Alex forced a confident smile as everyone turned to look at him. The past few days had moved so quickly that he was struggling to keep up. He wasn’t physically tired, thanks to the restorative effects of sleeping in the city hospital, but there was a mental exhaustion setting in. So much had happened in the past few days.

He’d found a loophole the Trialbringer had left for Earth, centuries too late to save the society it was meant to preserve.

He’d started a relationship with Becca.

He’d come up with a plan that he thought had a real chance of turning things around for Earth. He’d convinced himself that he would be a key element in humanity regaining control of the world. And then he’d learned that there was already a plan. One that directly conflicted with his.

And now he was going to undergo his emplacement, just like that. He couldn’t help but wonder if that was why the Dean decided to do the emplacement tonight. To force Alex off the path he’d been trying to create. It wasn’t hard to realize that he had next to no chance of gaining a mana type the way things stood.

Epic would have to be good enough. He could forge excellence out of an Achievement tier that likely fewer than one in a million received.

Realistically, he was already important to the city’s future chance at resurgence. In fact, the loophole might just be more important to the city than anything he’d do as an adventurer. Even if he reached Tier 3 in the future, could it compare to opening up a path forward for so many students each year?

A large part of him rebelled at the idea. He wanted to be great, to rise to the top. What was the point if you weren’t the best?

Alex wanted to go through with things anyway. To somehow overpower David’s compulsions and trailblaze a new path forward. So what if it was a risk, was the Dean’s plan really so reliable? Who would join David at Tier 4 if they held themselves back from the best Achievements?

He remembered the Dean’s frank claim that he was expected to try. No one thought he would follow orders, he was expected to disobey the Dean’s demands. Another part of him rebelled at that. He didn’t want to disappoint a man who had been one of his heroes for so long.

“Do you want a minute to prepare?” Alex was drawn out of his thoughts by David speaking, and he was startled as he realized everyone had been staring at him for several seconds while he contemplated.

Alex let out his breath and took in another. He paused a second before replying, trying to shake off the melancholy. Muhammad stepped forward and gave him a supportive clap on the shoulder while Becca squeezed his hand, “I’m ready. Let’s do this.”

Why did it feel like such an important moment, something that had excited him for so long, was just a chore to get over with? Where was the thrill? He was about to get his hands on his own magic for the first time.

Alex forced a grin on his face as David nodded, “Everyone give him some room.” Alex stepped forward, and everyone else stepped back. He focused on what would happen next, making the snap decision to do things the normal way. He would prove that he could be exceptional even without a Unique start.

“Three…”

Alex sat down on the ground. The rough, cracked pavement beneath him had some plant growth peeking through. He let his hands rest on his knees.

“Two…”

Alex closed his eyes. He took another deep breath and envisioned his blueprint.

“One…”

Six layers. He would inscribe the draw rune first, as the foundation. Then Sensitivity would lead to Durability, Power came next, and then Speed. The Heart Rune would be capped off by the distributor. He would place it in his chest, right over his heart.

“You’re all set.”

The change happened before David even finished his sentence, and Alex let out his breath in a rush as the world changed. Everyone he had spoken to had described the first few points of Sensitivity as being comparable to a filter on reality. Their five senses were expanded slightly, allowing them to see, feel, hear, or smell mana easily. Some could even taste mana, but that was not particularly common as unattuned mana was tasteless until your Sensitivity passed a certain threshold.

Alex’s experience was nothing like that, and he promptly threw up at the sensation of tasting and smelling mana. It was almost like he was in the middle of eating a meal. A sudden, unexpected assault of flavors assaulted his tongue in combination with a smell that added nauseating complexity. It was like eating something completely different from any food he’d ever experienced before.

At first, the missing sensation was the actual chewing. Alex’s mind was so dazed that he took what felt like a minute to realize he had actually started chewing on some of his vomit. Gross. He spat that out of his mouth, realizing as he did that he hadn’t noticed what he was chewing on because the flavors weren’t present at all. It was like his Sensitivity to mana was so much higher than his Perception of the physical world that he couldn’t really tell what was happening on a physical level.

Shit, that was exactly what was happening. His attributes were so imbalanced that his brain wasn’t processing the physical. He tried to reach out and touch something but didn’t receive sensory feedback beyond the unfamiliar mana in the air and the awareness that his hand wasn’t moving further because he was pressing it into the ground.

Alex vaguely understood that there were voices, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. It was like he was underwater, and the sounds were all too distorted to make out even though they should be very loud. They didn’t seem loud, actually, was he just assuming that they would be?

