I was laying on a massage table with my head in a hole. Meanwhile, I imagined my way through a deep tissue massage, working the tension out of my legs and back after about sixteen hours of straight training.

  The masseuse wasn’t a person, per se, it was just a distinct feeling of pressures and pushes against different parts of my body that served to undo some of the kinks and aches I’d built up.

  Or rather, served to make me feel as if my muscles were untightening. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure that my muscles could ache long-term in a place like this, or if my body could become strained in any sense of the word, but all of this was about building good habits. And, regardless of what made an actual physical difference or not, the process was relaxing. It felt like getting a week’s worth of sleep all at once, even though the whole process lasted about twenty minutes.

  It was weirder doing my front, though. I had to close my eyes once I flipped over. The sensation of being massaged was really hard to envision when you recognised that there was no one really doing it.

  But after a time, I chose to open them. It was a form of training, now that I thought about it.

  I tried to imagine a pressure forming against my chest, then my stomach, then my leg.

  The sensations were lighter than before, but still present.

  This room allowed me to manifest my imagination. Mana manipulation, from what I understood, was the practice of doing something kinda similar, only it used energy to serve as a catalyst, and different kinds of energy could accomplish different things.

  But surely a mage was limited not just by their sense for nature, energy, and the world, but by how attuned they were to their own mind and their own imagination. Weren’t those things a part of the spirit?

  And so it was that I started devoting time to learning to fly in my training room.

  It seemed like a fruitless endeavour at first. My first attempts had involved jumping, but gravity seemed to be a constant here. Was that because gravity was a constant everywhere that I’d ever been?

  I tried to envision the room as space. I imagined stars all around me to match the view beyond the room’s translucent walls.

  …it didn’t help. Neither did making a stairway upwards and then making it suddenly disappear after I’d climbed it. All that did was make me feel nauseous from the fall.

  Maybe weightlessness was out of the question. Maybe floating too… but what about capabilities I could actually remember having?

  Cael was way stronger than I was, fitter too. Surely he could jump higher?

  I imagined being within his body. The strength he might exhibit before pushing off for a long leap. I tried to envision myself as him. As the spiritual component to his body.

  Suddenly, I jumped further than I ever had in my previous attempts. I felt actual progress.

  I started applying that same principle to everything within the training room. I pictured the capabilities I’d had in my last life and applied them to myself. I found that my strength and speed both increased dramatically.

  Imagination was still a limitation, but I’d found a new baseline I could work with much easier. Training with my sword felt like a breeze once I adopted Cael’s fighting talents and made them my own, once my spirit recognised that in this room, it could do all of those things without effort. I continued to try and learn and remember Cael’s sword drills, and took regular breaks to study from a sword trainer’s writings on proper technique and instruction.

  Unlike all his other attempts at advancement, Cael understood his sword practice well, and I barely found myself adjusting anything in my routine after a fair amount of reading. It seemed he’d truly loved the sword and incorporated it into his daily life in a way that many in his family did their lessons, their bloodline skills, or their magic training.

  I wasn’t as fond of the weapon as he was, but I could appreciate the artistry of fighting with a blade, as well as the versatility of the weapon. There was a reason swords had lasted for thousands of years as a powerful weapon of choice.

  I’d definitely continue to practice with it, at least for now. It wasn’t that I owed anything to Cael, or that I wished to preserve elements of his previous life, necessarily. The guy was still a dick. I just felt that with all the time he’d already devoted to it, it didn’t make sense to give it up. I might as well use every skill at my disposal, and those of two lives lived were way better than just my skills at typing and scrolling.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Typing… could I use that here? Could that be of use?

  I had a strong memory skill, but it wasn’t infallible. I didn’t have an eidetic memory, or whatever it was called. Maybe I could copy down some of the contents of these books so I’d have stuff to go back over later?

  With that came the temptation to try and find more advanced manuals, information that might be valuable and rare.

