For the next month, all he did was eat, sleep, and train.

  It was horribly painful.

  He had plenty of mana to fuel himself, but he couldn’t even use it all before his soul gave out. It turned out that the soul got sore just like any muscle, and the resulting spiritual aching combined with the ever-present physical pain in his joints was a horrible combination for any kind of practice. There were times when he got so frustrated with the lack of cooperation from his mana that he threw his hands up in the air and wanted to punch something. But of course, without the Flowing Sands he was so feeble that he could hardly even stand up straight.

  The process of training was also mentally taxing, and even when his soul was relatively fresh, it took him longer than he would have liked just to muster up the willpower and energy to try again.

  The cave felt so claustrophobic despite its relative openness, especially because he was so weak that moving around it at all was difficult. In a sense, he was confined to this tiny little bubble of accessible space, trapped there until he could get good enough at this technique to let him move around consistently.

  The abundance of spiritual energy inside of him proved a sharp contrast to the nagging hunger and thirst that woke him in the night, and for the first couple of days no matter how much fruit he ate he still felt immensely dehydrated. The duneclaws would constantly wake him up with their horrendous screeches, and some nights all he could do was lay there and stare up at the dark ceiling, envisioning those glitchy cosmic wounds in the sky stretching over the world and consuming everything within.

  Those were also the times when the thoughts would come back.

  What are you even doing here?

  That was fucking stupid, asking to be Cursed. You should have just let yourself die instead of suffering through all this just to inevitably fail at the end.

  Who did you think you were, believing you were gonna make it out of this?

  He missed society. He missed people, even if for the years leading up to his abduction he’d hardly had anyone he could really call a friend. Just some stranger to talk to would have been enough — someone to share the pain of being trapped in a dark cave with nothing to hear but the sounds of monsters outside his door.

  But every day when the tiny streams of sunlight began to peek through the cracks in the cave entrance and the caws of seagulls joined the chorus of duneclaw chitters in the background, he would get back up and try again.

  Every time he’d falter, he’d give himself a minute to collect himself before jumping back into it. He would eat and stretch, massage his muscles, and try to mimic those same soothing movements for his soul. Anything to stay sane — to keep going despite the overwhelming feeling of hopelessness.

  Again and again he’d drill the technique, sometimes sitting still and sometimes while trying to move around the large cave. And at some point, he realized that he’d begun making progress.

  Just like an actual muscle, his soul slowly adapted to the stress, strengthening itself and growing in endurance as he trained. And just like the slight boost the Resilience gave to his physical healing, he thought it might have been helping his soul to recover, too.

  The progress was slow at first, with each go at the Flowing Sands only lasting a couple of seconds at most, but it gradually improved until he could maintain it for a minute. Then two, then three. And beyond that, the total amount of time he could train in a day improved drastically, until he was actually beginning to make a dent into his deep mana stores.

  The first thing he needed to tackle was of course the coconuts. His initial Analysis of them had left him disappointed, but he’d once again used that mental push on the System Boom to get it to spew out more info at him.

  It turned out that pushing for info about Earth objects yielded a lot of stuff, which he supposed made sense since he’d been around these things for all his life. It was like the entirety of the internet straight copy-pasted into his brain, and while it took him quite a while just to read through it all, he eventually found the info he needed.

  When ripe, crushing force can be applied on the topmost point of the coconut’s hull to weaken the fibers for easy peeling. The three points on the hard interior shell can be easily penetrated for access to the fruit’s liquid.

  While under the Flowing Sands, he grabbed the heaviest chunk of rock he could lift — which admittedly wasn’t all that heavy — and repeatedly slammed it against the fruits’ hulls. Afterwards, he found that he could indeed do as the description said and tear the hull off with just his own enhanced strength. It hurt, but thirst had been a great motivator to push through the pain.

  For the rest of the month, he would have a steady source of water.

  That success had sent a tidal wave of ideas streaming through his brain, and he’d combed through the info for the Flowing Sands carving in the same fashion, acquiring some helpful tips that let him refine his training. While the carvings were two-dimensional in nature, his Analysis spoke of the techniques in higher spaces, which helped him navigate his mana through his incredibly complex soul. That had been a revelation in and of itself — that his soul was somewhat overlapping with his body, yet still separate in a way that he couldn’t quite understand yet.

  Tyler was hoping that more practice might help with that — while the Analysis of the magic alien stuff still yielded far less info than the coconuts, he found that as he grew better with the technique the info increased accordingly.

  And he found himself eagerly awaiting every new bit of info he was able to squeeze out of those carvings. It went beyond a desire to improve his magical prowess, he realized. He pored over all the little factoids, the descriptions of their legends and culture that were so alien yet so oddly human. In the absence of actual people to talk to, he found a sort of companionship in the stories of the Reamans.

  He was walking along the same path that they were, in a sense. He was just an overgrown alien fifth grader, training extra hard and huddling closer to the wall every night as the duneclaws came by.

  And while the average alien fifth grader still seemed to be doing better than him skill-wise, he was quickly catching up due to the sheer amount of time that he could practice. It took hours before his mana pool was completely tapped, and his regeneration was so fast that he could drain and refill it twice in a day.

