The moment Jinx's eye opened, the faint black-magenta sparks clinging to his body stopped looking like stray discharge and became something far worse. They erupted outward in branching lines that did not merely flash and vanish, but lashed through the forest for miles like living fractures in the world, tearing through trunks, splitting stone, and burning black scars into everything they touched.
The sky answered almost immediately. What had first looked like a split became a violent rupture as the clouds were blown apart under the pressure of his awakened will, and the exposed night above churned into a storm so quickly it felt less like weather and more like the atmosphere itself recoiling from him.
The pressure on the environment deepened a heartbeat later. Trees began to bow, then crack, then crumble in jagged sections as though invisible hands were crushing them from every direction at once, while loose stones burst apart, larger boulders split down their middles, and the ground around the pond opened in deep branching fractures that ran outward beneath the roots and brush.
It should have ended there, with raw destruction and the shriek of black-magenta lightning carving the forest apart, but the space around Jinx was no longer obeying only one power. The trees nearest him started to warp in shape and meaning, bark twisting into faces with hollow eyes and mouths packed with needle-like teeth, and when those mouths opened the sounds that came out were not natural groans of bending wood but shrill, ugly cackles that made the night feel diseased.
The rocks changed next, though Mira only understood afterward that changed was not the right word. Pebbles and broken stone chunks jerked across the ground like living things, then pulled themselves together into ugly little golems with cracked limbs and misshapen heads, while the pond convulsed into a spiraling vortex whose dark center opened wide enough to resemble a monstrous maw ringed by wet, grinding teeth, like some pale imitation of Charybdis rising from a child's nightmare and deciding it preferred this forest to the sea.
At her desk, Mira went cold for one terrible second before she forced herself to stop trusting her first eyes and switched to admin view. The overlay stripped away the false image at once, and what it showed was somehow both better and worse, because the forest was indeed being ruined by the expanding pressure of Supreme King Haki and those miles-long lashes of black-magenta force, but the laughing trees, the golems, and the hungry pond were absent from the world-state entirely.
"Echoes of Madness," she whispered, staring from one display to the other while her fingers moved through diagnostics almost on instinct. It wasn't truly changing the terrain at all, not in the literal sense, but it was saturating the local space so thoroughly that reality and false perception had begun to overlap, and if an ordinary player had stepped into that area, they likely would've believed every monstrous thing there was real right up until their body started responding to the fear.
Jinx moved before Mira could dig any deeper. His fingers twitched against the broken earth first, then his shoulders drew in with a slow, unsteady breath, and finally he began to rise, not like someone waking from sleep but like someone pulling himself up from the bottom of something lightless and cold that had almost kept him.
The transformation had already started before he was fully standing. Frost gathered across his skin and clothing in delicate crystalline patterns, his breath came out in pale mist, and his hair lengthened and shifted in color until it flowed around him in a striking contrast of white and black threaded with cold violet sheen, while soft fox ears rose through his hair and multiple massive tails unfurled behind him in a slow, terrible bloom of fur, moonlight, and winter.
What Mira had watched before with system windows and race descriptions became undeniable reality in front of her. Jinx's body had changed into a form that was hauntingly beautiful and deeply inhuman at once, with the elegance of a Yuki-Onna, the regal predatory grace of a Kitsune, and the unmistakable danger of something that had survived being devoured and come back wearing part of the beast's face.
His clothes did not remain what they had been either. The ragged, half-wet look of someone who had collapsed by a pond gave way to layered robes and trailing fabric in black, white, and deep violet, all of it touched by frost and drifting snowflake patterns, while translucent ribbons of cold moved around him as if winter itself had decided to dress him properly now that he had earned its notice.
The sword at his side did not stay ordinary in that moment. When his hand closed around it, pale violet frost ran up the sheath and over the hilt, and when a blade finally emerged, it came shining with cold light and razor clarity, the edge wreathed in a chill so sharp that the air around it crackled and tiny ice-flowers spread across the broken ground at his feet.
