The worst breakthrough in Tristan’s life was much shorter than any previous one. Six and a half hours later he sat panting on the floor, ghostly feelings of the essence twinged through his body. He shivered, despite sitting next to Vulcan’s flaming cap. Everything he could sense felt wrong, almost as if he could see temperature.

  “Please tell me every tier in an anima isn’t like that?” Tristan asked, not sure if progression was worth the pain.

  “No, think of this like breaking and resetting a bone that healed wrong,” Vulcan said, “Only for most of your body. Waking up your domain is going to be a problem though.”

  “You don’t think I can handle it?” Tristan asked.

  “The cerebral nervous system is difficult to heal properly. You already experienced damage to it one time, a full scouring might make you into a completely different person,” Vulcan explained.

  Tristan had many of his memories from before the sifting damaged due to oxygen deprivation while his heart was being replaced. His running theory was that healing retroactively repaired the memories, the more recent ones being prioritized over older ones. Five years also seemed to be the limit of the memories it could accurately recover.

  Activating his domain in the same way as his anima would probably cause more than just memory loss if his brain was destroyed and remade. There had to be a simpler way, people successfully did it after all.

  “How did you activate your domain? And what does it even do?” Tristan asked. The jelly like elementals had created areas where their essence permeated everything and could charge up strange attacks.

  “Well, I was born with all three active. In the Numitor empire, you would be considered disabled if you lacked one of the three,” Vulcan had a hint of confusion in his voice, “It baffles me that everyone is subsisting on only a kern. As to what a domain does, it allows you to impose your will on your essence. Any construct you create will be freely controllable with just your mind.”

  Everyone had all three available. Did that mean everyone was a tier two? Tristan couldn’t imagine what a civilization with tier twos everywhere could accomplish. He leaned back against the door, what had happened since Vulcan’s time? The world he described was dramatically different than the one Tristan knew. Not that he knew much about it.

  A thought struck him, “If I have an anima now, does that mean I’m tier six?”

  “Sure, if you feel like bragging,” Vulcan said, “If you want to be realistic, no. You have crossed the threshold for a tier five kern, and have an uncultivated tier zero anima. As far as your anima goes, you gained nothing but the ability to cultivate it.”

  Tristan sighed, it was a bit much to expect abilities like Conni’s. The man had spent his youth developing the skills, and Tristan had just brute forced his way into an anima. Saying he did it was a bit of a stretch. He had fought the tortoises to get the absorption, he had bound it to his arms, and he had broken his kern over and over again, but he had not pulled the necessary essence in. Vulcan had done that.

  “Speaking of which, what force did you get?” Vulcan asked, “My money is on Connection because of the building.”

  “You don’t have money,” Tristan huffed back.

  A bit of apprehension crept in. That was solid reasoning for getting connection. It would not be a bad force and Tristan was sure he could find a use for it, but he was hoping for more. He turned his gaze inward to look at the new alloy. His metal sense gave him a strange view. Normally his bloodstream, bones, and heart were the only visible area. Now his whole body was visible.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  The muscle, viscera, and sinew were much dimmer than his kern, like a candle beside a bonfire. It was also untainted. Unflavored might be the better word, as no force had mingled with his anima. It was pure silver like a mirror, while his kern was cloudy with the alloys he had taken on. Hadrid’s kern probably looked similar, though with different alloys.

  Experimentally, he attempted to push essence into his muscles. He could, but mostly due to the tier four ability to fill objects with essence. It did not become part of his anima, in much the same way a nail was not part of the wood it was driven into. Unlike a nail, it did not leave a hole behind when he released the essence.

  He would need to ask Vulcan how to train his anima to a useful standard, something he could do later. Moving onto his kern he found the alloys. The two black colored alloys of decay and consumption, the white of architect, and the grey-green of infusion. He knew all of them and frowned as he was unable to find a fifth one.

