A thousand failures are just the price for success. They are proof of my improvement, learning what I shouldn’t do and more often than not, learning what might work if done differently. Learning about the direction of travel you need to take if you want to succeed. They give depth and context to all actions and eventually, you cross the threshold. But when the world says that you succeeded and you still feel the failure, the bitter aftertaste of a drink that should have been made with just lemon juice, but the zest from the peel burning your tongue lets you know that you have to fight the world.

I spent months frantically working on better engravings and making thousands of supposed successes cutting gems, all empowering our best mages and front line fighters. Making armor with shields that could handle twice the blows per unit of mana. Staffs that halved the mana consumption and increased the range of the attacks of our mages for specific elements. Magical swords and spears with improved cutting power and even portable fields to enhance buffs going from our normal 5% to 10% to a single characteristic. Like speed, defense, strength or another stat.

Even our hospitals saw improvements, but while I didn’t discount those gains, I also see them for what they are. Just a step on the road, but nowhere near the change I wanted to see.

Even if by every easily measurable metric my Qi saw gains, my connection to it was not in the same realm as most other mages connections to their external magical resource, because they weren’t the source of mana.

Mana seemed to be a one size fits all solution instead of forcing everyone to make the same that I did. But in the end, they were only borrowing their resource, and I… I was doing something different even if didn’t fully understand it.

Even after all the transformations of magic, I still should feel the full connection and I didn’t lose more than a hint of that sense over my own resources, but when I felt an intangible improvement while passing it through simply raw gems it was hard to give up so easily.

How to solve it is the real mystery and I don’t even know the first step.

Worse yet, I don’t even have a good idea on how to improve any of the designs our world was developing along more normal lines, so my attention goes back to the other half of my major endeavors and the one that I felt was more urgent.

My skills.

I climb atop my terrace and look out at the smaller but still large enough space and begin to dance. The movement lightens me up and forces a stream of blood through my brain at a much faster rate than if I had been sitting.

The switch was probably the best option to come up with a new idea beyond what I had already tested, but that is not the goal. The blood pumps through my brain and all the frustration and lack of real progress are driven away.

Now I need to focus on my current actions, to deepen my connection to my body and eventually steal control of myself from underneath the system’s nose, though that image might not be quite as simple as I first imagined.

My moves are far from perfect, my foot placement, the momentum of my arm swings and the preciseness of the positions that I try to get to. Sure nobody else could tell the difference, but I can and even when I come very close after I heal myself back up, there are going to be fundamental changes compared to my moves in such a state.

Without being careful, I might encounter other problems, like starting to grow overly reliant on roots to approximate the feeling and behavior of my current ‘prosthetic limbs’. But even if we are still nominally in control, fairly matched to our enemy with our advantage and we could keep them bottled up, the writing was on the wall: Eventually the dynamic will change.

Their levels continue to rise at a slightly faster rate than ours and their numbers swelled way faster so any attempt to overwhelm them on that front is eventually gonna crash and burn.

I start to get a hint of why Blackwood and the Automaton said that even holding out would be nearly impossible.

Sure, for now even if the numbers were large, in the 5 or 6 digits depending on how you compute it, against our population they were all but negligible. Not even a tenth of a percent. But the pendulum was starting to swing the other way and physics demanded a price.

My one ‘easy’ path to power that the system offered was still closed to me until I figured out how to heal my limbs.

If I had simply left before the attack, I might have avoided losing my limbs altogether or at least being slightly less injured, but crying over spilled milk now wouldn’t change anything.

I spin in the air a dozen times with nary a touch on the ground, sucking in lungfuls of air. With a grace that would make the ballet dancer envious, I shift seamlessly between thousands of different positions from every conceivable source and I lean towards the most extreme version always choosing different paths to get from one to the other.

Calisthenics moves, preceded by yoga and followed by kung fu poses.

The sense of action that I was looking for rises and the mechanical moves simply fade in the background.

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This state is rarer than I would have liked it. But practicing for about 14 hours a day did have its advantages. Luckily, something gave me the edge I needed today. Maybe my mental state, maybe what I had been doing before, maybe what I was looking for, but I don’t look too closely, for a moment I just embrace it.

Nothing so rare that it never happened. But by now I’m managing to get into this state every couple of days. The moves and poses come naturally while I still manage to retain that hint of mind body connection, but it was still too unreliable.

After a while, I get a faint hint and I follow my gut leaving that state, purposefully, trying to get a sense of what is different, what in my mind or body pushed me to this. A fleeting sense on the edge of my perception skittles away getting lost in the infinite void.

So I cycle a few more times, nearly effortlessly entering that wonderful state, and then as I go to look for what allowed me to reach it, it flees.

It only takes me half an hour each time.

But I still don’t discover it.

I’m trying to see something that can’t be directly observed.

