Zoe turned her focus inwards, to the familiar pulsating, bubbling effervescence that filled her soul. Or what she thought to be her soul — that was beginning to look a little more muddied than she'd imagined.

  Within the expansive darkness were thousands of tiny blips. Small patterns, definitions, that made up all of her skills, feats, classes, and anything else the system had decided she needed. Which lent well to the idea of that space not being her soul but some intermediary step between her soul and the system.

  Zoe pushed deeper within that space, her focus steady and unwavering as she searched through the essence of her being. She knew where her Enchanted Mirrors were — she'd found them more times than she could count in her many long years. Finding them wasn't hard.

  The problem was knowing what to do with them. How would she recreate those permanent structures in her soul? Was it like getting a piercing done? Ripping a hole through herself then forcing it to stay open until her soul just healed around it? Or was it more like a haircut or a nail trimming? Tearing away the already dead, wasting mass that grew on the edges?

  She wasn't sure. The temptation to toy with her soul, to steal the skills that were solely a part of her soul was powerful. But the fear of ruining something within herself was even greater. What would happen if she tore apart one of her skills? Would the system repair it, or would she lose that skill, forever?

  And that wasn't even mentioning the fear of permanently adding a structure that made her unable to see or hear on accident. Maybe she could accidentally give herself some weird mutation, or just outright kill herself if she made the wrong moves.

  So Zoe continued to push deeper, and deeper. Past her Enchanted Mirrors, past her skills and her classes, past everything she could recognize. Just to see what there was. To see an end, or a wall, or some kind of starting point. A nucleation point, anything.

  But days passed, with nothing to be found. No matter how far she tried to dive within herself, she never found anything definitive. Even as she spent hours trying to push deeper, all of her familiar skills were just a stray thought away. The distance she could feel her mind wandering through her soul more of an illusion than genuine distance.

  Zoe leaned back against the cold damp rock of the cave she was in and sighed. At some point, she'd need to bite the bullet and try something. No amount of searching within herself was ever going to show her some magic answer to forming her own skills. There wasn't an instruction manual included with the system, no tutorials or guides to follow along with.

  If she wanted to steal Enchanted Mirrors — and she very badly did, she would need to rip the bandage off and take a risk.

  She turned her attention to the Enchanted Mirrors in her soul. At such a low level now, there were only four of them. Each one a monument standing in her soul, a solid structure contrasting the bubbling, gaseous soul that made up everything around them. Even her other skills looked less solid than the Enchanted Mirrors did, though not by much.

  For all their glorious, powerful structure, they were still a part of her soul. They contained that same gaseous, strange existence that filled whatever space she was in. They were just more present.

  Like an imprint on somebody's favourite chair, or a polished nose on a statue of a cat. Each mirror was still a part of her soul, bubbling and twisting itself in different shapes. But it followed a pattern — more even than the patterns of mana she normally had to steal. These were definitive, they weren't mere hints at a mirror but more like the shadow of a mirror's soul.

  Within the mirrors was a stabilized zone, free of the coursing, rushing currents of soul that surrounded them. A place where Zoe could shove her enchantments and know they could be drawn on at a moment's notice.

  Zoe bit her lip. What was the point of the mirror, then? Was it necessary for the skill to work? Or was the mirror part just flavour, puffery, for whoever made them? If she could stabilize a zone in some other form, without all of the ornamental bits pulsing around the exterior, would she be able to draw on whatever she had stored inside all the same as Enchanted Mirrors?

  Or would it not work, because it wasn't in a mirror? Or maybe, the mirror's form was what was necessary to even have a stabilized zone for her enchantments to begin with.

  She shook her head. She was getting distracted, pulled away from her task by the fear of what she had to do. She turned her attention to an empty space within her soul, not even the faintest speck of a skill or feat visible in the distance and took a deep breath.

  A miniscule tendril of mana stretched through her body, pulled through her arms and legs, to the tips of her fingers and the tips of her toes. Searching for some way to get to her soul. She focused on that empty space within her soul, reaching out to it like she did when she turned off one of her skills as she tried to drag a piece of mana along with her consciousness.

  And as soon as she did, pain wracked through her body. Zoe gasped for air, pulling her mana back, but the pain didn't subside. A throbbing, pulsing pain deep within her soul. A piece of her that wasn't used to feeling anything suddenly feeling like it had been hacked through with a dull butcher's knife.

  Zoe grimaced, clutching at her knees as she tried to take deep breaths to calm down, waiting for the pain to pass. But it still didn't.

  She turned her attention inwards, struggling to focus on her soul as the intense pain battered against her mind. She looked for that empty space and found a single wisp of light floating within it. The bubbles of her soul that drifted through the space burst when they hit it, splattering an awful blackness against the horizon.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Zoe reached out to the wisp and grabbed it, pulling it back towards her. The wisp shot through her soul, smashing through dozens of bubbles. Each one trying its best to rip her consciousness away and leave her lying a crying, bumbling mess on the floor of some cave she didn't even know the name of.

  Zoe struggled against it, forcing herself to stay conscious as she dragged the wisp of light through her soul. Eventually, after several seconds that felt like centuries of incredible pain, the wisp of light was ripped from her soul and returned to the ambient mana. The pain left, the only trace it ever existed a dull throbbing in the back of her mind not quite enough to even be considered a headache.

  Several more minutes passed as Zoe breathed deeply, regaining her composure. She looked through her soul, through her skill list, her classes and feats. Everything looked the same, to her. Mana rushed through various skills, pulling elements from nothing and whipping them around the cave she sat in.