The monstrous images birthed by Echoes of Madness continued writhing around him, but now they did so like things that had found their king rather than their prey. The laughing tree-faces twisted toward him in crooked delight, the false golems skittered and circled through the debris, and the devouring pond-maw spiraled wider and wider, yet none of it moved to attack, because every hallucination, every distortion, every nightmare in the space had bent itself around the same center.
Mira forgot to type for several seconds. She only stared at the feed, at the snow falling where no weather system had placed it, at the black-magenta lightning still snapping through the ruined forest, and at Jinx standing barefoot amid broken earth and winter fog with fox tails billowing behind him like a storm of living silk.
"He actually did it," she murmured, though she wasn't even sure what part of it she meant anymore. He had awakened Supreme King Haki, overpowered the Zoan will enough to come back, triggered his Cursed Technique, and stepped into a full transformation on his first night in Etheria, and none of those things should have belonged in the same sentence.
Coming back into my body was less like waking up and more like realizing, several seconds too late, that I had already been awake. Sound reached me first—wood splitting somewhere nearby, thunder rolling overhead, something heavy collapsing through branches—and then the rest of Etheria crowded back in around it: cold mud beneath my feet, damp air against my skin, the smell of torn earth, and a strange weight behind me that shifted whenever I moved my hips. I stood there breathing for a moment because breathing was simple, and after wherever the Fruit had dragged me, simple suddenly seemed worth appreciating.
Then a black-magenta bolt tore away from my shoulder and erased any chance of taking my time. It forked through the trees farther than I could follow, blew one trunk apart around the middle, and kept going as smaller branches of light stitched themselves through the forest behind it. I stared after it with my mouth slightly open until another pulse of pressure rolled out from me and the already cracked ground near my feet split a little wider.
"Ah, shit, that's still happening." My voice sounded normal enough, which reassured me for approximately half a second before another strand of lightning crawled over my arm and whipped away into the dark. I didn't know whether telling myself to calm down counted as useful advice when my subconscious had apparently decided to become a natural disaster, but I tried anyway because the alternative seemed to be watching the forest get progressively shorter.
My first instinct was to force the power inward, and that went badly enough to teach me something. The moment I tried to squeeze whatever I was feeling down, the pressure around me thickened instead, a nearby boulder cracked with a noise like a gunshot, and another violent branch of black-magenta light tore across the clouds overhead. I released the effort immediately and stood there with my jaw clenched, wondering why every power I acquired seemed determined to make the first lesson don't do the obvious thing.
The Haki didn't feel like Mana, and now that I had something else inside me to compare it with, it didn't feel like Cursed Energy either. It wasn't sitting in a place I could point to, and trying to locate it only made the sensation slippery; what I could catch was the moment before it escaped, usually when a memory from the void struck too sharply or my anger at the creature flared again. Once I noticed that connection, I quit trying to physically suppress the pressure and started paying attention to myself instead, which was considerably more irritating because I was much easier to blame than an uncooperative game mechanic.
The first few attempts barely mattered. I would get the pressure down, remember one of those enormous eyes, feel anger spike before I could stop it, and another black-magenta arc would lash away from me as if it had been waiting for an excuse. After the fourth or fifth time, I stopped treating the memory itself as the problem and tried letting it sit there without following whatever emotion came behind it, and the next discharge only reached a few dozen yards.
That was when I noticed my Stamina changing. The bar had been sitting at the edge of my vision this whole time, mostly ignored behind all the other nonsense, but now it read 3,318 / 3,450, climbed to 3,325, then dropped sharply to 3,301 when another wave of Haki escaped me. I watched it happen twice more before I trusted what I was seeing, which meant I spent nearly half a minute staring at numbers while the forest around me continued sounding like it regretted meeting me.
"So you're eating Stamina." I let another smaller discharge go without fighting it and watched the bar dip again, though the passive recovery started filling the loss almost immediately. "At least you're eating something I know how to get back."
