The array was not actually contained within the book, with the book seeming to simply be a window looking at the pattern. Will could turn the pages, but every page showed the same thing. He set the book down. He turned to the drafting table in the middle of the room. It was well supplied with paper and tools Will recognized from his high school drafting class. Additionally there was another small bookshelf within arms reach of the seat. Four small notebooks were on the shelf, leaving the whole thing quite bare. When he looked at one he found it titled Strength Self Enchant. He could see what this place was supposed to represent. It represented his abilities, his powers. Why it was here, he had no clue.

That was until he found a book sitting open in his hand. It had appeared with little fanfare between one moment and the next. The page was open to the first page of a chapter titled Classes. The chapter gave a description of what classes were and their purpose. It had stumped Will at first. His class had given him some stat points, and the vague sense of being able to create area of effect enchantments within his aura. Will had to say, his class had seemed to be a bit of a letdown, with the other gods simply saying it made some skills more powerful.

Will had felt the power of his enchantments grow by a reasonable margin, but shouldn’t classes give skills? Apparently not. What a class did was re-engineer the architecture of the soul by creating a soul space. The soul space would be themed according to the class, and would give major bonuses to class related activities. In this case, because Script Lord was a mage type class focused on creating scripts, a library had been determined to be the best soul space.

Now hope was not lost for new skills. Will had gained them quite quickly at the beginning, even getting some rarer versions of skills like shadowmeld instead of sneak. He had been working on existing skills since then, but if he wanted to unlock a new skill, the class would help if it was even tangentially related to it.

Moreover the soul space could change to better accommodate the individual. Will’s class was new, but as it matured, and Will gained more levels, he could alter the space as he wished, slowly changing the class itself to better suit him. For example, he could add an enchanting workshop, making the class more oriented toward crafting. Or he could add a sparring room to make the class more oriented toward combat. But whatever he did, he wouldn’t be able to change the base nature of the class until higher tiers when the soul could be restructured again.

Will closed the book and looked at it. It was titled System Help Book. He felt it belonged in the outer section with the other books he had collected, but he had never seen this book before. Until he realized that the book must have come pre installed. Damn bloatware. Maybe he would find a sports app that he could never uninstall. That would bring back memories.

Will chuckled at the thought, but the book really was useful. He would spend time reading it later to learn some of the finer points of the system. Will looked around one more time before leaving the library. He woke up back in his room finding that it was near noon. Which meant he had work to do. The first thing he wanted to understand better was his soul concept.

Most soul concepts were moralities. Truth, mercy, love, etcetera. They gave very specific benefits based on that moral idea. Then there were the soul engineers. He had heard of them in a hushed conversation around the fire one night. Apparently they had concepts based around soul mechanics. The conversation consisted of hushed stories of body snatchers and traps that could crush your soul in an instant. Soul engineers were not well liked. Will tried to relate them to necromancers, but was very quickly told that soul engineers were worse. Necromancers worked on the spirit, creating false spirits and turning corpses into monsters. It was horrible, but somewhat par for the course. A soul engineer could strip the soul from the body, and insert their own soul, going on with the life of the other person as if nothing had ever happened.

Will had to agree that was horrifying, but he also didn’t think that his concept was one of those. Which left him in a situation where his concept was in the very large “Things I don’t know” category. He had thought the concept out enough to truly gain it, but he still didn’t understand how it actually worked.

And so he drew on his soul concept. It was very odd. A lot of what it did happened inside the soul which Will had not yet explored properly. However he could detect energy spreading out in filigree lines throughout his soul. Suddenly, he felt his stats jump. Like he was using one of his boosting enchantments, except every stat besides luck jumped across the board. They increased further as he drew on his soul concept even further. This was great in Will’s opinion, but this was still not the full extent of the concept. The concept was trying to work on something, and Will had an idea as to what that was. He went out to his living room and drew his rapier. Instantly he felt all wrong, and was forced to put the rapier back in its sheath. The wrongness dissipated, but not completely. Will had been sure that was what the skill wanted, and simply tried to sense the wrong feeling to figure out what it wanted. Will straightened his posture, and turned forty five degrees. He bent his legs slightly, and then felt it was time to draw his rapier. Now the motion was far more smooth.

Will followed what the concept tried to tell him for the next hour as he fought with the air. He was rarely perfect, but it was far better than any training he had received before. When he was out of breath from the training, the concept guided him to sit down. It then guided him in several mental exercises that Will didn’t understand the purpose of. Will tried to figure out where the information the concept was using came from, but couldn’t. Moreover, it was somehow teaching him techniques for a rapier despite the weapon being in no way ancient, at least in this world. Was it pulling from knowledge on his world? Will had no way to tell.

After a few hours of that, he went back down, had another meal, and went out to find the refugees. He didn't need to look hard, as the moment one of them spotted him they called out to the others. It took a moment to calm them down, at which point Will examined each one of their spirit maps. It turned out Arnold had one of the lowest numbers of open nodes, and so Will did them in order of who had the most nodes open. As one of the men had all but three of his nodes already open, Will did him first, sitting back to back with the excited man and pouring energy into his spirit map.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Will did his absolute best to keep his mind out of the gutter.

