Chapter 36
Achievements
When I went to lay down for the night I had a very strong urge to shift forms. Sleeping as a beast felt a lot more comfortable now for some reason and my head still hadn't stopped hurting. The System's pinging wasn't helping. I looked at my unlocked door, thought about how no one but Samuel would likely come in uninvited, and shifted forms to Mana Beast.
I felt like something that had been winding up in me relaxed, it didn't seem to help my head, and the System was pinging me louder by the second. So I let out a huff and answered the System.
Congratulations
For taking novel actions in accordance with your new class, you have been rewarded by:
Level up × 10
Error
Overexerted Mental Capacity Detected
Enhancement Process Cannot Start
Analyzing Potential Fixes…
Pause of cognitive functions deemed inadvisable at this time, valuable data may be lost.
Searching for Alternative Fixes…
Delay deemed inadvisable at this time. Swift leveling protocols are enabled.
Discarded Reward Found
Error: Reward Permanent Boon [Personal Catalog of Magic] is a part of Achievement System. Achievement System inactive in the contractor's current world.
Requesting permission from the ruling entity.
Permission Acquired
Temporarily activating Achievement System for contractor: Angel
Error detected - requested achievement is part of a set, sets must be rewarded in order.
Recovering Discarded Rewards
Applying Reward
Congratulations
For gazing into the fabric of reality and learning your first Concept, you have been rewarded by:
Class Ability [Sense Concept]
Sense Concept: The thoughts of sapient beings are weak individually but in numbers they empower aspects of reality with their Concepts.
Legends form when stories are told, and thoughts gather, the further a Legend spreads, the more power it will feed back to its source. Over time, that power becomes true in the form of Concepts.
Sense Concept will allow you to more easily identify how an object, idea, or being has been empowered by their Legend.
The System mana gathered around my throbbing head and speared into it. I let out a pained bellow, I felt my brain matter being altered. I lost control of my entire body as the System altered my skull slightly to make room. My jaw went slack, and my tongue hung out of my mouth.
Then in a flash, it finished. My poor mind felt even more battered than before, as I began picking up the Concepts associated with everything around me.
Temporarily Disabling Sense Concept
The System mana touching my mind felt like a balm as my new sense shut down.
Continuing Reward of Achievement Set
Congratulations
For continuing on the path of discovery and learning ten Concepts, you have been rewarded by:
Class Ability [Mind's Eye]
Mind's Eye: Properly comprehending and visualizing Concepts presents difficulties for the mortal mind.
Mind's Eye increases the effectiveness of intelligence for the purposes of perceiving and visualizing Concepts by 100%
The System got to work applying Mind's Eye, my brain was altered once again eliciting a pathetic, but loud groan from me. My poor gray matter was momentarily turned to mush, and reformed slightly differently.
My head spun, how my brain continued to function while in that between-state even in the limited capacity that it did, was a question I'd love an answer to. Why it continued to function, I put down to some innate sadism built into the System.
My mind was still disoriented when the next announcement hit, carrying its wave of change.
Finishing Reward of Achievement Set
Congratulations
For continuing on the path of discovery and learning fifty Concepts, you have been rewarded by:
Permanent Boon [Personal Catalog of Magic]
Personal Catalog of Magic: The path of the mage requires the memorization of many things from the intricate language of spellforms and the precise etchings of enchantments to the knowledge of Concepts and their varied effects. Perfect recreation of magic is required to prevent catastrophic failures.
Personal Catalog of Magic affixes an addition to your very soul on which all your findings in the field of magic are permanently etched. As a contractor this boon will stay with you between lives, allowing you a vastly growing knowledge base that will never be lost. One hundred lives from now, you will be able to recall magic learned in this life with the same clarity as when you first learned it.
I felt myself become detached from my body, as the System pulled me into the void it had taken me to during the class evolution. Before I could even grasp what was happening the System began to flow into my being.
I felt an intrusion into my soul as the System stitched a foreign mass into the core of my existence. Once it was firmly attached, the System pulsed an energy into the point where my soul met the foreign mass. The energy broke down a barrier that I knew existed for the sole purpose of preventing outside forces from influencing me. I can't say what I felt was pain exactly, it was more like a profound violation of my sense of self.
Once the barrier at the point of contact was broken some of the stuff that formed my existence flowed into the mass, and some of the mass flowed into me. The two mingled until an equilibrium was met, and the mass became part of me.
The System used its energy to aid in the creation of a new barrier that extended to include the new mass.
