Back in the metaverse, the space between and beyond the multiverse, I began my journey back to the Engine of Reincarnation. I had no body here, so emotions were different and I was incapable of physical reactions. Otherwise, I would have shivered as I remembered my final moments as Cheokit.
Completely devoid of energy, having spent it all to, hopefully, kill that miasma butterfly—or at least injure and slow it down enough that the squirrel reinforcements could stop it—I had no defenses against the roiling black. When I hit the boundary between the world above and the darkness below, it immediately started sucking the life out of me, a coldness that went beyond temperature. Once engulfed, my senses were entirely lost; no light or sound existed down there. I was glad I didn’t try to enter it willingly, out of curiosity, because it was no place for beings like me.
At least all it did was kill me. I didn’t seem to experience any soul damage, which was always a concern. I should probably stick to “safer” deaths, not that I was always in control of that. It was more of a problem in a reality like the last, where there was way too much I didn’t understand.
I drifted lazily through the currents that drew me towards my next life, but I felt a tug as I was hooked. Or, no, that wasn’t right. My spiritual journey was interrupted as divine light shone down, pulling me like a tractor beam towards heaven. Also wrong. As I cruised down the road towards my destination, I saw a flash of lights in my rear-view mirror, and a quick wail of the siren, telling me to pull over. That wasn’t exactly right either, but it was a bit more comfortable. I stopped trying to parse it, and just allowed my soul to be diverted from the natural order.
When I next focused, I found myself in a familiar interview room, sitting at a table across from a recognizable authority figure.
“Hey, kid,” the being I knew as Detective Jeb Gudell said with a smile. “How’s it been going?”
Such a simple question, with no simple answer. How to sum up multiple lives and all that I’ve gone through? “It’s been… interesting,” I finally decided on.
“I bet. Let me take a look,” he said, pulling up my System and looking it over. A second, much more detailed screen appeared, completely unreadable to me, but the metaversal authority hummed and nodded as he looked over it. I focused on what I could read, instead.
Michael Carter ▾
Body: 91 | Mind: 78 | Will: 103
Skills: [Ambidexterity] [Barrier 1] [Blood Augmentation 10] [Blood Blade 1] [Blood Claws 1] [Blood Compression 5] [Blood Control 7] [Blood-Empowered Blow 6] [Blood-Empowered Leap 3] [Blood Explosion 1] [Blood Hammer 1] [Blood Lance 3] [Blood Restoration 8] [Blood Shackle 2] [Blood Shield 1] [Blood Slicer 1] [Blood Whip 2] [Bloodletting 3] [Boundary 1] [Bowmanship 2] [Bulwark 3] [Calm Mind 2] [Carving 8] [Clean 3] [Containment 1] [Control Copper 2] [Control Earth 5] [Control Fire 4] [Control Gold 1] [Control Ice 4] [Control Iron 3] [Control Light 3] [Control Silver 1] [Control Stone 4] [Control Water 4] [Control Wind 4] [Create Copper 3] [Create Earth 4] [Create Fire 5] [Create Gold 1] [Create Ice 5] [Create Iron 3] [Create Light 5] [Create Lightning 4] [Create Silver 2] [Create Stone 5] [Create Water 5] [Create Wind 5] [Cure Condition 3] [Detect 1] [Dual Wielding 6] [Empower 3] [Farsight 2] [Flash Freeze 2] [Gather 1] [Generative Growth 3] [Grappling 5] [Hasten 3] [Induce Sleep 1] [Locate 3] [Magma Field 1] [Mana Manipulation 7] [Manakinesis 5] [Metasurvival] [Metatransmutation] [Major Healing 2] [Mind Shield 1] [Minor Healing 4] [Moderate Healing 3] [Mute 1] [Overheat 2] [Pain Reduction 1] [Preservation 1] [Purify 1] [Repair 3] [Restorative Growth 4] [Shadow Swamp 1] [Sewing 3] [Smithing 5] [Spearmanship 4] [Swordsmanship 8] [Transformative Growth 2] [Quadral Wielding 2] [Unlock 1]
Three lives worth of stats and skills. I had no idea if I had done well, nor even if there was anything I could really compare myself to in order to decide if I had done well, but Detective Gudell seemed pleased.
