Thanos looked up at the ceiling, taking in the wooden support beams but not focusing his full attention on them. The world felt different to him now as he looked around.

Nothing was standing out that he could pinpoint as an apparent cause. It just felt a little brighter for some reason.

He let his mind wander as he wondered if spiders were a thing in this world, the lack of expectant cobwebs where he expected them prompting the errant thought.

He knew there were worse things here than eight-legged pests as he remembered the horrid creatures outside his farm that night. Thankfully, they seemed scared of the light and antagonistic to each other. His house would be left alone under such circumstances, he hoped.

When he saw his father placing all those light crystals around the farm, he thought it overkill. Now, he wished that his parents would rebuild the house using them as bricks if possible.

Having wooden walls sitting between him and the monsters that lurked around at night didn't feel all that secure, no matter how thick those walls were.

He knew that when he got older, he would have to go out and fight monsters such as those on his path to getting stronger. What surprised him was finding a part of him that seemed eager for it.

He had a few fights back in his old life. Growing up in an all-male boarding school with dozens of other hormonal boys meant that it was practically a given that fists would occasionally fly. Those incidents fell off the older he had got, so his experience with such things was limited.

The old him wouldn't relish the chance to get into a scrap and much preferred avoiding people altogether. It seemed that after his awakening, he wasn't so against a liberal use of violence.

At least the idea of going out and slaying monsters, he wasn't sure where he sat when it involved people. Thinking about it more, it didn't matter as much. People were the monsters at times. Treating the good with kindness and the bad with enmity seemed better.

Deciding to do some introspection after calming down, he felt he could perceive minute details about himself that he would never have. An example was when he focused on his hand as his fingers moved. He could now build a picture in his mind of it in great detail, not just of the surface layer.

He could dig down past the skin, seeing it vanish like it never existed, seeing the muscles and tendons moving underneath. He could also do the same with those to see through to his bones.

He watched as his fingers moved repeatedly, admiring how his hand worked. Seeing all the flesh usually hidden away by his skin was pretty grotesque, but fortunately, he was never squeamish about this kind of thing.

Thanos decided to do some tests as he tugged at some muscles whilst letting others move normally. He found he was able to control individual tendons through fine muscle control.

There was no actual applicational use of being able to do such a thing that he could think of right now, but it was interesting to note down anyway.

What others had called the 'will' he found was more just a case of hyper-awareness and supreme connection with his body. He had thought it would be like a telekinetic power that worked only on himself, but that didn't seem to be the case, at least for now.

He could still exert a measure of control, but he had only been able to do things he could do typically but with added depth. The only new ability he found was seeing internally. He thought of it like a mind's eye, so that is what he decided to call it.

He didn't see through his body with some X-ray vision. It was more a case of feeling your hand, how it moved and being aware of it in your mind. This awareness creates a picture for you, like a vivid daydream or hallucination.

Using his will, he activated his mind's eye on his body, this time just above his navel area. He knew he had an essence system inside of him somewhere, so starting there seemed like a good idea since it was the most significant part he had seen on the diagram.

Thanos was surprised to learn that the large core area on the diagram was tiny. It made sense to him when he thought about it, as he still had all his internal organs taking up space.

The open area where the older man had told him to push all the damage was roughly about the size and shape of a large grape. The wiry channels that connected it were more like small silvery-white veins than the large arteries he had expected to see.

Starting at the empty area where the man had said the core would form, he used the diagram in his memories like a map as he followed all the crossing and weaving essence channels like roads. He saw the first red zone on his mental map and could instantly see the problem.

The silver and white channel in that location was more of a dull grey colour. It looked like the channel had gotten all desiccated and dried up from the outside, but it was worse on the inside.

As he intently focused on the area, he was surprised as his consciousness got sucked into his body. Instead of being able to build up a picture in his mind of his internals, he felt like he was inside himself for real, sort of like an avatar of thought.

He used this new ability to get close to the blockages that towered like large houses to his new point of view. He knew there was no light here, but that didn't prevent him from seeing everything clearly.

The blockage he had been expecting to find looked like cracked light blue sugar granules, all crushed and forced on top of one another. There were gaps through them here and there, but only a few. He now understood that this wouldn't be ideal for him if left in its current state as it impeded the channel.

He pushed past them and continued up to what he viewed as the starting position, humming his little song as he went. He wasn't going to win any awards for it, but it did the job of allowing him to memorise all the information he required to start correcting these essence channel defects.

