As the exercise inside this aspect or maybe a representation of my soul goes on, I feel my imaginary body is growing more real. But that comes with greater exhaustion as it feels like I’m trying to climb a mountain while carrying a wagon on my back.
The huge mass in my inner world that would ordinarily be separate makes each of my steps slow and heavy. My mind and body stray often, but I drag them back to where I want, for I will not be denied. The lump of flesh I carry has all the Life I accumulated over the centuries. It slows my journey down, but it also acts as a compass. When I drift, I pull hints of my Life resource and not only do I get direction, but that bubbling connection to whatever is my body in this place is rekindled. Both the imaginary body I made and whatever represents it in this strange place.
Though I have yet to witness proof that the latter was true.
My gut guides me and this time it feels closer to provenance. This is my first real step in reclaiming something that should have never been lost. Even with all the meditative sessions, both static and moving over the last few months, this for the first time feels tangible.
Putting concerns aside, I go back to the ‘ball and chain’ tied around my feet. It may not be worth the effort to carry all my Life just for this small extra guidance given that I have my gut as well, but I won’t abandon it now. The space around me gets more and more frantic, sometimes I seem to have a body projection that is as real as my body outside, other times it fades and I become an intangible wisp.
My surroundings change shape and color including the half moon representing my soul. It goes from an average gray through all the colors in the rainbow. Though that same grey base is always mixed in there. The air fogs over and then vanishes entirely as the solid ground with lush grass disappears transforming into an abstract painting. Even the moon stops being a source of light as light shifts to everywhere and then nowhere while still allowing for vision. Trying to understand this new place that the system introduced almost gives me a headache and I end up simply focusing on my next action instead of trying to overanalyze my surroundings.
I have no idea if my next step is gonna be the last one or just a fraction after barely having started the journey. I prepare myself to keep going forever, to achieve what I might be able to whether it takes a second or a year, and then the system’s gaze descents.
It surrounds me and scrutinizes me down to the very bones looking for something. But the system doesn’t care for my confusion not leaving a single cell untouched. That gaze is all-pervasive, stealing all my secrets, but it lacks the rotten touch of the council. It's not quite at the level of a living being as I had experienced in the past, but it is a machine one that wasn’t corrupted, so my trust extends ever so slightly farther and I don’t fight it.
A prompt arrives and I can feel even while inside this new place, but I stay grabbing with all my might as my surroundings desire a shift. Or more likely as the system gets ready to enact change in this place.
I can feel the power behind me, ready to transform, to bring something that wasn’t here and maybe to do even more.
Even now, as I’m trying to ‘escape’ the traps of the system I use its tools to the utmost. Like fighting against nature. You don’t change the direction of the current, you either let it take you or you work around it.
Dangerous as it might be, nothing else seemed likely to work in the short term. I probably couldn't change anything in this new place with only the faintest sense of connection and understanding, so I settle in to watch whatever is coming and possibly intervene if I see any system shenanigans.
In the distance, at alarming speeds approaches a smaller, but still dozens of kilometers wide realm. A realm that I could feel a deep connection to. THE realm that represented my body. Then everything clicks together.
“I KNOW that realm.”
Like a Titanic kilometers ship long hurtling after being thrown by a mountain-sized Titan, that realm collides with the one I’m on. I brace for the impact, for the end of all things, even as the voice that I tend to think of as my gut stays calm. Though I trusted it, it didn’t always pick up dangers, so using my head and other instincts was still important.
Then I see the other moon and the connection is unmistakable.
That place had always been with me. Each time I increased a stat I made it more and greater. I just lost this direct connection like I used to have before the system.
That place is home.
I learned and interacted more with my soul, so I popped in here but if I had shifted my own perspective, I might have need able to pop over there instead. The nature of this new ‘Realms’ make my head spin. Maybe there are more floating islands over here. Even my soul and the other places I explored suddenly resemble children’s playgrounds that I barely explored while the system had a thousand more hidden just underneath the surface.
It knew me better than I did.
The realm that represents my ‘body’ melds in perfect unison with this ‘soul’ space and even before the other ‘Moon’ representing my body crosses the old threshold, it finishes bleeding off all the speed. After the next few minutes, both spaces finish merging making everything more real and stable, the properties of each half complimenting each other and not letting the other half run rampant. A process happening at the hands of the system.
The sky now has two moons clear as day without the kaleidoscope of color and shifting shapes that had been this realm until a minute ago.
Rather the only bodies beyond the ground.
Two half moons that should be able to merge.
A grim spreads over my face even as another puzzle pops in my mind. This time the one representing my body is not a rock without an atmosphere full of craters that resembled the real moon, but one covered with plants that couldn’t be there without a bunch of other things.
That is when my brain breaks…
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
My mind tries to find what this difference means. My soul and Body manifest as different celestial bodies and though most of the forms of internal realms to be achieved with meditation depended more on my ability and imagination, this realm was a little more real even if it shifted wildly.
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Both masses seem similar, even if the Soul moon is ever so slightly larger. I can feel some type of change reverberating through this whole space. Waves of power from the system pulse out fundamentally changing it. The very space merging and becoming more with a greater base. Underneath my nearly formed feet of this mental projection of my body, true soil forms and I can feel how tangible it is. Perhaps it is not as real as anything on the outside, but I’m certain that it won’t change wildly like it had been since I got here.