I kept working at it, though working made the process sound much more dignified than standing barefoot in a ruined forest trying not to feel too strongly about anything. The lightning shortened gradually, the pressure stopped hammering the ground with every breath, and several minutes later the miles-long branches had become thin sparks snapping around my fingers and hair. Even those faded once I stopped checking whether they had faded every two seconds, which was probably the most useful lesson I'd gotten from the entire exercise.
My Stamina had fallen into the low three-thousands by then, but the instant the Haki stopped actively leaking out, the number started climbing faster than it was falling. I watched 3,126 turn into 3,139, then 3,153, and waited long enough to make sure there wasn't some hidden drain still fighting the regeneration. There wasn't, and within a few minutes the recovery had already erased a noticeable portion of what I'd spent.
That sounded impressive until I thought about what I'd actually done. I'd been standing still, using no sword technique, no Water Bending, no Cursed Technique, no flight, and nothing else that I could confidently say was consuming Stamina at the same time. The passive recovery being greater than the drain after I'd stopped doing anything didn't tell me what would happen if I tried maintaining Supreme King Haki while fighting, running, flying, and throwing around whatever else this build had decided to collect.
"Yeah, don't get excited yet." I rolled one shoulder and felt one of the tails behind me brush across the back of my leg, which distracted me enough that I looked over my shoulder even though I still couldn't see all of them at once. "Standing around is cheap. Try this while somebody's trying to take your head off."
I wasn't particularly worried about the Stamina anyway. The more of my character I uncovered, the less it resembled something designed by one coherent racial template, and at this point worrying about whether one resource pool was slightly strange felt like complaining about the upholstery while the car was on fire. I was basically Ichigo if somebody had looked at the number of things inside him and decided there was still room for several more species, magic systems, a Devil Fruit, Haki, and whatever the hell Cursed Energy actually turned out to be.
That thought made me laugh once, though the sound died quickly when I finally looked at the forest properly. Several trees still had faces stretched through their bark, one of them grinning with far too many narrow teeth, while chunks of broken stone shuffled around on crooked little legs and the pond twisted around a dark opening ringed with pale fangs. The real damage from my Haki was obvious underneath all of it—split trunks, shattered rocks, long cracks in the earth—but the rest looked like somebody had given a nightmare permission to redecorate.
I watched one of the stone things scramble across a fracture in the ground and noticed its foot pass through a chunk of displaced soil without moving it. That made me look at the nearest grinning tree again, then at the pond, and finally at the stack of neglected notifications floating off to my right. I had a fairly strong suspicion which one I wanted.
The problem was there were enough windows to bury me. Some were red warnings containing words like neural desynchronization, failed emergency return, and consciousness depth, which I read just far enough to realize I did not currently want the details, while others announced racial unlocks, resistance changes, Haki, Fruit integration, and several new Skills. I started moving them aside without reading everything, then stopped when two names beside each other made my attention snag.
Echoes of Madness — Lv. 1. This Cursed Technique manipulates perception through illusion, allowing false information to be imposed upon sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, distance, identity, terrain, attacks, and positioning. With sufficient development, false experiences can become convincing enough that a target's body begins reproducing physical consequences it believes have occurred, while advanced expressions may involve lingering hallucinations, false memories, sanity damage, Perfect Hypnosis, false death, Maximum Technique: Ninth Bell Nightmare, and Domain Expansion: Asylum of the Ninth Echo.
I looked away from the window and back at the pond. Its teeth continued revolving through the vortex, and when I shifted a few steps to the left, the entire mouth seemed to turn subtly toward me even though the actual water beneath the illusion was moving in a completely different pattern. That was enough evidence for now, though it immediately raised the less comfortable question of why I could see my own illusion.
"Is that because I'm the one making it, or are you actually affecting me too?" I asked while touching the edge of the window, as though the Skill might decide to become conversational if I phrased things politely. "And if I believe one of my own fake trees bites me, do I actually get bitten, because that would be an unbelievably stupid way to die."