Arriving at the starting position, he calmed down and got ready to start work, looking at the first blue crystalline obstruction.

I've just realised I never even asked where these blockages came from.

I just assumed they resulted from that energy put in my body by whoever tried to kill me.

Looking at them now, though, I can't help but feel something familiar.

He thought for some time but could not place the feeling, so he put the distracting thoughts out of his mind as he repeated his rhyme, ensuring he was confident it was correct before turning his full attention to the next bit.

Right, I need to push this first section down and around that bend into that crossroad part.

Wait, how do I move it?

He remembered getting told to use essence to push the blockages. The only issue was he had no idea how to do that. With a sigh, he moved past the bottleneck to the outer side, where he expected to see a healthy flow of essence just like the diagram but was stumped to find nothing there.

What now?

Thanos mentally scratched his head. The obvious solution was to find the essence here, somehow control it and funnel it like water pushing sludge down a drain.

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The only issue here was the lack of it.

Do I need to pull it into my body somehow? He said that it should be getting absorbed naturally. Maybe it is there, and I can't see it.

When he had encountered essences before, he had been just in a soul form travelling through space. The only other time was when Anton tested him with the glass orb. Now that he stopped to think about it, it made sense to be surrounded by essence, but he had never noticed.

If he knew that essence existed, that it flowed around and through him naturally, then he theorised that maybe it was there, and he couldn't see it. With his mind set on solving his hypothesis, he turned his will back to his shoulder area, once again entering that essence channel next to the blockage.

He focussed on the seemingly empty channel as he tried to remember what feeling those essences back then had been like. When he was around the space and time essences, he always got a familiar feeling, like when seeing a good friend after months apart.

It was this feeling that he was looking for now. He didn't know how essences propagated and again kicked himself for not pushing the man with strange eyes for more answers.

It took a while of him just existing there using his mind's eye in search of those two recognisable essences. He had decided to focus more on time, supposing it was the more likely of the pair to exist near him since he wasn't actually in space anymore.

What was that?

Something had materialised before him for an instant but vanished as quickly as it came. It resembled a flowing stream of dust or gas in a light purple colour that lit up the inside of the channel for a moment.

From his perspective, it looked like he was a tiny person standing inside of a large pipe just in front of a blockage. As he looked up, a silent flow of purple light became visible to him, and then it winked out of existence, due to his surprise.

Time essence!

He was confident that was what he had just seen snaking its way through his tunnel in a flowing, twisting motion through the air. He doubled down on his focus, clearing his mind of distractions again. The bending stream of purple made a return as it just popped into being visible again.

This time, he kept his focus trained on it, refusing to let it slip away.

Once he had worked out how to keep the essence of time discernible, he then did the same with space. He had thought it would be more complicated, but once he had gotten the hang of it, it wasn't long before a blue stream appeared, representing space's colour.

This stream looked closer to flowing gas than it did dust, standing in contrast to the essence of time that was the opposite.

If I have to do this for every essence, I'll be here forever.

He groaned internally at the laborious task waiting for him if such a thing was needed, not to mention the fact he wasn't even sure what types of essences existed in their entirety. Opting to use his motto of 'work smarter, not harder,' he looked at the space and time essences as he tried to find a commonality between them.

He knew they represented differing concepts of reality, but if he could find a common point between the pair, he was confident it would be the key to seeing essence as a whole.

It took what felt like hours before he had any results, making him wonder how he perceived time when using his mind's eye. He knew he should have been disturbed by his parents long before now if it had been hours, but he hadn't.

This left him in the realisation that whatever he was doing to enter his body as some mental avatar was done so in a way that he perceived time differently. He wasn't sure what the dilation effect would be compared to the outside world, but he was sure time moved slower externally when he used this ability.

He had also tried to exit his body with his mind's eye, but it felt like he hit some barrier in his skin, forcing him back. The breakthrough came when he introduced the essences he was already aware of, such as fire, water, earth, etc. Using these concepts, he went between them all, looking for that common point and eventually finding it.

The common point wasn't anything world-shaking or momentous. It was more of a feeling like each essence came from the same progenitor. If the essences were people, they would all be siblings with similar recognisable features that matched their progenitor.

He tried to dig deeper into this progenitor, but a feeling of dread smashed into his mind, preventing him from going further. Deciding that it seemed like a bad idea for now, he gave up and filed that away for another time.

