The next morning finally brings a peace of mind that has been severely missing in Adrian’s life for a very long time. Even before the Trial, the mere looming threat of it had been enough to keep him awake, practicing as much as he could.

  Then the Trials were another challenge on his body, mind, and soul, and even when he finally completed it, he hadn’t been given the chance to relax and enjoy, yet been dragged into a party he clearly didn’t wanna attend.

  Only now, detoxified and of a much more sane mind, does Adrian feel like he can sit back and relax for a while.

  He sits on his bed, propped against the wall, with his Status open in front of him.

  Name: Adrian Alphona

  Class: Manifold Warden lvl 1

  Body: 1

  Kinesthetics: 3

  Resistance: 0

  Mind: 3

  Mystics: 5

  Mana: 50

  Free Points: 2

  Primary Abilities: Avatar, Timer, Prison

  The zero in Resistance continues to annoy Adrian, its mere presence a blight on his Status. Without that single point, his body will continue to be weak and susceptible to any outside interference. Heck he might injure himself with his own strength if used too much. He’ll also age faster than others.

  Reluctantly, Adrian assigns just one point to it, and finally feels the effect of the final stat unlocking. It is just one point, and yet he can feel his skin be a bit more tense, less susceptible to tearing. Or maybe he is just deluding himself to believe that.

  He leaves the last point alone for later uses. A single point might not be worth too much, but with a few more levels, and if stuck in a critical condition, those points can easily save his life.

  I want to go to the Tower.

  To gain strength, to test himself. He has the powers now, the bare minimum qualification required to become something in this life.

  First let’s see what my abilities give me.

  Adrian finds a useless and empty pen from his desk, rests it on the bed, and casts the one ability he has been itching to try for a long time with a snap of his fingers.

  Mana: 50 → 45

  A yellow spark lights the room for a moment, the pen jerks, and then is encased in a translucent lantern like construct which is just big enough to fit the pen properly. The ‘prison’, looks like a square lantern, with yellow glass, and a deeper yellow making its frame and the handle on top. It lays on his blanket with a clear weight.

  The pen floats inside the lantern, as if suspended in a syrupy liquid.

  Slowly, Adrian reaches over and touches the lantern, a faint warmth radiating from it and infusing him with a comfort like none he has ever felt. It feels like home, like safety.

  Adrian picks it up and inspects it from every direction. The tactile feel to it, its non-existent smell, the faint light glowing from it, and the almost nonexistent taste. It tastes a little salty. Just a little.

  Then he tries to break it, flexing his awakened body to crumble it in his hands, but try as he might, the prison does not budge at all. He puts it on the ground and stomps on it after jumping from his bed, but even that does not produce any result.

  I wonder if those at higher floors can break it? Probably yeah.

  Convinced with the durability of his prison he next tries another very interesting feature of the ability. It’s shrinking effect.

  Shrinking the prison comes with a little mind juggling as he has to remind the prison that both the lantern and the thing inside has to shrink, not just the lantern.

  The prison shrinks and the pen inside too, but the ratio isn’t that high.

  The prison shrinks by around 5%. 5% for 5 points in Mystic? Would the shrinking effect become 100% at 100 points? There must be some fail safe. Maybe it’s not a linear expression, but only appears so in the initial stages? More tests are required. The weight remains the same though. That has to change.

  Adrian then tries to only shrink the lantern and see what effects would appear on the pen. The prison closes in on it, pressing a magical and physical weight on the pen. Adrian hears a crack, and then the prison stops shrinking.

  He dispels the prison, letting the pen rest on the bed, a little broken now.

  Then Adrian tries to pop up another prison, one with no prisoners in. The snap of his finger reverberates through the room, a yellow spark comes to life, and then it all fizzles away. Nothing happens.

  Adrian checks his mana points, and they too are the same. 45 points just like before.

  Why did it not consider the air as a prisoner? Maybe it’s because I don’t think of it as such? Is it a matter of perspective, or skill level?