  A slight glimmer caught his eye. Frowning, he focused on it. There was a fifth alloy, and it was nearly translucent as if it were trying to phase out of existence. It gave him a feeling of wrongness, he was not supposed to be looking upon it. The thing was, Tristan had done too many unrecommended activities to avoid something potentially dangerous, such as interacting with a potentially hostile force that was underpinning reality.

  He did the essence equivalent of poking it with a stick. When nothing happened he felt comfortable interacting with it. The alloy was easily created and manipulated. It still felt wrong, but he was starting to realize that wrong and dangerous weren’t exactly the same.

  Pulling his mind out of his kern, Tristan built a construct out of it. It had the same wrong appearance and unlike other constructs, it immediately started falling apart. Had he gotten a force of weakening? That could be more useful than adamance in some situations. Though decay and erosion were the two forces that dealt with weakening.

  “How did you get your hands on that?” Vulcan said, a bit of awe creeping into his voice.

  “I have no idea what it is, it feels nothing like what is described in ‘Natural Forces,” Tristan let the construct fall to the ground. It was a spring, something he was familiar with, and it shattered into dust when it struck the ground, “It seems both wrong and weak. What is it?”

  “You remember how I said division was a logic force?” Vulcan asked to which Tristan nodded, “They rarely develop naturally, and when they do they are ridiculously difficult to understand. It feels wrong because it is wrong. Not bad, simply put you are trying to observe something within that is both absent and intrinsically linked to reality.”

  That was not simple, “How can something be linked and unrelated to something?”

  “If I had two jade chips and you had two, then I gave you my two, how many would you have?” Vulcan asked.

  “Four?” Tristan said hesitantly, this had to be a trick question.

  “Says who?” Vulcan said, “Was your teacher a godly arbiter of math? No, it’s always four and nothing can change that. Addition would be the force we use to describe it. No one can touch, feel it, see it, or test it, yet it interacts with us every day.”

  “You seem impressed, what makes this one different than division?” It was also a logic force, yet Vulcan had looked upon the force with disdain.

  “Division has few applications at your tier, it is rarely used in nature and has little application beyond cutting things,” Vulcan said, “What you got is far more interesting. Substitution.”

  That did fit with what the book was all about. It was even more fitting when he realized he had used it to replace both adamance and division when they were taken away as options. Maybe that was the real reason why most people couldn’t get them, they needed a certain mindset.

  Substitution was not listed in ‘Natural Forces.’ At first, he had treated the book like it was a complete volume, however, he found more often than not it was lacking. Tristan tried to think of what he could use substitution for. Teleportation maybe. Swapping his location and another object would be neat. Maybe it allowed for generic materials to take the place of rarer ones.

  Vulcan was not done talking, “Substitution is solving for a variable. A symbol is normally used as a placeholder in these situations. Let me give you an example. With the coins earlier, if a jade chip is the same value as a gold talent I should be able to exchange them.”

  Tristan followed.

  “If a certain artifact was also worth a talent I should be able to substitute it in a transaction. Not feasible in an economy, but we’re not dealing with an economy, we’re dealing with a force. A force that will always become what is necessary to make an equation equal.” Vulcan seemed super excited. Tristan was struggling to see an application.

  He frowned, “So if I am understanding I can turn it into any force I want so long as I use the appropriate amount of essence?”

  That couldn’t be right, however, Vulcan let out a breath of relief. “Oh good, I was hoping that explanation made sense.”

  Doing was the best way to learn, so Tristan focused on his palm. He had a force that he was intimately familiar with, adamance. Mentally locking in ‘x=adamance’ in his mind he started making the construct. The construct was supposed to be a coin, as he was not sure how much essence this would take.

  Like a tub with its stopper pulled, his tier five essence drained away. He would have stopped, but the vault was the safest place he would be for a long time. The coin formed, made of adamant alloy just like Vulcan had said. Ninety percent of his kern’s essence was used on a piece of adamance slightly larger than his thumbnail. That was….disappointing.