He was now looking at the channel teeming with essence flows of various colours and shades. There were even some colours he had never seen or heard of before, and he had no idea how he would even describe such things to anyone who had never seen them.

The channel was now like a thick soup of colours near the blockage, thinning out on the other side as only a trickle was getting through. Multicoloured light squirted out from gaps all over the backup before it headed further into his body.

He checked the subsequent blockage further down and noticed it seemed to build up again on one side before squeezing through the gaps. He checked a few more, and the same thing happened to the blockages, but each time, the essence accumulated before a jam was less.

Returning to the first impediment, he now had to start what he had called phase two. This was learning to control the essence so he could use it as a hammer to smash the blockage down the channel.

He spent what felt like days in this minuscule world. Eventually, he worked out how to control the essence in his body in varying ways. Some felt incorrect, and others more natural, but he considered any information useful.

One of the ways he worked out how to push the blockage was by causing his muscles surrounding the essence channel to flex and expand. This straining compressed the channel and the essence building up just before the stoppage, forcing it to move a little.

The main problem, besides the mind-bending pain, was that he didn't have muscles in place to do this type of compression all the way along, as the channels themselves had no muscle structure and were more akin to a more flexible cartilage.

He had gotten the idea from thinking about how blood pumped through his body and how waste moved through his intestines. He even went to check it out in person but regretted it. Thankfully, there was no sense of smell in this projection.

The other two ways he had found were probably more similar to what the old man had in mind. If he focussed on the empty core area, he could work it like a heart to suck in and expel essence.

It didn't really do much but pull and push it around, but it was still a way to move it, and he filed the information away for further thought another time.

When he had been comparing the essences earlier, the commonality between them was the crutch he had used to affect their movement.

He honed in on this feeling, using it as a handle to take hold of all the essence flowing into his body naturally. He then gathered the essence into a condensed ball before he shoved it down the first channel into the blocking mess.

The sudden, intense pain brought his mental introspection to an abrupt end as he cried out loud, causing his mother to come and check on him.

After getting soothed, he was placed back in bed, his afternoon nap seemingly not over yet. This fact made it a certainty that he observed time differently when using his mind's eye.

Thinking about it, it doesn't make sense why it should be so painful.

The essence channels themselves are more like cartilage, and I can't see any nerves connected here in any way.

The intense pain didn't even seem to come from his shoulder area. It was more like his entire body got engulfed in flames that peeled the skin from his bones. He wondered if it had something to do with his soul as he knew it connected to the body in some esoteric way.

Steeling himself, Thanos closed his eyes and gritted his gums in a pre-emptive grimace as he again condensed a ball of the essence and forced it into the crystalline obstruction.

The pain again was sudden and intense, and it took all he had not to stop and give up then and there. He used his newfound drive as a focusing rod to combat the building agony as he pushed.

Thankfully, the blocking crystal structure slid forward easier than he had expected. Before he knew it, he had shoved it halfway down the first essence channel as he screamed in his heart not to quit.

The ever-present voice of defeat whispered for him to leave it and figure out another, less painful way, but he ignored it. He told himself pain was weakness leaving the body repeatedly as a mantra to help him keep pushing.

Finally!

The blockage slid into a junction of the channels, where he stopped pushing and left it stationary. As per the method in the diagram, he knew it would be left here for now as he moved another stoppage.

The essence could move around better now that it was at a crossroad due to the extra space, and he took all this in within but a moment before he fainted from the total exertion.

* * *

It had taken him a few weeks, but he had managed to finally complete the task set to him without many issues apart from the excruciating pain that had become like an unwanted guest.

There was one movement he had nearly messed up after a couple of days, but he had realised before it was too late and corrected the issue by moving the right piece first. This close shave with failure and the older man's words made him take his time and spread the work over the next few weeks instead.

Thanos looked at all the gathered debris from his channels tucked away inside his empty core, where he was supposed to put it. He used his mind's eye again, this time noting the smooth flow of essence that travelled around his body naturally as he followed it, pleased with the result.

Nothing much had happened over the weeks he had endured his painful grind. There had been other training sessions, but he had not been able to get close enough to learn anything valuable as he was just tortured by little Rhea instead as his mother had joined in on the training.

Life around the village went on slowly, and whilst set in a beautiful location, it was pretty dull. Winter seemed to be gradually closing in as the villagers and his parents looked to be preparing for it, and a noticeable chill started to fill the air.