I felt all of my current knowledge of Concepts cleanly stored in the new feature, ready to be accessed at any moment. The various spellforms and enchantments I had witnessed were stored as well, but they were fuzzy, and incomplete. I knew they were useless until I understood them better, and had a class that had the ability to utilize them.
Once the process was finished, and my connection to my new addition was stabilized, the System moved me back into my body.
I yowled at the feeling as the knowledge of my new Boon settled into me.
My head no longer hurt, but my mind felt stretched, and stressed from the out of body experience, and the violation of my very being from the System.
Re-enabling Ability Sense Concept
Deactivating Achievement System for contractor: Angel
Allowing One Hour Delay Before Enhancement Process Resumes.
The door to my room burst open just as I was growling a fuck you to the System.
Ivo stood in the doorway looking frantically worried. His eyes were wide taking in my form, that was sprawled on the bed in my full Mana Beast glory.
I huffed, I should have known better than to expect privacy when I was making the racket I had. Without the lock enabled nothing stopped the sound from escaping my room. I hoped Ivo wouldn't spread the knowledge of what I was too far.
He looked frightened, I suppose after what he'd heard, and with my imposing size and form, it was fair.
I sent him an attempt at a friendly hello, my mind was still filled with the echoes of the violation I had felt from the System though, so I think some of that bled through.
"Angel? I'm so sorry, I heard all the noise, and felt your anger and pain from the hall. I didn't mean to intrude, but…" He blushed profusely, and hung his head. "I thought you needed help."
I rolled to a more upright position, putting my legs under me, because it made me feel more secure. I let out a great sigh.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
I tried very hard to send words. "I shouldn't have taken this form with the door unlocked. It's my fault. Please don't tell anyone, Samuel and Nefen already know."
I think they actually made it mostly intact.
"Okay, if they know, and haven't spread it, I trust their judgment. But why were you in so much distress? I felt such a sense of violation coming from you that I couldn't take it."
I growled a little thinking of the System, before sending.
"The System saw fit to grant me some help with a problem that was preventing it from giving me levels tonight."
The words made it intact again, but the word System was filled with feelings of anger and spite at a dispassionate entity whose control of my life I resented. The word help was filled with the feelings of violation of self I experienced, along with a whole heap of disdain. The word levels was filled with the dread I felt at the prospect of growing yet more in power before I was ready.
Ivo stumbled in place and clutched his head as my message entered his mind.
When he recovered he said, "Ah Angel, you need to work on that, normal people can't tolerate so much emotional data shoved at them at once."
I lowered my head, my ears drooped in shame. "I haven't had much practice."
I think I managed to keep my emotions out of that message, except for a slight feeling of shame at causing him distress that I packaged with it intentionally.
Ivo walked closer to me, and reached out a hand like he wanted to pet me before he pulled it back like he realized what he was doing. I let out a huffing attempt at mimicking a laugh. My ears flicked back forward.
"It's okay, everyone who has seen this form seems to want to touch my fur. At this point I'm almost willing to believe it's a Concept inherent in my form."
I knew that statement to be true as soon as I thought it, my fur contained both the Concept Soft , and the concept Petable . Which, considering how I was constantly infused with mana, meant that both those Concepts were absolutely true.
I wondered if having the Concept petable was the reason I actually couldn't say I disliked it when people did that.
Something about the message caused Ivo's eyes to roll back in his skull and he fell to the ground like a sack of potatoes
I lept off the bed and instinctively lowered my head to sniff at him. I had no idea what I was smelling for, but he smelled fine, and I could hear his heart beating strongly in his chest.
I put a giant paw on him, as I did, I was amazed how large I'd grown in this form. My paw was as large as his torso. If I kept growing like this I would eventually outgrow my room. I was already taking up a lot of the giant bed.
For the first time, I mentally crushed one of the mana crystals inside my body. I embedded the life mana it contained with the concept Regenerative that I had learned from the aspect of my healing trances.
I found it surprisingly easy to move and alter the mana from the crystals with Minor Mana Manipulation.
I sent the healing form of life mana into Ivo. I felt it spread through him, and I noticed as the bulk of it was spent healing some minor lesions in his brain, the rest went to healing the minor bruising from his fall. One crystal alone didn't seem to do enough, I had to crush two more to fully heal the poor man. It left me with seven more life attuned crystals, I would have to pay attention to how long they took to return.
Ivo's eyes shot open and his hand darted forward to grab me by the mane.
