Xavier sat cross legged on the ground as great energies flooded into him. No notification appeared to tell him what the spell he’d just cast did, though he had plenty of spells that lacked notifications on casting.

  Xavier had cultivated energies into himself before—a great many times—but it had never felt quite like this.

  The energy had nowhere to go. It wasn’t heading to any of his uncovered cores. It was simply swirling around the different energy pathways in his body.

  Xavier wrinkled his forehead in concentration as he shut his eyes and focused inwardly. He used senses he had been developing since the moment he’d uncovered his Spirit Core. Since then, he had uncovered several more cores—his Willpower Core before he’d reached the rank of E Grade, and his Speed Core before he’d reached the rank of D Grade.

  He’d yet to uncover a fourth core, but he knew he would do that in the future.

  The energy that he took in wasn’t specific—it felt like the raw energy known as Celestial Energy. Celestial Energy was the energy that fuelled all of a Denizen’s cores. When it was cultivated, it turned into the necessary energy for each of the six different cores, which each had a corresponding attribute.

  The Celestial Energy moved down one pathway to the next, in a seemingly unordered way, until it finally left his body and dissipated into nothing.

  Xavier opened his eyes with a frown. “Well… that was anticlimactic.”

  The energy had just… disappeared. And as far as he could tell, it hadn’t actually done anything for him. Maybe there was something going on that he wasn’t aware of. But if so… he wasn’t aware of it.

  He let out a sigh, then tilted his head to the side curiously. Usually, when a spell was cast or when it ended, he would feel the cooldown for that spell activate.

  No such thing happened for this spell. He concentrated on it, but nothing showed up.

  The spell had no cooldown at all.

  He looked inward once more, this time at his cores, and realised that he hadn’t spent a single bit of energy to cast the spell.

  That’s strange. Usually it’s only skills that don’t require energy to cast, and all my other cultivation abilities are in the skills category…

  That at least settled something—he was able to experiment with this spell inside the time dilation field. Which was good, because he certainly didn’t have a handle on it after a single cast.

  Xavier just sat there for a long moment, staring outside the barrier at the chaos with the four Infected Rock Worms, the C Grade beasts that The Nightmare controlled, and the boulders they had launched up at the sky like cannonballs in a steady stream of attacks. Not to mention all the other infected D Grade beasts.

  Volkarin was high in the sky, a stream of fire and ice flowing from his giant maw. The dragon looked more ferocious than he ever had.

  There was a very small part of Xavier that wondered if he should be regretting his choice of spell. Only moments ago, before he’d opened the spell description, he was excited to discover what it could be.

  Now, he was more annoyed than anything else.

  Maybe it’s a lost art because it isn’t even useful anymore. There must be plenty of “Old Ways” that were forgotten because they were simply no good.

  He let out yet another sigh and banished those negative thoughts, ordering his mind once more. There was no point in feeling self-pity about his spell choice. He had trusted the spirit he’d spoken to, and at the time he’d gotten a feeling of rightness about the path.

  Besides, he couldn’t change what he had done.

  The phrase came to him unbidden, One cannot walk backward on the path.

  Xavier had always known the truth in those words, but now more than ever they were clear.

  I’m just going to have to work with what I’ve chosen.

  Xavier closed his eyes once more and cast Body Cultivation for a second time. He felt the Celestial Energy flow into him, and this time instead of simply observing the process, he took control of it.

  Xavier found that he could easily control the flow of the energies that came inside of him—which made sense. He had been cultivating Celestial Energy for a long time. He had also been cycling different energies around his body and back into his core since he’d uncovered his Spirit Core.

  This all felt incredibly natural and easy to him.

  The moment he took control of the energy a notification popped up in his vision.

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  Body Cultivation has taken a step forward on the path!

  Body Cultivation is now a Rank 2 Spell.

  …

  Body Cultivation is now a Rank 5 spell.

  One cannot walk backward on the path.

  Xavier blinked. He certainly hadn’t been expecting that to happen. He’d gained four ranks in the spell simply by moving the energy around in his body?

  He still didn’t actually feel any different, but at least—as far as the System was concerned—he was on the right track.

  Xavier sat there for several hours, cycling the energy through his body, and brinigng more of that energy into him. This process was an easy, intuitive one to him, and he gained several more ranks as he did this, until he reached Rank 25 in Body Cultivation, and all progress suddenly stopped.

  He still didn’t even know where to keep that energy. It simply left him when he was done cycling it.

  Even with all those ranks achieved in such a short time, he still had no idea what he was actually doing with the spell.

  He stopped what he was doing and got up from where he’d been sitting cross legged. He paced around the clearing, remaining inside of the time dilation field he’d created, and tried to think through what was going on.

