"So, essence. Since this is a separate system and not something I'm familiar with, it must be new to this world. The only real new thing I've come across here is magic, so this 'essence' is most likely the same thing."

"Wait, does that mean that those glowing lights in the glass orb the healer had me mess around with were essences, space and time essences?" His mind started firing, synapses sparking as he made a series of connections.

"That is correct. That test, whilst crude, is functional and is a basic way of determining someone's affinity to the essences. All the essences are gathered and stored within the object."

"When placed near a person, the essence a person has a greater affinity for gets shown by it moving closer to them. The ones that retreat are the ones the user has no or little ability with. The ones that stay in the middle are considered neutral. Unlike the others, there are no upsides or downsides to using those neutral essences." The man patiently explained as he walked around the floating hologram, holding his hands behind his back, looking like some Napoleonic-era general addressing his troops.

Kayne barely took in the floating anatomical display or the man as his attention was more focused inwards. He used this new information to remove incorrect speculations or guesses from his brain. He started tapping his chin as he paced left and right from where he stood.

"On my journey here, I came across several what seemed to be essences, but it was space and time that I seemed to have had the most contact with. Was that because of my strong affinity for them? Wait, do you know what happened to bring me here?" Kayne had been so intrigued that he was finally learning about magic or what seemed to be known as essence in this new world that he had forgotten to ask the most fundamental question.

Why am I here?

His fast pacing stopped suddenly when he mentally kicked himself for forgetting as he blurted it, staring intently at the man.

"Did you encounter those essences because you have an affinity for them, or do you have an affinity towards them due to your encounter?" The man replied, answering a question with one of his own, leaving him stumped before continuing.

"You already know the reason you're here. Isn't it because of that celestial pendant of yours? Those purple bastards always were skilled soul smiths." The man sneered as he seemed to stop walking, his face taking on a faraway look before returning to walking with a shake of his head, his face calm again.

Kayne guessed that the look of bafflement on his face must have made the man feel sorry for him as he continued his explanation.

"The dumbed-down version of events is that you, back on the world called Earth, had a life-saving treasure in your possession. The child on Tyrannis, this super world we now reside in, had the receiving end. When you got bludgeoned to death by that brick-wielding bandit, the device activated to save your soul and sent you here."

"Those devices were crafted so that when a favoured descendant of an expert died, his soul would get transported through a higher dimension that only souls can usually access. The soul would then travel across the universe to a receiving device, usually kept safe by some powerful elder. It would then be kept secure until a new body could be formed. However, in my opinion, the expense of doing so is rarely worth it." The man sighed as he stopped pacing again at the edge of the pyramid and continued speaking as he looked out over the cavern.

"When your soul travelled here, it should have been unimpeded, but you had the misfortune of travelling through a danger zone that would affect such a higher dimension. Quite frankly, it is a miracle of the ages you survived. You should be dead."

"The space-time distortions there should have shredded your soul long before you reached this world. Instead, it looks like you got hit by just enough to affect your soul, so it changed your natural talent in those two areas to a considerable degree. The downside is every other essence, but those two should be like an anathema to you with how much remodelling took place." The grey-haired man stopped speaking and looked over at him as if making sure he was still following along before he carried on.

"Remember how I said the body and soul have a fundamental two-way connection?" The man asked. Kayne nodded in the affirmative, and he carried on.

"The only reason other essences are not poisonous to you is that you merged with this child's body and soul, bringing your new talent and ineptitude in those areas. The new body had a talent that mitigated your negative aspects, resulting in the outcome you saw with that testing globe." The man looked over to ensure he was still following before continuing.

"It's both fortunate and unfortunate, as the child was supremely talented before your merger. Not entirely on your new skill level with the space and time essences, but not far off in many aspects. To pull your negative results up to the point where those essences don't harm you is proof enough of that lost potential. "The elderly man sighed but didn't seem bothered by those results. Their eyes met before he stood there, waiting for the inevitable onslaught of questions.

"You're saying that if I had arrived here and gone into another body with lesser talent, the essences other than space and time would have poisoned and killed me?" Kayne asked, wanting to be sure he understood correctly.

