His greatest priority was Ten Thousand Wet Hells.

  The other abilities he believed he could push at least close to stage 3.

  But with Ten Thousand Wet Hells, he wasn’t so confident. His usual method for pushing it required slaughtering vast numbers of monsters and abusing an absolutely overpowered spirit ability. Without it, making any progress whatsoever wasn’t guaranteed.

  Very quickly, a massive pain point became agonizingly obvious.

  The ether generators were awfully slow.

  It was only now that Freddy was beginning to realize why rich gathering areas were so essential for most people.

  Although he usually didn’t think much of it, he was gaining a new appreciation for his cute little scythe. It seemed like a minor thing compared to all the other broken bullshit he casually abused, but it was a truly top-tier soul construct.

  It made both recovering his essence and purging his body of reflux essence a lot faster.

  Just this soul construct alone could completely change any ordinary archhuman’s future prospects.

  And for him, it was a total lifesaver.

  Day in and day out, Freddy worked on growing himself.

  While he was still seeing some growth regarding his physique, it was gradually grinding to a halt. He always strived to do a little better than last time, so he either added a tiny bit of extra weight or another additional rep.

  That bit of extra weight kept getting tinier. And tinier. At some point, the “weights” were reduced to rings that could just barely wrap around the barbell.

  But even then, he didn’t give up on looking for ways to improve. He worked on his technique and mind-muscle connection. He looked for innovative ways to isolate neglected muscles. And when there was no more work to find there, he worked on getting better at swinging his weapons.

  To grow the abilities that created his weapons, he needed to use them in combat. And there was but one opponent he had available—Bloodshed.

  While the little skeleton could become more powerful than himself when summoned through Blood Sacrifice, it couldn’t compare to him in its base spirit form. However, that didn’t mean it couldn’t help him grow his abilities.

  The key part of growing an ability was making it matter.

  The easiest way to do this was to use them to get out of danger. But without danger, he needed to get better at using them. And without risk, he had the luxury of focusing on just one ability at a time.

  All he had to do was cut as many other things out of the equation as possible.

  For example, when he worked on his Crimson Wing Shield, he only created one. And then. He didn’t move from the spot where he stood. Without using any other abilities or even his other arm, he defended from as many of Bloodshed’s attacks as possible.

  To escalate, Bloodshed attacked him from the back, and then from increasingly bizarre and difficult to defend from angles.

  He used similarly restrictive methods to work on his other weapons.

  As for his other abilities, the methods to move the needle varied.

  For his Tsunami Strike, he employed the straightforward method of simply slamming the barrier of nothing as hard as he could. As long as he got the timing perfectly, it would improve the ability a little bit. On top of that, he could work on refining strikes from different angles.

  Naturally, given that he was striking the edge of reality, the backlash was extreme. But, if anything, that made the progress faster.

  Hydraulic Flex was similarly easy. He just had to push his body to its limits, swinging from odd angles and perfecting the timing to keep things going.

  For Hydraulic Throw and Accelerate Blood Projectile, it wasn’t so simple. He naturally had to throw things, but the challenge had to be apt for it to matter. At first, he would throw chunks of metal into the air and hit them with something else.

  Then he did it from further away. Then he made both items smaller. Then he bounced his shots off the edge of reality to increase the challenge. But hitting such shots, deliberately at that, was easier said than done.

  Days kept marching.

  He could feel that he was staying up longer every time he woke up. How long, it was hard to tell. He thought it would be easy enough to estimate, but he wasn’t exactly confident about his guesses.

  Was he up for 40 hours at a time? 60? More?

  And as for how long he slept, he didn’t even have a vague estimate anymore. There was pretty much nothing to go off.

  At first, he enjoyed the solitude to an extent, but it was getting tiring. Bloodshed was also acting strange. It was too quiet and absent. And he felt like it was observing him a little too intensely.

  Reading books was fun, but it was becoming tiring as his focus wandered. He found himself increasingly obsessed with drama; anything that had people and personal relations was welcome. He craved humanity more than ever before. By god, he even started becoming obsessed with romance of all things. Even the extremely girly stuff with all the tropes he used to despise was welcome.

  He kept the music for special occasions at first, but soon enough, he found himself constantly listening to it, especially while working out. Anything to drown the maddening silence. It took a surprisingly short time to hear all the thousands of songs on there. And before long, he could even recite all of them from start to finish.

  Every time he started a movie or a series, it took all the willpower he could muster not to start binging. This was slowly becoming the one thing he actually looked forward to. He had to keep some for when the going got really tough.

  While he was short on exact estimates, he could definitely tell that more time was passing than he was aware of. The samey days were all blending together, vanishing in each others’ folds and fusing to the point where he couldn’t tell whether something happened two or fifty days ago.

