No matter how I looked at it, my soul was a complete and utter disaster. I expected some damage from absorbing that much experience at once, but this was beyond anything I could imagine.

From the moment I opened my eyes in my soul, I was surrounded by a twisted mockery of my clearing. All the plants I’d painstakingly molded were flattened, ripped in half, or stretched into grotesque shapes. Patches of my stonework were strewn everywhere, and my meditation hut was in ruins, looking like it had imploded and exploded simultaneously.

But gravity didn't exist here, so while my hut was reduced into countless pieces, the chunks just floated in midair, making it look like everything was frozen mid-explosion. Everything was trashed in every sense of the word, but the most concerning thing was the deep gashes in the ground.

Even though my soul's surface resembled a forest, everything except the occasional hill or divot was usually flat. But now the ground was upturned, and deep crevasses, some over five feet wide, stretched as far as I could see. The gashes dug deep into the surface of my soul, and just looking at them made me feel a faint pain in my chest.

Was this the result of absorbing too much experience at once, or did that first soul horror damage my soul more than I realized?

But this was why I had to risk entering my soul; this was why I was here.

It didn't matter where the damage came from; I needed to fix it. A damaged soul was a weak soul. What would happen if I got hit with another skill as powerful as the winged serpent's?

Many factors went into determining how long a skill would affect me, mainly the user's skill level and whether it was malicious or beneficial, but they all worked the same. Multiple fragments try to integrate themselves into the target's soul’s surface, but now, with all these gashes, those fragments could burrow deeper than they should be able to.

My soul was naturally mending itself, and I could sense the crevasses slowly filling in, but it was happening gradually, and as I said, some of the fissures were quite big.

Focusing on the closest crack, I manipulate the surrounding experience to start filling it in like I was patching a crack in the sidewalk. The broken remnants of my meditation cabin break apart into motes of light, and I use that experience to cover the last bit of the fissure once it reaches ground level.

When I was done, all that remained of my cabin was a single billboard hovering in the air. On the board were multiple plaques, each representing the multiple contracts I made with Pacore and Kervin. It was a good thing they were intact, but I had a feeling it more likely had to do with their nature as a foreign skill rather than them being that strong.

Glancing around my soul, I sigh; one fissure down, untold more to go. It was good that the time-dilation factor worked in my favor, or else I'd never get all this done in time. But then again, filling that first crack didn't take long, and manipulating the experience felt much easier than I remember.

Like how I improved Mana Skin, thanks to leveling my other magic skills, controlling the surface of my soul became much easier due to the levels I gained in Soul Manipulation and Sense Soul. Improving the former gave me better control, but breaking past the latter's bottleneck was arguably more important.

Overall, I could sense my soul to a much greater degree now. I knew the state of everything around me, and I dare say I felt like a god in my own little world.

But speaking of gods.

Looking up, I stare at the seven full moons hovering overhead, especially the two I felt a faint connection to. It felt like I was being watched, but if I probed any harder, I would be ejected from my soul, so I didn't look up for long. Pulling my eyes away from the celestial bodies, I glance again around my surroundings, half expecting a particular pair of goddesses to appear. However, after a minute, I was still standing alone.

The pair said they could only interact with mortals on rare occasions, so I shouldn't be surprised they didn't magically appear, but I wasn’t necessarily going to take their word on it. I highly doubted there was a convenient rule saying gods couldn’t lie to mortals, so until I was absolutely sure they couldn’t appear on a whim, I would treat it as if they could.

But even if they were here, there was no reason to do anything differently. So, ignoring the moons overhead, I focused on patching everything in sight. If I had the time, I'd work on the clearing I always appeared in, but only after I had secured my soul.

From the tiniest cracks to the biggest ravines, I scour every inch of my soul for anomalies. The smallest ones only took a few seconds to smooth over, while others felt like they took hours to fill in.

I with the surface anomalies in the forest before moving onto the rocky area separating me from my sea of memories. While working on that section of my soul, I do something I've been planning for a while: I carve a clear path to my sea of memories to get there faster in case of emergencies.

I avoided the sea because even though there might be more cracks in it, I didn't want to risk getting booted out of my soul prematurely.

Time seemed to stand still as I worked, but even so, I worked as if my life depended on it— which it did. I had no time to mess around and had much to do.

