He’d been awake through it all. Greg had felt it firsthand when a foreign mind had tried to take over his mind.

After his initial surprise at the sudden change that had taken place and the fact that his body was suddenly starving for mana, he had wanted to explain to his teacher that he wasn’t trying to attack her in any way. He had seen the suspicion in her eyes and while he understood it owing to her past, it still stung to have her suspect him of wanting to harm her in any way. But just as he was about to argue his innocence, his mind and body felt like an insect dumped in amber. Suddenly Greg was little more than a spectator in his own body. At first, he thought that this was some strange side effect of transitioning between one tier and the next. That’s, however, when he felt him.

You’d think that after encountering one being of titanic power, the next one won’t have such an impact on you. But as Greg felt just the edges of the mind trying to take over his own he despaired. He knew perfectly well that he could put in two hundred percent effort into trying to resist this invasion of his mind and like a fly standing in the path of a car, the mind trying to take him over wouldn’t even notice the difference. Greg suspected that the only reason he was even conscious of what was happening at the time was because of the hidden room in his mind that the first deity-level being he encountered had installed. Whatever it was that was trying to take him over, not even it could break through that barrier.

The only thing that gave Greg any kind of hope that perhaps he’d make it through this, was how much mana the entity trying to take him over seemed to need. After just a few breaths, all the mana inside the cave had been used up and what little was flowing in from outside wouldn’t be enough to sustain whatever it was trying to do. This faint hope of survival, however, was the reason could he could feel the depths of despair claw at him when several prompts appeared before him. Greg knew that Olivia was just trying to help by sending him this list of mana-rich potions that would infuse him with a substantial amount of mana. This, however, was probably the worst move she could have made at that moment.

Greg had been resigned to his fate when the prompts from the system appeared. It wasn’t until a few seconds had passed and nothing happened that he realized that something was up. It wasn’t for lack of trying that the entity trying to take him over hadn’t agreed to buy the items Olivia was recommending he could feel the burning way its attention was focused on the ‘Yes’ button. But no matter how much it focused, nothing happened. Olivia had taken corporeal form and was trying to urge him to buy the items. Greg could feel her worry through their bond but all he felt in that moment was pure relief. Whoever this invader was, they didn’t have access to the system.

Of course, as is often the case in life, Greg’s elation was short-lived. His teacher produced a purple mana crystal from somewhere and threw it over. The moment the crystal had been produced, all of Greg’s senses had focused on it. He’d never felt something so dense with energy, even the mana contract he’d signed with the healer paled in comparison. While the former was a magical item. This was concentrated mana taken physical form. And much to Greg’s dismay, it seemed to possess enough mana that whatever entity it was that was trying to take him over was bubbling with glee at the sight of it. Greg knew that Olivia and his teacher were just trying to help but all they had succeeded in doing so far was make things worse!

Rather than waste time getting frustrated with them, Greg turned his attention in the direction of the entity trying to take him over. While it was nowhere near photographic, Greg had a good memory. As such, he didn’t have any confusion about who it was that was taking over his body. He could remember the aura of the deity-like being that had reincarnated him into this world, and this wasn’t it. Besides, that one had already proven that she could rip his soul out of this body should she want to, there’s no reason why she would use a slow mental takeover of his mind. If she wanted his mind, she’d just snap her fingers and Greg would be completely erased.

Greg could remember the words that the being that had reincarnated him had said when she gave him the appraiser’s eyes as she had dubbed them. “I took them off someone who forgot their place and thought they could plot against me”. Those were the casual words that the deity-like being used as she’d given him his second reward. When stated like that, Greg hadn’t even bothered to pause and wonder who it was. He had assumed that she was referring to some mortal that Greg didn’t need to bother knowing. It only now occurred to him that a random ‘someone’ to the being that had reincarnated him was probably a terrifying being for him, a mortal, a lesson Greg was learning far too late.