His thoughts were derailed by a hit of a new flavor, it felt like more mana had washed over him. This mana came with the realization that his eyes weren’t open. How could he adjust to the new senses if he didn’t even open his eyes? He fought back against that idea, it didn’t feel like his own. Instead, he shifted his hands again and started to feel the grass.

It only took him a moment to realize the problem. Why could he feel the grass? It wasn’t really a physical sensation…

The grass was nothing special compared to the environment that surrounded them, but there was still some mana present within it. Alex felt like the grass was on the cusp of becoming something greater, and his newfound senses tried to determine what as he rubbed it between his fingers.

Grass, and most other plants, should be Manaless. Some plants had adapted to the Arrival, but it was fairly rare. Magical materials almost universally came from trials because of that lack. The presence of mana in this grass had suddenly become the most important thing in the world to Alex. It felt like a Mana Body had been built into the grass, turning it into something that surpassed the mundane. With his connection to the mundane feeling like it was slipping away, the grass felt safe.

It was like him, a being of magic in a mundane world.

That wasn’t right. Alex wasn’t a being of magic. Not yet, at least. He forced his thoughts to a halt and focused. His Sensitivity to mana had fused with the five senses, but he could also sense mana inside himself. He took a moment to do so and immediately noticed that there was a lot of it.

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Way too much mana for someone who hadn’t even entered the path. He was going to die, he could immediately tell that there was no way for him to survive having this much mana in his body. His Capacity wasn’t high enough.

“Open your eyes.” The command was somehow spoken to his magical senses, instead of the mundane, and Alex listened this time. He was facing the knees of David Alvarez, recognizable because he was shining with the same magic that had such an odd taste. The man’s clothes were significantly more impressive than they had been back before he had Sensitivity.

“Your Sensitivity is too high,” The man spoke, still talking through magic. Alex realized that David was somehow controlling the mana around his body to make the magical equivalent of sound waves to communicate.

Oh, that was right. He wasn’t going to die because David could siphon the mana out of his body. That realization brought a feeling of relief. His earlier plans of seizing greatness were forgotten, this was too much.

“I can’t cut off the surge and let you come down from the high, you’ve already begun to inscribe something.”

“What?” Alex asked, not hearing his own voice when he spoke.

“When you were Obsessed with the grass,” The man grimaced, “I hadn’t even noticed that my Domain had Inspired it to become an Ensouled Plant. I rarely pay much attention to the city, since I’ve been focused on the gathering horde near the edge of my senses. Something this small and weak barely registered.”

“What?” That raised so many more questions than it answered.

“Don’t worry about it. The point is that you inscribed half of a rune in your arms. You did it in under a second, as well. Shows incredible talent for later on.”

Alex was more than a bit taken aback, he didn’t remember doing anything of the sort. He made eye contact with the man and realized how odd it was that he could see perfectly fine while his other physical senses were so muted. “Why can I see?” He asked, struggling to focus enough to speak while his senses were still so overwhelmed. He went to look down at his forearms, wanting to see just what the rune that he’d inscribed was. He’d need to either use it or remove it, eventually.

“None of that,” David stated. Suddenly Alex was not at all interested in figuring out what he’d done to his forearms. That wasn’t right either, the partial rune was interesting, he wanted to know, “Alex, that is how you trigger a False Enlightenment.”

That put a stop to his efforts, and Alex took what felt like his 1000th deep breath of the day.

”Now, you can see because I told you to,” David continued, “I’m going to steadily give you back your other senses in a minute, but you need to try to get used to this amount of input first. Sensitivity doesn’t just enhance your senses, it allows your brain to process those senses.”

Alex nodded and started to take in his surroundings. He looked around, immediately noticing the various shades of mana in the air around him. With the ethereal overwhelming the physical, his other senses had become disquieting to focus on. It was uncanny, the senses that he was used to were producing completely alien sensations. His brain struggled to equate these feelings to the familiar but wasn’t particularly successful.

He turned to look back at his friends, but David interrupted him, “Don’t look back. That’s not what’s important.”

How his friends were doing seemed very important, but Alex let it slide. He would talk to them when he was done.

“Your mind has set up a barrier, trying to protect itself,” David spoke, “You’re thinking about anything but the sensory input you’re receiving because you know it's too much for you to handle. That’s not true, anymore. You have the ability, you just have to use it. Feel.”

Alex did so, feeling the mana that touched his skin. It was odd how much the experience reminded him of the colors he’d seen during Deng Jing’s Imprinting. It wasn’t a perfect match, the feeling was more complex than being caressed by the color orange, but it was a reasonable way to think about it as he tried to adapt.