After the influx of experience, the surface area of my soul increased drastically, so there was a lot of new scenery to see. There was more forest to comb through and larger mountains separating me from the sea, but the most exciting discovery I came across was a lake.

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It wasn’t a big lake by any means, only a couple hundred feet from end to end, but it was new, so it was interesting. The lake was shallow, no more than five feet deep at its center, with water so clear I mistook the lake for a crater when I first saw it. It wasn't until I touched the surface and the water rippled that I realized what had appeared on the surface of my soul.

I say water, but just like everything else here, it was made from experience and just looked like water. And unlike the sea, touching the water didn’t make me relive any memories. In fact, as far as I could tell, the lake did nothing and was simply another way for my soul to express itself.

Personally, I liked to think the lake at the center of the Endless Forest had left a lasting impression on me, but that could just be me reading into things. The point was that it was something new, and I was interested in manipulating my surroundings to see if I could replicate the feeling of water.

But I knew I was getting distracted, so after thoroughly examining the lake, I returned to fixing things and didn't stop until I was done.

After a lot of hard work and circling my soul multiple times, I was confident I patched everything up. Of course, it would take a few days for the patches to blend seamlessly into everything else, but I was convinced everything would be stable again by the time we had our rematch against the winged serpent.

Now, how long have I been here?

I could vaguely sense that it’s been about nine hours in the real world, meaning I should leave soon, but there was one more thing I needed to do before I left.

Using a combination of Sense Soul and Soul Manipulation, I conjure my status page inside my soul.

LV: 82 Experience: 932,190/ 1,484,280

Health: 2,686.19/2,700

Stamina 1,836/1,836

Mana: 909.61/1,060

Vitality: 270.01

Endurance: 100.41

Strength: 181.01

Dexterity: 181.00

Senses: 62.77

Mind: 65.67

Magic: 106.02

Clarity: 79.35

Status Points: 0

Skills:

Tier 1:

Meditation (LV81), Running (LV80), Blacksmithing (LV75), Hammer Skills (LV71), Axe Skills (LV60), Cleaning (LV58), Chanting (LV53), Mining (LV51), Drawing (LV48), Trading (LV48), Cooking (LV47), Sword Skills (LV40), Acting (LV36), Dagger Skills (LV35), Wood Carving (LV32), Sewing (LV32), Dancing (LV32), Pugilist Skills (LV16), Alchemy (LV15), Spear Skills (LV2)

Tier 2:

Sense Mana (LV81), Double Step (LV68), Charm (LV50), Hammer Arts (LV50), Measurement (LV49), Axe Arts (LV39), Steady Hands (LV36), Intimidating Shout (LV34), Writing (LV32), Mathematics (LV31), Increase Price (LV22), Lower Price (LV20), Sword Arts (LV17), Gourmet (LV15), Dagger Arts (LV13), Marching (LV5), Shout of Valor (LV3), Pugilist Arts (LV1)

Tier 3:

Mana Manipulation (LV67), Expel Mana (LV64), Weighted Strike (LV47), Double Strike (LV46), Precise Strike (LV46), Flash Step (LV39), Contract (LV22), Poison Resistance (LV14), Enchanting (LV10)

Tier 4:

Mental Resistance (LV63), Mana Skin (LV61), Inject Mana (LV57), Extract Mana (LV40), Magic Blacksmithing (LV36), Magic Threads (LV34), Air Walk (LV24), Empowered Spell (LV21), Ironclad Agreement (LV8), Multi-Strike (LV7), Appealing Deal (LV3),

Tier 5:

Sense Soul (LV41), Soul Manipulation (LV23)

Tier 6:

Soul Devourer (LV17), Experience Transfer (LV3)

Increased Skill Levels

Meditation (LV81) 4,050exp

Hammer Skills (LV71) 3,550exp

Cleaning (LV58) 2,900exp

Chanting (LV53)2,650exp

Steady Hands (LV36) 3,600exp

Precise Strike (LV46) 6,900exp

Poison Resistance (LV13-14) 4,050exp

Mana Skin (LV61) 15,250exp

Inject Mana (LV57) 14,250exp

Magic Threads (LV33-34) 16,750exp

Empowered Spell (LV21) 5,250exp

Soul Manipulation (LV23) 11,500exp

Skill Experience: 90,700exp

Crafting Experience: 4,736exp

Fighting Experience: 0exp

Total experience Gained: 95,436exp

“Wow,” I whistle.

