Two days later, with a lot more kills than I ever wanted under my belt, I zip along with the sky on a modified flying bus alone with the designated pilot.

The green canopy blurs some 50 meters down at the sheer speed we are keeping at the highest altitude this particular craft can reach.

The formerly wide and tall flying bus lost a bit of comfort while keeping the same length to sustain the same altitude ceiling. All its seats are reclined in a single row with no corridor to walk upright on. With the same mana output, it could now be concentrated into pushing air out of the way, and a few gains in the aerodynamics made along with a generous allotment of my silver twisted wire around the roots made for a slightly higher efficiency propulsion core.

The 210 kilometers an hour with a constant ‘fuel’ consumption of 10 mana points a second is worth it and comparable to a single person speeder, something only possible because of my incredible Inner World.

The very way my soul is structured seemed stranger and stranger to me the more I explored this substitute for the very basic space bags that the merchant sold.

Out of the several lights at differing distances within my soul, the first one was barely 2 meters away and the next was dozens of meters after that.

I let my mind settle and I come back to my soul. Meditating with a slow breath just following the waves. Simple rhythms that I follow until my mind is fully settled. Even if I fail to accomplish anything right now, each time I inch forward and make progress. A journey can only end after you take all the thousands of millions of steps needed.

I absorb the way my mind interprets the core of my soul.

My body standing amidst a black void floating amongst the stars. Except these stars are light bulbs only dozens of meters away instead of being pinpricks impossibly far away. A tether ties me to the center of this place or rather something closer to gravity and there is nothing to push off against with my will.

My body itself seems to have grown ever so slightly. But even though the entire space seems to be my soul, I can only influence my body and possibly my immediate vicinity, and even that I can’t prove. If I ever grow like Gulliver, I will be able to leverage a lot more of my soul, for whatever benefit that may provide, but even the steady incurrences in the Soul stat didn’t reveal anything yet.

I try to swing and will myself away from the central point in every imaginable way. I try to grow my body and shrink it, I even try to split myself in two or to spin crazily trying to impart momentum in another form counterbalancing the pulling force to the middle of this space.

None of these ideas are particularly new, but perhaps with the right outlook, they will work. In the end, the closest light seems ever so slightly closer than the first day with my growth, and I could probably reach it at around 3 meters away, instead of the two that it too, but this is much much farther.

I think of heading deeper in meditation or using Aether, but the next light sphere is so far away that it won’t even matter, not unless I spend months, maybe years improving, and even then it is a dubious prospect unless I learn a lot more.

Better to invest most of my time into something that will pay dividends sooner.

Before I even get to my list, a pang passes through my soul knocking me off and back to my body. I could probably weather it and ignore the protests of my latest Aether Egg, but I don’t do that.

Reaching for Aspen, he almost instantly fully melds with me. The roots in my body and the smallest amount of tree sap running in my veins as my blood slowly cycles in his roots, an experiment that seems to only be confusing us even more, but even if I'm not going to drop everything else for my nature side, they are a powerful part of my toolset.

I add his senses to mine giving the best on what is happening that is possible. The unruly twelfth addition is even wilder than the first.

The panther’s Aether was stronger, but after it was encapsulated and no longer in contact with me, it calmed and became all but passive. This addition after the last battle however is full of bluster if lacking in the real raw power of its seniors. Another 145 Leopard runt that I could probably have held back on my own for a minute or so, a sharp contrast to the Black Panther. It was even weaker than the average beast.

Even as I think of what do really do with all this Aether, I discard simply using it as raw materials to make coins or something. Not that I even know the technique, but while I may forcibly take what the dead no longer needed, I would try to respect their remains.

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It is the bare minimum I can do after slaughtering them.

I take strains of my own Limited Aether and puling on a little of the beast’s Aether to form a small cage. A way of keeping it in place that is different from trying to make it hibernate on an Egg.

Disgust washes over me at my actions. How many people have I judged from even having a bird in a cage with a locked door? My only excuse is that this is not alive, it is no more than an echo of its former self. And even its former self… the system... the council.

I swallow my bile and push through sealing it within a larger space, before forming a layer to filter out its screams. The remnants of its emotions and what it once was.

Tying a bow on the whole situation I ignore the way my own Aether seems to have changed after interacting with another’s. The way I seemed to have grown callous and just push forward. I’m not going to absorb it, that would be the epitome of stupidity. For the rest, it is just what I needed to do.

