I knew I was missing something that would make everything come together, but I just couldn’t pin it down, like the answer was on the tip of my tongue but refused to bubble up from my subconscious. So I decided to take a look at my Mental Operator control center to see if anything in there would be able to clear things up.

Using my Power I came to the control center and saw a multitude of controls and displays, many of them still completely foreign to me after the Power’s recent evolution. I wandered around trying to see if I could find anything that stood out that might point to the missing feeling I had.

The large variety of controls and displays weren’t forthcoming with their purposes or uses, so the only thing I could do was slowly label them as I found out what they correlated to, but currently only about 10% of them were labeled. So far I had found out what some of the new controls were for and what some of the displays were, but the vast majority of the new things were opaque in their purposes.

However, as I wandered through everything, I came across a display that seemed to be lightly flashing around the edges. When I took a closer look at the display I saw something similar to a mind map with different ideas and concepts linked by lines to other ideas and concepts. Currently the display had one idea that seemed to be glowing in comparison to everything else, and that idea was the Talent choice [Collected Potential].

I didn’t know what exactly the display was trying to say, but I decided to take a closer look at the things [Collected Potential] was connected to and what it might be trying to say.

After a while of piecing all of the connections and clues on the display together, I understood what the mind map was trying to tell me. It was telling me I had to choose the Talent [Collected Potential] as my Talent choice. The reasons were many, but the biggest reason was the fact that the description for [Collected Potential] had said it can be used on myself or things with a strong enough connection to me, and that was a big deal for my current situation.

I had to assume that my Skills were a part of me, or at least had a strong enough connection to me. If I could use the Talent to make a slight modification to my Skill (Selective Transformation II), then I could make it permanently alter my appearance. If I could do that, then my problem would be solved.

It would be a bit of a gamble whether the Talent would be strong enough to accomplish this change, after all it said it was very weak at the beginning, but it wasn’t that big of a risk. So I made up my mind to choose [Collected Potential] as my Personal Talent.

I exited my mental space and returned to the empty System room. Although I had made up my mind to choose [Collected Potential] for my Personal Talent, I would save that for after I received my rewards. Awakening a Personal Talent was something that slowly took place over the course of a person’s lifetime up until it awakened naturally, but in my case I prematurely awakened my Personal Talent with a Talent awakening orb, so in my case I would be unconscious while my Talent awakened. So I would save my awakening until after I collected my rewards.

Now I had to choose my last 2 rewards, but now I didn’t have any glaring problems that I needed to fix anymore. I needed to rethink my priorities and what I wanted out of these last two rewards. In the past I might’ve been tempted to get some generic power increases, but my foundations were pretty solid at this point, and any more reinforcement of my base capabilities wasn’t going to be as effective as focused synergies and improvements would be.

Since I had a magic focused build, I decided that I should think about increasing the strength of specific areas of my magic. Currently I was making up for my lack of strength with an overwhelming amount of mana, but compared to actual mages I was a pathetic excuse for a mage. Sure I could get the job done, but what I was doing was the equivalent of using 1000 toddlers for a job instead of 10 strong guys.

I had already settled on an attack spell I could use, but if I wanted to get more out of it, then I would need something like a magic tempering technique. It sounded more awesome than it usually was though, a magic tempering technique wasn’t much different from spells, in that there could be really powerful spells, but there were also very simple and mundane spells too. The same could be said for magic tempering techniques, sure there were some really powerful techniques, but the kinds I could currently get weren’t extraordinary. But no matter how mundane, it would give me the boost I needed to have at least passable magic strength.

So I went about describing and designing my fourth reward for 2700 points. After a lot of searching and refining of my search criteria, I was able to find a tempering technique that I wanted out of the many options available. The tempering technique was called Icelated Star. (Pronounced similar to isolated)

This tempering technique would make use of my enhanced mana cells and transform some of them into an Icelated Star within my mana nebula. This transformation would change the identity of the mana produced by these mana cells into Icelated mana, and the Star itself would act as a stabilizer for ice related spells.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

I wasn’t exactly sure what Icelated mana was, but I knew it was some form of ice mana at least, and since the new attack spell I would be using was an ice spell, I thought it was a great choice for my first tempering technique.

Now all that was left was my fifth and final reward. Unlike the first four rewards, this one was much more unique, a special reward. Special rewards, and the things one could get from them, were only obtainable if at least a +20 reward modifier was present, and even then a special reward was only obtained every fifth floor. So it wasn’t easy to get one.

However, despite the importance behind this reward choice, I already knew what I wanted to get. I’m not saying it was easy coming to my final choice, but the choice I had come to was something I knew I would never regret choosing.