I must be adjusting after absorbing all the soul horrors because leveling twelve skills in three days was a lot, even for me, especially considering I spent two of those days sleeping. That meant I leveled almost every one of these skills in the last twenty-four hours, which was insane.

I knew Mana Skin and Magic Threads leveled, but the rest were a happy surprise.

I was overjoyed to see that Meditation leveled again. It'd only been like a week since it last increased, and for it to happen again so soon was a big boon. It probably reached level 81 because of the mana control I demonstrated while leveling Mana Skin. I was in a deep state of meditation during that whole process and was rewarded for maintaining it throughout the experience.

A couple of my skills leveled because of what I did with Mana Skin, but the rest went up from helping Tabitha fix her armor and me cleaning my hammer. The only exceptions were Poison Resistance, which leveled twice after the winged serpent poison finally made its way through my system, and Soul Manipulation, which leveled just a little while ago while I was repairing the damage to my soul.

The two skills I was most surprised to see level were Inject Mana and Hammer Skills. Inject Mana leveling was a big deal; I used it on a bunch of different objects, mainly in combination with Magic Threads, but that wasn’t why it improved.

Instead, Inject Mana leveled because I channeled my cleaning spell into my hammer. I don’t know why I’ve never thought of it until now, but it made sense once I thought about it. What were spells but mana organized and controlled by an enchantment? As long as I kept it powered and waited until it was finished, why couldn't I force a spell into something?

I was going to need to investigate this further. Too bad I only knew four spells: self-cleaning, hovering light, small flame, and flame javelin. The cleaning and light spells would do little inside my hammer, but I could see potential with the other two.

To this day, I still miss the flaming katana I sacrificed to bring down the soul devourer, but I couldn’t just channel any spell into my only weapon. What would happen if the spell melted it from the inside out? I could be left without a weapon or something worse.

I needed to test this new application of magic on something I didn’t mind destroying, but that was another thing I would have to wait until later to explore.

My magic skills were growing by leaps and bounds, but my mind kept returning to Hammer Skills. I still couldn't believe it leveled from fixing Tabitha's breastplate. It took a lot of control not to ruin it by accident but enough to level from it; I didn't think so.

Maybe the skill was closer to leveling than I previously thought, and Tabitha's armor was just the thing to push it over the edge...

So much was changing; it was hard to keep up with everything. Don't get me wrong; I'm happy that I'm improving, considering our situation. I just felt tired, which was funny because I was almost fully healed.

In the last nine hours, my body had converted enough mana to bring me back up to 90%, and I only needed less than twenty points until my Health was fully recovered. I was almost back to perfect fighting shape, which meant it was time I returned to the real world and checked on Tabitha to see how she was doing.

She'll want to explore the bottom chamber of the ruins, and so long as she's recovered enough, now might be a good time to finally see what's drawing the remaining death mana to the chamber beneath us.

If we can find one more soul horror, I should get enough experience to reach level 83.

I know it's greedy of me to hope for such a thing, especially after spending so much time fixing my scared soul, but I wanted to help Tabitha. According to her, there were still around fifty levels separating me from the winged serpent. Sure, I killed the soul devourer, which was at an even higher level than the lesser dragon, but that was only because I had the exact skills to counter it.

The winged serpent wasn't as specialized as the soul devourer, which, oddly enough, made it more dangerous rather than less.

No matter what, Tabitha would have to be the main attacker, but there had to be something I could do to help her.

I groan in frustration. My mind was spinning in circles, and that wasn't helping anybody. Maybe Tabitha can help me come up with an idea?

Closing my eyes, I search for the connection that leads back to my body and find it almost immediately. Again, Sense Souls' breakthrough fundamentally changed how I feel my soul. If I was ever in the same situation again, crushed by experience, I was confident I could handle myself better.

Triggering the connection, I feel my consciousness being forced back into my body and the real world.

It was time to see what secrets this building was hiding from us and, if lucky, maybe a way to escape this death trap.

Or, possibly…. kill a lesser dragon.

Wouldn't that be nice?