  The practice was almost entrancing, and he realized that this was probably what some people meant when they said they hit the flow state. It was this deep immersion that seemed to transport him into a different state of being — it was like time was flying by while at the same time standing perfectly still.

  Every time that he trained, he felt his soul grow, resonating further with the Aspect of Resilience. His mana grew more solid, more turbulent, and with that growth the enhancement surged through him with greater and greater power.

  But it wasn’t just then, he began to realize. Like a muscle, his soul would only grow when it was being exercised. But even as he just went around, doing the necessary chores for his survival, he felt Resilience accumulate within himself. It was like magical proteins floating around his soul, waiting for an opportunity to strengthen it.

  That was also what gave him insight about the technique at the very bottom of the spiritual inverted pyramid. When he accumulated Resilience in his soul, it would naturally weave itself throughout his spirit as he worked it. However, the process seemed inefficient, and the integration itself seemed… incomplete.

  Once he’d realized that, his Analysis had given him a proper description of the bottom-most technique. It was the central cultivation technique of the Art of the Sandstorm — which he thought meant it was used to properly weave an Aspect into one’s soul. The outer-facing part was just to get the Aspect from elsewhere, he thought. The important part was what happened inside the soul.

  He tried just the inner part of it, and after a couple hundred failed attempts, he finally got a pattern that seemed to work for him. It distributed the Resilience fairly evenly throughout his soul, and it came with a pleasant tingly sensation whenever he used it.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  After a month of doing it, his soul was feeling much stronger. His mana felt just a bit more substantive, and his enhancement seemed to pack more oomph to it — though how much of that came from his own healing rather than the strengthening of the technique he couldn’t tell.

  Near the end of the month, he realized that the accumulation of Resilience in his soul was reaching a soft bottleneck. It wasn’t quite like a barrier preventing him from integrating more Resonance, but more of a natural limit to the current matter of his soul, like water saturated with salt.

  His Analysis identified this as a Saturation Point, which was also depicted in one of the auxiliary carvings in the pyramid. It looked like he’d need to gather a large buildup of Resilience and then cultivate it all at once to break through.

  Of course, he was once again bumping into another drawback from his Curse. As he grew more in tune with his own spirit, he began to realize that the stuff that he felt all around him was Resilience — he found it in the never-extinguished dragonfire, the magical apparatuses he’d found within the broken furniture, and even the cool stone beneath his feet. If he could cultivate all that Resonance, he suspected he wouldn’t need to generate his own Resilience through his actions.

  At the same time, he realized how those who didn’t have such a bodily Aspect would never cultivate more than bare scraps. It was a bit throttling, to see just how lucky he’d gotten with the Aspect he’d Awakened. If he’d gotten Sand, or Reflection like Savadiere had, or something even less compatible with a living human body like Fire or Death…

  That cruel fate hinted at by his Analysis made far more sense now. He had been a roll of the dice away from dying powerless and pitiful. Then again, he supposed that had been the case regardless.

  And he was extremely grateful that he’d made it, despite the restrictions. After all, he generated more Resonance in a single training session than the passive Resilience in his entire cave.

  But he still needed to properly recover from his training sessions, and as great as his enormous mana pool was, he was pretty sure actual nutrients were still necessary for his body to patch itself up.

  So at the beginning of the month, he'd taken a risk and eaten some of the flesh from the duneclaw he killed.

  At first he'd been apprehensive to even touch the meat again — not knowing if it was hiding any sorts of alien parasites or magical substances that his feeble human body simply couldn't handle.

  However, he’d realized that he could potentially reignite the embers that were still sitting there from the table.

  With a quick Analysis, he'd been pleasantly surprised.

  Dragonfire

  The flames of the Emerald Dragons are imbued with their unyielding will and immeasurable potential for growth. This instance is but a pale shadow, but it is still formidable compared to its mundane counterpart.

  It reignited as soon as he fed it some kindling, and the flame was truly magical — bright, pleasant green, and without a hint of smoke.

  He'd been worried about suffocating himself to death if he left a fire going, but he figured that if the fumes were enough to kill him, they probably would have done so when the table had first burnt down. And if anything, the fumes that the flame released felt like that of a pleasant scented candle. It smelled like encouragement and a promise of better times — not at all what he’d expect from the attack of a raging dragon.

  Of course, the fire had encouraged him to cook, and so as his stomach grumbled for something more than fruit, he'd cautiously torn off a piece of duneclaw flesh and made a skewer to put over the flame.

  His Analysis had expanded its description after that, and it hinted that the meat should have been safe to eat. He started with very small amounts — just a nibble, then a bite, and then a finger-sized portion. It tasted bitter and astringent, but it was food.

  As he felt no consequences, he began to consume more and more. He had to be careful to preserve his limited stockpile of furniture and wood, but that proved fine as the embers seemed nearly impossible to extinguish and luminescent enough to let him see through his dark-adapted eyes. He only really fed the fire to cook, and he tried to cook the meat in the biggest batches he could without giving himself heatstroke — anything more raised the temperature of the poorly-ventilated cave far too quickly. But once the meat was cooked, he could expect it to last.