Nothing in the description changed. I made a face at it anyway, then dragged the second Cursed Technique closer because whatever created this nightmare forest was at least easier to understand than the thing waiting underneath.
Throne of the Hollow Marionette — Lv. 1. This Cursed Technique perceives bodies as vessels and souls as interconnected structures that may be influenced through Hollow Threads, with Flesh Threads governing bodily movement, Cursed Threads interacting with Cursed Energy flow and technique activation, and Soul Threads concerning identity, memory, consciousness, and the connection between body and soul. Further development may permit increasingly sophisticated control of puppets, artificial vessels, corpses, compatible bodies, imitation, soul transfer, divided consciousness, Composite Marionettes, Cursed Technique Reversal: Merciful Severance, Maximum Technique: Pale God—Cathedral of a Thousand Bodies, and Domain Expansion: Throne Room of the Hollow God.
I made it through Soul Threads before reading the first paragraph again from the beginning. The words were plain enough individually, but the thing they described kept widening the longer I thought about it, because manipulating a limb and manipulating whatever Etheria considered a soul were not remotely the same category of problem. I found myself looking at my own fingers, wondering whether there was some thread connecting them to me that I simply lacked the ability to perceive yet, then decided that trying to test soul control on myself five minutes after nearly getting lost inside a Devil Fruit ranked poorly among my available ideas.
"Can somebody cut the threads?" I wondered, and then another question followed before I had done anything with the first. "Do they know they're there, and what happens if I pull on the wrong one?"
The window remained silent, which was probably for the best because I could already feel my brain starting to wander through possibilities. I had no experience with either of these techniques, no established theory to borrow from, and no idea what their practical limits were, which made them far more interesting than a fully explained spell would've been.
Then my eyes caught the resource bar beside the windows.
CE: 42,000 / 46,000.
I frowned at the abbreviation for a second, and the answer arrived with enough obviousness that I actually felt embarrassed before I finished thinking it. I had a class named Cursed User, Skills called Cursed Energy Perception and Cursed Energy Manipulation, and now two things explicitly labeled Cursed Techniques, yet somehow I'd spent hours looking at CE as though Etheria had invented a mystery fuel and refused to tell me the name.
"Cursed Energy." I brought one hand up and smacked my forehead hard enough that one fox ear twitched, which was a new sentence about my body I wasn't ready to examine. "Health, Mana, Cursed Energy. Brilliant, Jinx."
The useful part was that the comparison gave me a starting point without pretending they were identical. MP was fuel for magic, so CE looked like the reservoir behind whatever counted as Cursed Techniques, reinforcement, and whatever else I could eventually force it to do, but that still left the much more interesting question of what forty-six thousand actually meant. Was that huge, average, embarrassing, or the kind of number that made people quietly leave the room?
I opened the resource details and got almost nothing useful. Four thousand points had been spent somewhere across Fruit integration stress, consciousness stabilization, and Cursed Technique manifestation, but the log didn't tell me how efficient any of those events had been or what a normal expenditure looked like. The missing four thousand might have been enormous, or it might have been Etheria's equivalent of leaving a light on overnight.
"How high can I push this?" I murmured, and that question interested me far more than whether the current number was technically impressive. "Forty-six thousand now, but is that a hard cap from the character, something I train, something Mind affects, something the Fruit increased, or can I just keep building it until the number gets stupid?"
That thought pulled me toward Cursed Energy Manipulation, but I stopped before opening it because another possibility arrived first. If the pool could grow, then output and capacity might be different problems; having an ocean of CE wouldn't matter much if I could only force a cupful through a technique at once. I wasn't sure Etheria even separated those concepts, but the idea was irritatingly plausible, which meant I'd eventually need to test maximum output, recovery rate, efficiency, reinforcement, sustained drain, and probably several things I hadn't thought of yet.
I caught myself smiling and closed the resource details. There would be time to find the ceiling later, assuming the ceiling existed at all, and trying to empty forty-two thousand points into a crater just to see what happened sounded like the sort of experiment Mira would somehow hear about before I finished it. I was also still standing in the aftermath of the last time I pushed something without knowing where the limit was, and the missing sections of forest made a decent argument for developing patience.
