I was a bit frazzled about what to do first in my tiny cave. I had made a lot of gains in the Dungeon of Tribulation, and I wasn’t sure where I should start my consolidation of strength. It wasn’t a stretch to say that I had made off like a bandit with the kind of gains I had made, but, just like gems, they were only sparkly rocks unless you polished them.

After a bit of internal debate I decided to start off with the biggest gem, my Personal Talent. I was eager to know everything about my newfound Talent, since a Tier 9 Talent was on par with things like Dragons in terms of strength and growth potential. Although it was an unfortunate set of circumstances that led to me being able to obtain a Tier 9 Talent, it was mine now, and I didn’t want to waste it.

So, while sitting in the small dark cave, I closed my eyes and focused inward in the same exercise I had taught Genesis all those years ago. My mana core, as always, appeared in my mind’s eye, but something else was now present alongside it. It felt similar to how my Personal Talent in the past had, at least on the surface, but at the same time I could tell that it was completely different in function.

As I focused more deeply on my new Personal Talent, I began to get feelings and impressions that soon crystalized into a basic understanding of my new Talent. As I understood, I was also confused, because the Talent was simpler than the one I had in the past.

My Personal Talent in the past, [Globetrotting Shopper], had had multiple facets to it, and each piece had been a pain to learn and master. But this new Talent [Collected Potential] only had two major parts to it.

The first part was spending collected potential. This required me to specify something to connect to and create a mark/link to it by spending some of my collected potential. After a successful link was formed, then I would be able to modify/alter whatever it was, however I desired, if I had enough points to accomplish the modifications.

The second part of my Personal Talent was collecting the potential I would be spending with the first part of the Talent. Collecting potential wasn’t easy, definitely not as easy as spending it was. The simplest way to describe it was that there were both active and passive ways of gaining potential.

The passive way was very understandable, I could set my Talent to automatically take a percentage of different ‘increases’ I gained and turn them into potential. I could also sacrifice things I owned, and gain potential from that. Though what I ‘owned’ was limited to things I had marked/linked to, which limited what I could sacrifice greatly. So it wasn’t like I could go around marking everything in a museum and sacrificing it, but I could steal things from the museum and then mark them when my ‘connection’ to them became strong enough.

The active way of gaining potential was a bit more esoteric. It was almost like a quest system, where I could spend potential to create a goal/quest, and if I achieved that goal then I would get potential based on the quest, calculated at the end of quest.

It all seems pretty self explanatory. However there are a lot of things that aren’t specified, like what happens if I fail a quest, or what it takes to make a link to something. I guess these are things I’ll have to find out on my own.

Currently I have 30,000 points available to spend. It didn’t seem like much, but I had no frame of reference, so I would have to try and do something with the points to see how rich or poor I currently was. So I decided to modify what I had planned to modify already.

Following the first step of my Talent, I created a link with my Skill [Selective Transformation]. As the link was formed, 1 point was taken from my total. I wasn’t sure if creating a link would always cost one point, but I would find out soon. For now I focused my attention back on what I was doing. After the link was formed I gained a feeling that I could specify any changes I wanted to make.

To start off I started small. I specified that I wanted the transformation to last a few minutes after I wasn’t using the Skill anymore. When I did this I got a System response along with an understanding from my Talent.

[This change will cost 8 points.]

Only 8 points huh? Pretty cheap, but that’s just a small change, let's try doing a bigger change.

I discarded the previous change and didn’t spend any points. Then I tried again, this time trying to make the Skills effects permanent even after the Skill was no longer in use. Again I got both a System message along with an understanding from my Talent.

[This change will cost 24230 points.]

24230 points just for that!? I don’t know if I should be grateful or upset. It’s good that making what the Skill does permanent is within what I can afford, but at the same time there are still other things I need to change before the Skill is what I need it to be.

I discarded the change once again, and continued to change various things to try and gauge what different changes cost. After trying out various changes, I was able to discern a few things. The first thing I learned was that [Selective Transformation] was more powerful than I gave it credit for.