“Seems like you’ve learned a lot. And you’ve started to get a taste of the wider multiverse. This is just the beginning. There’s so much more to see. Unimaginable worlds, realities with completely different rules, things that—”
“Actually,” I interrupted, before the Detective got too excited. He paused, looking at me. I took a breath. If I wasn’t honest now, I might never get the chance. “I… uh, well. I think I’d rather be human, again. If that’s all right.”
It’s not that I wasn’t curious about the multiverse and what could be out there. My life as Cheokit had been nice, at times. It was interesting learning about the tree, and I was glad to discover a purpose in its defense. I had also found meaning and happiness as Mali. The bad things that happened in that life could have just as easily happened in a human life; I couldn’t put the blame on being Uli, really. Nonetheless, those lives didn’t feel quite as real to me as my human lives, both my time as Tovar and the fading remnants of the life of the man who had once been Michael Carter.
Maybe Mali and Cheokit’s lives were just bad examples for me, personally, but I had really felt like a visitor in them, transient and passing through, as opposed to finding my place in the world as Tovar. I was sure that had to do with love and family, and it’s not like I didn’t find a bit of that as Mali, but it never really felt right. Maybe I’d get used to being non-human after a few more lives, and be able to root myself in those worlds as well as I could in Argadia, but if they were going to get increasingly weird, it seemed like it would be a game of endless catch-up. I could only assume it was a result of getting [Metasurvival] too early for my soul’s development.
Detective Gudell sighed, and I wondered if I had made a mistake.
“Sorry,” I said. “If it’s not possible—”
“It’s possible. Honestly, soul attunement is quite common among Metasurvivors. I just hoped it would be different, for you, since your soul was younger and more malleable.” He glanced back at the more detailed second screen. “Maybe I shouldn’t have put him in a human world to start,” he muttered to himself, shaking his head.
“Sorry,” I repeated. “How do I…”
“I’ll do it for you. I just need a [].”
Did I hear that right? I couldn’t quite comprehend the last word he said. “A… what?”
“Ah, right. You’re so young. I need a… how should I say this… a skill frame, for the soul attunement.” He lifted his hand, somehow showing me the square brackets around the names of my skills. “One of these.”
I blinked a few times, then squinted, trying to comprehend what I was seeing. “I don’t understand.”
“Basically, I need you to sacrifice one of your skills, so I can use that part of your soul to create the harmonization for the Engine of Reincarnation.”
That was certainly an uncomfortable thing to hear, but I asked for it, so I glanced at my System to focus on the immediate problem. It was nice to see all my skills activated again, not that I could actually use any of them in the metaverse. After two lives without my spells, my first inclination was to pick one of them, since they felt a bit useless. But now that I had [Metatransmutation], I had a chance to get them back, and I worked really hard to learn those to make my future lives easier. Looking through them, I couldn’t pick one to give up.
My Blood constructs were also a bit unnecessary, since I could mimic them with Blood control, but that would take away a usable skill for my next life. If I understood [Metatransmutation] correctly, I would have all those skills, as well as my squirrel growth skills, right away at the start of the next life. Blood had conflicted a bit with my body as a squirrel, too… but would that happen when I was human again? Rather, the squirrel skills might have more of a conflict, since I wouldn’t have access to the Mother tree.
Of the three growth skills, one was an obvious outlier. [Generative Growth] helped the crystalline world-tree grow. Maybe that would apply to other things in human worlds, but the skill definition was fairly specific. If it only worked on the Mother, it was wholly useless outside of my last life.
“[Generative Growth], then,” I said.
“I need formal confirmation,” Gudell said, and a screen popped up in front of me asking me to accept. “Since I’ll be working with your soul.”
Nervously, I accepted, and I felt a part of me disconnect. It flowed from my System and into Detective Gudell’s hands, where he started doing… something to it. Quite frankly, it was visually indescribable.