This place was change and a few waves of the system couldn’t change its nature completely, it just gave it some underlying structure. I keep walking as the ‘real’ ground shifts from moon rock to grass, then desert, swamp and then back to rocky ground.
In the sky, the little momentum left in the Body moon fades entirely even before it gets ten percent of the way to my Soul moon. The system’s gaze and attention vanish as I stare upward in utter silence.
“How the hell I’m going to drag both moons together?”
The effort seem monumental when I didn’t even couldn’t properly exert my will on this space like I could inside my soul but I can tell that even this much was a step in the right direction. Stepping out of this metal projection place, the prongs asking me to look at my system screen are almost painful. But a clock just before me shows me how long I spend inside: 10 days. I wait for a moment and absorb the information before giving in.
No need to endure this any more than necessary when I’m curious about what changes I can expect.
Name: Nash
Level:100
Titles:10+
Class: One with the World (*)
100 M+/0 EXP
Strength
309
Soul
92
Constitution
307
Body
88
Agility
327
Dexterity
338
Endurance
555
Perception
938
Intelligence
526
Willpower
987
Life
5855/5855
3656
/day
Qi
10205/10205
1119,1
/hour
Vigor
3976/3976
63,26
/min
I stare at my stats, sure these were my normal ones and if I left Pando’s range I would lose about 60 points across the board with my ‘broken’ soul or rather broken system constructs. But even without these extra few points, I’m still closing on a thousand points with two of my stats. I try to feel for any changes and can find little but one thing, that sense that my body is back and I’m no longer reliant on the system to heal me.
Without waiting around even a moment longer, Life streams from my completely full core. Point by point, I drag my limbs back from my memories. They grow even as I lose some body mass elsewhere, but I manage to ‘steal’ enough nutrients from the plans and my Life stores to only lose a fraction of the normal amount.
Without the passive interference of the system, I can feel the inherent healing properties of Life, but I don’t just rely on that and try to make the process as efficient as possible.
Even in this simple exercise, I feel the fundamental changes in myself.
The upsides and the drawbacks of my actions.
I don’t know if it's something I did by getting this new special stat or if just accessing that other place is involved.
But as special stats go, it doesn’t seem all that special. Not if this is the only thing that it can do.
I doubt that.
I try to connect to the Aether on the screen and for the barest moment, I get an impression as the screen winks out without power.
Body is an avenue to increase all physical stats
I run a little math in my head trying to calculate my base stats before all the multipliers and other stuff were added. The ones that my very body and heritage seemed to provide instead of the system granted ones by classes multiplication percentages or anything of the sort.
My lowest base stats are 89 88 and 92. Given how everything is organized I know that no other is higher.
Eighty eight points.
My base Constitution stat is exactly the same as my Body attribute and I don’t think that is a coincidence.
Now properly unlocking it has some advantages, but I had been unknowingly working on it for ages, even before the system.
But one thing is clear, from how deep I needed to reach to find the former shape of my arms, and after a few tests, I can tell that the system is no longer helping me to directly heal my own body.
I lay down and start experimenting, really learning the limits of my control. I no longer have training wheels on. Or they are so high that they might as well not be there.
I try reaching across the planet with my root network, finding injured people in hospitals. I only heal a dozen who had been waiting to survive naturally healing or for me to see them on the list and help them along as I occasionally did for some training or testing of some new idea. The system’s ‘blueprint’ for their normal body is still there, so I wouldn’t have to pay extra attention while healing someone else, but that also means that healing someone injured by the void would be a little more Troublesome. I still feel that it is possible, to override someone’s body, but it would require time practice and concentration.
As for myself, I have full control back. If I regenerate a finger, I won’t have to painstakingly heal it each time a single muscle fibers tears, nor will I have to keep it under a tight leash least I risk cancerous growths exploding if so much as brushed my Life resource over it without a specific goal in mind.
I pick a rock from the inner world and crush it with my bare hand, testing the tendons and muscles and finding them at eth same level of strength as before. Skin, bone, tendons, ligaments, joints and muscle, everything in order.
A sigh of relief escapes my lips.
I’m back to full strength, even if there is a cost. But, I’m not in the middle of the sea without even a rudder on my dinky and if I fail I can only blame myself.
I spend the next half an hour slowly growing my other arm and both my legs. Growing used to them once again takes me seconds, almost like never lost them in the first place, though my living wood limbs with a decent level of feedback probably had something to do with it.
I jump a couple of times, then dance and move outside like a gazelle after it first learns that its legs work. Like a bouncing ball, I move back and forth, amazed at the even higher level of control that I have over my body after barely a minute and I don’t match my previous performance for the same stats, I exceed it.
Not by going beyond a fundamental limit, I simply no longer have the normal system’s placed protections rooted in my brain to avoid muscle tearing from bone or the hundreds of other injuries that pushing too hard could cause. I can almost feel the shadow of the extra limiter the system put on beyond what all humans have in place. And now I can push myself even beyond those limits.
I need to get myself reacquainted with my body to really let loose. Now I have an opportunity to squeeze a little more performance out of my body and it’s a careful balance, lest I break myself in the process.