Rather than bemoan his fate, Greg chose to channel his energies in a more productive direction. He’d try to figure out as much about his attacker as he could before he was done in. There were no delusions in Greg’s mind that he would somehow be able to beat this titan and come out of this alive. With absolute clarity, Greg knew that his best hope was to plan for what came after he was ousted from this body. When giving the eyes to him, the deity-like being had spoken as if she’d already dealt with the one from whom the eyes had been taken. Clearly, she had been mistaken. Some fragment of that entity remained, and by the look of things his body would soon be lost to it. Perhaps if Greg was able to bring back this information to her, the being that brought him into this world would be willing to send him back after she’d dealt with the invader.

When the mana began to flow, Greg almost despaired. What was the point of taking him over just to blow him up with overconsumption of mana? Was this some sort of spiteful last middle finger from this being to his reincarnator before they died at last? How was Greg supposed to be brought back into this body if it blew up into smithereens? It all felt like some cosmic joke. To be brought into the world and be given a second chance at life, only for him to lose that life equally through no fault of his own! It took a while for Greg to pick up on the fact that the mana wasn’t being forced into his body. If anything, his body was just the conduit. Like a bottomless hole or an insatiable beast, all the mana was somehow disappearing into his two eyes.

In a way, it turned out to be for the best that he had been relegated to just an observer of what was going on. Otherwise, Greg didn’t know if he would have been able to maintain sanity with the kind of excruciating pain his body was currently experiencing. As things stood, Greg was connected to his body just enough to know that his body was in pain but not enough to feel any of it. The mana might all be going to his strange eyes, but it wasn’t like it was teleporting there. No, it was his just completed tier-one mana pathways that were being used as the highway to deliver the mana. It felt like a garden hose had been hooked up to a firetruck and the water opened up to maximum pressure.

How his mana pathways didn’t just immediately burst, Greg didn’t know. The entity taking him over must have been doing something to keep them going, otherwise, he too would lose the mana he so badly seemed to want. There was no direct path from the sigil to his eyes. Mana simply forced its way into his body through whatever channel was closest. Most of them were like overstuffed sausages, full almost to bursting seeing as, despite being voracious, the speed at which the entity was consuming mana through his eyes, was still outpaced by the rate at which mana was flowing into Greg’s body.

It was precisely because of how ‘swollen’ and painful each of his mana pathways was that Greg was able to pick up on something odd. The eyes weren’t part of his mana cycle! Greg could remember that his teacher had once told him that his mana pathways were found in his spirit body and not his physical one. However, given that they seemed to be overlaid on each other, Greg could see that his mana pathways ran through every part and organ in his body up to and including his brain! The only exception to this was his eyes. With them, instead of being full of mana pathways like other organs, only a single mana pathway was connected to each eyeball. There wasn’t even a mana pathway connecting the eyes back to the rest of Greg’s mana pathways.

In a way, Greg wasn’t that shocked by this discovery, these were the eyes of a being far above the nine tiers, to expect that the awakening method of a tier one individual would affect them in any way was beyond ridiculous. The one mana pathway connecting to each eyeball was probably because of the modifications of the deity-level being that gave them to him. She did after all say that he’d need to supply mana to them and the rest would be done by the eyes. That single mana pathway to each eye was probably how he would have infused them with mana. Whatever feedback they would have given would probably have been transmitted to his optic nerve, which was why there hadn’t been any mana pathways leading away from the eyes.

Or at least there wasn’t supposed to be.

In much the same way that people knew that they had blood vessels but couldn’t actually feel any of them, before today, Greg had been aware that his mana pathways were slowly developing but had never actually felt the actual process. That changed as he got to feel firsthand new mana pathways branch out from the mana pathways around his eyes. The newly developed pathways reached into and connected to other preexisting pathways that were already present within the eyes. What the result of this was going to be, Greg couldn’t tell. He, however, paid close attention ready to report everything once he was finally ousted from this body. The merging of the eyes to the mana circuit of the rest of the body seemed like it was very important to the entity, seeing as almost ninety percent of the mana being drained from the purple crystal was being directed to this task. The being taking him over was not only creating but also modifying the already existing ones, all in a matter of moments. A task that had taken the healer months of constant, cumulative effort to achieve was being replicated in mere moments.

The being was halfway through the modifications when Greg felt his right eye be pulled open. Greg wanted to immediately look for his teacher and seek some kind of help from her. He was aware of the fact that his teacher would probably not be able to contend with whatever vestige of the being was still left. Still, a drowning man will clutch at straws, he was desperate for a way out of this predicament. Unfortunately for Greg, control of his own body had already been taken away from him. Still, there were only two individuals in the cave, so Greg wasn’t too surprised when the being chose to turn its gaze to the healer.

