Chris

Near the Arctic Circle

It was getting colder, which was a boon in more ways than one. Normally, the gradual shifting of the seasons made it difficult to distinctly feel the changes from day to day, but up here, covering many miles everyday, it was much clearer to feel.

The change from the seasons was there, obviously. I felt less invigorated and less free as winter fell away for spring, and that feeling only intensified as summer began in earnest. But it took days of waning to get to the bottom of the wave.

From the crest of the wave to the trough, from the dead of winter to the dog days of summer, it was half a year. Over 180 days of gradual decline that made it easier to forget the heights in between.

Going from low, midsummer, to high, nearing the Arctic Circle, in days was a stark improvement that I could nearly feel with every further step I took. There was still a way to go until I hit the Arctic Ocean, but I could feel the difference.

Another change was that the days were much, much longer. I wasn't yet at the point of eternal day, but I was getting close. There were only a scant few hours of darkness until the sun rose once more.

It was... odd.

Usually, fatigue would set in and I would have to rest every day regardless of whether the sun set or not, but that wasn't the case anymore. Endurance, especially my endurance, made sleeping every night not a requirement anymore.

With the amount of exertion hiking took out of me every day, I needed rest every two or three days, depending on whether I got into any fights. Not every wild beast was scared off by my aura.

Nothing under D-rank tried me, but that didn't mean nothing did.

With only needing to rest every few days, and the sun being up for a large majority of the day, it made my sense of time go wild. It was hard to remember when one day ended and the next began. Sure, there was the hour or two of darkness, but it was easy for those to blur together.

My trip wasn't all boring, though, as I continued to train my aura.

A leaf hovered beside me and kept pace as I traveled. It was held aloft and moving with me under the power of nothing other than my aura. I had learned to affect things a few days ago, and now I could continuously do so.

My first success at plucking a leaf from a branch was a massive surprise, and I shouted happily when it happened. Then I realized that my accomplishment wasn't all that grand.

Plucking a leaf wasn't very powerful in the grand scheme of things, but it was a stepping stone.

Plucking leaves led to lifting pebbles, which led to large pebbles, and so on. I was getting pretty good at sudden and intense movements, which led to my next avenue for training.

Sustained loads.

I had to travel all the way back down to the leaf, but I was seeing the same progress that I had before. The leaf also provided an additional aspect that the pebbles and small rocks lacked.

They were fragile.

Not only did I have to control my aura to lift it, but I also had to regulate it enough not to crush it. It was a balancing act that I hoped would result in faster training than the mundane exercises that I could come up with.

I had high hopes about what would come about from this training, and I was antsy to get there, but small, controlled steps were my only path forward.

It sounded childish, maybe, but I wanted this to be mine in a way nothing else was. Rachel had her mana talent, Abigail with her managerial skills, Gabriel with his skills and spells, Vincent had forging, and Connor had alchemy.

I wanted my thing to excel at that wasn't smashing something like a brute.

Not that I would give up hitting things that deserved it, but I wanted something more sophisticated than that to be my thing.

Gabe had dabbled, learning to speak through his aura and listen through it, but what I imagined was above that. Further even than his dreams of 'true telekinesis.'

And it started with keeping the leaf aloft.

Other than aura training, I worked on [Wind Manipulation]. After the demotion, it had gone back to Common, which was far from where I wanted it to be. By the time the next demotion came around, I wanted a lot more of my skills to be of higher rarities, but that was a long way off.

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[Wind Manipulation] had lagged behind [Ice Manipulation] ever since I had gotten the skill. Getting it so much later was a large reason for that, but it was also because I didn't train with it as often.

Ice was always my go-to, and where many of my skills went. Wind wasn't really represented, and I wanted to fix that a little bit. They would never be equal, but a little more variety wouldn't hurt.

I didn't see my Class offering me any skills that would do so, but I could buy them when we got the funds. It was on the list, behind a bunch of other things we needed that were more pressing.

Training [Wind Manipulation] was similar in a way to training my aura, but different enough to be distinct. Wind was different than ice, in that it needed a different way to command it than what I was used to.

I usually commanded the ice to do what I wanted, whether that be gather in a specific shape, shatter, compact, fly through the air, or whatever else I needed it to. Wind didn't respond in the same way to those commands.

Such a heavy hand worked against me, rather than for me.

The concept of dominance I gained my Tier 2 Wind Law with helped, as it bridged the gap from my heavy-handed commands to the wind's natural behavior, but it wasn't perfect.