The Status window seemed safer.
I opened it mostly because I expected familiar numbers, and the first few lines were familiar enough that my attention skipped straight past them. Then HP: 21,760 registered in the corner of my vision, and I stopped scrolling so abruptly that the interface bounced slightly back in the opposite direction.
I stared at the number, checked that I hadn't somehow opened a comparison screen, and then looked at my Level because some part of me assumed I'd missed several dozen level-ups while unconscious. Etheria continued to say Level 1, which made the twenty-one-thousand HP considerably harder to dismiss.
The full sheet expanded when I focused on it, and this time I let it stay open instead of trying to process every field separately.
Lucifer Morningstar
Level: 1
Race: Yokai / Lunarian
Type: Corrupted Lunarian / Yuki-Kitsune
Primary Element: Water
Secondary Elements: Cold • Underworld • Godslayer Magic • Fire • Fox-Fire
Class Set: Cursed User • Godskin Celebrant • Frost Witch • Underworld Mage • Fallen • Ice Barrier • Yokai
Titles: ??? • ??? • Conqueror Haki User • Creator of Breathing Styles
Resources
HP: 21,760 / 21,760 (Base: 2,720 / 2,720; Hybrid Multiplier ×8)
MP: 770 / 770
CE: 42,000 / 46,000
Stamina: 3,450 / 3,450
EXP: 0 / 1,000
Level: 1
Player Rank: Rookie 1
Rank Points: 0 RP
Fame: 0%
Stat Points: 0
Core Attributes
Vigor: 128 (Base: 16; Hybrid Multiplier ×8)
Mind: 24
Endurance: 152 (Base: 19; Hybrid Multiplier ×8)
Strength: 120 (Base: 15; Hybrid Multiplier ×8)
Dexterity: 200 (Base: 25; Hybrid Multiplier ×8)
Intelligence: 49
Faith: 17
Arcane: 29
Luck: 19
Combat Ratings
Physical Attack: 696 (Base: 87; Hybrid Multiplier ×8)
Magic Attack: 184
Godslayer Power: 216
Curse Power: 198
Healing Power: 792 (Base: 99; Hybrid Multiplier ×8)
Physical Defense: 728 (Base: 91; Hybrid Multiplier ×8)
Magic Defense: 137
Status Resistance: 1,248 (Base: 156; Hybrid Multiplier ×8)
Poise: 58
Movement Speed: 108
Casting Speed: 121
Critical Rate: 7%
Critical Damage: 150%
Elemental Affinities
Godslayer Magic — SSS
Cold — SSS
Underworld — SS
Water — EX
Fire — SSS
Illusion — SSS
Dream — S
Death — SSS
My eyes kept jumping between the values instead of reading them in any sensible order. Dexterity: 200 caught me, then Status Resistance: 1,248, then I went back to the HP because twenty-one thousand still looked like somebody had accidentally typed an extra digit. Only after bouncing around like that for a while did the repeated note beside several values finally become impossible to miss.
Hybrid Multiplier ×8.
That made me look at the tails again.
I reached behind myself and grabbed the nearest one more carefully than I had before. My hand felt soft fur and the tail felt my hand at the same time, which remained deeply strange, but at least confirmed that the body I was standing in wasn't simply wearing some decorative transformation effect.
"Hybrid," I said while looking back at the Status. "So this is the hybrid form."
The idea immediately pulled up what I remembered about Zoans. Human form, transformed form, hybrid form, variations depending on the Fruit and user—except this one was a Yuki-Kitsune, and I had no idea whether Mira had kept the usual structure clean or done something more complicated because the creature itself was already a hybrid of two kinds of yōkai.
I went back through the numbers and noticed which ones had actually been multiplied. Vigor, Endurance, Strength, Dexterity, physical attack, healing power, physical defense, status resistance, and HP had all exploded upward, while Mind, Intelligence, Faith, Arcane, MP, and most of my magical ratings had stayed where they were. Whatever the ×8 multiplier was doing, it wasn't simply multiplying my entire character sheet.
