He didn't know how long he trained there. It was hard to tell time in the tower. And it was mostly irrelevant to him anyway. He trained until he was too tired to move.

Then he'd rest and let his body heal up by feeding on the essence. He figured that was why he probably didn't hunger often these days.

His sleep schedule would be completely fucked if he still stayed on Earth and had to get to school in the morning. Only, who would have cared if he never went to school. Not his parents, his guardians, his friends. He had been missing for about a month and a half at this point, but did anyone know?

Rafe shook himself out of the funk. He'd know in a few more hours. He'd be going home in a few more hours.

He started to move, like a dancer. He imagined there was a foe ahead of him. As he charged, Rafe deliberately let all his attention turn to his left. Any perceptive opponent would think he was going to side step in that direction.

And like a well practiced surgeon, Rafe threw a large detached chunk of his aura in that direction. His imaginary opponent followed the solidified aura instead of the, for a moment, invisible Rafe who instead attacked from the right.

It would have been harder to practice if his aura skill was a lower level, or even rarity.

Still, the footwork and simple evasive maneuvers he'd learned as part of the basics before he'd graduated to the beginner tier had been well worth it. His Swordsman's footwork had not improved, mostly because this was not a sword wielding technique, he assumed. In fact, none of his skills had improved.

Even his Aeon's Sword mastery, despite the fact that he had learned a whole new sword technique and taken it up to advanced tier.

Though he was already predisposed to it, as he had the basics of swordplay down to an art, and he had a lot of skills and abilities that complimented the new technique. He was yet to take it to the peak of the advanced tier, but he suspected that was only because he hadn't fought a real opponent with it yet.

He was sure even his untouchable phantom would grow to the intermediate tier after the duel he was about to have.

Rafe opened his map screen to stare at the tower on one side, and the nondescript darkness on the other. The void. A place where time and distance did not matter. A place he'd been in for decades. A place he would be leaving with his next few steps.

Rafe took one last breath. And as he'd been instructed, he chose the white jewel encrusted door.

When he entered the first thing he noticed was that there was no notification from his status. The second was that all the doors regardless which he would have chosen would have led to this same room.

There was a dais in front of the door he'd chosen. As there was in front of all the other doors. He thought he had figured out why Sam had told him to only start the process after he'd entered.

He moved forward. What he found there was a ring. He dare not touch it, as that would start the countdown to the challenge starting. Or so he assumed.

Instead he sat down and ate the Ten Star Spirit fruit he'd received as a reward from the fourth floor quests he'd taken part in. He felt the effects almost instantly. A burning in his belly, a clouding of his thoughts. He was going into a kind of meditative trance. The perfect time to perform an act of creation.

He opened the skill scroll he'd gotten from Granderel all those months ago.

Spacial inventory. A spatial storage ability with its own status screen that catalogues its contents. Ability grows with increase in user's soul level.

It figured Granderel's upgrade was for a cataloguing method. And of course there was the fact it was now an ability as opposed to a skill.

If there was a difference between skills and abilities that Rafe had yet seen, it was that abilities sometimes didn't carry rarities. They grew in unique ways, sometimes depending on the racial rank, sometimes the soul, probably sometimes the mind as well.

As a similarity though, both had underlying frameworks of runes and essence packaged together into a glowing star. A new structure started to stitch itself onto Rafe's soul. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. It was time to interrupt the process again.

Moreover his soul was in a very sensitive state. Agitated by the fruit he'd eaten.

He put the Elixir of Spiritual Relaxation on his tongue as he tried to hype himself up. It took him a few seconds, and in the meantime the skill was starting to settle and the first pill he'd taken was starting to diffuse throughout his soul. He had to force it to settle on the newest skill.

And then, while forcing the bitter anaesthetic down his soul, he disrupted the new structure before it could finish attaching itself to the curtain.

He did not just need to disrupt it though. He had to tear it in half. To wound his soul again. The pain came, this time stronger and faster than it had ever been before. It almost knocked him out but he managed to stay awake for the minutes, though it felt like hours, that it took the anaesthetic to calm his soul down a little.

And then he was there, in his soul, looking at the wound he'd created. He entered it, trying to see inside the curtain.

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It was like they were two pieces of cloth stitched together. If he put a finger through the hole he could separate the two pieces of cloth and see the space between them.

His own version of Liam's soul vault, though as Sam had said, his would be very small. So they had to expand it. The first thing he did was get up from his lotus position.

He grabbed the ring on the dias in front of him.

Name: Void storage ring (legendary)

Type: Void affinity storage item.

Description: The Enchantress tried to colonise the void. This was the result of her first few experiments. A storage item using the void affinity instead of spatial affinity. It more easily keeps things from spoiling, as time is suspended indefinitely in the ring. Unlike normal storage items, it can hold living beings.