“That’ll do. I should warn you, attunement to a particular species isn’t perfect. Species aren’t as well-defined as you might think. There could be some minor variance across your lives.”
“That’s fine,” I said. It was better than nothing.
“This was a level 3 skill, so there’s enough effort within to dial it in a bit more. Anything else I should add to this?”
“Oh,” I said, suddenly remembering dealing with people like Kiritik in my last life. “Male, too, please.”
Thankfully, Detective Gudell nodded, continuing with the work.
I prodded myself, trying to feel the difference with a piece of my soul missing. “What are they? Skills, I mean. I never understood why some things become skills, but not everything. You said the System cultivates the growth of souls, and I know conflict can be a factor, but… what does that really mean?”
Gudell paused in his work and looked at me. “I’m not sure I can fully explain it to you, but skills aren’t that different from stats. Both are… what’s the best way to say this. Refined effort.”
“Effort?”
“It’s not a perfect descriptor, but it’ll do,” he said, going back to his tinkering while he spoke. “Souls grow from effort. There are different types of effort, some more complex than others. At first, a lot of a souls growth will come from the effort of pure survival. When a soul has grown to reach a point of sapience, that can change. Tell me, how much does an idea weigh?”
“What? Uh, nothing?”
“Only without effort. Through the application of effort, an idea can become something enormously heavy. A building. A dam. An idea can have enough thrust to escape gravity. A rocket. A space station. An idea can be sharpened enough to cut an enemy in two.”
I glanced at the first skill I gained in my life, [Swordsmanship]. “So skills are… ideas?”
“Not quite,” Gudell said, pausing and frowning. “More like they don’t exist without ideas. They’re still refined effort, but through sapience, the potential effort expands beyond survival. Maybe it’s the effort of learning. Or the effort of practice and training. Sometimes, it’s a burst of effort from achieving victory or an accomplishment.”
“But it takes effort to run, and there’s no running skill. I also didn’t get a mathematics or arithmetic skill from learning how to add.”
“Again, effort isn’t exactly the right word for it. But that’s also the difference between stats and skills. Some effort, maybe even most effort, is purely physical, mental, or spiritual. This is the primary kind of effort that builds a soul up to the point of sapience, but even then, something like learning to add numbers is almost entirely mental effort. Once a soul gains a System, effort like that is refined into your stats, hence the lack of an associated skill. Some effort, however, fall into the spaces between stats. Some skills, like martial and crafting skills, exist between Body and Mind. Your spells, for example, exist between Mind and Will. And others, like your [Blood Augmentation], exist between Will and Body. There are also skills which fall more in the center of this triumvirate, and touch on all three stats.”
“Huh. In my first life after gaining [Metasurvival], I got stats from killing monsters. That was… the effort from achieving victory? And as an Uli, there was Blood retaliation. Was that also harvested effort?”
“Yes and no. Monsters—creatures made from the supernatural forces of certain realities—don’t have souls, but can still accrue effort. In a world with levels, you can generally harvest that effort in killing them, though it depends on the reality. As for the Blood retaliation…” Gudell glanced at the detailed second screen. “That looks like it was a form of borrowed power. The only real effort you refined was your own.”
“I… think I get it now.” That explained Tovar’s levels and the strangeness of Mali’s Blood stat. At the very least, this new information gave me a framework to build off of to better understand the worlds of my future lives. “And… what about metaskills?” I asked, hesitantly. “I’m not sure why the System allows something like [Metasurvival] at all. It clearly doesn’t need to.”
Gudell grinned. “Well, I shouldn’t say too much. It all serves a function. Speaking of,” he said, tossing the skill back at my System. I felt something inside me click, and the skill description appeared before me.
[Metaharmonization]
Harmonization for reincarnation. Guides soul to appropriate worlds. Attunement: Human, male.
“Thank you,” I said, relaxing into my seat. “This was something I would have figured out to do myself?”