  The duneclaw's acidic and quick-drying blood seemed to have preserved the meat in some way, and he remembered from his Analysis that the Reamans could stockpile duneclaw meat for years in their cellars without it going bad.

  He was sure that it wouldn't last quite that long, but he would trust his nose and taste buds for now. With the meat, he could also begin training his physical body.

  On the opposite side of the cave wall from the carvings detailing the Reamans’ spiritual techniques, there was another set of carvings showing forms of their people, practicing something akin to a martial art.

  He realized that some of the physical stances were meant to be paired with the spiritual stances, and as he pondered them, he turned to his Analysis for more information.

  Rather than the carvings forming an inverted pyramid, it was a regular pyramid. Most techniques were at the base, with only one at the top: a depiction of a horned man with a thousand arms and legs swirling around him. He didn't understand if he was supposed to grow more limbs or if that was symbolic, but at least the bottom exercises felt more reasonable.

  His Analysis identified them as bone-strengthening exercises, and they involved repeatedly slamming your limbs into hard surfaces to build density and resilience within them.

  Of course, his own limbs were fairly fragile, but with the enhancement running through him, he managed to try it out a couple of times. It hurt, of course, but everything hurt these days. His limbs were actually doing pretty well despite the pain — even his injured leg was feeling mostly normal again.

  When he began doing the exercises, he soon discovered that with each blow, an abnormal amount of Resilience would pool in his soul.

  It made sense, once he thought about it. His actions throughout the entire day were Resonating with Resilience, but it was these exercises — the pain, the fortitude, the perseverance despite the inflammation — that really embodied it within him. Perhaps his condition was actually benefiting him, for once. A greater harmony was being reached as he pushed his body to the very limit.

  The second layer of the pyramid was also a variety of exercises, but these seemed more like stances — martial arts forms for the physical half of The Art of the Sandstorm. He struggled a bit to walk through these, his newfound dexterity from the Flowing Sands the only thing keeping him from completely flubbing them. But by the end of the week, he'd at least gotten semi-comfortable with the basics.

  He would set out duneclaw-sized tables and chairs in a circle around his cave, and then he would train against them with his new weapons — the detached tail claw of the juvenile he’d defeated, and a long, sturdy branch that he’d sharpened against the cave walls into a makeshift spear. He practiced thrusting, cutting, and throwing against them a thousand different ways, feeling the twitch of his muscles become faster and faster as the habits gradually sank into his body.

  And then, once he thought he understood the theory behind it, he would refer to his Analysis of the duneclaws, adapting his imaginary battles with the way that the creatures instinctually fought.

  He listened to his body as he moved, feeling how when he struck a certain way his spear came down harder, or when he stepped with a slight twist, it allowed him to more easily transfer his motion into his next move. The Aspect of Resilience seemed to boost his learning, too, and he found that his muscle memory and instinctive reflexes adapted faster than he’d ever hoped they could.

  He practiced until he could slash an imaginary duneclaw between the eyes while jumping backwards to evade another, and drilled his rock throwing until he could consistently hit his targets from thirty feet away. His legs grew nimbler over the scattered branches and pebbles he used to simulate the outside ground, and his calloused skin rarely broke anymore no matter how much he abused his feet.

  Every evening he would sit around the pile of embers soaked in sweat, and with at least a couple of new bumps and bruises to show for his mistakes. His inflammation would come back with a vengeance the moment his sore limbs cooled down from the exercise, and he knew that even despite the constant training his forms were barely up to par with what was expected from a Reaman fifth grader.

  Still, for just a month’s worth of effort, he couldn’t have imagined a better result.

  Now, he just had to see if all the hardship was worth it.

  Tyler finished off his last piece of duneclaw, washing it down with a sip of coconut water and the flesh of a wrinkled passionfruit. That was the last of his food. Now, he had no more excuses.

  He walked over to the entrance of the cave, the Flowing Sands singing steadily within his veins. His limbs felt good. Solid, and less inflamed despite his nightly date with a bed of hard twigs and leaves. He clenched his fists, and they felt more powerful than they had in years.

  It was now or never.

  Drumming up the Flowing Sands to a higher speed, he swirled his entire core, letting the mana become a mini-vortex inside of him as it suffused his body with power. He set his feet, placing his hands against the log at an angle that should maximize his leverage.

  He counted himself down, heart hammering in his chest.

  Three. Two. One.

  Scraaaape.

  Slowly, the thin beams of moonlight began to widen as they hit his face. A sky of brilliant stars enveloped his vision, and fresh, salty air flooded his lungs with a crispness that he hadn’t tasted in weeks.

  He furiously grinned, straining his arms and legs as he heaved for one final push.

  Whump.

  The log fell over with an unceremonious thud.

  Immediately, he could hear chittering in the distance.

  Tyler took a deep breath, retrieving the weapons he had placed next to the cave entrance. He was free. He was finally free.

  Now, it was time to hunt.