I can probably think of a good way to handle everything eventually.

Swearing off the whole endeavor to deal with later I get on with the last few things I wanted to settle during the trip.

There will be a next trip. Another change for my whole body to be drenched in blood, but for now, I’m back, and I can focus on better pursuits. And next time, we may not even rush into more danger, but rather just dip our toes in. I need to absorb all the lessons, improve my pain points and take care of the pans in the fire and loaves in the oven before heading back. The others are probably trying to improve so they can build a safety cushion as smaller and smaller groups are likely to explore the HLZ, even if not confronting the beast’s over there.

It is a dangerous prospect but likely necessary.

I don’t even try to empty my mind as I switch mental tracks, just letting the next thoughts fully push out the previous ones.

I start playing with the growing repertoire of plants that Aspen has at his disposal and the puzzle that the automaton gave me. Just about every single species of plant, including a pair of finds from inside the HLZ are stored in this memory or DNA for me to reproduce. What calls most of my attention however are the revived plants from the trial’s white room. Most of them were in a bad state, biologically speaking: the pears, all the nuts and the single berry available were all dead with no recovery.

At least I now had real bananas, real avocados and half a dozen other fruits to complement my persimmons.

The different palates of the instance may be novel and interesting, but the absence of entire families of food was a tragedy.

I play with the ones less familiar to me and grow them mixed and alone to get a feel for how they interreact. To my horror, none of the plants from Earth can’t be mixed with the ones from the instance without causing conflict, at least at my skill level. So I end the wonderful experimentation and start on the next task something I’m anticipating.

My avatar.

I leave it in the inner world and through it, I grab the staff slowly spinning it inside before doing a quick drill just to limber up our connection. Speeding up until my mind can push this body as far as the strength of the wood making it can take it needs only a minute or so and I keep riding the edge on a plateau for another few minutes total trying to get in sync with it.

Not because I want to concentrate on increasing the skill level, but simply because I want to make this my own capability instead of overly relying on the system, for even if the knowledge of how to make an Avatar has left me, the nudges of the system while we are in the instance are a lot more pronounced when I’m using the skill. In the right circumstances, just a few Avatars would be more useful in combat than my own body. I doubt I would be able to control more than one at a time effectively any time soon, but it is a direction I want to develop.

I pull on all of my related skills: From Creation to Nature Connection and finish with the very skill at the center of all the fuss: Avatar.

Only relying on my memory and instincts to guide me, I try to grow another avatar, but I don’t know where to start. Not really.

Nature aspected Qi pools in my hands and I just take the plunge. I may not know what to do, but standing still will just make it harder. Action, movement and learning will be my teachers.

I begin with a skeleton trying to follow my own as closely as possible. That seems like a safe bet. Just growing strong wood pieces joined by slight and flexible tendrils, imitating tendons. Little by little, nutrients and water flow from the ground becoming something new. Muscles, skin, organs and even hair all get their own unique tweaks to best suit their use in this new machine, for while it is alive in a small sense, it has less intelligence than the average tree.

Last, I work on the hardest aspect: the brain. A small but highly complex structure that would take this hunk of wood, just a sculpture of myself and transform it into a vehicle that I could use.

I finish in just half an hour, a veritable copy of me. The exact same height roughly my weight. The main difference for someone looking at a distance would be the color of its skin: a translucent white color with hints of brown and green just beneath the surface.

With trepidation, I reach out to connect with it. At first, it all seems to be going smoothly as I slide my consciousness inside its brain that is so much more than the mold of a brain, but while there is a hint of something similar to the main avatar, nothing else happens.

I narrow my eyes. So, even the most basic of connections is not quite as simple as I had hoped. Luckily I didn’t risk my first avatar in battle wth the HLZ Beasts, not that it would have been particularly useful, but it was an option.

I to go over both ‘brains’ and compare their differences. The rest of the body is in night perfect order and I could only make slow improvements with time. However, the brain is missing a fundamental piece. Its shape closely matches the one of and perfectly matches the one of the First Avatar, but even if the type of wood and everything I can think off are precise copies, its presence is only a fraction of the original.

I understand only form, not function and my skill is no help with this.

I see the challenge, and I take it on. Time to grind. Pumping brains out, over and over until I succeed… or I shelve it for later. But I’m hoppig to succed.