Greg reeled, his mind feeling like it had been punched from the volume of information that flowed into his mind with one simple glance. After his mind had had a few seconds to parse out the information it was receiving, Greg was left feeling a bit sick and guilty. If one was stripped completely naked and put on display, it still wouldn’t be as invasive as the single glance that the being had sent the healer. Like the layers of an onion being pulled back, the being had calmly gone over every aspect of the healer, and worse than that, he’d assigned a certain value to everything he saw. There weren’t any words or numbers attached to any of what he was looking at, they all just glowed with different intensity and colors. Anything that didn’t glow at all was deemed to be completely worthless.

On the healer’s first layer, were her clothes, her face her figure, and any outwardly visible item or aspect of the healer. All of them were tagged with the grey color which was the lowest value designation from what Greg was picking up from the being. On the next layer, much to Greg’s shock, he found himself looking at his teacher’s internals. From her brain, heart, liver, to her very bones, it was all there, and much to Greg’s discomfort, each of them was also assigned a value. Her brain bore the most value, followed, unexpectedly enough, by her liver! All, of them, however, were still in various shades of Grey. A fact that didn’t really shock Greg all that much. To a being at the level of the one that had reincarnated him and the one currently trying to take him over, a mortal body, even a tier-seven one, was probably of very little value.

But while the being didn’t seem to value much that he saw, Greg had one of his long-standing questions answered in this most unexpected of ways. He couldn’t help but marvel at the ingenuity of the healer even as he counted them. Though he’d always respected her privacy and never asked, he’d always wondered where the healer hid her storage rings or whatever storage device it was that she used. There were nine in total, one around her radius, the other around her ulna on each of her two forearms, for a total of four. Two around each of her femurs, for another four, and the final around the base of her spine. The design of her storage rings seemed to be of far higher intricate make compared to his low-grade tier-one storage rings. The being’s eyes, however, still recognized them as storage devices.

It suddenly clicked in Greg’s mind that he’d been limited in his thinking over the form of the ring as opposed to its function. Because it was a ring, he’d locked himself into thinking that it could only be around his fingers. But even if he held it between his fingers, he’d still be able to access what was within the ring if he supplied it with mana. If one took away the name ‘ring’, then the storage rings were just bands of metal that could be placed anywhere, visible or hidden. Given that she probably got these rings long before she was betrayed by her supposed friends, she must have still been very powerful. And if she could open up the obsidian earthmover in her current state, it would have been trivially easy for her to open up her own body back then. This was probably the only reason that his teacher didn’t lose everything when she was betrayed. Greg didn’t know how big each ring was, but he doubted that a seventh-tier mage would have had low-tier storage rings. His teacher carried her wealth wherever she went.

Her teacher’s internals disappeared and for a second, Greg wasn’t sure what he was looking at. When it finally clicked, however, Greg couldn’t help the horror he felt. His teacher had been open about the fact that her mana pathways had been damaged. Greg, however, had never even in his worst estimations of the damage come anywhere close to how bad it truly was. The being had turned his gaze to his teacher's spirit body and from the several black spots with zero glow that Greg could see, it was nothing short of a miracle that his teacher could even cast a simple spell, let alone match a third-tier mage.

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Just below her navel, in her spirit body, there sat a clear orb that Greg immediately recognized as her mana core. Several cracks ran all across the surface of the mana core. Some ran deep enough that Greg feared that a small nudge would be all that was needed for the thing to shatter. Greg could also see what to the being’s eyes appeared as some sort of liquid inside the orb. It didn’t take that big a leap of logic to realize that this was the mana held inside the core. What left Greg figuratively pressing his lips together in consternation was the fact that the core only seemed capable of holding about ten percent of what it should be capable of. Any mana collected beyond that seemed to vanish through the cracks on the core.