"What in Belua's creation is a Concept, and why did it hurt so much to try to understand what you sent me?" He asked in a croaking, pained voice.
I moved my paw off his chest gingerly, and looked away as much as his solid grip on my mane would allow before responding.
"I'm sorry I didn't know it would do that, I didn't have much problem with them till I'd learned a lot of them I didn't think I was special."
Too little too late, the System granted me the knowledge that people had to be eased into Concepts. Dumping even just the idea of what they were directly into someone's head could seriously hurt a mortal. Reality rejected knowledge of them in the heads of the general population.
I was an exception, my class dealt with concepts, and my body was formed from them.
I suspected it before, but at that moment I knew I was not and never really had been a cat of any sort. My mind was suddenly clear on precisely what my body came from. The information flooded into my mind.
Mana Beasts are creatures drawn from another realm by the existence of a wound in reality. Their passage through the crack into our realm strips them of all they once were. Somehow the act of stripping their being of all that it was provides reality with the right kind of energy to seal the crack.
Creatures from the other realm become drastically unstable in ours; their dying instincts are to perform a desperate gathering of mana to attempt to stabilize themselves.
Once the gathered mana reaches a certain point, the mana will coalesce over the incorporeal entity into an extremely large crystal composed of the dominant concepts in the area. The creature then forms a body out of Concepts taken from a representatives of the local fauna.
When the body is first formed, it is not entirely physical, and the newly born Mana Beast links itself with the crystal they have created using the contained mana to stabilize themselves until reality can integrate them.
During the process they lose all memories of the previous life, and are left only with the Concepts their body was created from to guide them, along with the ability to feed on mana.
In essence, I was given the body that a creature who came through a rip in reality created to stay alive here, and it originally constructed that body entirely out of mana and Concepts. It made me look at the young Mana Beast sleeping inside the body with me a little differently, not that he remembered his origin.
I shook my head, it was a lot of data to unpack, and I was in the middle of something entirely unrelated. The System information packets could use a rework, I wondered for a moment if there was a way to submit a support ticket.
The System Exited Active Development 6958 Years Ago, Support Ticket functions are currently restricted for entities below status: deity.
If your problem persists, please contact your local deity.
That was interesting, but useless additional information. I tried to remember what was happening before the information overload.
Ivo cleared his throat, I was still standing over him, and at some point he had released his hold on my mane. "It's okay, I know you mean it, you don't have to send me emotions by the way. I can already feel them, I'm a natural empath, something the System has seen fit to work with. Those were some interesting emotions you just went through, am I right in assuming they had little to do with our conversation?"
I nodded, thought about trying to keep talking this way, then made a decision.
"I don't know how to not send emotions and ideas with my words, I usually can't even send words like this, I'm going to change to my normal form, you may want to turn away."
My frustration with the form of communication leaked through, as well as the idea that I thought he might be disturbed watching me change.
He chuckled. "I'm fine, go ahead."
I got backed a little distance from him before shifting.
He seemed to watch my change with interest, I'm sure it was a sight, I had no idea what it looked like.
He certainly didn't look away when the change was completed. When I summoned my outfit, he almost seemed disappointed.
"Come on now Angel, I may be in a faithful relationship, but I'm not going to turn down a peek." He laughed as I was the one left feeling embarrassed.
Ivo laughed and patted me on the shoulder. "I was just playing, don't take it too seriously."
I scratched the back of my head, honestly his joke reminded me of an aspect of my new life I was studiously avoiding thinking too much about. The worst part was I didn't even understand why I felt so awkward. It wasn't like I lacked experience in my previous life, and a part of me felt more than a little pride in myself at the compliment.
Ivo looked me in the eyes as I worked through my thoughts. "Ah, I'm here if you want to talk."
I quickly shook my head, I couldn't tell him what my issue was with the rules I was under. He nodded.
I was pretty grateful when the next words out of his mouth dropped the subject entirely. "So really, what are you, and what is a Concept? I didn't understand a bit of it and I felt like it was killing me to try."
I told him what the System informed me of, about Concepts, and how they weren't okay for most people to know about. But the System hadn't informed me of that until after I had hurt him by accident, which I apologized for, again.
We talked for a while, I explained what I was in vague details to him, and told him about Belua's quest for me.
I explained how my need for mana since my level up made me leave my door unlocked. He told me I should buy some mana crystals, they were apparently pretty cheap. I told him about my lack of funds, he asked what I'd spent my pay from my mission on.
I looked at him blankly. He laughed his ass off.
