The enemy is relentless in their desire to inflict as much damage as they can, so barely the fight has begun and thousands of us have suffered what would ordinarily be fatal injuries, but I healed most in a timely fashion. Though a few, not even the magical properties of Life can do anything about it.

In our very front lines stand our most experienced and strongest troops. Hundreds that either spend most of a year in the instance and then decades developing in the void afterward, though many of them were actually born there. They all show their prowess, managing feats that even I would be hard-pressed to repeat under similar conditions, but while they provide strong points throughout the main battle line, without reinforcements, they would only barely be able to surround the village and not all of them are melee fighters.

The enemy, in turn, may not have brought their highest caliber of troops this time around, which tilted things in our favor slightly, but the losses on our side taint our eventual victory.

My mind turns to a curios elf much more skilled than the others to his side. I watch him expertly wielding a fairly heavy spear and before he can cut down yet another one of us, I erect a shield. The spear breaks through my attempt to defend and nearly severs a leg from a level 30 spear wielder through a thin gap in damaged his plate armor.

That skill is more than I would expect even from their commander this time around. But instead of letting yet another surprise hamper me, I send my Qi and a few runes directly from the inner world and under the few roots that managed to encroach on their territory. A sense of panic shows in his eyes as if he knew what I wanted to do, even if he can’t directly sense the Qi aiming at him.

The roots leave my control as soon as they touch the top of their walls, but I don’t need to move or shape them any longer, I only need the runes to stay intact.

A strong pulse of Qi, with about 300 points rushes in and for a second I freeze him. The formation is basic, he is well aligned in it and it doesn’t have my whole will backing the effort, but he is significantly lower level, his stats don’t even compare to mine and he doesn’t seem to have anything else in his bag of tricks to get out of this situation.

All he can do is strain and attempt to hasten the depletion of the Qi powering the formation while hoping I don’t have the time to capitalize on it in time. But I’m not alone, and a pair of warriors take the opportunity after my warning. With a thrust of their spears, it is over. Glowing streaks of light from minute long skills make all the enemies in the vicinity take a step back. They would ordinarily have saved and timed something like this with the whole squadron for maximum effect and both the surprise along with my work means they can use it to maximum effectiveness. Their weapons go past all the leather layers, muscle and even bone ending the elf in a rather permanent fashion.

Both hit directly. One just below his kneecap nearly severing his leg, while the other hits his main arm nearly crimpling his ability to wild a spear.

Even then, his moves are perfect and he fully escapes the freezing effect before a second attack comes. But a pair of fireballs from the back line make the inevitable arrive as reality catches up and his death is no longer just academic, but true in all senses.

“No healing for you, sir. No sir, you get the same that you gave to a dozen of us.”

I swallow as I spend the next 2 seconds trying to piece together what he had been doing before.

I don’t have any direct surveillance of him, though what little I can get from the seeds that were on monitoring duty and my own impressions of where the injured were streaming from, returns to me that he had probably been slowly moving around while leaving a trail of dead.

I should have noticed this sooner. It might have saved dozens or maybe even not hundreds of lives. He must not be the only one.

So I call the head enchanter and our military commander speaking quickly.

“Paul, James. I saw a skilled elf that seemed to have killed a dozen of us. They might have others like him hidden in their ranks.” As I speak I mark his path on the map and a few areas with high attrition to help narrow their search.

“Yeah, we noticed it. It makes sense that we was moving around, but don’t worry we will deal with whoever is causing trouble, just keep healing the ones you can. We have no one else that can do that.”

My attention is instantly back to the healing camp with hundreds of doctors and nurses helping to triage as an ever thicker stream of Life leaves my stores.

The fight outside rages on at full intensity and though a few of our advantages let us contend not just on even footing, but showing an edge over them with my capability to heal.

We can overcome this enemy.

But although too many of us were already dead, each cycle we identify another of their elite troops and soon I start to see a sharp drop in the number of the seriously injured and best of all the ones beyond healing.

Still, from the effort guzzling my Life resource, it seems that it only takes gulps down at a slightly lesser rate.

I had enormous stores, but they are ultimately ‘finite’, and I didn’t even have a significant stream of it regenerating. So every smidge of knowledge about healing streams through the back of my mind as I attempt to find a way to do this more efficiently.

After all, while a shallow cut, might just need a couple of points of Life, I had to heal thousands, tens of thousands of injuries one on top of the other, and none of them were cosmetic.

I attempt to recapture that feeling of splitting my mind that I experienced so long ago that gave me a headache, though this time I’m not trying to get two perception fields working at once but to be able to think in two simultaneous streams.

That sense comes back fairly easily and I can sense something behind it, but for another minute, I just keep going as I’m. I try to acquire one of my natural skills, something that doesn’t depend on the system, not because it wouldn’t be helpful to have its guidance, but simply because it doesn’t pop into my mind to do things any other way. I feel something hiding underneath all my effort. A faint impression that I wouldn’t have noticed before returning to Earth and increasing my stats.

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The system is reluctant to give me another skill. The air almost vibrates, like I’m trying something unnatural. I draw out hints from my Aether pools and even a few motes of soul scruff.

The barest sense of the depths, the highest peak of Everest and another o my epiphany on my actions permeate the air as a fourth stream of absolutely pure Aether weaves around it all. It all seeming draws something about this moment helping me overcome some of the potential that the system requires.

Then I wonder why I hadn’t gotten any new skill in ages that wasn’t part of my class or subclasses. Sure, a few had transformed and my first two complex types of mana gave me new skills, but I knew and used a lot more than nature and magma. Where was Ligthining manipulation? Or a derivative of the stone singer abilities, that I knew could be acquired with training. I certainly had shaped enough stone to get it.