"So the body gets most of it." I flexed my hand slowly, then hesitated before making a fist because I suddenly wasn't sure how much pressure counted as normal anymore. "That seems fair, assuming I don't accidentally break everything I touch."
I crouched and picked up a stone about the size of my palm. It felt almost insultingly light, and when I squeezed only a little harder than I thought necessary, a crack ran through the middle with a dry pop that made me loosen my grip immediately.
I stared at the stone, then set it back down more gently than I'd picked it up. The frightening part wasn't that I could break it; the frightening part was that my body hadn't warned me I was using enough force to do so, because Strength 120 apparently felt just as natural from the inside as Strength 15 had earlier. That meant I needed to relearn what careful meant before I touched anything fragile, which included people.
My eyes wandered back to Level: 1 while I was thinking about that. The contrast was so stupid that I read the EXP line again to make sure the game truly hadn't credited me with anything.
0 / 1,000.
Still zero.
I had awakened Supreme King Haki, created Breathing Techniques, acquired two Cursed Techniques, eaten a Mythical Zoan, changed race, multiplied half my physical stats by eight, and apparently none of it counted as the kind of experience Etheria used to level me.
I started laughing before I could help it.
The laugh came out a little ragged after everything that had happened, but it felt good enough that I let it run its course instead of stopping myself. "Fine, then. Maybe I'll kill a rabbit and finally become Level 2."
Before I could close the Status, a smaller notification unfolded near its lower edge. I almost dismissed it automatically, then saw TALENT SECTION in the heading and stopped because that was something I hadn't expected to see without deliberately seeking it out.
TALENT SECTION UNLOCKED. Sufficient appraisal conditions have now been met for previously concealed Talent values to become visible within the user's Status. Talents that cannot be inferred through obvious race, class, behavior, or manifested ability normally require an external appraisal method such as specialized equipment, magical evaluation, ritual assessment, an appraisal artifact, or another System-recognized source of analysis.
I remembered that from Etheria guides, though not immediately enough to feel clever about it. Players could know they were good at obvious things from their classes and actual performance, but most precise Talent grades weren't freely handed out on login; guild halls had appraisal tools, wealthy players bought specialized artifacts, and plenty of NPC institutions had their own methods. I vaguely remembered people calling one common crystal device an appraisal ball, though whether that had ever been its official name or just the player base refusing to learn the proper term was beyond me.
"What appraised me?" I asked while opening the notification details, and the System responded with the wonderfully useless phrase sufficient appraisal conditions satisfied. I stared at that wording for several seconds, wondering whether the Fruit had somehow done it, whether Overactive Imagination had effectively appraised my own mind, or whether Mira peeking through admin tools counted as an external evaluation.
The thought of Mira made my attention catch. She had sent me the pond video, so she'd definitely been watching at least part of the night, and if the red warnings I'd skipped meant what I thought they meant, she had probably watched the Fruit nearly turn my brain into soup too. I almost opened a message to ask whether she'd done the appraisal, then stopped because I wasn't sure I wanted her explanation before I'd even looked at what the System found.
I hesitated before pressing the new tab.
That bothered me more than the actual numbers had.
Stats told me what the body could do right now, and I could treat that as equipment if I wanted. Talents felt closer to having the game turn around and say, Here's what you're naturally worth learning, which shouldn't have mattered as much as it suddenly did.
"Don't embarrass me." I touched the tab before I could make the hesitation into something larger than it was, and the list opened alongside the rest of the sheet. "Or do, I guess. You've been doing whatever you want all night."
Talents
Swordsmanship — SSS
Archery — A
Hand-to-Hand Combat — C-
Magic — SS
Tracking — A+
Toy Making — SS
Imagination — EX
Whipmanship — D
Alchemy — A-
Cooking — A+
Nature Arts — EX
Nature-Related Magic — S
Nature Energy — SS
Holy Arts — A
Demonic Arts — A
Dark Arts — S+
My eyes went straight to Hand-to-Hand Combat — C-.
