Tom monitored his fate pool as he was spinning the wooden hammer through the forms that April had showed him. Both he and April had decided that the short while he had access to the trial was too precious to be spent practicing with his secondary weapon. For that reason, he dedicated some of the hours in the isolation room to it instead. Despite it having limited long-term value, he needed it for his public persona. As far as everyone else in the orphanage were concerned, he was going to be a slightly above-average hammer and lightning wielder.

Precognition, Earth, and Spear skills would be kept hidden so that no one could link him directly with his past life. It was a small deception, but one he felt compelled to pursue.

Hence the practice.

While he was training, he monitored his fate pool. When it ticked up to full, he placed the hammer down. He had only been training for twenty minutes, which meant there was more than enough time remaining in the isolation room to do what he really wanted.

He focused on deep, even breaths to recover, then ran through the prerequisite spells that he had mastered so far and cast them each in turn with a single point of mana. Physical Shock simply allowed him to zap someone via contact. It was designed to be cast through the hands but the spell form was flexible enough that he could use his toes, knees, elbows or nose if he wanted to. Unfortunately, it was too weak to be effective in combat. Ionised Air, the next spell, was a support to prime his environment for more powerful electricity spells. After casting it, he instantly felt all the hairs on the back of his hand, neck, and head rise up. Then Plasma Path let him create a link between two spots. For now, he picked a point at head-height for him and linked it to the metal combat dummy stand. Preparations complete, he cast his final spell, Electricity Explosion. Sparks rained out from the open point, with about seventy percent of them using the link he had created with Plasma Path to discharge harmlessly into the combat dummy stand.

Once levelled-up, they would be a good set of abilities, even if all of them were officially classed as mid-tier-zero trash. While Tom could see how they could be developed into a flexible, and probably powerful, set of combination attacks that would be simplified when he combined them all into Spark.

While he waited for the mana he had just expended to fully recharge, he created the frameworks in front of him. While he liked the spells, their evolutions had been a disappointment. Out of all four of them, only Plasma Path had qualified for a sideways evolution, and it only made his control of lighting twenty percent better, which felt like a weak improvement.

He hoped, while creating Spark, that he would luck into something punchier. He wanted it to gain a sideways evolution with a passive effect; something to make it more potent, or a passive ability that could ignore resistances or increase the chances of a stun what it hit. Maybe a combination of all three. What he wanted was a basic upgrade to everything Spark did.

With his desire locked firmly in place, he spent all of his fate, and then manually started to construct the perfect spell form.

This was another spell that he had used extensively in his prior life. He knew in detail how to adjust the final product, to adapt it and stretch it to do far more than a tier-zero ability should have been able to do. However, like with Touch Heal, he lacked experience on the core structure of the spell.

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The information provided in the isolation room was a massive help once more. The four subcomponents of the spell were created effortlessly; then he overlaid them on top of each other. They were all electricity-based spells, and there were large areas where the spells forms were identical. Those spots he allowed to merge by relaxing his iron will that had been holding them apart. There were only two internal lines that got a differentiating treatment. Those, as per the wire frame diagrams he was following, were kept separate. With the structure fully generated he put it in stasis while rechecking the sheets of paper against what he was building.

Then he watched the ebbs and flows of the magic as the manually constructed spell transitioned from one wireframe in the document to the next. It felt perfect.

Please, work, he prayed, and then started filling it up with mana. At first, it was only from his own pool, but that ran out, so he switched to his stored precognition mana. As the second type of mana entered the spell form, the lines of the spells buckled in a couple of spots and twisted in others. Some of the perfectly straight links grew deformed as the separate lines twirled around each other like you would do when creating a rope.

Fate was acting in concert with the changes caused by the precognition affinity mana, so Tom did not try to stop it. Whatever it was doing, it was bound to be to his advantage. He had a suspicion that the precognition mana plus fate combination was an advantage only DEUS would be happy that he had discovered.

Then, once all the mana he had access to was invested, he released the spell.

A thick band of electricity snapped from his finger to slam into the inactive combat dummy’s stand. It was blinding in its intensity.

Crack.

The noise was deafening, and then the smell of fresh ozone filled the air.

There was a ding.

With a relieved sigh, he lowered his arm and grinned.

There was a temptation to rush to the status ritual to confirm the gain, but, given the time left in the isolation room, he was only going to get one use of it. So, rather than rushing to it, he paused for a moment to test something he had been wondering about.

He concentrated impatiently on his precognition mana skill to push it to generate mana faster. Four points of mana later, he was ready. He triggered Spark, and the spell form crackled into existence.

It was good to have it back.

But he suppressed those feelings to focus on what mattered. He applied his knowledge and control gained from years of training to force Spark to act at a level most people couldn’t imagine. A series of layers of static electricity appeared in the surrounding air. Tom was aware of all of them, and then he took the next step to turn it into a pseudo-domain.

If anything went through the reduced two-metre range of the spell, he would be able to track it as it breached each unique layer. Almost instantly, he would have the predicted path of the projectile and its speed. It was a pseudo-sensing domain that had proven surprisingly useful in combat.

There was no ding associated with forming the complex spell, but he could feel the improved responsiveness of the spell immediately, and, when he pushed, the range he could act at increased to two and a half metres.

He grinned. It had worked out exactly how he had hypothesised it would. There were further easy jumps in levels that he could gain as well. He focused and drew the latent energy from the sensing spell back to him, demonstrating a different kind of control. Around half the potency was lost, but the rest of it appeared in his hand, ready to be reused. He established the pseudo-sensing domain, and it was even easier this time.

Then he repeated the earlier test. Once more, around fifty percent returned to him, but he could feel that the percentage had improved slightly. He raised the ball of lightning above his head. Then he focused and created a series of paths for the lightning to follow; after that, it forked out to strike four different cupboards.

His grin became broader.

It was good to have the spell back.