For some reason, it never registered, but he is reluctant.

For that matter where is my memory skill, to compound with the development of my memory Palace?

“Uhhrrg… system shenanigans.”

I keep trying to split my mind in two while healing everyone in turn. Somehow noticing the system’s reluctance and interference changes the game. So I start to make meaningful strides until a small and feeble rendering of my mind starts to isolate itself in the corner. It is still me ad shares everything that is me, but it is also independent.

I try each and every which way to get it to be more than a feeble hint of my intelligence until I lose myself in the effort.

The adrenaline and high stakes of the situation simply build. I’m already doing something completely impossible before the system for someone that wasn’t born with their brain hemispheres ‘completely’ severed and if I’m even halfway correct in my assumptions this is entirely better.

Another ten minutes pass as I try to nail down my efforts and when I have something that might be nearly as good as a proper skill, if still at level 0, a torrent of Aether constructs rush into me.

A web with hundreds of nodes and potential that I wouldn’t have believed from any other skill hit me like a truck, almost making me lose control of the Life in my hands.

This new web attaches itself over the Aether construct on my soul. I record everything I can in my memory palace, now having a much better idea of what I should pay attention to after witnessing hundreds of skill increases, stat increases, and even a couple of acquisitions while inside other people’s souls.

It rushes near the bottom of my soul, the web seeming much larger than a moment before when it was outside my soul, but I ignore that impression and pay attention to what matters: the connection process.

I strain all my senses to the limit. Slowly moving down closer to that spot. Ordinarily, I couldn’t even get within a hundred meters of the system construct, let alone have any chance of altering it, but inspiration infuses me as the remnants of the Aether stream flow back into me. The magnitude of what I’m doing strikes me as the constructs meld together.

All that atunned Aether comes to my beck and call under the same frame of reference as the toy that the automaton gave me. I chain together a thousand small connecting constructs in a long rope like thing. My first real Aether creation and it’s dead simple.

I try to climb inside and somehow, that nearly physical weight of these constructs, lets me approach the most complex system integration process I ever witnessed to capture even more detail.

A wave of energy washes over me as I cross an invisible boundary and I keep climbing my rope down.

Information streams into my mind. Not very precise or even completely new, but enough that I start to piece together a sharper picture concerning a few mysteries.

I know that there is more to it. I’m somewhere I’m not supposed to be and whatever efforts the system is doing suck some of the Aether around me. Even though it is inside my soul, the system would prefer that no one entered this place. But I’m like a surgeon getting his hands inside his own body, unnatural, yet when no one else can do the same, what else could I do? So I use the very capabilities that those small constructs allow me, strengthening my willpower, my perception and even the control of my soul to grip and heave my body closer to where the action is.

Each hand grip feels like I’m back at school, trying to climb a rope with my noddle arms, straining to get more than a few inches each time, but this time I don’t fail or give up.

Then it comes to me: If I found a way to temporarily sever my connection to the system or something so close to it that it made no difference, I might be able to go all the way in. Though with that though comes a sense of deep foreboding. Sure with effort and study, I could probably do it, but the sense of the madness that I would risk if I broke the protection of my perception too early holds me back.

This piece of my soul that was ‘claimed’ by the system, some 150 meters wide, seems to be mine in name only.

Could I have done this before the system? With enough effort and work, probably, but I would need to know that it was here. If I temporarily sever the system’s hold over me, today that I know it is possible, would I still retain enough control to do this even without the system fighting me every step of the way?

That eternity ends. A thousand thoughts flitted through my head while witnessing the system’s actions with that giant Aether construct that operated so differently to any I saw before from much simpler skills. As I open my eyes and see that only 10 seconds passed, I also drag more Life from my stores and go back to healing.

Transporting a pair of people marked for healing and dumping Life streams on the more critical cases, I soon get back on track.

Then a new sense that I can fully split my attention pops at the back of my mind while a system prompt lets me know that it is just a thought away.

I don’t open it, almost knowing the gist of it.

Acquired rare skill:

Yadda, yadda skill that lets you split your mind - Lv. 1

This is big. I had a few of these higher tier skills and they were all wonderful, such as my Deep Meditation that didn’t just allow me to increase my regen by 99%, one per each level, but to apply one of that lovely system hidden multipliers depends on how deep I went. After years of practice, I was nearing a tenfold multiplier so calm and smooth are those sessions of mine. That is probably the main skill that helped me to get as many points of Life as I had now as Pando made use of my Life resource to grow the containers out of my flesh that were the only real place I could store it in.

The barest thread of my attention comes to me as something extra, that ‘imitates’ my mind, but it is so slow and pitiful that I doubt that even when the skill got to level 50, this piece of mine would fail to match myself before the system.

But this is just the start.

A moment exploring the skill, even as a dozen of streams of Life keep healing the right people, a sense of minute improvement arrives using up the remnants of the Aether left behind by my efforts.

Skill level 2

The system induced insight into the skill arrives. It is not close to a complete breakdown, but it is a primer to get me started and I know what I can do.

I can temporarily ‘sacrifice’ stat points to my second self o turn it from a pale copy with an 85 IQ, to a real helper with full access to all my resources and memories.

A dozen intelligence and willpower points get me roughly to the level I was when I encountered the system. This is a core functionality of the skill and the ways it is intended to be used, but pictures of my Avatar skill come to mind as my own unconscious efforts slightly shaped the skill.

“Well, the manual says that it is to be used like this, buuut… I don’t need to follow it to the letter, do I?”

A grin that stretches my face perfuses my body and I call out one of my younger seeds that was yet without a path.

Do you want to play?