"That is what I said, wasn't it? In a way, you would have been unnatural and against nature. It would have meant your death." The man answered.

"So rather than actively harming me, the other essences now dislike and avoid me instead?" Kayne asked, hoping he understood it right.

"That is a basic way of looking at it, sure." The older man replied with a nod, looking a little tired.

"So what does that mean for my future?" Kayne was starting to be a little worried about whether he had caused harm to the baby he had merged with or his future path of magic.

"Having talents in many different essences is not always a good thing. It gives you more choices, but it's not like a person would try to cultivate them all. That would be too difficult. With essences, the more you try to carry, the harder it becomes."

"Having a couple of essences like your space and time are much easier to manage, and your talent in those areas is exceptional. Rest assured, your path is wide and open." The elder replied with a hint of mirth in his voice.

Since the elderly man seemed to be in a more talkative mood now and not so frustrating to deal with, Kayne decided to get more answers to the things that had been bothering him.

"When I arrived at this world, Tyrannis was it? I seemed to enter a strange cave system filled with rats and a strange blue wolf. Was that some test created by the pendant? I had assumed it represented the child's body before I merged, but the strange animals didn't make sense to me." He spoke out loud with a hint of questioning in his voice.

He had given that aspect of arriving here a lot of thought, and those two theories were the best he could come up with.

"You are correct regarding the part about the cave system representing the child's body. Your soul arriving here at the exact moment you did saved both the child's life and your own. You prevented that external energy placed within the child from destroying his soul. Even though you lost that fight in the end with the invasive energy portrayed to you as rats, it allowed you to merge with the undeveloped pure soul of the infant who saw you as a protector and a kindred spirit."

"This acceptance enabled you to become one. Otherwise, all you would have been is a disincarnate soul without a body to sustain you, a true ghost. The wolf is more interesting. That was energy left over from the creation of an essence body." The man mentioned with what looked like an excited twinkle in his eyes. He waved his hands, cutting Kayne off just as he was about to speak.

"No, I don't expect you to know what an essence body is. You can consider it a mutation concerning essence, like my eyes." Kayne glanced at the man's swirling eyes in interest as he pointed, trying not to fall under their strange hypnotic effect as he carried on.

"A crude example might be someone born with an essence body that has an unnatural connection with fire essence. Their control of that essence would be unparalleled compared to someone without such a body. The fire they create might also differ from standard flames, such as being even hotter or something strange like burning the soul instead of the body." The man took a few breaths and looked at him, ensuring he seemed to follow along again with a satisfied nod before continuing.

"Essence bodies are mostly unique, and whilst they are not inheritable, a flame body such as I described might produce offspring with a little of their parents' talents in that area. I say mostly unique, as that isn't always true. The only case of an essence body duplicating I know about is during the birth of twins."

Stolen story; please report.

"I have never seen such a thing before, but I have heard of this referenced as being twice blessed, once cursed by my master." The older man said, stopping once more to collect himself, and Kayne thought he could see a hint of sadness etched deep on the man's face at the mention of his master.

The sadness suddenly seemed to pass as if it were never there as he carried on quickly.

"The twins, when born in such a way, will form their essence bodies in tandem with each other. The only issue is that the younger one will always steal the essence body of the older one for a time. If the twins stay within proximity, the flow of essence between them evens out eventually and allows them to maintain their essence bodies without issue."

"The younger will take on all that combined power if the older dies or is separated. I suspect you're the older one of the two in this scenario, and someone has left you here and even tried to kill you to keep that energy from returning. Someone stole your birthright, which has turned you into a cripple. Physically, you're fine, but when the time comes for you to train with essence, you will have nothing but problems." The man said with a pitying look that replaced his usually haughty demeanour. Upon hearing the man's words, Kayne didn't know what to think or feel.

Was it possible someone tried to kill me?

He had started to think of this new body as himself the more that time went on and hardly distinguished between his old self and fresh now. Just as he tried to pull himself together, he felt a strange sensation, like an earthquake rocking him, but it didn't seem to affect the cavern and only himself. His reality quaked and wavered for a split second before the feeling vanished.

