The days of hunger and productivity continued. I spent a fair amount of time working on building up my attunement and establishing my first rune. When I had time, I also tested out my healing ability on my mother, to see if it was possible to cure her drug addiction. My deepest fear right now was that my attunement might not be able to heal something as complex as a drug addiction. Since my mother seemed rather unaware of her surroundings anytime she came home blissed out, I simply waited a few minutes, before I gently splashed a bit of water on her and used that as a medium for the renewal spell. Even if I wasn’t sure that the healing spell would work, I dearly hoped it would help.

My first few tests were inconclusive.

I could clearly tell that my renewal spell was doing something to my mother. It felt just like when I healed something else, like a missing limb. However, I didn’t actually notice any changes in my mother when I applied the renewal spell to her, which was very frustrating. I had no idea whether it was just because I wasn’t healing very much, or whether I couldn’t heal my mother while she was high, or what.

I also tried adding a little bit of water to her hands while she was sleeping off one of her drug-induced hazes, and the next day I did notice that she seemed a bit more lucid than usual. However, the blue discoloration around her eyes never faded, and I had a hard time figuring out whether she was just having a particularly lucid day or whether my healing was actually doing something, because the day afterwards, she seemed about as out-of-it as usual.

When I talked about it with my friends, Sallia’s theory was that my healing was working, but the efficiency was abysmal. At basic grade attunement, with me spending about half of my alteration essence each day and reserving half for emergencies, I was probably undoing whatever damage Fizz was doing to my mother’s mind and body, but perhaps I wasn’t actually outpacing the damage she did to herself. After all, my mother continued to take bliss almost every day - that kind of extensive drug usage had to be doing damage to my mother. And considering how many tiny little alterations to the chemistry of my mother’s brain a drug like bliss made, it was probably hard for my healing spell to fix everything. In a strange way, healing a drug addiction might literally be several times harder than regenerating a limb. Which was very strange to think about.

Although my first healing efforts weren’t really going anywhere, and I was still feeling very hungry, I successfully set up my first rune by the end of the fourth day after regaining consciousness.

Just as Sallia and I had discussed, I felt that it was best to set up two abilities in this world first - one to mess with bullets, and one to somehow improve my senses of the area around me. However, being able to sense the area around me was useful for more than just teleporting bullets around - it would also give me potential information about people sneaking up on me, and also give me the information needed to dodge things like knives and blunt weapons. Even if guns seemed to be the primary weapon wars were fought with in this world, they weren’t used everywhere, especially in the back alleys of the city. After all, smuggling weapons wasn’t easy, and while street gangs and gunshots seemed to be a big part of life in the section of the city Sallia lived in, it was still impossible for every gangster to own a gun. Most used whatever weapons they could scrounge together, or even their fists if they couldn’t find something to swing around.

Being able to sense people sneaking up on me with a knife or a pipe would give me plenty of time to debilitate or kill them with an extinguish, and I felt that was a higher priority ability than forming some kind of object teleportation ability.

So, when I was setting up my first rune, I pictured all of the world around me as a giant, endless undercurrent of rippling, distorting space - and I pictured my own body as something like a giant eye, continuously scanning the area around me in a neverending vigil. As I tried to form my ability, I realized that something was missing - before I winced.

Even though my ability had evolved towards spatial manipulation, it wasn’t actually a spatial ability. At least, not completely. I pulled up the ability’s description again, just to double check what was missing.

Keywords: Ocean, Madness (2 Keywords.) (Intermediate Grade)

Glut Penalty: 40

While you are submerged in water, your body will generate absorption essence, regardless of whether the local dimensional laws support the existence of absorption essence. Furthermore, contact with water will naturally remodel your body and brain to support absorption-essence spellcasting.

Absorption essence may be spent to create runes, which have the following effects:

The first three runes will grant you +20 to your mental stats AND an ability. This ability MUST be related to space, and use the ocean or water as a medium. You will have significantly enhanced control over what ability is formed here.

The fourth through sixth runes will now fundamentally alter one sensory organ, providing +10 Perception per level, and also giving you improved vision when trying to see space. Additionally, each rune will provide you with a significantly increased ability to resist external spatial manipulation targeted towards you or the area directly around you.

The seventh through ninth runes will now grant +10 to each physical Stat and begin attuning your body to the power of space, allowing your body to innately interact with the idea of space, regardless of which dimension you are in. This will replace the standard fusion and condensing boosts that runes 10 through 12 would give you, and give benefits such as decreased wind resistance, the ability to teleport without reliance upon rune abilities at all, and increased ability to sense space using your skin.

In addition, every keyword activated within the past week and every rune you have condensed will also give you a moderately increased ability to control madness, as well as madness-adjacent magic such as illusions and mental attacks.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Whenever you use water-related abilities to drive something insane, you will collect Achievement as if you had killed it. Madness-related keyword Abilities will be slightly easier to form and upgrade in the future, up to [Master] grade.

Killing an enemy with a water-related ability or with water for the first time in each body will allow you to form a skill related to that creature. You may absorb this skill into your current body in order to permanently enhance yourself.