  His beard and hair were getting ridiculously long. The colorful posters in his room were beginning to fade a bit, the color no longer so vibrant. There was brown dust everywhere from the particles of dried blood he kept kicking up during his practice.

  He put aside days to clean things. Before he even blinked, the dust was back, thicker than before.

  His training was becoming tiring. When he was making steady progress, it was easy to motivate himself, but with every new bottleneck, he felt his patience thinning and fraying.

  One by one, he reached the limit of the easy ones, those that required nothing but stubborn repetition. He needed a spirit to upgrade them, and he had none, so they were stuck for good.

  All his abilities had reached stage 2 a long time ago. Well, almost all of them.

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  He used the concept of “cleansing” for Purifying Crimson Spring, the concept of “potency” for his Water Body tempering technique, anti-gravity for Blood Javelin, which could now float in the air for a while when conjured, and Accelerate Blood Projectile got “speed.”

  Knuckle Blade got “impact” so it could more easily punch through defense. It created an effect similar to the Crimson Wing Shield’s blocking function, just in the other direction. The function only worked once—twice if double-starred.

  Dissipate wave got “dissipation” for stage 1 and “nullification” for stage 2, with “refund” being left for the stage 3 spirit upgrade.

  Crimson Wing Shield got “shielding” for stage 2, which made it so that every time when he blocked an attack with the “blocking” function, blood essence would spread all over the surface of his body, momentarily shielding him. This made the blocking effect a lot more useful, especially against big caster attacks that would spread out, explode, or wash over him.

  Crimson Dragon scales was upgraded with “impermeability,” drastically enhancing its ability to prevent essence from invading his body.

  Create Water got “volume.”

  Hydraulic Throw got “tension,” allowing him to “charge up” a throw before releasing it.

  And finally, the two stubborn fucking pieces of shit—Perished Water and Ghosts of the Drowned. No matter how hard he tried, they wouldn’t move them past stage 0—50%. They just wouldn’t budge. Did they need living targets? He didn’t know. Whatever the secret was, he was positively infuriated to be was stuck on this.

  He had brought a number of miscellaneous vestiges he could potentially use for these two, as soon as they decided to start moving forward.

  This was supposed to be one of the big things he would figure out during his Century of Solitude. If he spent a hundred years trying shit only to fail to figure it out, he might just go completely insane.

  Every so often, he’d write down his progress, just to see how he was moving over time.

  And on one day, he sat down and cracked the book open. He scanned the latest page and then started moving back.

  No progress since last time. Or the time before that. Or the time before that. Or the time before that. Or the time before that. Or the time before that. He turned a page a bit more aggressively. No progress that time, either. Or the time before that. Or the time before that. Or the time before that. Or the time before that.

  Or the time before that.

  Endless pages of nearly identical writing.

  And not a single percent of difference.

  He took a deep breath and grabbed hold of the pencil to write his latest entry.

  GATHERING:

  Second star—199% essence capacity

  2-star satellite

  TALENT:

  1% Lifesteal: Dynamic-quality healing

  SOUL CONSTRUCT:

  Scythe: Essence Extraction

  TEMPERING TECHNIQUES:

  Blood affinity:

  Lake of Blood: Stage 2—99% Progress (Ready to Upgrade)

  Crimson Mercury: Stage 2—99% Progress (Ready to Upgrade)

  Purifying Crimson Spring: Stage 2—99% Progress (Ready to Upgrade)

  Water affinity:

  Adaptive Water Body: Stage 1—Complete

  Ten Thousand Wet Hells: Stage 2—46% Progress

  Abyssal Depths: Stage 2—99% Progress (Ready to Upgrade)

  Water Body: Stage 2—99% Progress (Ready to Upgrade)

  ACTIVE ABILITIES:

  Blood affinity:

  Gore Knuckles: Stage 2—61% Progress

  Blood Javelin: Stage 2—30% Progress

  Absorb Blood: Stage 2—13% Progress

  Accelerate Blood Projectile: Stage 2—40% Progress

  Sanguine Beheader: Stage 2—70% Progress

  Knuckle Blade: Stage 2—56% Progress

  Crimson Wing Shield: Stage 2—14% Progress

  Dissipate Wave: Stage 2—90% Progress

  Crimson Dragon Scales: Stage 2—1% Progress

  Water affinity:

  Tsunami Strike: Stage 2—99% Progress (Ready to Upgrade)

  Hydraulic Flex: Stage 2—99% Progress (Ready to Upgrade)

  Create Water: Stage 2—99% Progress (Ready to Upgrade)

  Hydraulic Throw: Stage 2—54% Progress

  Perished water affinity:

  Perished Water: Stage 0—50% Progress

  Ghosts of the Drowned: Stage 0—50% Progress

  He breathed out a frustrated sigh. As expected, there was no difference. Why was he even bothering to write it all down anymore? It wasn’t like there was any change.