Although [Selective Transformation] would currently only hold its effects while the Skill was in use, the things it was able to do while it was in use were more powerful than what I had been using the Skill for up to this point. However, most of the things [Selective Transformation] could do weren’t going to be necessary for me in the future, and what would be necessary could be accomplished through other means, like medicine or artifacts once I reached civilization. This was good news, because it meant that I had a strong base to work from when modifying the Skill.

From this I was able to determine that it was much easier for my Talent to change existing things than it was to add things. For example, [Selective Transformation] could resist or enhance any transformation that might happen to me, and it cost very little to change those capabilities of the Skill. However, when I tried to make the effects permanent, the Skill was no longer just resisting or enhancing things, it was picking and choosing what would be permanent or null and void, which might as well be a Power at that point.

Needless to say, changing things was fine within a limit, but once I went outside of that limit the cost would exponentially increase. With this, I used what I learned and tried to change [Selective Transformation] into what I needed. And after meticulously crafting the changes in my head, I directed the changes towards my Talent, bringing up a System message.

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[This change will cost 22,643 points.]

Hmm, not bad. Considering what I know about the world, this isn’t too large of a price to pay for a Skill like this.

If I went through with the changes, the Skill would basically become the perfect disguise Skill. I would be sacrificing the Skill’s ability to react to all transformations, but in return it would gain the ability to actively transform my physical body and make permanent transformations there. In addition, the changes the Skill made wouldn’t be detectable, and would appear to have always been that way.

I wouldn’t be immediately making these changes to the Skill, but considering the fact that I wouldn’t be able to set foot in civilization without something like this, the change was practically set in stone at this point. Unless something else came along before I was ready to escape from this place, I was going to have to act as if I was already down 22,643 points, bringing my total down to 7,356 points.

With this in mind, I was going to have to find a way to earn more points. The first thing I wanted to test out was quests, so I used 1 point to start a very simple quest to breathe once. The quest actually activated, and even completed right after I took a breath. However, instead of gaining any points, a System message popped up.

[Quest completed. Calculating rewards… No rewards gained. Points spent gaining the quest will now be refunded.]

Although I didn’t gain any new rewards, I did get back the point I spent on the quest, so it wasn’t all that bad. It would at least mean I would be able to experiment and try things without losing points.

The next thing I tried was seeing what would happen if I failed a quest. So I tried to create a quest to breathe twice in 10 seconds. It was definitely achievable, but I was going to fail on purpose. It was necessary information to know going forward, I couldn’t be afraid to start a quest just because I didn’t know what would happen if I failed.

So, after spending one point creating the quest, I waited out the 10 seconds without taking a single breath, and right after that the System message appeared.

[Quest failed. Calculating rewards… No rewards gained. Points spent gaining the quest will now be refunded.]

It was somewhat surprising, but at the same time not outside my expectations. There had been no penalty for failure, and it even seemed that it was possible to gain rewards from failed quests. It was nice to see, but my sample size wasn’t exactly all encompassing, so I couldn’t be certain that the ‘rewards’ couldn’t be negative, or that I would always be refunded the points I spent on a quest. But at the very least I wouldn’t have to worry about doing small experiments with the quests.

This is great. I can take my time and learn all I can about how my new Talent works. The next thing I want to try is what kind of things I can link to and modify. The System description was pretty vague on that part.

The first thing I tried was making a link to my new concealment artifact. When I went to make the connection I felt resistance, and I failed to make a connection. However I could tell that it wasn’t because I would never be able to do so, in fact I felt that it was just ‘too soon’ to make a connection. Which meant that time was one of the factors that determined what I could link to.

Well I feel that I’ll be able to link to it fairly soon. It’s a little unfortunate, but I can wait. Now I know that I can link to Skills and objects; I wonder what other things I can link to?