He quickly realized that this was the feeling of David’s mana type, he was nearly completely encased in attuned mana. It was probably a good thing he was going alone, the man was capable but the amount of attuned mana Alex could see and feel must be stressing even his prodigious Capacity.

He was getting distracted again. What the mana was didn’t matter that much. He needed to feel the physical. He focused and was able to make out the touch of the wind and the coarse ground.

Satisfied, he focused on the sound of mana, trying to hear his surroundings like he did when his physical senses weren’t so drowned out. He quickly realized that the density of mana was the reason everything felt like it was coming to him underwater. He was basically undermana, and the sheer amount of mana drowned out individual impressions as it all came together in a cacophonous blend.

That gave him a headache, so he focused back on seeing the mana. Sight wasn’t the most important sense, but it was perhaps the most familiar for him. More equal than the others, maybe?

Unimportant, focus.

He looked down, forcing himself to avoid paying attention to what he’d done to his arms, and saw that the mana around him was just as homogenous as he had felt. It was not a small layer of Inspire mana that surrounded him.

It was what he was tasting and smelling as well. The odd, complex blend of tastes and smells from earlier had been replaced. Everything was Inspire. “You’re drowning out the atmospheric mana,” Alex said aloud.

“It will make things easier for you,” David replied, “My mana is not simple, but having just the one type lets you spend less effort on parsing the different mana in the air.”

“Isn’t atmospheric mana unattuned?” Alex wondered.

“What is Dean teaching you kids?” David frowned, “Unattuned mana is just as diverse as mana dominated by a mana type. That’s like asking, aren’t humans carbon-based? You and I aren’t identical.”

Alex’s mind whirled at that information, which he had known in vague terms but not put together without actual access to mana.

“Now, this might be a bit rough for you, but you have to do it eventually. Smell.”

Suddenly, Alex’s physical sense of smell was no longer completely drowned out. It was like his mind had grown to be able to process the lesser input. After how easily he handled sight, he had expected this to be the same.

He was completely wrong.

While his sense of magical smell was dominated by Inspire, that wasn’t at all true of the physical environment. Suddenly, the mix of smells from the ruins came flooding back in. They felt wrong, off somehow…

“Taste,” David commanded.

That fixed that problem, smell and taste were interdependent and without the other, the first had felt wrong. The larger problem remained, the imbalance between his mana and physical senses was blurring his mind. How could both be real at once? It felt wrong, he could smell sweat coming from himself, but there wasn’t any sweat for him to smell.

His mind began to spin, unable to keep up with the two differing inputs and the confusion caused by his still missing hearing. He vomited again, unable to keep up with everything. David had claimed that Sensitivity gave him the ability to handle the input, but did that extend to the physical?

“Focus.”

It was an order, backed by the full force of David’s power, or close to it. Alex suddenly felt so very small as the amount of Inspire mana in his surroundings was multiplied several times. A good amount of it started to leak into his body, and suddenly he found that he could handle the sensory input. More than that, his sense of hearing came back as well.

It was all under control, this mana was incredible stuff.

He focused back on David to thank him, and that’s when he saw it.

Until now, he hadn’t paid much attention to the man in front of him, he was struggling too much with everything else to even parse the complex view. Now, he could see it all, and it felt like the man’s mana was improving his eyesight to see more than even his Sensitivity should’ve been able to manage.

David had twenty-five apertures, but Alex only needed to see the one. It was placed in his calf, which seemed an odd choice. Heart Rune and Soul Aperture were fused, creating an array across three dimensions that pumped Inspire mana and something else into David’s body. A large amount of that mana was coming straight to Alex, helping him handle the situation.

It felt like the mana created a link between them. It had been present before, but it expanded into something more as Alex stared at the aperture. Their connection extended into the Ethereal Plane, and suddenly Alex saw even more. The man’s aperture didn’t exist in three dimensions. It existed in four. Suddenly, he was able to see into the Ethereal Plane, overlaid with his sight of the physical. Now, the aperture seemed perfect.

A voice spoke in his head, “The goal is simple, you must unify body and soul. Only once you have formed a perfect gestalt is the path complete.” It was Plato’s voice, but that was impossible. Plato wasn’t present.

A resilient part of Alex’s mind realized that he was Obsessed. The majesty of the man’s path had overruled his own thoughts.

No, that wasn’t right. He made several different realizations as the link between the two of them reached full strength.

He wasn’t Obsessed. He was Inspired.