  Still, just for the sake of the habit, he started writing the rest of it down, if anything, just to ensure that it all looked clean and consistent.

  SPIRIT ABILITIES:

  Blood Sacrifice

  You failed him

  He blinked. “Huh?”

  SPIRIT ABILITIES:

  Blood Sacrifice

  Leviathan’s Fury

  For a long moment, he had imagined that he’d written something very different down. He released a shaky breath and slowly closed the notebook. Whatever. He already knew what items he had. Nothing had changed about them in the slightest.

  A drop of sweat creased his brow and fell into his eye. He wiped his eye with his arm and put his notebook away. “I don’t think I’m going to be writing anything down for a while.”

  That day, he knew damn well that he’d stayed up far longer than usual. It was quite obvious, given he passed out in the middle of training, waking up sprawled on the ground beside the bench. He grabbed the bench to pull himself up. His movement almost made him look hungover. “Maybe it's time for a bit of a break.”

  He punched the spark of undeath for a while. Part because it felt good and part to vent some frustration.

  Then, he slowly moved over to his room and turned on the BC.

  Bloodshed got cozy on the bed beside him, and they just lay motionlessly, watching together.

  He decided to put on a series he had already finished and then binge it from start to end.

  It was a show about a man who became a detective to resolve the murder mystery behind his parents’ death. Had some romance and a bit of comedy. This was Freddy’s umpteenth time watching it. It was a comfort show for him.

  The episodes just kept going, and before long, he wrapped up the final episode.

  He sighed. “I can’t believe it's already done.”

  Subconsciously, his hand reached for the remote. Should he play something new? Maybe rewatch another show?

  His arm slowly pulled back, and he fell into the sheets. Although he had brought plenty of sheets and took good care of them, they were well into their life cycle. Holes, general wear and tear, faded colors. He caressed them, feeling an uneasy comfort at the sight. “It had to have been many years at this point.” He deflated, his mouth growing slack. “I wonder how many I have left.”

  He rested his head on the pillow and then focused, projecting his soul into the Netherecho.

  There were a few wisps floating in the air around him. He ignored them, heading for the exit from his room. His soul projection pushed through the relatively thin barrier that was the cloth covering his room entrance.

  He turned to the side and walked a bit until he finally reached the edge of reality.

  While it looked like a mirror in the real world, in the Netherecho, it was a pure, white surface. Just… white. Immaculate.

  His projection, the reaper wearing a blue hood, sat before the white void, and he hugged his little knees, raising his hooded head and just watching the shimmering nothingess.

  He developed a habit of doing this whenever he wanted to clear his mind. And he wanted to clear his mind very often.

  Looking down, he ran his little fingers across the brown floor. Then, he lay on his back and looked up.

  There were a few water wisps in the air, slowly flowing and shifting through the empty space, like water seeking a path through stone.

  Not all wisps were made equal. Within them, wisps contained a glimpse into a truth. These truths could be collected and extracted to aid one’s comprehension of their element.

  The wisps born by a little patch of march and the wisps found at the bottom of a vast ocean didn’t carry within them the same concepts. And both could hold the key to a crucial insight.

  Freddy had to admit that he had been a bit lazy in this regard. After all, it only really mattered for creating new abilities and then reforming them at stage 3—50%. Well, it also grew one’s latent aura. And it helped with breaking through bottlenecks.

  He winced uncomfortably.

  Was this why he felt so stuck with so many abilities? Because he had failed to spend enough time gathering?

  His career as an archhuman had been extremely turbulent, and it had all been going at a breakneck speed. He’d done many things out of order, and even completely neglected others.

  No matter how powerful he was, he was keenly aware that his approach would hinder him later down the line.

  Well, no point in crying about it now.

  Regarding these insights, the wisps above him couldn’t possibly be more useless. They were made in a generator, and they held no truth within other than that water was wet. And water wasn’t even wet. It just made other things wet.

  He chuckled.

  There were other things he’d messed up, too.

  His two spirit abilities were both lifesavers in their own right, but… they also had an impact on his growth. Not so much his abilities, but his star? Oh yeah. He would suffer later down the line for that one.

  Despite his current mental state, he had to admit: there were times when he was really enjoying being here. At moments, he wished it could last forever. He was tired. Too tired to keep going. But he had to keep going. He had to get up.

  His projection rose.

  The day when he would return to all his problems would eventually come. And by then, he wanted to be ready.