That’s strange. I have two panels of light now? One bears the ordinary personal status to which I’ve become accustomed. The other is completely blank, nothing but a gently glowing highlight in my vision. However, from the blank panel, I feel some sort of mental tug. As if the new one’s empty and desirous of purpose, lacking any ability to create its own.

  Is it broken? Am I supposed to do something? I can’t recall ever having seen these little threads on my status before. Ah, no, that’s not true. After I stole the ears’ status, in that ball of light before I absorbed it. It contained tons of little threads exactly like this one, all woven together. Was this thread the same thing? Is this new panel the stolen, second status? Is that why it’s blank? The first status already displays the default, normal functions. There’s nothing left for this one to do.

  Pondering hard on the matter for ideas, I remember the ears using his status to show maps. That’s another purpose. Can I do that too?

  Drawing more blood onto my claw, I tap it against the fresh panel, attempting to command some kind of change. I intend maps, imagining the same service witnessed on the other’s status. The surface warbles in response for a moment, but otherwise everything remains the same.

  Puzzled on exactly what to do next but heartened by having any reaction, my finger dances along the light’s surface as if intuitively drawing out what the ideas held in my head. It’s as if it has a mind of its own, moving outside of my control. To my eyes, it’s concocting total randomness, but the motions somehow feel so natural and obvious.

  Other than my hand, my body freezes solid in place, sitting on the floor and only supporting the action. My rigid spine aches, but the hand keeps going. Almost ready to collapse from the painful tension, my hand finally stops, and I feel an incredibly deep, profound change.

  A throbbing pain pounds at my head, and I release my long stale breath. It hurts so much. Falling forward onto my hands, I repeatedly smash my forehead into the ground. It must stop, or else, if it can’t, then it must be replaced with another, more acceptable pain! However, it only builds further until, after a final, contracting crescendo, there’s a sudden pop followed by a wave of relief and acceptance.

  What was all that?! It was so similar to when my mind mud becomes agitated, but so much worse. Did I make a mistake? Did I break something?

  Absentmindedly, I glance up at the new panel. It’s there! A beautifully rendered map of the library inside this pocket. It worked! However, is that it? After all this time, I know the library like the back of my hand, so this is hardly useful.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Excitedly, I gather more blood on my finger before dashing it around on the screen. Show me more! However, the surface only warbles again, resistant to any new additions. What’s wrong?

  After a moment of searching, a vision of the ears freely manipulating his maps plays back from my memory, and he certainly had no mud. He only used simple, helpful gestures likely paired with conscious intention, exactly as the books have described to me so many times now.

  As such, I instead imagine the Tranas sewers, and then gesture towards the light. The displayed scene briefly fades before reappearing with a visual representation of the complex web of interconnecting pathways living beneath the town’s surface. Rapidly, I imagine Tranas’ surface, Vastra, Figeholm, Central City, and any of the other dungeons that I’ve seen in maps but never visited. Every single experiment works wonderfully!

  Greedy for more, I zoom out to a picture of everything, further imitating my memory of the ears. The wheel, as the books call it. Central City, perhaps unsurprisingly, sits at the center of this sprawling wheel. The towns all encircle it, fairly equidistant from each other and the center. The villages then extend out from their respective towns, but only farther from the center and never back towards it. Noticing the pattern again, it’s as though they’re scouts penetrating deeper into the different sorts of dangerous wilderness surrounding and threatening the inside of the wheel.

  Amazing! I don’t need to carry any of these paper maps with me anymore. It’s like an enormous, extra backpack that’s only for information. Although, only visual information. It’s not like I can read any of the books on this.

  However, then it hits me. It’s visual, exactly like the map reading and writing songs. During my research, I discovered that those skills do also apply to my written notes in the form of the pictures and diagrams that I created to practice. Will those work here too?

  Imagining one of the song diagrams from my notes, I swoosh a hand. The screen again fades and reappears, but this time it shows an extensive conglomerate of all of the song diagrams that I ever created and many more that I didn’t.

  Everything everywhere is interconnected as one giant map of all the songs that I’ve ever heard of, read about, or learned. Not only that, but I also found myself able to manipulate this map exactly as the others. Move it around, zoom in to a particular location, or emphasize highlights for specific elements. It’s all the same, as if for escape routes or rat hole networks.

  However, in the case of the song diagrams, zooming in completely also shows me details on each of the songs. The descriptions I created for my notes, plus so much more. It’s as though appraisal and its associated songs have fully integrated in order to collect all of my knowledge and intuition together to describe whatever’s taken focus.

  Realizing the profound implications of this, I quickly search for it. There!

  How do I have this? Isn’t it too much? I’m probably missing most of what it’s mentioning in that list. I didn’t even focus on the hierarchies for those when building my notes at all. Is that why the notification light was so strange? And the pain? Did I really break something this time?