Rafe cared little for the description just then, as the pain was still all consuming despite him having taken a spirit anaesthetic. He wondered if he would have been able to do it without the system's help.

Sam would have been able to. Had been able to in her day.

Rafe studied the enchantment of the ring. Now that he was doing it, Sam's plan depended a lot on theories she couldn't even confirm. Rafe had a nascent void affinity, so studying a void affinity enchantment should, in theory, allow him to easily copy the enchantment down.

An affinity helped in many things, including learning simple spells. And this was the simplest void spell the enchantress had woven when she tried to conquer it. Only, now that Rafe thought about it, wasn't the void a higher level element. If the void had any basic skills, Rafe would sell both his kidneys. Not that they were going to survive the pressure he was currently under.

First though, to ensure the wound did not close. It was lucky his soul was in such a malleable state.

He grabbed the void ring and forced it into his soul, into the wound. Into his soul space.

"Gahhh! Arghhhhhh," he screamed, knowing time was of the essence.

The skill he'd torn in twain before it had fully attached was flapping side by side. Like a paper cut in two. And its structures were flaking.

Rafe cursed, hoping it hadn't lost at least the cataloguing function yet. He needed that. How had they planned to get past this hiccup? By attaching the skill structure to another half completed ability.

Rafe's E-rank racial ability had prematurely awakened, and it had been influential in the creation of his pseudo-class skill Mimic, but it had never settled.

Sam's plans had revolved around those two skills.

Rafe had to focus on unlocking his soul space though - and keeping it open long term - so he started with his technique manuals, which were still charging. They disappeared into that space he'd just discovered. Then his potions too, one by one by one.

He felt like an overstuffed turkey after that, but there was still space there. He grabbed his hammer. Half of it went in.

"Shit," Rafe cried as he tried to get the damn thing out. Half of it, the butt, was in his soul space. Its head and the rest of its shaft was sticking out of his chest in a bizarre way that almost had him gagging.

The wound was starting to close up. If Rafe's plans didn't move faster, his soul would be an overfull treasure dump for a long time.

He rushed to the darkened star that was his closed off racial ability and started to remove the essence bindings by force. It was another painful few seconds.

'Ding' Your E-rank racial ability, humanity's creativity, is evolving. Please provide sufficient energy or your life force will be…

Not yet, Rafe thought. He knew how to block skills from leveling now. He'd had to do it on the aura training floor back then.

And now to use his Mimic pseudo-class skill to copy the enchantment on the void ring. He did just that. Using the essence from the flakings of the storage skill to try and recreate it.

'Ding' Fifth floor of the training tower entered.

Side Quest received: Defeat a calamity beast.

Floor objective: one on one battles(5 chances) against chosen calamity beasts.

Hidden objective: Last a full hour against any calamity beast.

Last two hours against a calamity beast.

Last three hours against a calamity beast.

Rafe wasn't done with copying the runes and everything from the void ring. And he'd never used his Mimic skill before. And he was sure this wasn't its true role. And there was not enough Essence. Sam probably expected him to use maybe his mana pool or stamina pool. To try and convert one of them to Essence and use that.

He and Sam hadn't thought things through, and the fight was about to start, and he had no way to finish the mission.

Then he remembered a thought he'd once had. The cores of magical items, the parts where their runes were etched, reminded him of skill structures. So then couldn't he read the runes the way he did from a skill scroll? Couldn't he 'steal' a skill from an enchantment?

He had nothing but his little speculation, but he went with his gut. He ignored the essence he had been using to try and copy the runes of the void enchantment. They had thought his void affinity would help him with learning the runes, as they were basic void spells. At least according to Sam.

They had perhaps failed to consider that void was not a basic element.

Rafe felt it when he broke the enchantment from the ring, causing the hunk of metal to break in his soul. Brute forcing the enchantment from its place had caused the ring to break apart.

The structure was falling apart, but Rafe forced it into the pile of a hot mess that was his flapping storage ability.

With everything Sam had told him to do out of the way (although he'd had to improvise at certain stages). Rafe couldn't do anything anymore. He had his flaking and rapidly deteriorating storage ability structure, and the enchantment core from the void storage ring, and his unaligned racial ability. And this was the part where Liam was supposed to arrive and save the day.

Presumably, Liam would combine his racial ability with his new storage ability, letting the ability rank up everytime he did and grow exponentially bigger. He would also have to deal with the wound in Rafe's soul, but presumably he'd dealt with worse. In the end Rafe couldn't handle all this himself.

So he had to ask himself, "now what?"

A familiar roar shook him out of his funk.

Now he just had to keep the wound in his soul from closing whilst fighting off a calamity beast. Fun.

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