  I shot that temptation dead. Complete waste of time right now. I needed to focus on having the basics damn near perfect, on pushing myself through the Tier 1 gauntlet. As far as I understood it, advancing to Tier 2 made a person much stronger, as well as more magically capable. Once I’d got there, I could worry about the next steps.

  My other niggling concern was one regarding money. Cael had been borrowing money for advancement resources for months now, and from what I’d gleaned from his memories, that well had ran completely dry. His plan to marry Amara was partially an excuse to secure funding from his family for the establishment of a new branch of the Soulgrave clan at Skyreach.

  That had fallen through completely, and angry creditors aside, Cael didn’t have the means to carry on paying his way at the guild. The guildmasters would likely give him a grace period on account of his name, but I’d need to pay his debts eventually, and I’d also need money for food and materials.

  There was a use for my typing skill. I used System to access a journal page, and asked to have access to it upon my reawakening. Then I started to jot down business ideas, everything from farming to cooking to a cleaning service to ‘invention’.

  After, I started copying down whole encyclopedia entries of information on things I found relevant. Stuff concerning agriculture, medicine, plants, trades, architecture, the technology levels of Elesia when contrasted with Earth, anything that might give me the relevant information and knowhow to form a suitable business plan.

  It was mind-numbing work, as I wasn’t retaining almost anything in the moment, but through enough rote copying, after a day, I was able to look back on about fifty thousand words of information I’d stored away for later use and be proud of my devotion to have kept on writing it.

  Then it was back to training. Training with a vengeance. Sword drills gave way to weight lifting and resistance training, to seeing how many pushups I could do with no final limit to my fatigue, to seeing how many pull ups I could do with the same lack of restrictions. Running. Running in laps so long around a room so wide that they trained my patience as much as they did my muscles.

  How had I ever managed to lay here on my phone the whole time? I felt bored if I stopped moving or thinking at this point. If I sat still for more than twenty minutes, I was fully recovered, and what was the point in sitting around waiting?

  I had a goal to prepare for. An enemy to defeat. A life to live.

  Maybe I hadn’t had that before. Maybe there’d been no good enough reason for me to push myself.

  Wake up, Cael.

  There was definitely a reason now. I’d continue pushing myself, and I’d continue to grow. No matter what.

  I’d barely heard her voice at first, but it grew stronger as more time passed. As I continued to train. As the plant that represented my spirit continued to loom larger and stronger.

  Wake up, Cael.

  I felt her voice that time. Maybe a whole day had passed. Maybe only a few hours. Time blended together in here. Either way, it was more forceful of a response this time. It tugged at me. Seemed to make the construct of the room around me fray and fizzle just a little.

  I lasered in on that feeling and pushed against it. Felt the room bend against my will and then snap back, hurtling my consciousness back into place.

  My body’s trying to wake up…

  I need to try too.

  It was like attempting to fly all over again, the monumental effort it took to imagine myself taking my spirit and thrusting it back into Cael’s body. Even conceptualising where he was, where I was in relation to him, how I’d go about taking my astral body and combining it with his physical one—it was mind-numbing. Too much for me to clearly picture.

  So I simplified once more. I told this System I wanted out. That I wanted to wake the fuck up. That I was ready, and that I was going to keep banging on the walls of this place and rattling my cage until they got the hell out of my way and let me respond to that voice!

  Wake up, Cael.

  I’m trying, dammit!

  I was about to throw my latest mental tantrum when I felt a lurch inside of me, when I felt my body shift and the floor beneath me give way. When colour drained from my eyes and the world dematerialised before me. It was almost like dying again, but more cerebral. Less sensation.

  Then, just as suddenly, there was a lot of sensation. There was light and noise and smells and fabrics and sheets and pillows and a shadowed figure looking down at me, a knife in his hand, a horrible smirk on his face.

  Then I blinked, and the man was gone. Amara was there. She gasped as I stirred.

  “You actually woke up!”

  I’d never heard her so excited before.

  She leaned down and hugged my still-bruised body. I groaned in discomfort.

  I was Cael Soulgrave again.

  I never thought I’d be so grateful to say that.