Note: Only Achievement-granting creatures can form abilities. Only three abilities from this effect may be ‘held’ at once. You may delete a copied Skill from this ability at any time to replace it with a new one.

Held Abilities:

1.

2.

3.

After rereading my ability description, I sighed. I needed to use water or the ocean as a medium to fuel whatever I wanted to do using spatial manipulation. I had been wondering how hard of a rule that was, but after trying to form an ability without using water as a medium, the ability simply failed to form at all. I had been hoping I could dodge that somehow.

I hesitated. How was I supposed to combine space and water into a proper sensory ability? And was it really ideal to create a weird sensory ability using my first rune? I suspected I would also get some odd sensory abilities once I pushed into my fourth and above rune, but I also wasn’t sure what this would look like. After all, I hadn’t formed a fourth or higher rune since evolving the ability. It was also distinctly possible that the upgrades to my sensory organs would enhance my ability to sense space, but not physical objects within space, and if I had no sensory abilities in this world, I would still be very vulnerable to guns.

At the end of my thinking session, I still felt it was prudent to create an ability for sensing bullets before they hit me, even if I would end up forming a rather weird version of what I had originally envisioned. Just in case the ‘sensory organ upgrades’ worked differently than I thought they would, it was best to be prepared. After all, I couldn’t go back and change my runes once I formed them, and unfortunately, the sensory organ upgrades took place after I had formed my abilities. This made experimenting with that component of my evolved ability very difficult.

After tossing ideas back and forth with Sallia, Anise, and Felix for a while, eventually, I decided to focus on water vapor as a medium for my sensory ability. According to some comments Felix had overheard in the lab he lived in, there was a great deal of evaporated water floating around in the air all around us, much like there had been in our previous worlds. It was only a small part of the air, but it was still present. And since there was a very small amount of water in the air around us, I decided that I could probably use that water vapor as a radar to sense the space in the air around me - and more specifically, I would use it to detect physical objects.

I also adjusted my vision of what my ability should be quite a bit. My new mental image was of every single droplet of water in the air around me transforming in an eye. These eyes would also be, at their heart, partially comprised of spatial manipulation - the ultimate idea of this ability was that I was transforming each droplet of air into an illusory eye connected to my own, peering at the world around me through the cracks in space and reality. I wasn’t sure if my image would work perfectly, but it was worth a shot.

This image worked, and a few hours of concentration later, I was the proud owner of my first rune, which I had stuck to the bottom of my feet, just like in my second life.

Power: Form your first rune (Note: this dimension does not have the laws to support runes, although it does somewhat support absorption spellcasting. moderate Achievement penalty).

Achievement +70

This little bit of Achievement brought my total up to 662.08 Achievement. Not an amazing amount, but I was still happy to earn a bit of Achievement here and there.

More importantly, I now had a proper sensory ability, and I had my attunement so that I could defend myself if needed.

I poured a bunch of absorption essence into my new rune to give it a proper test, and felt my vision start to expand.

Every single bit of water in the air around me for several meters in every direction seemed to become part of my eyes. For a moment, I could see everything around me. Space, the physical world, the souls, the air itself… it was as if I could see every single aspect of the world at once. It was beautiful.

And it was also overwhelming.

I felt an intense headache start to build up behind my eyes, and frowned, shutting off the ability.

My brain did not have the ability to process all of the information my ability had been feeding it at once. I had been looking through hundreds of thousands of little droplets of water at once, and the information was several orders of magnitude beyond what my mind could handle. I winced.

I had put too much absorption essence into the ability. I felt that increasing my mental stats would probably help - Intelligence, in particular, would help me actually process the information I had been trying and failing to absorb from my ability. And Perception also seemed to assist the brain in processing all of the information one got from enhancing their senses. My first rune had also bumped up my mental stats by 1 grade each, so I was now working with Grade 6 Intelligence and Grade 8 Perception. I could definitely tell that those stat increases were helping me. But at least for now, I probably needed to keep the ability operating a rather low level. I couldn’t handle the full ability.

I tried activating my new rune ability again, but this time, I drastically reduced the essence I put into it, and I also focused on ‘combining’ larger clumps of water vapor into single eyes instead of hundreds of thousands of smaller eyes. This helped a great deal, and I was able to get a proper view of the world around me from multiple angles - as well as the ability to see through walls, so long as they weren’t more than a few meters away from me. My ability also let me sense disturbances in air or space around me, rather like a radar - which would, hopefully, be enough to alert me to a bullet before it hit me. I intended to make my next rune ability able to teleport bullets around, which would let me teleport any bullet near me to another location, and potentially even return it to its sender. I grinned. It wasn’t perfect - I would still need quick reflexes to respond to people shooting at me.

However, for now, I was satisfied.

And I was also very hungry.

I took one last look at my mother, who was twitching in the corner again, and sighed.

“I’m going out, mother,” I said, before I walked over to the door and opened it.

I had spent several days confined inside of this tiny little house, trying to save my mother and feed myself. but there were no easy solutions here, there wasn’t enough food, and I was running out of patience for the gnawing emptiness in my belly. If I wanted to actually solve the food problem, I needed to investigate this world, even if this was the first time I had done this at the age of four.

It was time to step out of the house and explore the outside world.