Gudell waggled his hand. “Probably. Might have taken you longer.” He grinned. “If you get tired of being human, try playing with it and see.”
I closed the skill description, and looked at my System. It was… pretty messy, if I was being honest with myself. “Does that mean I can modify these other… skill frames, as well?”
The detective sat back, crossing his arms with a slight smile on his face. When he didn’t respond, I assumed this was some sort of test.
My System displayed the refined effort of my soul, but Gudell had just proven that it could be interacted with, in some way. I was familiar with the feeling of gaining skills, but now that I felt the loss of a skill, when I gave up [Generative Growth], I could almost sense the boundaries between the individual skills, and the wells of my stats. With a new mental picture of how the skills existed between them, I could almost hone in on them.
I changed my perspective.
These skills were my effort, and I knew what had gone into them. Many of them were very, very similar. The skill frames were already touching, if not outright overlapping. I could see a few patterns. My creation spells were here. My Blood constructs were there.
Reaching into my soul felt almost natural. After all, I was my soul, here in the metaverse. I gathered up my twelve creation spells, which all shared a common root, and squeezed.
In place of my old creation spells, I had a new skill: [Creation Magic 7].
“Wow,” I said through a heavy exhalation. “That was…”
I trailed off, unable to describe it. I glanced up at the detective, suddenly worried I crossed a line, but the fact that I could do it suggested it was allowed, and he seemed like he had been baiting me to try.
Gudell nodded, as if reading my concerns. “Well done. If it isn’t already obvious, you can only do that here in the metaverse, between lives. Things are a bit more rigid in reality. But as a Metasurvivor, that’s a crucial ability to manage skill bloat.”
“Does this… change anything? Beyond how it looks in my display. Wait,” I said, looking more closely at the skill level. “Why is it 7? My strongest creation spell was level 5, and there were twelve spells total.”
“It does change things. [Creation Magic] is what the System decided was the closest skill to the value of your combined effort. It’s either from elsewhere in that world, or from a reality with a similar energy and set of rules. Skill levels aren’t one-to-one. They aren’t exactly like stat points. It just serves to quantify the refined effort into that specific skill. In this case, a skill level of 7 for [Creation Magic] must be comparable to what you could do previously.”
“So I can still do what I did before.”
“In most cases. It might also open up a more generalized path forward for further training, but really, that will depend on the reality you reincarnate into, even with [Metatransmutation]. You probably won’t be able to add to what you can create with this skill, in a world without any form of supernatural creation, but you should be able to strengthen how much of what you can already conjure if you practice, even without increasing your Will. It should be easy to bump up the power of your weaker creation spells to your stronger ones with this, but that was already true when they were distinct. Brand new conjuration may start more powerful, but will likely require new methods; it will depend on the rules of the world.”
Given that my old spells were all based on long and precise incantations, opening the door to generalization seemed like a good idea. I didn’t have access to mana until I reincarnated into a world with it again, anyway, where I would need to learn the local practices, so I decided to make some more changes. I collected the control spells next, which gave me [Control Magic 6], then considered the rest.
With my shifted perspective, I could see my other spells were a bit more distinct, though there was still a lot of potential crossover. I wondered what the limits of this were. “What would happen if I mix completely different skills?”
“If you can pull it off at all, there must have been some skill out there that shared the specific effort required to gain those skills. It will likely be much more general, in which case you’ll likely wind up with a much lower skill level. That’s one case where you might lose efficacy, at first, until you train the new skill back up.”
I nodded. That could still be worth it, in some cases, but it sounded like I couldn’t totally ruin what I had, especially if I kept to a reasonable range.
[Flash Freeze 2] and [Overheat 2] became [Temperature Magic 2].
[Minor Healing 4], [Moderate Healing 3], [Major Healing 2], [Calm Mind 2], [Cure Condition 3], and [Pain Reduction 1] turned into [Healing Magic 5]. I debated if I should combine it with [Blood Restoration] or [Restorative Growth], but decided against it until I actually gained the ability to use mana again.
