Twenty days.
Twenty hours of sleep across twenty days.
Every part of my body carried the accumulated weight of that deficit — a deep, structural ache that lived in the muscles and joints and didn't leave regardless of what the Healing passive did to the surface damage. But my control over the Cheater Sword's Qi had become something I no longer had to think about consciously. My magic response time had compressed from seconds to fractions of seconds. The skills I had read about in the library and then nearly died attempting to apply in practice against Yama — they were mine now, genuinely mine, the way things become yours only after they've tried to kill you a sufficient number of times.
I don't want to admit it.
But she taught me a great deal.
And soon — one more.
Inner Domain.
"What can I actually do with this skill?" I asked.
She looked at me with an expression I had come to recognize as her default setting for questions she found simultaneously obvious and beneath her — a particular quality of patience that wasn't really patience at all.
"You can store anything inside a domain you construct within your own body."
I processed that.
"...That's possible?"
"It's possible," she said. "But skills of this nature are extraordinarily rare and require substantial power to access. Even I cannot form a domain." She paused. "You also need a specific tool. There are external tools — rare enough on their own — that generate a domain within themselves. But internal domain tools are Mythic grade. Across all of recorded history in this world, the number of times one has existed can be counted on one hand."
If what she's saying is accurate — finding something like that would be impossible.
"So where exactly am I supposed to obtain a Mythic-grade tool?" I asked.
"You've had one since the beginning."
I looked at her.
This girl has finally lost her mind entirely.
"I have one? Where? I'm not holding anything."
She crossed the distance between us in three steps and pressed her fingertips against my sternum.
"Here."
I stared down at her hand against my chest.
Since the first day I opened my eyes in this world — in that small, warm room, held in arms that smelled like someone's home — I had felt it. Something in my chest that wasn't quite my heartbeat and wasn't quite my Mana and wasn't quite my Qi, but drew from all three simultaneously. A presence. A warmth that never fully cooled. The strange marking burned into my skin that the doctors of Zahour Village had looked at with their various instruments and concluded was beyond their understanding.
I always assumed it was connected to the Chaos Ring.
I never imagined it was something else entirely.
"When I placed my hand on your chest the first time we met," she said, stepping back, "I felt another domain already existing inside your body."
"So how do I get things inside it?"
"You're fortunate," she said — and there was something in the way she said it, the faintest edge of something that might have been genuine interest beneath the composed delivery, "because I have read every available text on the subject of domains. How they form. How objects are stored within them. How they're retrieved." She held my gaze. "I'll show you now. And we'll confirm whether what you have is truly a personal domain."
She moved to her desk — a heavy piece of dark furniture that I had never seen her sit at, only approach when she needed something from it — and returned with a book.
Blue cover. Old. The title pressed into the material in script that had faded but not disappeared:
The Epic of the First Demon King.
"Hold this."
I took it from her. It was heavier than it looked — the particular weight of things that have been held by many hands over a very long time.
"Close your eyes."
"What are you going to do to me?" I said, with a small smile I didn't particularly try to suppress.
"Close your eyes."
"Fine. Fine."
I closed them.
"Try to feel that this book is part of your body. Part of your soul."
Part of my soul.
Do I have one?
An old man told me once — right before I killed him — that every person you murder takes a piece of your soul with it. That the damage accumulates. That eventually there is nothing left.
He said it while laughing, which I had found irritating at the time and found somehow more interesting now.
I killed him anyway.
I don't remember why, specifically. There were so many reasons in those years and they blur together now.
...Do I still have a soul? Or did I spend it down to nothing over the course of one very full life?
"Imagine it merging with your soul," she said quietly. "Until you and the book are a single thing."
The old man had a white mustache. A long beard. One eye that didn't work. He sat in a wheeled chair and he had been alone when I found him.
Alone.
Like me.
His words were still moving through me — slow, unhurried, finding rooms I had forgotten existed —
"Now place it inside your soul completely."
I thought about the old man's face. I thought about the word alone. I thought about the specific quality of silence in a room when you are the only living thing in it, and how I had lived inside that silence for so long that I had stopped noticing it was silence at all.
"Well done."
Her voice, cutting through.
Why is her voice always so disruptive?
▶ Special Skill Acquired ◀
▶ Inner Domain — Learned ◀
「 A domain constructed within the body. Allows the storage and retrieval of objects. Capacity and speed of access increase with Realm advancement. 」