  Everything felt normal. Whatever she did, there didn't seem to be any permanent effects from it at least. The experiment was painful, disorienting and ranked pretty low on her list of fun things to do on a date, but it was a success. She didn't manage to recreate her Enchanted Mirrors, but she did learn a few very important pieces of information.

  The first was that with a little effort, she could bring in mana to her inner soul and manipulate it. Whatever structures she needed to make, she could force into shape with her mana and enough time.

  The second was that she could remove mana from her inner soul. It wasn't a permanent addition. She could pull mana into her soul, manipulate the inner reality to her liking and then tear it out before things got too bad if she needed to.

  And the last thing she learned, which might have been the most important thing, was that the experience was painful. She knew it would be, she had expected it to be. But what she hadn't expected was for it to be the exact same feeling of having the system tear through her when she took a new class.

  Which was more than a little terrifying, but for Zoe's goals was an excellent sign. It meant that whatever the system was doing, Zoe could repeat, with her own mana. As long as she could maintain her focus and consciousness through the system shock.

  It also meant that the endless expanse of effervescent essence might even be her genuine soul, if that was a thing. Though, she supposed it could also be a middleman for her to interact with her soul. The system sitting between that bubbling mess and her soul, replicating whatever she did to her real soul, or whatever manner of existential form she had beyond her physical body.

  And there was only one way to be sure of that, Zoe thought. If what Zoe could see was a middleman, the system would bypass it when it needed to make adjustments to her soul. It wouldn't need to go through the middleman, it would already have a direct, integrated connection.

  Zoe turned her attention inwards, and watched her Enchanted Mirrors. She took a deep breath, and replaced her Enchanted Mirrors class with Mana Storage.

  In an instant, an incredible amount of mana tore through reality, flooding the dark expanse with wisps of light. They ripped through the space with expert precision, passing by each of the drifting bubbles as her Enchanted Mirrors structure was torn apart piece by piece. Then, just as quick as the mana came, it vanished.

  A wide grin appeared on Zoe's face. There would be more secrets to the system's power, of course. The physical changes it created, how it formed stats and classes, the bonuses. How the system could interact with, quite literally, every single living, sentient being at the same time. So many pieces that they didn't understand, that Zoe wondered if they ever could.

  But now, at least one small piece of the system's magic had begun to make sense. Skills were carved into a person's very soul. The soul itself was still confuddling — how did a definition of as kill being in Zoe's soul make her able to draw on its power so effortlessly? Was there some connection between her soul and her mind? Was her soul just a piece of her mind?

  So many questions that would be answered, one day. The important thing for now, was that a definition being in Zoe's soul was how the skills were formed. The system pushed its mana through a person's being, forming a memory or a structure that the person could draw on naturally. Whether that happened through some secondary layer the system used, or whether that was the natural way of the world, Zoe wasn't sure, and didn't need to figure out immediately.

  All she needed to do was watch what the system did when it created her Enchanted Mirrors, and then replicate the process for herself. It was nothing more than recreating any other skill. Follow the mana patterns, and then repeat them.

  The only difference was that this time, she needed to be precise. Zoe didn't know enough about her soul to rely on the system correcting her. She didn't know if the system even would. When she formed the Enchanted Mirrors in her soul, would the system grant her the skill, or would she just have the skill herself, as her own person?

  If she made some mistake in the process, would Enchanted Mirrors still work? Or would one small variation turn it into some weapon of destruction, wreaking havoc through her soul? There were too many unknowns. When she created the skill in her soul, she needed it to be exact. No modifications, no brute forcing. One attempt, one success.

  Zoe turned her attention back within herself, to where she remembered her Enchanted Mirrors to be. Then she pushed the system to replace her Mana Storage with Enchanted Mirrors. The slightest pinprick of pain shot through Zoe's being as the skills were switched, barely even perceptible when she was specifically looking for it. But nothing appeared in front of her.

  She checked her skill list and saw Enchanted Mirrors sitting at the bottom. She turned her attention back inwards, and found her familiar Enchanted Mirrors sitting within her soul.

  "Tsk," Zoe scowled. The system didn't put skills in the same place each time. Of course it wouldn't.

  Zoe tried again, and again, over and over as she drifted through her soul and hoped for the system to choose somewhere she could see. Switching skills was quick — she could try again almost every second. Thousands of attempts went by, then tens of thousands.

  She tried urging the system to switch her skills at the same time she pushed her consciousness elsewhere, tried racing through her soul as quick as she could while the system worked its magic. She tried everything she could think of, to find the system's magic as it worked.

  But the system's mana was never anywhere to be seen. Not even the faintest wisp of light or even the hint of power in the distance able to be felt by her. Zoe felt that could only mean one thing. The system knew where she was looking, and went out of its way to be hidden from her.

  Which meant that if she wanted to replicate her Enchanted Mirrors, she wouldn't be able to just copy what the system did. She'd never be able to see what the system did, no matter how hard she tried to. She could spend thousands of years trying, but if the system was able to know where she was looking and simply put the skill somewhere she couldn't see, she'd just never see it.

  At best, she could watch as the system dismantled the skill and try to recreate the process in reverse. But there was little sense in the process. Destruction didn't require the same precision construction did. There were details that might be necessary, patterns that might need to be imbued. She'd need to replicate all of them, in exacting precision, first try. Without ever seeing it done.

  Zoe shivered with excitement. It had been far too long since she'd last felt that familiar passion.

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