When this layer was peeled away also, all that was left behind was a flame. A bout the size of a small bonfire, calm, stable, and… green. Everything else that Greg had seen through the gaze of the being’s eyes had been various shades of grey, both bright and dull. The flame, as such, stood out starkly against the grey background. Greg wasn’t sure why or how, but the flame somehow felt familiar, like he knew it personally. And given that he suspected that this was a representation of the healer’s soul, he wasn’t that surprised by the feeling of familiarity. Why her soul was green when everything else about her had been grey? Greg didn’t know. He didn’t even know whether this was a good or bad thing.

It now occurred to Greg, why the being that had reincarnated him had asked him to first increase his own mental fortitude before trying to make full use of the eyes. It had only been a second of looking and yet, he could feel a migraine developing from all the information that he’d been forced to take in in that moment. The best and worst part of it was the fact that it was as if the information had been burned into his mind. It had only been a second-long look and yet Greg could remember every last detail of what he’d just seen. From what the healer had on, to the ascending order value of each of her organs, to exactly which parts of her mana pathways were completely damaged and which parts were just in critical condition. If this was how his body felt after just a few seconds of the eyes being used at max, Greg suspected that five minutes of looking around would be all that was needed to turn his mind to mush.

When the eye turned to regard Olivia, even Greg who was divorced from his own body could feel the sharp stab of pain that coursed through him. It felt like someone had jammed a metal rod in his brain and begun to stir. When the deity-level being that reincarnated Greg into this world gave him the eyes, she had warned him not to look at beings at the level of deities lest he go blind. Greg didn’t know if a primordial was a deity or not, but he was left feeling glad that Olivia’s true self wasn’t present, otherwise he would have almost certainly gone senile. Unlike his teacher, Olivia appeared to be a turquoise shade of blue when seen through the being’s eyes. Also, unlike the healer, Olivia didn’t seem to have any internal organs. Her body was like shaped clay. It was hard where it was supposed to be hard, and soft where it was supposed to, but in the end, it wasn’t an actual body. As a familiar, she was pure mana taken shape, a mana construct!

She also didn’t have any spirit body like normal human mages did. After all, she was an avatar of a being that was far more powerful than a ninth-tier mage, and her magic operated on different principles compared to what he’d be learning as a human mage. While a bit surprising, seeing this far into his familiar wasn’t all that hard or detrimental to Greg. It’s when his gaze peered into Olivia’s soul that he felt like his head was about to split open. At Olivia’s core, there was a small golden flame, about the size that would be produced by a candle. But while it seemed much smaller than his teacher’s soul flame, Greg could feel a vast ocean of power residing in that small flame. But even more than the flame itself, Greg felt like he was peering into higher truths that his mind wasn’t meant to comprehend! Just trying to understand what it was he was seeing caused the pain he was feeling to double, then triple the longer he kept at it.

From the small flame that represented Olivia’s soul, there were two connections. One connection, a green one, stretched out from the side of the flame and moved in his direction. The other connection, of similar color to the golden flame, stretched out from the tip of the flame and turned into a string that disappeared into the roof of the cave. Greg suspected that if he was standing outside the cave, the same golden connection would stretch out far into the distance. Where it actually went, Greg didn’t know. Given who was on the other end of the connection, however, Greg doubted that it was a simple matter of following the line to its end. It was a pure guess on his part but, Greg suspected that Olivia’s true self was probably in some hidden realm that was very hard to find, let alone enter.

Greg didn’t know if it was the fact that the new mana pathways being created between the eyes and the rest of his mana circuit were completed, or the fact that his body had been pushed beyond a certain limit. But eventually, even the being taking him over couldn’t keep him going as everything slowly faded to black! Right up until this point, Greg had been certain that his life was forfeit. If he was lucky, he’d get another chance from the deity-level being that helped him reincarnate the first time. That had been the best he’d been hoping for. But at this juncture, the strange presence that had so far seemed like it was about to completely take him over, suddenly receded into the strange pair of eyes like it had never been there. If Greg didn’t still feel the residual burn of his overtaxed mana pathways and the migraine resulting from the use of the eyes, then it would have been all too easy to believe that he’d dreamt up the whole thing.

