I panted above the broken bottle, alone in the dark. My lungs screamed for air, rebelling against the memory of the mage’s body shutting down as paralytic spread through his veins.

I hadn’t drank every last drop of blood in the bottle; the tiny droplets that escaped me and spilled onto the floor called to me. For a moment, the image of myself licking the blood off the dirty stone filled my head. And then I pressed my Willpower to the desire and resisted, stomping it out like a bug.

Willpower felt like control over myself.

I sat cross legged in the dark, still recovering from the shock of dying on the ground of the Last City. Or at least experiencing dying there. It was just a few minutes of memory, but it felt like an eternity. And the skill the mage had used — I reached out to the new, temporary skill I stole from his blood.

[Move the Earth VI(TEMP)][+30 INT]

Like with [Sanguine] and [Progenitor’s Will,] the skill provided not just control, but a new, dizzying sense. My Willpower let me focus on the skill, and in exchange, it bombarded me with information. I felt the pillar of earth around me, as well as each and every stone brick in the tiles. I had a feeling I could only process them due to the temporarily raised Intelligence stat as well.

It was like trying to count the leaves on a tree. Except I could do it.

I wasn’t the Archmage. I wasn’t that powerful. I needed to be stronger. But I couldn’t do it alone. He had tried, and failed. I wouldn’t.

I reached out with [Move the Earth.] The skill pulled on the stolen blood inside me, like flexing a muscle in all of my veins at once. With a little bit of applied effort, I rolled the stone beneath the broken bottle, swallowing the glass shards and potent drops of blood into the brick before re-solidifying it.

It didn’t even consume any of my blood.

The skill gave more stats per level than the ones I had easily leveled. The skills that gave me the most stats hadn’t leveled at all. In fact, the System had even commented on it ‘good luck leveling those up.’

Not the system. Cody.

“Cody, what did you mean when you said good luck leveling the vampire progenitor skills? Are they hard to level?” I asked. I thought I already knew the answer.

The book had been hovering at my side, unusually quiet. Or maybe I had been tuning him out. I hoped Willpower could help me do that.

“The rarer a skill, the more difficult and rewarding it is to level the skill.” Cody said. “True meritocracy, even in the System. Skills level better as you understand them, and especially while using them under stress.”

“So while fighting, in short.” I said.

I closed my eyes, focusing on the stolen memory the blood had shown me. Surprisingly, [Progenitor’s Will] seemed to respond. The skill was an amalgamation of poison resistance and blood manipulation, but it resonated with my boosted Willpower and Intelligence.

I pulled back the memory of being the Archmage with intense lucidity and clarity, remembering the feeling of the mage using the skill. Like with [Progenitor’s Will,] it was more that the skill enabled him to apply his Willpower and Intelligence to directly control magic. But it was far more intense than I could follow. I felt him bend his Willpower into shapes of infinite complexity, a hovering maze of stone.

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And only a small part of it felt like [Move the Earth.] I recognized it; it was a skill that had merged together, just like [Progenitor’s Will] had, but it felt like dozens of separate earth magic skills at once. I could only barely follow the shaping as it erupted. Enough power to move a city.

But as I focused on it, [Progenitor’s Will] burned stronger and stronger. I shaped my own Willpower into it, nothing like the Archmage’s efforts, but more complex than I had tried before. I felt myself getting closer and closer to… something. Like my blood was burning brighter and brighter.

[Progenitor’s Will XI has leveled to Progenitor’s Will XII!]

Another memory played. It didn’t slam into my mind and send the world spinning, this time. It played like a choppy reel being fed through an old projector, a series of spotty images and feelings. These were flashes of the Archmage before he was an Archmage.

I saw the Archmage’s young friends running toward him in a dark passage. He screamed for them to come closer. They weren’t going to make it. They were running from… something. It was a hole in the memory, like parts of the reel had been burned away.

The sound of footsteps in the cave grew closer. A monster roared.

Then I felt him activate [Move the Earth.] Half of the memory blurred. The dark passage was blocked by a stone wall. A woman was screaming at the Archmage for him to drop the wall, that the others could still make it.

The scene blurred again. Then silence. Then the memories were gone.

[Progenitor’s Will XI has leveled to Progenitor’s Will XII!]

“Not the skill I needed to level.” I said, groggy from swimming in the broken memories. I could feel that [Move the Earth] had grown closer to leveling; I wasn’t sure if it was just a product of my temporarily boosted Willpower. I had been able to sense myself getting close with [Sanguine] before it evolved.

“It’s almost night out. You might be able to finish evolving the skill by leveling.” Cody said.

“What?” I asked, turning to him. It should’ve still been hours away from dusk.

“You’ve been down here almost two hours now.” Cody said.

“Shit.” I shot to my feet, opening the door to the underground cavern and shooting up the stairs. I had a distorted sense of time while using [Progenitor’s Will,] but it had never been this bad before.

I pushed open the door to the foyer of the castle and found a shouting match between Steve and Clarissa.

“It doesn’t make me any less capable of fighting.” Steve said. He didn’t even look at me. He was irate.

“That’s not what I’m sayin’!” Clarissa said. She had her hands raised in a gesture of surrender. Her eyes flicked to me for a second before going back to Steve. “Look. All I’m sayin’ is that we can’t know how healed you really are. What if you go out there and it… gets worse?”

“It’s the only possible way for it to get better!” Steve shouted.

I corrected myself. Steve was yelling. Clarissa was talking.

“We should get as many people to level as possible.” I said, stepping forward and interposing myself in the conversation.

Steve huffed. Clarissa looked at me — not with derision or suspicion this time — but with an open, considering expression. She looked like she was going to bring up her earlier point again.

“Cody, how does the system’s healing work?” I asked, cutting her off.

“The system expends — ” The room went quiet. Not just, people stopped talking quiet, but all sound was suddenly gone. Cody, too, disappeared. The entire space around him was just a blind spot. Then sound rushed back into my ears. “Well, that was rude. The system expends the ‘resource known as health’ to restore the user’s bodies. It can revert any wound if you have enough. And to perfect health! Even being beheaded! Once I saw someone regrow an entire body from the neck down. Horrifying. And gross. It does not regrow clothes.”

I could hear the quotes in his statement.

Cody stage whispered, loud enough for everyone to hear. “It’s not health. It’s — ”

“Don’t!” Steve said. “Do not do that again. I don’t know what the hell that was, but it was goddamn creepy.”

“The System censored information.” I said, guessing. “How much control do you actually have?”

“How dare you imply that I am not in control! I am an almighty shard of the Catalog!” Cody said, rising from the floor. “I am the all-powerful Codex of Acquisition!”

“So, read only access.” I said, shaking my head. Then I turned back to Steve. “We need to get more than one team together. There are vampires roaming the city. Every minute we spend waiting is a minute we spend with other survivors in danger.”

“I’ll go.” Clarissa volunteered.

I quirked an eyebrow at her.

“My dad…” she said.

“Is he…?” Oh no. I started to frown.

“He’s on the north end of town. He’s fine, I’m sure.”

Even Steve softened for a second.

“Alright. Then let’s get teams together and go.”