I didn't choose to look there first. Apparently my ego had been waiting specifically for something insulting and ignored the SSS Swordsmanship and two EX Talents until it found one.
"C-minus?" I stared at the grade and opened its information before I'd even thought about whether I cared. "I'm not that bad with my hands."
The description reminded me that Talent wasn't current competence, experience, Strength, reinforcement, or how well I could beat someone in a fight. It measured how naturally I developed within that discipline, and once I stopped feeling personally attacked for ten seconds, I had to admit that I had always reached for a weapon whenever one existed.
Even hand-to-hand training had never stayed purely hand-to-hand in my head. Give me a wall, a belt, a pen, a chair, somebody's jacket, a wrench, or anything else within reach and my brain immediately started treating it as part of the fight, so maybe Etheria had caught something about me I hadn't particularly cared to name.
"Still rude." I moved on only to hit Whipmanship — D, which was bad enough that I stared at it in silence before a laugh escaped through my nose. "Okay, that one can stay."
Swordsmanship — SSS felt good, though not in the dramatic way I expected. Mostly I felt relieved, which was stupid considering the things I'd already done with a sword, and then curious about what separated SSS Talent from actual mastery. If somebody had a lower Talent but spent fifty years training, could they still beat me easily while I was Level 1, or did the grade change learning speed so violently that the gap eventually became unfair?
I didn't know.
That made it interesting.
I skimmed down rather than opening every entry and immediately got caught by Toy Making — SS. The title sounded ridiculous until I checked what Etheria counted under it—models, articulated constructions, dolls, puzzles, mechanical toys, carved objects, miniature structures, and enough fabrication work that half the things I'd built over the years suddenly qualified.
"Oh, that's cheating." I looked at the grade again and thought about some of the little mechanisms I'd built because I got bored, then about the detailed models I'd made for projects that didn't remotely require that level of effort. "You can't call all of that toy making and then act like you discovered something."
I was still smiling when Imagination — EX caught my eye.
That one wiped most of the smile away.
I looked at the grade, then instinctively opened my Skills in another window and found Overactive Imagination — Lv. 1 sitting exactly where I'd left it. The connection felt obvious enough that I distrusted it immediately.
Imagination — EX. This Talent measures the capacity to conceive, visualize, mentally simulate, reconstruct, recombine, and develop ideas beyond conventional patterns. An EX appraisal indicates that the Talent exceeds ordinary predictive ranges strongly enough that its practical developmental ceiling cannot currently be determined.
"Did the Talent make the Skill, or did the Skill make this visible?" I asked while shifting the two windows beside each other. "And if Overactive Imagination is actually doing what that description says, how much of the weird shit tonight was me and how much was the Fruit?"
That went nowhere, but the question stayed.
I nearly messaged Mira again.
Then Nature Arts — EX distracted me.
I stared at that grade because I couldn't immediately explain it. Water was EX, Ice Barrier belonged to some primordial Water lineage, the Fruit had turned me partly Yokai, and Nature-Related Magic — S plus Nature Energy — SS were sitting directly underneath, which gave me too many possible explanations instead of one useful answer.
"Nature Energy." The words alone sent my imagination toward several possibilities, and I immediately became suspicious of myself because I'd already proven I could accidentally turn a familiar idea into a functioning Etheria system. "We're leaving that alone until I know what you mean."
I wasn't joking.
I had already spent an evening standing in water and somehow caused the entire world to gain Breathing Techniques.
I did not need to sit under a tree and discover that breathing suspiciously around squirrels created something else.
The remaining Talents were easier to accept without interrogation. Archery A, Tracking A+, Alchemy A-, Cooking A+, Holy Arts A, Demonic Arts A, and Dark Arts S+ formed a strange enough spread that I couldn't decide whether it looked versatile or deeply confused. I eventually settled on both.
