Henry suspiciously peered at his surroundings. “Doing alright,” he answered using his illusory voice. This must be an illusion, right? He couldn’t sense Maurice through his telepathic sense.

Actually… He didn’t sense anything from his telepathic sense. He then tried to activate Arcane Arm, but it didn’t. Instead, he felt something move in the world around him for an instant, before it was smothered.

Where was he?

The system picked up a little stone with one of its many tentacles and transferred it to its human hand. “Are you done inspecting everything; can I start my lesson?”

Henry would have raised an eyebrow at the creature if he had any. “Lesson? What lesson? And where are we?”

The system sighed, shoulders slumped.“Oh well. I guess we’re not socializing, so we can just move on to the next part.”

It—or he—chucked the stone into the turtle shell, and the image shattered like broken glass. The shell was gone, along with the water, leaving an infinite stretch of flat sand below an incredible starry sky. Barely a few feet away, there was a pedestal.

Henry felt a sense of mild whiplash from the sudden change of mood. While the turtle shell home had been comfortable and familiar, this new area was solemn. Quiet. But still incredibly alien and wondrous.

“I used to do this to promising individuals a long time ago. But after a few hundred years passed with… uninspiring results, I made the lesson into regular ol’ system messages. Which is, to be frank, the only thing I’m obligated to do.”

The system wasn’t small anymore. He was as large as Henry, but the kraken couldn’t focus on the creature.

He couldn’t take his eyes off whatever was on the pedestal.

They were… fragments. Large shards, each with a different color and tone. Some were smaller, some large, and all were arranged in a vaguely octahedron—like shape. Around the octahedron, there was some sort of frame. A cubic thing that glowed with an unearthly clear light, shining its light out into the heart of the strange shape.

The more Henry stared at the shape, the worse the itch in the back of his brain got. He felt he was close to getting it. There was something familiar about the pedestal, and it was gnawing at him.

One of the shards was a slab of deep red. A hungry thing that—if the other shards hadn’t been part of it—would have consumed them all.

Another was a dark and smoky thing, shifting and roiling, constantly disappearing only to show up behind another fragment a second later.

A third was an almost translucent shard that kept shifting color and texture. Even shape.

There were more smaller ones. A relaxing and pleasant green one. A blue one crackling with energy. A purple one that was almost as large as the first three, but it somehow stretched itself to touch all the others.

And then, it dawned on him. These were his Aspects. His abilities. And that frame around it… his class?

“I see you realized what this is?”

Henry tore his eyes away from the pedestal. “Where are we? Is this…”

“Your soul. Yes. In a way. Don’t worry, we’re just here for a quick lesson. You can’t break anything. Not yet.”

Henry was quiet for a moment as his gaze shifted back to the pedestal. Within him, something twitched. Like a small stone hitting a calm pond and disturbing its surface. Something bothered him, but he couldn’t put his arm on what it was exactly.

“What’s the lesson?” asked Henry. Then he frowned, and turned to look at the system. “Also, why did the new classes not say anything about skill slots?”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

The system floated up from his seated position and came to stop next to Henry, who tensed up. “Stop worrying. I told you I’m only here for a lesson. And part of that lesson—and an answer to your second question—is that, to keep things short and simple, the training wheels are coming off. As you know, or might have guessed, the early evolutions and classes were there to help you and guide you, but there were a lot of protections baked into them. Now that you’re about to start playing with concepts and potentially reforge yourself, we can’t have those restrictions around. Even your class, that pretty frame you see around the Aspects, will soon disappear. Unless you figure out a way to integrate it with everything else.”

The system floated closer to the pedestal and swam around it for a few moments before he stopped and faced Henry, the pedestal between them.

“From now on, things will be both simpler and more complicated. You’re going to need to experiment a lot. You’ll need to be smart. And if you play your cards right, you’ll go far. Now, here’s the question for you. Did you have a new Aspect in mind?”

The system smiled at him, and the different lights coming off the Aspect made the smile look ominous. Still, the question allowed Henry to get his suckers around the issue that’d been bothering him. Forgot how annoying this guy can be.

The system put a hand on his chest and mimicked shock. “Mean. But yes, say it.”

“Isn’t it already a bit… crowded? For another Aspect.”

The system grinned. “Yes. And no.”

Henry gave the system an even stare and forced his thoughts to stay polite. “Those are both options.”

“Well, it’ll depend on what you do with this. This isn’t—” the system gestured at the octahedron of shards, “—exactly as it appears. There are lots of variables. You’ll have to test and play with things, but yes, you can’t just keep piling up Aspects and hope to make something useful out of them.”

That was a more useful answer. “What’s a good number?”

The system moved away from the pedestal and stood to the side, shrugging. “For some people it’s one. For others it’s five. You’ll have to see for yourself. It comes back to efficiency and synergy, more than numbers. Your basic Aspects clearly work well together, so, if I’m giving you a hint, your other Aspects should either work well together, or work well with your basic abilities. If everything clicks well together, then you’re set.”

So everything needed to match thematically? Okay. Henry could wrap his head around that.

“Alright. I think I’m following. What else are you going to teach me?”

“Yes… You’re beginning to grasp it. You’re still a bit off, but that’s normal. Good! And to answer your question, I’m gonna have to ask you. What do you want to learn?”

Henry considered the question for a few seconds, then nodded.

“Can I cast skills without having them? Actually, what are skills and traits?”

The system nodded along, hand on his chin as he listened. “Hmm. What do you think they are? What have you tried? Actually. I know what you’ve tried. But what do you think of it?”

Henry recalled his mana experiments and his mostly unsuccessful study of Arcane Arm. “Well… it sounds like there’s some black box somewhere in my soul where my mana disappears, and the skill triggers. I don’t know much more than that.”

“It’s close. I can answer you this, because this will be something you’ll learn as soon as you start using that Concept workshop that was just unlocked. Basically, a skill—or trait—is a collection of concepts and intent stabilized into a construct attached to your soul. To an Aspect, or to the class. The more you use it, the deeper it merges to its foundation.”

“Can Aspects be fused?”

The system gave him a slow nod, while the look he gave Henry was pointed. “Yes, but you should be careful with that. You’ll have access to it in the Aspect Workshop, now that it was upgraded. That sub-system might let you do dumb things, so think it through before you commit. What will happen is, the smaller Aspect—if compatible—will change a bit to match the larger one, and the larger one might gain a new… angle to what it represents, and that will have ramifications for your abilities. Maybe even your sense of self. This is dangerous territory, and you’ll be on your own. So be careful.”

Before Henry could finish assimilating all of this information, the system clapped his hands and grinned. The world—or the illusion—began breaking down, rippling and tearing away, leaving only Henry and the system unaffected.

“Well, it was nice seeing you again! Work hard, and maybe you’ll get yourself another lesson from yours truly next time.”

Henry watched the world slowly dissolve. The pedestal was the last to go, but somehow he felt like that part was still present. “Why did you do this? The special treatment?”

The system began to dissolve as well, with the octopus arms fading into dust. It smiled at him and raised a hand, preparing to snap its fingers. “I’ll tell you next time. Maybe. Make sure to survive.”

And with that, the system snapped its fingers—

—and the cave wall in which Henry had started the process came into view.