For my fifth and final reward I chose the Trait [Mana Sustenance]. This Trait would allow me to substitute mana for food. Although, with my current amount of mana generation, I would be nowhere near being able to completely replace my body’s food requirements, but it would eventually allow me to do just that.

I had always hated the fact that I had to eat and drink just to live, sure I loved food and water just as much as the next Human, but requiring it to live just sounded strange to me. But with this Trait I would be able to overcome this limitation and overcome a portion of my mortality.

With all of my rewards now selected, I claimed all of them at once.

Just like that, five different things appeared in front of me, floating in the air waiting to be claimed. From left to right was: a simple looking bag, a white rod that looked perfectly designed for me to grab, a thin booklet with the words Frozen Water Lance on the cover, a small metal box with extremely complex patterns all over its surface, and last was an orb of amorphous glowing light.

There weren’t many rewards, but they were each valuable. I didn’t waste any time and grabbed the small bag on the left and placed it into a pocket on the inside of my jacket, then I reached out and grabbed the white rod, and once my hand wrapped around it I received a System message.

[Would you like to learn the technique (Icelated Star)]

I wasn’t surprised by the sudden System message and gave an instant reply, “Yes.”

Immediately I felt information flow into my mind, and I came to understand everything about the technique (Icelated Star). It was more impressive than I had first thought, and I would have to take some time to practice it later, but I didn’t have the time to fully go over it right now. So I reached over to the Frozen Water Lance booklet and quickly flipped through it, only needing to see it once in order to have a perfect memory of everything I saw.

Just from my initial impressions I could tell that this spell was one of the most advanced attack spells I had ever laid my eyes on. Though that wasn’t saying much considering that I had had to create almost all of my spells from scratch in the past. That wasn’t to say that I didn’t know strong magic, but the level of information I had access to in The Archives didn’t go past a certain point.

Needless to say I was excited to have a stronger spell I could reference and use, but there were still two more rewards to obtain. I reached out, but before getting the fourth reward, I reached my hand out to the glowing light and received another System message as soon as my hand entered the light.

[Would you like to obtain the Trait (Mana Sustenance)? This cannot be reversed and is difficult to remove once obtained. Alternatively you can store the Trait within an orb that will last up to 720 hours and can be used by someone else.]

I obviously wasn’t going to give this to someone else, so I said, “Obtain the Trait please.”

The light went from floating in the air, to flowing into my hand and suffusing throughout my body. Immediately I felt like a new hunger arose from within me, but this hunger was minor and very ignorable. However I felt that I could feed this hunger with my mana, and it even felt like I could use a new muscle to automatically pull mana to feed this new hunger, similar to a new lung. However at the moment this new ‘lung’ wasn’t doing anything and lay dormant waiting to breathe in my mana to feed my body.

I decided to experiment with it later, but for now I moved on to obtaining my last reward, the intricate metallic box. As soon as my hands wrapped around the object, I felt my skin tingle and my TechnicMorph senses were whispering into my mind that this was Good, like a good smell, and that I should absorb it.

I wasn’t going to deny my instincts on this matter, and I allowed my hands to liquify and morph to surround the object and send it into my [Body of Artifact]’s ‘stomach’. The box disappeared and my hands returned to normal while I could feel my body start to ‘digest’, or maybe a more apt word was ‘decode’, the artifact within me. Because of the complexity of the artifact I could tell that it would take a while before my body would be able to display the properties of the artifact, but I still had around 15 hours left in this reward room, and the decoding would definitely be done by then.

In the meantime I had one last thing to do. I opened up my System messages and selected the Personal Talent I had decided to awaken.

[Collected Potential]: You have collected potential power for so long but never had the opportunity to show it, but now that will no longer be a problem. Over time, and through many means, Potential Points are collected and saved to use later. Potential Points are Omnipotent… with enough of them, but they can currently only be used on yourself or things with a strong enough connection to you. (WARNING: This Talent is very weak at the beginning.)

The warning was still a bit worrying to me, but I had made my decision and I wasn’t going to change my mind.

[You have selected to awaken the Personal Talent (Collected Potential). Awakening the talent will render you unconscious for up to 18 hours, and once the process has started it cannot be stopped. Do you wish to proceed with the awakening process?]

“Yes, I would like to begin the awakening process.”

Just like the first time I had awakened my Personal Talent, I felt something intimately familiar heat up and shake within me. The heat and shaking continued to increase moment by moment, but before it could reach the point of pain my awareness started to fade and I was quickly rendered unconscious.