It only took a few minutes for the man to have his spirit map properly healed. More and more Will felt that the absent nodes were damage in the men’s spirits, and he had no clue where that damage might have come from. It was present irregardless of the men’s age or profession, and he expected to see the same in the women and children when he got to them as well.

Will proceeded to help the man gain a concept. It was easier for this man as well, as it seemed that having lived with the mostly full spirit map greatly increased his concept affinity. The man ended up gaining a fire related body concept, which was completely at odds with him being a farmer, but ok. Will moved on to the next person, and then the next, managing three before it started to get dark. Of course he only was able to do that because most of them had mostly intact spirit maps before they even started. Will ate and went to bed. He would have to go out the next morning to get more food. This time maybe he would bring some of the others along. Arnold especially. He had gained a lot from joining up with Will, and it was time he earned his keep.

Will woke up the next morning and practiced using his concept. He had training with a longsword, and using the rapier was surprisingly similar, but that didn't matter to his concept. Every time he made a mistake, a glaring feeling of wrongness came over him. It was a strong deterrent, as Will found the feeling more distasteful every time he felt it. It was like a sharp buzz in his mind. The one good thing Will saw in it was that it was increasingly easy to tell what was wrong, even if the right way was supremely uncomfortable.

When Will was done with his training, he decided to try to keep the concept on for a bit, to see what it would do. The concept held the idea of training, but that was not all it was supposed to do. Of course, the moment Will took a step toward the bathroom to clean himself off, he felt the wrongness again. For a moment Will was worried that the concept wanted him to train more, but no, it simply wanted him to walk correctly. Head high, shoulders back, with perfect posture. It even buzzed him as he got into the bath tub. Apparently there was a proper way to do that as well.

By the time Will was done in the bath he was sick of the new concept. He thought about turning it off, but some masochistic part of himself wanted it to be left on. He got buzzed as he got dressed, he got buzzed as he made his bed, he got buzzed as he walked down the stairs. He would have started to flinch away from the buzzes except for the fact that doing so would get him buzzed again.

“Wow, who are you to be acting so fancy?” Emerys shouted as Will walked to the table. Will noticed that the food was now being prepared and served by a couple of women from the town. Will accepted his food gracefully and made sure they knew how much he appreciated their help. The concept said he had to, after all.

“I don’t know what you mean.” Will said as he started eating. Buz, Buz, Buz. By the time he had taken his third bite he was eating as though he was in a palace. Everyone was staring at him by this point, now that Emerys had brought attention to him. It wasn’t long before Will was forced to share.

“I got a soul concept.”

“Ahh, the profound morality of having a stick up your ass.” Emerys said in a lofty voice. “How is that working for you?”

“Not well.” Will said. “It turns out that it helps me train. It has already helped a lot with my form while using the rapier, and so I thought I might try to see what it did when not training.”

“Well it looks as though it is trying to turn you into a noble. You should probably stop using it too much.” Without thinking, Will pulsed his royal aura. Emerys sat back in his chair. “My apologies my lord, I did not mean to offend his highness.”

Will immediately turned off the concept, finally getting some reprieve.

“I am so sorry, you are obviously right.” Will stood with his plate. “If you will excuse me, I have some meditation to do.”

Will then promptly retreated back into his room where he scarfed down the rest of his meal. He then sat down in the middle of his living room and started to meditate. He fell into himself, examining his spirit map, and then his soul. He picked out the thread that corresponded to his soul concept and followed it into his soul. He thought it would go to the library, and it indeed looped through that construct. However it also went deeper. It led to another location, even deeper and more ephemeral, like the plain of windswept ice Will saw when he thought of his Desolate Heart of the Frozen North.

Will pushed forward and broke into the place. It was a courtyard surrounded by dressed stone walls. Small openings in the paved ground allowed plants to thrive in small gardens. In the middle of the courtyard knelt an old man dressed in fine and practical clothing.

“It is about time you came to speak to me, my child.” The man stood and turned toward Will. “You turned off our connection so many times… You are not one of my descendants, who are you?”

“That should be the question I am asking.” Will said.

“Pah. No respect. Very well, I am Tirum Alexander, ruler of the Golden Isle. From the look of you it has been quite long since I crafted this concept for my descendants, or we are very far away. Now, please tell me, who are you and how did you get a hold of my concept?”

“My name is Will, and I killed a curseforged abomination. The core it dropped possessed the concept.” Tirum Alexander got a downcast look.

“Terrible fate, that. To think it happened to one of my descendants. Truly terrible. Pray tell, what happened to my kingdom?”

“I am sorry but I have never heard of it. Where was it?” Will asked.

“It was a beautiful island, warm year round with pearly white beaches. It was between the two continents to the south where we dominated all trade between the southern coasts and the inner sea.” the man basked for a moment in nostalgia. “Do you know of such a place?”

“Do you mean Aetherglow?”

“Pah, what do those cultists have to do with anything?” Then a look of horror overcame his face as he realized what Will said. “Please, tell me they didn’t win!”