This is a fundamental part of this state and while I sustain that state of focus, I can’t look too closely at its constituent parts. Almost like Heisenberg’s principle. The simple act of looking at something changes it. Trying to slice apart all the pieces drive away success. So I settle for ‘simply’ deepening my connection to my body. For a moment, an hour or a day, I simply let it build. Moving with the flow and taking my preconceptions of how this was supposed to go.

Then I pull on a deeper layer of myself.

I sense my soul, both separate from it and also a part of the system while sustaining this state. Wisdom that I didn't directly earn streams into my mind and I glimpse what these special states and places are. They are manifestations of our will, helped and ‘guided’ by the system, but in a fundamental sense, they are ours. In the same sense as I feel the inner world is mine.

Everybody has a soul, but I consciously and deliberately control mine. And the confusing scene around me has to be my soul from an entirely different perspective.

In the lulls of the mad shifting of color and movement, I build a picture of the half moon in the ‘sky’. This has nothing to do with my normal view of my soul, nor with the injury I suffered from Pando losing part of his soul.

My soul manifests here in a way that I don’t understand. It seemed to have come to me even before the system or at the latest, in the moment of integration. But it was only a piece of the whole.

Maybe even something that came as a result not really of my actions, but of the strange legacy that was left to me. Maybe I did something that unlocked the tiniest hints of it, maybe it had always been there, but now I’m looking to expand on that on a more fundamental level, to not only get half of that but to complete the sphere. To get the other half that would fit together and make it whole.

It seemed so close and yet so far away like I’m trying to take a piece of chalk and make a perfect line on a chalkboard.

But I couldn’t randomly strike the board, I needed to make a machine to achieve the results I desired, creating a line that I could magnify up to the size of a country and still fail to encounter any visible imperfections peak or low.

But first things first. I can pick up the piece of chalk from the ground, so I do that. I can take the first step in reclaiming what the system stole. Recover my body, recover the agency that I lost when someone took ‘responsibility’ for something that is so fundamentally mine.

As I move downward, in this imaginary plane, a place that is unlinked from ‘normal ‘reality and that I never visited before, I realize I lack arms or legs and other any limb. For that matter, I even lack eyes to see that lack.

I’m more fundamentally constrained in this place than I had expected.

Even getting the chalk from the ground is a big first step.

I don’t let that settle as truth in my mind, simply moving out and trying to bring that old sense of connection that I had to my own body. That sense that in different ways I tried to achieve and maybe even connected to, but now I want it in full. Before the system, my senses were too thick and nonspecific, so the most I could do was to point a general direction encompassing a muscle instead of specific fibers, neuron axions and patterns running along it. But precision came at the cost of losing control to something I didn’t trust and that I cannot abide by.

Slowly my mind reaches the perfect state. I try to further develop and get that fleeting sense into reality casting it into a permanent state.

I can almost feel the hours, maybe even the days passing, but it seems that I’m so close and I don’t want to let go.

It took me months to glimpse this place, now I can’t just leave it for later. So I become a dog with a rag doll in my jaws.

Aether spins by itself and most normal processes happen in their own time. I reach for the changes I induced in myself, from the introduction of more actions into my autonomic system like taking care of the inner world state with the same ease as breathing, all the way to increasing my stats past all expected limits through training and meditation.

They all help me to find the limits of this place, but they don’t hit the nail on the head. I try to evoke the sense of wonder from my first few meetings with Pando and a hundred different other states since the system arrived, but while a few of them paint my surroundings, they are only insular to the heart of the question.

And the image of a heart pumping blood is what opens up the slightest of cracks.

I grab onto it as if my life depends on it. It might not be strictly true, I knew myself too much to stay away from all battles, so eventually, I would be back in the thick of it even without proper limbs and that would be too dangerous.

If I kept getting in more and more dangerous situations without growing faster than those obstacles, I would surely die.

I let my senses track the flowing blood out of my heart as I move around. Even without a proper body, I can imagine it down to the minutest detail and that is what I do. Summoning my body from thin air, feeling the thumping of my heart mild without any significant level of exertion. Then I increase my pace until I reach roughly half of my capacity.

I dance atop the strange shapes in a careful balance that was slow enough that I could have kept going forever, but fast enough to strain me, now settles down to true equilibrium.

And if this was before the system, the amount of blood being pumped would have already exploded in my heart, but now it isn’t even a proper warm up.

Trusting that oxygen gets to where it is needed and that all the nutrients taken from my body go out to feed everything, I almost feel the leakage. A thin stream went in and out of my body to the inner world where all that tissue storing my Life resource was housed. Life that I now needed so desperately to heal half of the world.

I sense that shutting that off would make my job easier, but when had I ever chosen the easy path if what I wanted was on the harder one?

Never.

I wouldn’t start now. I know that I’m on the right path, I just need to clench hard enough and I will become the goose that lays the golden egg.