"Time is running short. Whilst I can make another connection with you in the future, it will take me over a hundred days to restore my reserves enough for me to do so. In that time, you need to learn as much as you can regarding what I am about to show you and action it if you don't want to grow up a cripple." The man stepped forward and nodded at him as he pointed towards the floating diagram in the air nearby.

This caused the outlined green channels to start moving like they were flowing in one direction and the red flashing points to disappear.

"This is the correct direction essence should flow around your body if you were uninjured." The man said before the image changed to how it had just been.

"This is how your body currently is. As you can see, the essence flow is all messed up due to the blockages." The older man said. Kayne could see the flow was all over the place and didn't look as tidy as the first image.

"This final diagram is how you are going to correct the issue. This is what you need to learn as fast as you can. The longer you leave it, the harder the issue will be to fix. You are fortunate to have a mature consciousness at this young age, allowing you to work on yourself."

"In this order, you need to force the essence through you, pushing the blockages together into where your core will form. This open area just above the navel here. This is your core area." The man clarified as he pointed at the void in the middle of the outlined essence channel diagram.

The green channels pulsed in an order that rotated through a cycle, apparently showing the correct way for him to correct the defects. The only issue was the number of blockages needing removal, which made the process appear complicated.

"You must do it in this order, or you risk creating even more damage than you repair. Also, you must get it correct the first time. If you mess up somehow, as long as you force all the damage from your channels into the area where your core will be, it will be fine."

"I will mention that this will probably be the most painful thing you have ever experienced, including the attack that led to your transportation here. You will need to grit your er gums and fight through it." The man scratched his head, looking slightly confused at the self-correction regarding his lack of oral growth, before shrugging.

"I think I get what you're saying, but I don't understand how I'm meant even to do this?" Kayne asked as the solution, while looking complicated, made sense to him.

He just didn't know how he was even supposed to interact with this internal system.

"Ah yes, I forgot that you are still a fledgling. Most children would have already mastered their will by a young age." The appearance of a wise older man dropped as an embarrassed look decorated his face for a time before he cleared his throat and carried on.

"We don't have the time for in-depth lessons on essence cultivation, so you will just have to learn fast today. Recall how I mentioned the soul and body connection. Well, this connection can be interacted with by using your will." The man emphasised the word 'will' as he continued to talk.

"The soul is the intangible aspect of a person's makeup. The words soul or spirit can be used interchangeably here. The body, vitality or vital energy, as it can also be known, is the physical manifestation of the soul and is how it interacts with the world. These two aspects together make up a person, and neither can survive for long without the other for the most part."

"These two sides of the same coin allow a person to exist and be cognitive; it is what makes you, you. You can hone in on this consciousness of yours to take better control of it and to direct your soul and body better. We call this ability willpower or will for short."

"With your will unlocked, you can see inside your body to make subtle changes, which is the cornerstone of essence cultivation. Without unlocking their will, a person cannot gather essence and cultivate." The man held up his hands, stopping Kayne from opening his mouth and speaking as he carried on.

"It's a complicated, very in-depth subject, and we don't have time to get into it. The main focus is to unlock your willpower and then use it to enact the repairs to your body."

"To unlock your willpower, you will have to do some soul searching, excuse the pun, find out what drives you at your deepest level, and put down any burdens you carry. Once you work this out, you can use your willpower to pull external essence in and push it in the directions we need to enact the repairs." The elderly man finished with a tired sigh at the lengthy explanation.

Seeing that the man looked finished as he stood there without saying anything else as he watched, Kayne turned his focus to the diagram, leaving the aspect of forming his will for later.

Studying the diagram, Kayne tried his hardest to memorise it as best as he could. It seemed that the changes needed to be made in a set order for it to all work correctly.

It started at a point in the top left of his body and looked to move roughly clockwise as the flowing green streams pushed and manoeuvred the red obstructions about in a set order, gathering and pushing them all into that central empty place.