I wanted it to feel just as easy as my ice, which was asking for a lot, but I had nothing if not time to spend training it. Plus, it was easy to do as I walked, just like my aura training.

Wind was everywhere after all, it wasn't like I had to seek out a specific spot or keep ice conjured on a hot summer day when it wouldn't otherwise exist. When I got tired or fed up with one, I switched to the other.

Other than that, there was a lot of time where I just pondered. Pondered on a lot of things. The future, my life, how I had gotten where I was, and where I hoped to go. What I thought about most was my semi-immediate plans in the not-so-distant future.

My Laws, specifically. My Body Refining was already set. I had my technique and was already setting things in motion to follow through on it. My Anchor was being as fickle as ever, and I knew I couldn't rush it. Just like forming it, the harder I pushed, the further away it seemed.

The spark I felt was still there, deep down, but it would take something else to bring it to the forefront. I'd explored it, meditating and diving into my Spirit, but it was still some time off.

Other than my Mana Heart, which I was currently in the process of finding a spot for, my Laws were the only other thing I could think about. The gap to Tier 3 Laws was something I needed to think about.

It wasn't the same kind of upgrade as from Tier 1 to Tier 2.

Those upgrades were relatively easy. To gain a Tier 1 Law, you just needed a seed of a concept for it to attach to. My Ice Law was first gained with the idea of denseness and coldness, and how they related.

Forging what would be my first hammer and compacting it down so that it was as hard as steel. My Wind Law was gained from imagining the penetrating effect winter winds had through clothes. The chill that cut through no matter how many layers you wore.

From that initial concept, you then built it up, expanding and deepening the insight you had gained into a fully fleshed-out tree, far from the kernel first used to gain it.

Then, after you felt you had deepened it enough, you added a second concept and connected the two. They could be similar, or they could be wildly different. The closer they were, the easier it was to upgrade, but it also made the resulting Tier 2 Law less diverse.

If you focused on the penetrating concept of Wind for Tier one, and then added a shearing concept, there wasn't a whole lot you could do with it other than cause destruction.

Using it for something more constructive, like blowing the sails of a boat or airing out a room was... ill-advised. It wasn't where its strengths lay.

That being said, that was only the case for the low tiers. The higher tier the law, the more it encompassed. There were a lot of concepts that went into any one element, and the further up the tree you climbed, the more you gathered under your command.

Tier 3 was the first time that gaining enlightenment of another concept wouldn't improve your tier. Sure, it would still improve the Law you did have, but it wouldn't let you make the jump to the next tier.

It took more than that.

You still had to expand it, that was true for every tier upgrade, but you also had to peer deeper and understand more of the universe's inner workings.

It was sometimes easy to forget that Laws were exactly that: how the universe worked. The building blocks it was constructed upon and the rules with which it interacted with the physical world.

There in lay my choice.

Where was I looking to go next? Where did I want to take my Ice? Where did I want to take my Wind? Did I want to combine them like Austin was hoping to do?

Would having one combined Arctic Law be better than two separate Wind and Ice Laws? How would that affect my fighting? How would that affect my skills?

There was a lot to think about on the matter.

I wasn't even sure how merging Laws worked. Austin was hellbent on merging his Fire and Light Laws into a Solar Law, but I wasn't sure that was the right path for me. A lot of my Skills were either or, not both, unlike Austin's.

He had built himself around both his Laws relatively equally, while I had mostly kept them divided, except for a few exceptions.

My hammer, my armor, the walls I created, the projectiles I formed. All of that was pure Ice. The wind I enhanced my throws with, to expand how far my cold reached, to increase how far it penetrated, that was all pure Wind.

[Desolate Blizzard], now [Tundra's Descent] was one of the only skills that had a foot in both camps. The weapon skill [Pervading Cold] as well, but not to the same extent. I didn't count [Frozen Rift] as that felt like a different category completely.

Would combining them now cause problems? Would it make my Law more powerful, or would waiting be better?

I wasn't sure.

Combining them into an Arctic Law sounded like it would be more powerful, but what if that wasn't the case? What if I kept them separate and pushed them further, combining them later?

Would that lead to the same result, or a different result?

Vulwin was surprisingly unhelpful on that front. I had assumed we could just get the answer from him, like we had in a lot of cases so far, but that fell flat. It also wasn't something that could have been bought from the System Store after the test, Austin had checked.

This was something we had to figure out on our own, and it was that way for a reason I still couldn't understand.

Even after the tutorial, there were some things that were being kept from us.

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