but they come together as soon as Mr wizard finishes pumping random mana into my body in the hopes something might stick.

Affinity filled. You have an organ affinity.

Skill(s) found.

Organ Item.

Critical Strike.

The second skill looks like something for fighting so I check the first one not expecting much.

As soon as I accept the example for Organ Item the wizard prints out an entire book for me.

It looks like a diary – most of the pages ripped out or damaged beyond repair. Flipping to the entact pages I stare in growing interest at the skill being shown.

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Last entry: legacy.

Dear reader however far in the future, however far away. Hello.

I was once known as Grim. The growth item master. My legacy is contained in the device you see before you and the page to follow. If you qualify and dare, I emplore you. Eat it and allow it to give you my skill so that my legacy may live on. It is my ultimate creation – the ability to parcel the very organ mana that blessed me into a similar blessing. This is it. The final whims of a dying man if you can call me that after three hundred years of solitude.

Organ Item.

Its path extends far, the ability to create is unrivalled.

With such a weighty legacy of course this skill has requirements.

To qualify you must have an empty node in your soul to branch off of.

You cannot have an existing skill on or affecting your blood. You cannot have a butchery skill or any affinity that weakens anything you have made.

Finally. You cannot have a crafting skill that would interfere in the creation of a standard magical item.

Assuming you qualify and have swallowed the skill seed in excitement, allow me to describe the methodology for my skill and where I took it.

I am a firm believer that beyond that first step all should make their own choices but it would be a great honour for you to follow in mine.

To start you must understand what an organ is. Conceptually all organs are are portions of a whole that fulfill a purpose. They take in inputs operate upon them and release outputs. The organ needs a shell as well but this is the least important of the components.

To create an organ you need to build all three of those main parts. As a simple example, imagine a sword that creates flames upon each swing. All along one side tiny holes take in air conceptually being fueled by the swing. In the center lies a thin core of ember flint dust and coal to conceptually transform the air into flames. The transformation or core of an organ always requires a mana rich material and the higher it's tier and purity the better. Finally all along the output and touching the inside I’ve laid petrified ash oak to conceptually release the flame.

This is a simple item. A flaming sword that converts a portion of the kinetic energy of its swings into an alternative damage type.

You might assume if this worked you wouldn't need a skill for it and you might wonder over the conceptual comments. The truth is without my skill this simple sword wouldn't work. The holes would not suck up air without an air based output. The emberflint however prone to sparking would not create much fire even if swirled around and the oak would either not light or burn itself up in the blaze.

The final key is life. A single drop of your own blood ties the whole structure together. The organ mana in your blood should blend all three parts into the shell and create a work of art.

This key is the reason for my solitude. The land I live is harsh and rigid. They see a skill that requires blood and consider it a slippery slope to necromancy or sacrificial magic.

Ignore the fact that the only blood you can use is your own. Ignore the fact that organ mana is used – in a primitive manner – in a popular butcher skill [dismantle].

Fools. Ignore them. If your land is as close minded as mine always hide that final step from others my potential apprentice.

To follow in my footsteps, your first branch should focus on creating items that use multiple organs instead of a single powerful organ. You may need multiple sub branches to achieve the final important step. I had a complementary skill. No two paths are the same.

The next important step however far ahead in your skill tree you are is to create a system out of your organs. A body instead of a single transformation item.

The more steps, the more organs you give your item the more effective it is.

Think of your own body and what function each part of your body might have. Your stomach takes in food and transforms it into energy and waste. Your lungs transform air and spent blood into oxygenated blood and spent air. All the separate systems combine into a single creature that can grow and think and act and create more of itself. Even if food doesn’t directly help you breathe, through cascading systems the energy from your meals fuels your lungs.

The way to create a living item is similar. If you treat it as an art form, no two items are the same – even if they all have the same goal. An item is less limited than a human body – you can skip many of the steps a body needs or add several stages a living creature might not need.

And finally you come upon the heart of my legacy.

The goal is to transform inputs into permeant power but such a goal is to great to achieve with a single organ. It’s too great to create with even a few organs. I’m serious with the scope of this – You need an entire body worth of organs and systems to create a single growth weapon.

First. Create a method for growth focusing on your inputs and breaking up each step into as simple a form as you can. Process those inputs into a general energy if you can. Store that input and refine it into power and permanent strength. Redirect the output of your system into each organ in it if you must. Consider how your item might need to grow – the consequences of an item that grows heavier continuously would be an item impossible to pick up without an equivalent method for motion or ease of control. A sword that gets hotter and hotter might burn itself up without an equivalent fire proof form.

I have a final secret. One final confession.

This skill reduces organs to conceptual transforming structures through your blood. I focused on growth pushing for organs the could themselves improve endlessly. As a side effect your own organs may improve through contact with your blood. They qualify after all. Inputs, outputs, core and shell.

Mine happened without me noticing it – each and every organ strengthening over the years till I never grew sick. My focus on organ improvement ended with my lifetime tripling. My mind grew sharper and my patience for the masses deteriorated.

Still it is worth it. I promise.

That is it. That is all I have to share. Please don't let me become forgotten.

----------------------------------------

Well alright then. This diary has been a rollercoaster for me.

I don’t know what to think of its owner – I can’t find a single part that stands out but there's a heavy sort of arrogant vibe to the whole thing. Like each line was written by someone with a superiority complex…and they weren’t even written by him! They were written by Mr wizard as he translated whatever diary he stole.

Does Mr wizard have a superiority complex?

The skill sounds fun – it would become my first proper item crafting skill and one thing stands out to me.

The middle of the organ is a mana dense material. I wonder how well mana pearls would work?

Suddenly I notice a blinking light and a swirling chibi wisp on the system panel.

It’s the goddess. Back with her quest.

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Quest: Fix armour.

Time limit: As soon as possible.

Max time allowed: 1 year.

Description:

I have transferred the armour to your inventory. I think you should be able to fix it with mana crystal creation and your upgrade to Triboadhesion. Please be careful both that you don’t hurt yourself and that you do not damage the armour.

This artifact could be seen as a very minor strategic asset. A great warrior was using it to great effect on the frontlines. It is broken in such a way that no one on that battlefront can fix it. I could fix it with a minor blessing but as I mentioned before that would allow one of the ███’s to enact a similar boon to their pawns.

It is not important enough to risk that interference but important enough you would be doing me a massive favour. I hadn’t realized until you offered to fill this role but you are divorced enough from my power to act as a third party. Even if I compensate you for fixing it, the amount of interference me transferring it to you and back would equate to is miniscule.

Definitely feels like a loophole I’m going to take advantage of to the best of my ability. It's to the point I’m nearly positive some of the other powers might have an equivalent to you helping them bypass the interference ██s. I’m just now finding this out!

As you do not currently have an ongoing debt feel free to consider the completion of this quest as equivalent to a single favour you may use in the divine shop. I look forward to your help!