The warehouse still crackled with residue energy, the aftershocks of a battle won on the razor's edge of self-destruction. Every inhale tasted of iron and sickly sweet decay. Jason, leaning against a crumbling support beam, wasn't reveling in his victory – he was mapping out weaknesses.

Essence Theft was powerful, horrifyingly so. But he'd come near the brink, channelling unstable energy like water through a cracking dam. His body pulsed with potential, yet inexperience could have incinerated him from within. The System offered gifts, but each had a barbed cost.

His fingers trembled not from lingering terror, but analysis. With a grimace, he touched the wound on his chest. As it absorbed more light, the bite mark seemed to throb as if mirroring the rift itself. In his memory, there had been no mutations like that beast, but also no wounds like this on him. Were those absences clues to his rebirth, or side effects?

"Damned questions," he snarled. Foreknowledge was no longer a cheat sheet, but a list of deviations – each a variable that could bring triumph… or obliteration.

Focus was essential. He forced his racing mind towards external threats. The System wasn't a simple predator, it was a machine built around escalation. If not contained, this rift would spawn worse... things. His past whispered names: goblin hordes, lumbering behemoths. Yet, those had been structured waves, designed to overwhelm. Here, he sensed only nascent potential – not yet moulded into their ultimate forms.

This gave him a grotesque window of opportunity. His eyes flicked to the remnants of the disintegrated beast. He had an idea – one both monstrous and brilliant.

Harvesting motes from a shattered husk offered nothing his body didn't violently reject. But, perhaps, his body was too limited a vessel. Wax, for all its potential, belonged to his old life. It was time to think less like a craftsman, and more like the System's warped architect.

With a brutal precision born of survival, he broke off a jagged chunk of metal from the collapsed shelves. As his wound flared in response, he didn't flinch. The pain had become a map. Essence pulsed thickest towards the centre of the floor, where the energy seemed to spiral toward…nothing. A void, or was it something not yet manifested?

Holding the jagged metal, he willed his control to extend past his flesh, pushing towards the heart of the warehouse. It resisted at first, then something snapped. His vision pulsed as Essence Theft took another step in its horrific evolution. Not absorption, but… grafting.

As his focus bled into the metal, it became a crude extension of his will - not a weapon, but a probe. Slowly, painstakingly, he pushed it towards that vortex at the heart of the room. With every inch, an invisible cord formed, energy flowing outward – the reverse of how he normally fed.

Then it struck something. His mind erupted in a vision not of swirling fire, but of icy clarity. An egg, translucent yet throbbing with sickly violet light. Its shell wasn't physical, but woven of raw System energy. There was… potential here. Potential more vast than in any single mutated creature. His blood roared as if finally recognizing the path to true dominance.

But there was another presence, not born of the beast, but woven into this spectral structure. Something… alien. Aware. Cold rage rippled through the connection, pushing against his probe. In its formless fury, he sensed not malevolence, but violation. An architect discovering a parasite leeching off its work.

Jason recoiled, nearly dropping the metal, his vision swimming. Had he… had he nearly been noticed? Whatever monitored rifts, orchestrated this monstrous game, had brushed against his presence. Not strong enough to crush him now, but aware. He needed more power, more understanding, and swiftly.

His gaze hardened. It wouldn't be just about killing monsters now, not even manipulating their essence. The rift pulsed with the System's power – that was his ultimate prey.

But how to devour something larger than yourself? This, perhaps, was where his foreknowledge could pave a path.

He stumbled from the warehouse, every street pulsing with reminders of the chaos to come. His plan was insane, audacious, and the kind of thing that should have gotten him killed countless times.

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"Not this time," he hissed. The past was only useful if it served his survival. This wasn't about avoiding his old mistakes – it was about making the System itself stumble.

The moment he entered the streets, another System notification blared in his mind:

Warning: Rift Instability Detected. Energy Discharge Imminent.

"Perfect," he rasped, the irony echoing in the empty street.