[Barrier 1], [Boundary 1], [Containment 1], and [Preservation 1] became [Field Magic 2]. [Bulwark 3], [Empower 3], [Farsight 2], [Hasten 3], and [Mind Shield 1] gave me [Enhancement Magic 3]. On the other hand, [Induce Sleep 1] and [Mute 1] combined into [Curse Magic 2], which made me a bit uncomfortable since they were spells I used while raising my children, and “curse” was a pretty loaded word.
The remaining spells weren’t quite as bunched up in my soul. I considered them and decided to collect the bulk of them regardless. [Clean 3], [Detect 1], [Discernment 1], [Gather 1], [Locate 3], [Purify 1], [Repair 3], and [Unlock 1] became [Utility Magic 2]. That wasn’t everything, but I wasn’t sure about combining my two big area of effect spells. I had barely used them as they were, having learned them for future lives, so for the moment, I left them alone.
With my spells largely consolidated, I turned to my Blood techniques. I had a bunch of single-purpose constructs, which were superior in some ways to the free-form [Blood Control], but seemed excessive. They also overlapped quite a lot. I collected the various forms together into [Blood Shaping 5].
There was still a lot of overlap in [Blood Control] and [Blood Shaping], as well as [Blood Compression] and [Blood Explosion]. I was less sure about merging those, my concern rooted in the fact that I got a lot of good use out of [Blood Control] as it was. Since I should retain access to Blood in my next life thanks to [Metatransmutation], I decided not to push it any further, for now.
I looked over the changes, as displayed by my System.
Michael Carter ▾
Body: 91 | Mind: 78 | Will: 103
Skills: [Ambidexterity] [Blood Augmentation 10] [Blood Compression 5] [Blood Control 7] [Blood-Empowered Blow 6] [Blood-Empowered Leap 3] [Blood Explosion 1] [Blood Restoration 8] [Blood Shaping 5] [Bloodletting 3] [Bowmanship 2] [Carving 8] [Control Magic 6] [Creation Magic 7] [Curse Magic 2] [Dual Wielding 6] [Enhancement Magic 3] [Field Magic 2] [Grappling 5] [Healing Magic 5] [Magma Field 1] [Mana Manipulation 7] [Manakinesis 5] [Metaharmonization] [Metasurvival] [Metatransmutation] [Restorative Growth 4] [Shadow Swamp 1] [Sewing 3] [Smithing 5] [Spearmanship 4] [Swordsmanship 8] [Temperature Magic 2] [Transformative Growth 2] [Quadral Wielding 2] [Utility Magic 2]
It was still a bit busy, but I was hesitant to make any more changes until I had lived another life or two and tested things out.
“All done?” Detective Gudell asked, drawing my attention back to the metaversal being.
I realized I had kept him sitting there while I had done a deep dive on my own soul. “Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”
He dismissed my apology with a small laugh. “Don’t worry about it. Glad you were able to learn some things that will help you, moving forward. If you’re ready, I’ll get you back on your way.”
“Thank you,” I told him. “I guess I won’t be seeing you again.”
“You won’t,” he said, escorting me out of the precinct, or tossing me back in the ocean, or whatever the metaversal authority was actually doing beyond my perception as I left the bounds of his higher dimensional control. “But I’m sure you’ll be just fine.”
As I was pulled towards the Engine of Reincarnation, I looked back on my journey so far. It took me a few lives, but I felt a bit more confident about what was coming. I had a better idea of what to live for, what to fight for, and what to die for.
When I was Tovar, I started out too disconnected, and almost missed out on a life worth living. When I was Mali, I started out so concerned about missing out on a life worth living that I almost sacrificed a part of myself that I couldn’t get back. When I was Cheokit, I did sacrifice, but in a way I could come to terms with. To protect countless other lives worth living.
I knew I would face more challenges. I wouldn’t succeed every time, but I would put the effort in, and I would get something back in the process. It would change me, but hopefully for the better. I would have to work at it, if I wanted to keep it that way. That was life. All I could do was live, to the best of my abilities.
And soon, it would be time to do it again.