  The Body Cultivation spell clearly wasn’t like any other spell that he’d learnt in the past. Usually, a spell would guide the Denizen through its usage. Simply casting the spell did the thing the spell was designed to do.

  But this was something from before the System, and it didn’t appear to function in the same ways as that. There were no frameworks built into the spell itself. Nothing about this was automatic.

  Xavier was simply wielding raw energies without a clue as to what to actually do with them.

  He would need to figure out what to do with them by himself. This would require an amount of experimentation that no other spell in his arsenal had ever needed, and right now he certainly had no access to an instructor who could help him.

  The spell was similar to his cultivation skills, but there were clearly things about it he was missing. So far, all he had been able to do was circulate the energies around his body, and that clearly hadn’t been enough. There were other things he would need to do if he was to master this spell.

  “No,” Xavier said to himself. “This isn’t just a spell. That’s my problem. This entire category of magic has only this one thing. It’s not a spell. It’s an entire path.”

  Xavier sat down on the ground again, cross-legged once more, and closed his eyes.

  He cast Body Cultivation, bringing Celestial Energy into it and cycling it through the different channels in his body.

  Then he opened his eyes and raised his right hand and looked at it.

  He focused on the energies moving around his body and pushed them toward his hand.

  Before the System, the Denizens that existed didn’t have already established frameworks to work with. They would have had to work with the raw energies and figure everything out for themselves. They would have created spells. They would have made everything that was now in the Greater Universe from scratch.

  As Xavier pushed the energy toward his hand, he felt something curious stir inside of him. A sense of wonder. It wasn’t the first time he’d felt this. There were so many things that he had discovered in the Greater Universe since being integrated by the System, things that were arguably much more amazing than what he was doing right now.

  But there was something alluring about the possibilities of what he was doing right now.

  The energy flowed down his arm until it reached his palm. He pushed it toward his fingers and suddenly felt as though the energy wanted to be released back into the air—this was what often happened when he was practising with this new spell. The energy would simply leave him before he’d really done anything with it.

  This time, Xavier didn’t let the energy leave him. Instead, he made it pool into his hand. As he watched his hand, something curious happened. It began to develop a red glow.

  Xavier blinked down at his hand, glowing as red as metal heated long at the forge. He tilted his head to one side. The longer he pooled the energy at his hand, the warmer his hand was becoming.

  Xavier was able to handle incredibly cold or hot temperatures with ease the way his body had developed, and he was sure that had only been further enhanced when he’d become a dragonkin—it wasn’t something he’d gone out of his way to test.

  But he had to imagine that a dragonkin, of all the different races, would have a particular strength for withstanding heat. It was a natural assumption to make.

  And yet the heat pooling in his hand was beginning to grow unbearable, to the point where he could see that his skin was starting to melt.

  Xavier tried to pull the Celestial Energy away from his hand, but for some reason it was trapped there. He had the inane desire to wildly shake his hand, as though he’d just touched a hot stove, but he resisted. He could keep a cool head in a crisis. If he wasn’t able to, he would have died a long time ago.

  If I can’t move the energy back through the channels and into my body, maybe I can release it.

  Xavier raised his hand. It was shaking now. The pain was intense, but he bore it well. The skin was melting so much he could see his bone beneath. He wasn’t worried—he could heal from such a wound—but it still made a shiver of fear run up him.

  What if he’d pooled the energy in the wrong place, and melted something else by accident?

  He shook that thought away and refocused, pushing the energy out of his body. This, too, seemed blocked in some way. Usually, if he wasn’t careful to keep hold of the Celestial Energy, the energies would disperse out of him without him even meaning for it to happen.

  His hand continued to melt.

  More of the skin and muscle was sizzling and disappearing before his eyes. He couldn’t help but wonder just how hot it was getting, for it to actually be doing him this much damage—to him of all people.

  Your health is at 90%.

  Doing this has taken away 10 percent of my health? That’s insane!

  Xavier didn’t let himself panic. Panic wouldn’t serve him. All it would do was make the situation worse. But he definitely wanted to panic. He wanted to freeze time, give himself time to think, but it was already frozen around him.

  Xavier released a breath.

  He had a sudden insight, though it was one that felt foolish. One that felt like it would be nothing but a waste of time. But it was something that he needed to try. His flashes of insight often got him out of trouble. He wasn’t going to stop listening to them now. If he ignored every crazy idea he had, he’d never have gotten anywhere.

  Xavier stood, curled his fingers into a fist—he had to retract his claws to do so—and punched. At the same time as he punched, he focused on the energies in his hand, and a target in the air where his fist struck. There was nothing there to hit, but he hoped that this would work—not that he even knew what he was doing.

  Xavier struck air. And…

  Nothing happened.

  His hand slowly melted away until it was completely gone.

  Accidental Champion!

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