But then, something strange happened that Greg hadn’t been expecting. He’d already been relegated to the background by whatever force it was that had been trying to take him over. And while it seemed to have handed back control over to him, the changeover wasn’t immediate. In much the same way that a limb that had gone numb didn’t immediately recover, Greg’s mind was once again slowly expanding to regain control of his body just like had been the case before he was shoved aside. And so, like some passive observer, Greg could only take in what was happening around him but not actually respond to it. It was like a strange sort of coma or sleep paralysis. He couldn’t get his body to move or respond to him in any way, and yet, he could understand the sounds that reached his ears, and pick up on his teacher’s scent when she came close.

The conversation that followed between his teacher and Olivia’s true self didn’t reveal much that Greg didn’t know. That the Primordial had several options outside of Greg, he’d already learned from the time She’d been negotiating with his teacher over the sigil. That fate would think of him as an anomaly that needed to be corrected for was something he’d known since he met the deity-level being that reincarnated him. The only new piece of information was perhaps the fact that fate operated on the principle of balance. That, counterintuitive as it may have sounded, fate would reward him every time he survived an attempt on his life. This, however, was cold comfort given the fact that it was throwing a tier-zero mage at him when he was still a mundane human. Greg dreaded to imagine what would be sent his way the more he grew in power.

What Greg was most relieved by, however, was the fact that Olivia’s true self didn’t seem to think anything of the fact that Greg was somehow associated with another deity-level being, and one that was more powerful than she was at that. Greg had always been careful not to reveal anything to Olivia that might hint at this fact. An effort that turned out to be all for naught given this new force that seemed to have just made an attempt to take over his body. Listening to Olivia’s true self and his teacher converse, however, it was clear that they thought of Roka as some hapless victim caught in the crosshairs of powers far greater than he could comprehend. In the eyes of Olivia’s true self, he was almost like an extra on the scene. He was little more than a pawn on the board. To beings like Olivia’s true self, Roka didn’t matter, it was the deity-level beings behind him that actually had her attention.

In a way, it made sense, seeing as they weren’t aware of Greg’s presence. As far as they were concerned, Roka was an unremarkable boy who had been born and raised in this little town out in the middle of nowhere for all his life and nothing about that had changed. If they knew that he was a different soul put in the place of Roka with a direct mission from an incomprehensibly powerful being, then perhaps the way they thought of him would change. However, to Greg’s tremendous relief, he remained a relatively minor character in this play as far as beings like Olivia’s true self were concerned. At the very least, this meant that Greg wouldn’t attract undue attention from beings like her, or any other that might be watching from the sidelines. The fact that Olivia’s true self expected him not to remember any of what had just happened was just the cherry on top as it spared him the burden of having to explain what had happened to him. Not that he could fully do so even if he wanted to…

***

Greg must have drifted off in the silence that followed his teacher’s conversation with Olivia’s true self as he woke up to find himself on his back, lying on a very comfortable bed. With the roof of the cave above him, Greg immediately recognized where he was. His gaze turned to the side of the bed where his teacher and familiar were. A weak smile crossed his lips “D… Did something go wrong?” he asked. Greg knew that keeping a deception simple was the best way to keep yourself from getting tangled up in lies and losing track of which lie was told and which wasn’t. By asking the question, he wasn’t actually telling a lie. Instead, he was giving his teacher a chance to tell him what story to go with. They were already expecting him not to remember any of what had happened, so this way, they could collectively come up with the version of events they would all agree on.

“How much do you remember?” Olivia questioned, a sweet smile on her face.

Not surprised by the question, Greg furrowed his brow pretending to concentrate on remembering what had happened. “I finished the morning infusion then… it’s all a jumbled mess past that. Di… did I threaten you?” Greg asked his teacher looking both horrified and unsure of himself. Greg knew that it would be a bit too convenient if he forgot everything, so he gave his teacher a chance to frame the events that took place after he transitioned to the first tier.

Alena smiled at him. “It's a new awakening method. I might have overreacted a bit when something felt off,” She said. “You passed out shortly after crossing into the first tier, it seemed that your body needed a bit of time to acclimate to the new power residing within it,” She explained. A look of incomprehension crossed her expression as she continued. “I can’t tell you how or why, but your mana pathways widened to about three or four times what they were supposed to be,” His teacher explained. And though he had to be careful not to let it show, Greg was actually relieved by this. Back when the mana from the purple crystal had been draining mana into him, his mana pathways had been stretched to almost ten times what they previously were. Ten times might sound great in principle, but every moment they’d been in that state had been absolute torture to Greg, not to mention the fact that his mana pathways had been on the brink of rapturing. That they had shrank back down to just three or four times what they usually were, was an actual improvement as far as he was concerned. It was a sign that perhaps his mana pathways were recovering.