Then I noticed the Elemental Affinities again.
Cold had become SSS.
Fire was now SSS.
Illusion had appeared at SSS, which at least made Echoes of Madness less mysterious, while Dream sat at S and Death at SSS.
Death held my attention longer than I expected.
"Where did you come from?" I murmured, mentally counting possibilities without really expecting to solve it. Godslayer Magic dealt heavily in death, Underworld Magic existed, Echoes of Madness had false death buried somewhere in its higher expressions, Throne touched souls, and whatever else the Fruit had changed might be contributing too.
I left it alone rather than inventing an answer.
That was becoming easier.
The Race line was still waiting at the top of the window whenever my attention wandered back there: Yokai / Lunarian, with Corrupted Lunarian / Yuki-Kitsune underneath as Type. I shifted my weight, felt the tails behind me rearrange themselves automatically to keep from being crushed, and laughed quietly when the Ichigo comparison returned.
"Yeah, I'm definitely Ichigo." I reached back and ran my hand through one tail while trying to count how many distinct supernatural categories were currently involved in my character. "Just keep throwing races in until the genealogy gives up."
That actually took some pressure off the need to understand everything immediately. If this character was going to be a mess of lineages and systems stapled together by whatever Etheria considered compatibility, then treating every new page like an exam I needed to pass before moving forward was pointless.
I could learn it while using it.
That was probably how the game wanted me to do it anyway.
My Stamina had reached 3,450 / 3,450 while I'd been distracted by Talents. CE remained at 42,000 / 46,000, and the difference between those two recovery patterns brought me right back to the question I'd been avoiding.
"How much of you can I actually use at once?" I asked, pulling the CE bar closer even though I knew it wasn't going to answer verbally. "And how much bigger can I make you?"
Forty-six thousand sounded enormous only because thirteen thousand had sounded enormous earlier. Without anyone else to compare against, neither number meant anything, and that annoyed me enough that I opened Cursed Energy Manipulation — Lv. 1 before I remembered I'd planned to stop experimenting.
I read the first part instead of immediately doing something stupid.
Cursed Energy Manipulation — Lv. 1. The user can consciously direct the flow and output of their own Cursed Energy, providing the foundation for reinforcement, weapon channeling, Cursed Technique activation, output regulation, and increasingly complex applications. Capacity, output, efficiency, recovery, precision, and developed Techniques are related but distinct aspects of Cursed Energy growth, and high reserves do not automatically grant equivalent control.
I stared at the last sentence for several seconds.
Then I laughed because apparently Etheria had been listening to my question closely enough to insult me with the answer.
"Right, so forty-six thousand means I own a big tank." I flexed my fingers and tried to find that strange dense presence I'd touched earlier, feeling around mentally without actually pulling on it yet. "Doesn't mean the pipe isn't tiny."
There.
I felt it.
Not as a location exactly, though my first instinct still tried to place it somewhere around my chest. Once I stopped worrying about where, the sensation became easier to hold onto: dense, heavy, restless in a way Mana hadn't felt during the little attention I'd given it.
I started to draw some of it forward.
Then I hesitated.
The ground around me was already split open, the pond still had imaginary teeth, half the nearby trees were either genuinely destroyed or pretending to be monsters, and I had only just regained control of the last power I'd decided to poke without knowing how it worked. Maybe testing maximum Cursed Energy output here was less scientific curiosity and more evidence that survival instincts could file for divorce.
I let the pressure settle back down.
"Small first."
Even saying it made me grin a little.
I held one hand in front of myself, not because I knew a hand gesture was necessary but because I wanted something physical to focus on while I tried to coax the smallest amount of CE I could manage toward my palm. The first attempt produced almost nothing I could perceive, the second came too quickly and made the muscles in my forearm tense, and on the third I caught a faint sensation gathering beneath my skin without any obvious explosion accompanying it.
I kept it there rather than pushing farther.
Forty-six thousand could wait.
For the moment, I wanted to know whether I could control forty.