The first waves in his past had followed a set script. Yet, his tampering with the core – draining excess energy with Essence Theft – had consequences. It meant fewer mutated beasts roaming, but an inevitable, raw discharge of unclaimed energy. A monstrous surge with devastating force...if left unchecked.

In his past, that surge had decimated this town, its uncontrolled blast turning survivors into mutated fodder. In this iteration, he could almost see the outline of another path: contain the release, not to save anyone, but to harness the System's excess against itself. It was suicide, or salvation – and there was a twisted thrill in knowing one might well bleed into the other.

The question was, where? It would need a space large enough for a potential detonation, while defensible enough to give him some control. An impossible duality amidst the town's cramped infrastructure. A flash of memory illuminated the map: the high school grounds. Not some desperate clinging to normalcy, but a ruthless twist of his past life's failures.

The high school had, later on, become a monstrous nest of horrors. Yet, early on, its open design might just do the trick. It offered a wide area to play out his gamble, and potentially – if this gamble failed – distance to flee an even greater mutated horror.

But that would be an admittance of defeat, a thought he ruthlessly crushed. It wasn't about safety anymore, about the scrabbling he knew would lead to nothing, as it had before. It was about forcing growth, demanding that this world change to suit his will. And to start that forced evolution, he'd need more tools.

"Essence Theft..." he mused, tracing a hardened shape from a spilled pool of wax. Crude, inefficient, born of desperate struggle. It was no longer enough.

In the distance, a woman's scream echoed, then cut off with a gurgling snap. Another lost to the chaos, another potential mote harvester... but even those were too slow. His gaze lingered on the shimmering marks left by the hounds. Those held energy, but in too weak a form to push him past his current state. He needed... a conduit.

The answer didn't come in a vision, but in a flicker of desperation. In his past, as the rifts settled into their sickening routine, they produced more than just monsters. They warped plant life, spawned festering pools of tainted water - all infused with System energy. Were these mere aftereffects, or another step in the invasion's progression?

Focus narrowed to a razor point. Plants, even mutated by this hellish influence, would possess different… properties… than flesh. It took another agonising minute scanning the streets before he spotted his target: a burst of purple flowers spilling from a shattered planter, each leaf tinged with the iridescence of System taint. In his old life, he'd have treated such growth as poison. Now, a wicked grin spread.

These flowers were weak, not yet evolved into truly horrifying threats. But within them might lie the key he needed: a link to a different form of essence, to a more fundamental form of System pollution.

Harvesting was brutal, fingers trembling as he crushed the blossoms into a wax mould. In a sickening twist of his old skill, he poured the remnants of his power into the waxy mix, forcing an artificial fusion. His wound pulsed, not in warning, but as if drinking deep from an alien well. The final creation throbbed with sickening violet, but beneath that alien hue pulsed a potential so rich it felt intoxicating.

It wasn't a weapon. It was fuel. And it was only the first step. He needed more, more variety. Different flora would react differently, each one a key to pushing Essence Theft deeper.

There was no time for finesse. With every step towards the school, another scream would cut through the pandemonium. Each a reminder of how slow the harvesting of life had been in his past. How, by the time he'd had enough power, it was already far too late.

A surge of System energy rippled through the air, sending tremors through the streets. This time, his warning wasn't mental, but visceral: the world itself was groaning in preparation for the cataclysm he'd set in motion.

Ahead, the school grounds loomed, its shattered perimeter bathed in an eerie crimson light. He stalked forward, not towards sanctuary, but the centre of his makeshift crucible.

Something was changing. It wasn't simply the school he saw, but the spectral overlay the System forced upon him: motes swirling heavier, marks glowing with malevolence. This wasn't the view from his old life.

Power sang in his veins. Each step forward was a testament to his ruthlessness, of his transformation. Yes, he had been sent back, but not simply to follow his old path. He was meant to carve out something brutal and bold, to turn the System's energy back upon itself. This school, he now realised, was more than just an arena.

It was an incubator.