“I know that ‘I don’t know' isn’t a very satisfactory explanation,” His teacher continued. “But I’d be lying to you if I pretended to know what was going on,” She offered with an expression of resignation. It seemed that his teacher also understood that the best lies were simple ones. She probably knew that draining the purple mana crystal was the reason his mana pathways had widened so much. But to tell him about it would lead to questions she wasn’t willing to answer. So, instead, she just said that she didn’t understand. Unsatisfactory, perhaps, but unassailable as an explanation.

“So what does that mean for the rest of the process?” Greg asked. He was supposed to have his mana capacity and pathways reinforced to the same degree as a third-tier mage. With the drastic distortion and change that his mana pathways had been subjected to, Greg wasn’t sure what it would mean for his progress as a mage.

Whatever fears he’d been holding at bay, however, immediately turned to smoke as he noticed the genuine smile that crossed his teacher’s lips. Whatever the coming prognosis, it clearly wasn’t a bad one. “We will still have to work on your mana capacity,” she informed him. “Your mana pathways, however, seem to have been tempered beyond what even a third-tier mage might lay claim to. It would be a strain, no doubt, but I think that as you currently are, your mana pathways might even be able to handle fourth-tier mana,” his teacher declared.

Greg’s eyes widened at the revelation, his elation not in any way hidden. Despite knowing that it was because his mana pathways had been forced to endure unbelievable amounts of mana, Greg pretended to ask a few questions about how this could be possible, just to keep up the ruse. In the end, a serious question came to him. “Wait, so how long have I been out?” Greg questioned. The question wasn’t a baseless one. Every time Greg had gotten his mana pathways modified using different beast-cores, he would be out of it for several days. A change as drastic as the one he’d just endured was certain to have taken him a while to adjust to.

The smile on his teacher’s face stiffened a little at the question. Still, she answered him genuinely. “The bad news is that it’s been a month and a half. The good news is that, at the very least, winter is over, we are in the first week of spring. Congratulations on turning nineteen cycles,” his teacher relayed with a weak smile.

Greg was frozen with shock for a second. But after using beast cores many times already, being passed out for several days on end was no longer as jarring as it once was. With a sigh of resigned acceptance, Greg pushed up off the bed into a sitting position. Part of him had been expecting either his teacher or familiar to push him back down and urge him to be careful. But from the ease with which he moved Greg could tell that he was perfectly fine. If there had been any issues with him after rising to the first tier, they had been resolved in the month and a half that he’d been out of it.

Greg’s gaze moved to the sigil as for the first time since waking, he became aware of a fourth individual inside the cave. Seated in a cross-legged position in the middle of the sigil with his eyes closed, was an old man in a monk-like robe. So old was the man that even his closed eyes looked like another fold in the plethora of wrinkles on his face. One palm was placed on top of another, both facing upwards, as the man seemed lost in meditation. The man didn’t give off any aura of power and looked largely harmless. But if his teacher had allowed him into the cave, then he couldn’t be a nobody.

“Who is he?” Greg asked softly, not willing to disturb the man’s meditation.

Turning to the side of his bed, however, Greg was surprised to find a look of confusion plastered on both his teacher’s and Olivia’s expressions as they looked between him and the sigil. “Who is who, Master?” Olivia questioned him, her gaze scanning the whole cave for anyone who might have escaped her notice.

Looking at the two of them, Greg could tell that this was no pretense on their part, which prompted him to once again look at the old man whom he could quite plainly see before him. A creepy smile was now playing on the old man’s face. One of his hands rose to his lips with the index finger straight and the man made a shushing sound even as his eyes opened to regard Greg. On his part, Greg felt his heart almost come to a stop with shock and dread as where the old man’s irises should have been, Greg found himself looking at what looked like a nebula of stars…