The solution reminded him of one of those cheap puzzles where a blank space was left, and you had to move all the other square pieces around each other, eventually getting them into their correct places to complete some overlaid image.

"Can you put three diagrams next to each other? One showing how it should look once complete, one demonstrating the method to do it with the other showing how my body is now?" Kayne asked.

"Yeah, like that, great. Can you put the diagrams in order so that the way my body is now is on the left, the way to correct it is in the middle and how it should look when finished on the right? That's it, thank you." Kayne directed the man to create and adjust the diagrams for him, laying them out in order so that he could get a better grasp of the situation overall.

The man complied and didn't say anything, merely waving his hands to produce the desired changes as asked for before he decided to speak up.

"I acknowledge that it is quite a difficult series of changes to remember, but try your best. If you forget, stop, and we can pick back up once I establish a connection again. The longer it is left, the harder the problem will be to correct, but you should have a year or so before the damage becomes irreversible. I can come to you a couple of times in that period." The elder said.

Kayne was surprised at the man's tone as this was the first time he had broken his aloof persona to try and make him feel better at the difficult task before him.

Nodding at the older man, Kayne started by counting the number of the red areas that denoted blockages, coming up with the number seventeen before working out the best way to commit the information to memory.

So there are seventeen damaged areas. The real issue is correcting the order, which requires moving the blockages around to push them into the middle.

"Wait, why does it have to be so complicated? Can I not shove the closest ones to the open space and work my way out?" Kayne asked a question that had just started to bother him. He suspected it wasn't possible, but he felt it best to ask anyway, as he didn't want to leave anything to chance.

"If you look at the moving green lines, these indicate the ambient essence flow into your body that occurs naturally in the inexperienced and the young. Do you see much movement in these flows closer towards the centre? There isn't much because the essence is mostly blocked from reaching those areas in your current body."

"How can you push the blockages if you cannot pull in enough outside essence to move them forcefully? That is why we need to work in the order I have created. This method will result in bunching all the debris up in your channels that you can shove to the blank space your core will eventually inhabit." The elder said as if clarifying Kayne's thoughts for him.

Nothing more was said after that between the younger and older pair as Kayne knuckled down to memorise the pattern of movement needed for his self-restoration.

He knew that from the time spent during his education, there were several tricks to remembering and committing important information to memory. He used some of those to help store all this better in his brain.

He started at the top left of his body, where he would make the first change. He decided to call this point "one" because it was roughly where one o'clock would be if he superimposed a large clock over himself. It was also the starting location, so that helped.

The next point was slightly down and left from "one," but instead of calling it "two," he called it "seven" because it was in the direction of where seven o'clock would be in relation to "one."

He went through his entire body, using the number one as the starting reference point. He gave all the pulsing red dots a number regarding the direction they were from the previous point.

This approach gave him a long seventeen-digit number to memorise. He was reasonably confident he could manage if that were all there was. His mobile phone number on Earth was eleven digits long, and it hadn't taken him long to know it by heart.

The real complication was the order of movement needed to push the blockages around to ensure they all ended up in the right places to allow for a continued flow of essence to be able to move them.

He wanted to avoid getting to a point where he messed up, creating a scenario similar to a self-checkmate where he incorrectly positioned the blockages so that they interacted with each other negatively, not allowing further movement.

With the seventeen numbers in mind, he added directions to help with the rote learning while creating a little song about the whole thing. This layering of techniques he hoped would allow for better recall.

"You sure do love your strange songs, but if it works for you, then who cares?" He said to Kayne, punctuating the words with a half-hearted shrug before carrying on.

"Just continue until the connection between us finally ends, and you will be able to wake back up. Remember, it's better to stop and wait than risk making a mistake."

Kayne carried on his attempt to store the diagram, mentally shrugging off the man's stifled amusement at his methods. He carried on over and over in a repetition thousands of times, ignoring the reality-bending quakes that continued to rattle him with ever-increasing frequency.

Eventually, a spinning sensation grabbed him during a violent tremor that sent his world into blackness, and he knew that his time in this dreamscape was over.