I told him I'd be on the receiving end of 10 levels in less than an hour, so he might feel more pain from my room. He raised his eyebrows at the number and called me a lucky bastard.
He also said he wanted to get some training in with me in the arena before I outleveled him too much. Apparently it was known that training with a goddess marked person would reward a person with a large amount of progress, depending on how useful they were to the marked individual.
He outright told me he was willing to stand still and be my training dummy all day if that's what I wanted. He did ask that I spend half the time training with Pierce though, as they felt it very important that they level at the same rate.
The look in his eye when he mentioned Pierce was kind of adorable.
I asked him about Pierce, since the man rarely spoke. He told me that if I wanted to understand Pierce, he'd have let me in on how they met. I was a bit of a sucker for that kind of story to be honest, so I eagerly listened to what he had to say.
"Well, Pierce is one of those people who got messed up by the System with his very first class. He tells me he was always a little hot-headed as a kid, nothing severe or anything. Just slightly more prone to anger than the other kids. When he turned fifteen and received his first class, he was given Raging Warrior, which is usually a class that leads to Berzerker at level 50. "
"That class, and his current one feeds off anger. The System does something to people who have classes of that type, that makes it very easy to become enraged." Ivo shook his head sadly.
"It's no way to live. Pierce worked hard to remain in control no matter what, he very rarely slipped up, and was well thought of in his previous guild. When he hit level 50 he received a class that wasn't Berzerker, but it is still funded by anger. What it is, is not mine to tell, while it does come with its own additional complications, it's nowhere near as bad as a Berzerker has it. Things remained good at his guild for a while. But one day he blew his top when someone there egged him on, after seeing a healer, the man recovered just fine. Pierce was so embarrassed by the loss of control that he left the city he was born in and moved all the way out to Brightwood."
Ivo smiled a little. "That's where we met, we were partnered together because of a synergy between our classes. Mine does a lot with emotions. I can absorb them to power my abilities, and I can heighten and direct existing emotions. The heightening ability is mostly meant to direct the flow of a fight, as well as giving me more to draw from. But used on Pierce, it makes him a devil in combat."
"When I'm around him I absorb his excess anger with my ability. He's still in the process of learning who he is without the System pushing him, and he still retains his habit of firm self control at all times. So you may not see it, but I've gotten to know the person he is. He's naturally kind, and if he wasn't in such a habit of keeping his emotions inside, he would likely smile often, and be rather quick to laugh. He's quite lovely to be around for someone like me. I do wish he could let that part of himself out, but he must maintain his habit for the times when I am not around."
After the story, Ivo and I ended up deciding that since we were stuck in town and couldn't do anything about whatever happened on Torill and Krassis's mission, we would head to the arena after breakfast in the morning.
After a bit he said he was going to head to bed, he had kept his partner waiting too long, he wished me a good time leveling, and called me a lucky bastard one more time.
System started pinging, I crawled into bed, shifted back to my mana beast form, and got comfortable. I mentally prepared myself for the hell that was coming, and answered the System's call.
Congratulations
For taking novel actions in accordance with your new class, you have been rewarded by:
Level up × 10
Strength + 40
Constitution + 50
Agility + 40
Dexterity + 30
Intelligence + 20
Wisdom + 10
Perception + 10
Free stats + 50
The last time I leveled as my new class, the System had put me into some sort of deep sleep. I sorely wished it had done so this time as well. It was so much worse than any other time I gained levels. I screamed in my head the whole time, my body was an unresponsive mass of pain, as every part of me was enhanced at once by the System.
I mentally begged to lose consciousness, but I did not. The minute it took felt like a lifetime.
The System allowed me a few minutes to get my wits about me before I had to go through the encore, I spent them cursing the System.
Please focus on the desired placement of free stats
I chose intelligence , my mind had suffered so much from learning Concepts, even with it as high as it was, I wanted more of a buffer. Plus, apparently I was a contrarian, whatever the System seemed to value I put the points somewhere else. If it wasn't so useless to me, I'd have put my free points in Charisma just to spite the thing.
Fifty to intelligence didn't feel so bad after everything else, it didn't even take that long.
I remembered to check my stats before I curled up in a ball on my bed, and fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.
Name Angel
Race : Spirit Beast
Level : 70
Class : Adventurer (Bestial Mana Shifter)
Str 155 Con 170
Agi 140 Dex 101
Int 320 Wis 192
Per 163 Cha 53
Condition: Guildmaster's Decree