Feeling a bit adventurous, I tried to think of what would be the most powerful thing I could link to at the moment. Maybe my Internal World? What about the System itself? [Mental Operator]? They all sounded game breaking if they were possible, but there was something that would be more impressive than even those. What if I could connect to [Collected Potential]? It sounds crazy, but if it’s possible…

I didn’t waste any more time thinking about it, and immediately tried to make a link to my Personal Talent. However the link failed to connect, and I almost deflated with disappointment. But, just like the artifact, I received the impression that it was just too soon, not that it was impossible.

My mind almost ground to a halt before speeding up like a lightning bolt. Holy Jilly this is too good to be true! My mind filled up with all sorts of possibilities, and I sat there in a daze, daydreaming for almost an hour before my excitement calmed down enough for me to think clearly.

It’s too soon to celebrate Radiant, the link isn’t even possible right now. Maybe in the future, yes, but I can tell that it will take a lot longer than it will take for the artifact to be linkable, around 10 to 20 times as long I feel. It’s frustrating not knowing the exact amount of time, but I would be willing to wait years, decades even, to have such an opportunity. For now I have other things I can do.

With that revelation, I wasn’t in the mood to continue to experiment with my Talent at the moment. I needed to focus on something else for a while to stamp down my growing expectations and imagination. I was still incredibly weak, and I couldn’t afford to waste time daydreaming when there were things I could be doing that would increase my strength.

Which led to my next order of business, linking my Internal World to my new spatial storage bag. Making a small light float in front of me, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the small black spatial storage bag that might as well be called a coin purse.

It was pretty pathetic for a spatial storage item. It didn’t have a very large internal space, it didn’t reduce the weight of things inside of it, and it could only store things that fit through its opening. But all of that didn’t matter, because what I got this bag for was to conceal my Internal World. And for that reason, most of the points I had spent on this bag had gone into making it so only I could take things in and out of it.

Because of this property of the bag, there was a magical connection between the bag and myself. This connection was what I would be hijacking in order to make my Internal World accessible through the bag. It wouldn’t be easy or even possible, for other people, but this was right up my alley of expertise: Magical artifacts, Spatial magic, and the soul.

Considering what I had had to do in order to come back in time, this would be easy. Focusing on the link between my soul shell and the bag, I started to fill the link with my mana, and slowly started to soften the link with a very complicated process that had to account for all the minor changes to both ends of the link during the process, otherwise either end of the link might ‘unplug’ and sever the connection.

It took a couple hours, but eventually the tether between the bag and my soul shell was soft enough for me to work with. Taking the softened link in my mental hands, I pinched the middle of the tether and made an offshoot link that I connected to my Internal World. It sounds easier than it was, but because my Internal World was inside of my body I was able to locate its position within the strange conceptual space that the soul tether existed in.

With the connection complete I was able to relax my mind from the mentally strenuous task. Taking the black bag in one hand I used the other to reach into the bag. When my hand passed through the mouth of the bag I felt the connection to both the bag and my Internal World, and I knew that with just a thought I would be able to reach into either one.

Wanting to test it out, I pulled at the connection with my Internal World, and my hand suddenly felt the chill of frozen air. Since I hadn’t specified where to connect to, I had reached into the largest space in my Internal World, and my hand had come out near the ice spire that had been growing within it. I could even see the clear ice through the mouth of the black bag. Taking my hand out of the bag, the scene inside switched back to the empty space within the bag.

I was happy, and smiled at my success. This might not make me any stronger in combat, but it would drastically increase my safety in other ways. Now I wouldn’t have to worry about others finding out about my Internal World. It was a bit narcissistic of me, but I couldn’t help but imagine the scenario where I pulled something out of thin air while I thought no one was watching only to end up displaying my awesome capabilities to the wrong person, then I would be taken away and exploited for my talents once again.

I shuddered at the thought. I didn’t want to ever again be treated like a slave. Sure I might’ve been a rich slave with many freedoms, but I was still a slave. Never again. I will be free this time, no matter what it takes.