  Then Adrian spends the next five minutes convincing himself that the air around him is not following his rules and is being bad air so it must be confiscated. Even to him, it sounds like pure bullshit, but he has to try. He snaps, the sparks come, and then nothing. But this time he feels a shift in his power.

  A spiritual hesitation is the only word he has for it. Like his power itself is unsure if it should activate or not.

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  So he tries again, meditating and moving deeper and deeper into that place within himself he goes when things get too hectic and he needs some calmness. The place where his own body feels like a puppet in his hands.

  The air starts to smell bad, almost poisonous bad. Adrian starts to choke, his breath coming in short gaps and yet his mind feels calm. In that calm state he flexes the power flowing within him, and commands it to imprison the bad air.

  Snap!

  Sparks fly, a suction around him, and then all air around him is captured in another much larger lantern in front of him. Air rushes towards his face to fill the sudden vacuum, and the surprise of it all breaks his focused state.

  His mind drops back to his body, the air suddenly becomes good again, and the prison breaks.

  So it is my perspective. But it’s hard to keep thinking that the air is bad. It’s easy to think that some person is bad based on even the smallest things they’ve done against me, but how do you constantly convince yourself air is bad? How would I even breathe?

  That makes him wonder. How did he do it on the first try with the pen?

  The pen had been useless even before it. He realises. It was empty and since I don’t want empty pens, it ‘went against’ my rules. That’s why it can be captured.

  Seeing that he has 40 mana points, he leaves 10 more for the Avatar test later, and 10 just to be safe, and renews his experimentation with Prison.

  Throughout the experiment, he realises a few things.

  One, that it becomes very easy to create one when he has something bad to focus on. Like a blotch on a t-shirt, dead branches on his plant, and so on. Just the existence of those few things which shifts the object from being fundamentally working, to not, is enough.

  So in short, it doesn’t work on some arbitrary good or bad, or even that he could use it on anything. But whatever he imagines is not working properly for him, and is breaking the rules of his ideal world, goes to prison. Which is good, as well as bad.

  It makes the prison fickle.

  In the sense that should his mind waver, or his perception of his prisoners change, they can very easily escape.

  Can they throw their abilities from inside? What about psychic attacks? Would that work on me if they are imprisoned? What really happens to people inside?

  Two, that he can manifest it anywhere he has a direct line of sight and a depth perception to. He can’t open a prison high up in the air just because he can see it. He needs to have a rather blurry estimate of the distance. The more accurate the better though.

  Third, there is a certain limit to how big he can make the prison before it starts to take more than 5 points.

  Those are the few things he has been able to check until now. There are still a lot of experiments he has yet to conduct, especially ones on living beings. In the tower, his main enemies would be living creatures. Knowing more about his powers is good, but he also needs to know how they affect his enemies.

  Does the prison only hold a volume of space, or can it also stop time? Can noise travel out of the prison? Are there more criterias to what would make the prison spell not work?

  There are many questions, and so few mana points to spend.

  Adrian stills the stirring in his heart to focus on the second ability in his arsenal. Avatar.

  At his current level, Adrian is certain that he won’t be using Prison for much imprisonment, especially with his Mind stat as it is. Maybe it can work as a well-timed shield sometimes, but it will not give him any offensive strength.

  He’ll have to depend upon Avatar for that.

  Thinking of the spell brings back bad memories from the party two days ago. He is kinda sure that he has actually ended up using the spell, already revealing his hand in front of the entire clan.

  Perhaps that is another part of this party. To make new climbers reveal all their cards.

  Thankfully, two of his cards were unavailable at that moment, and thus he had only revealed 1/3rd of his hand. Good enough.

  That makes me wonder, but can I imprison the alcohol in my stomach? What about poison? Won’t that make me too strong? Is it even capable of that without destroying my organs first?

  That is one direction he could take when upgrading the skill. Something to chew on.

  Avatar!

  Adrian closes his eyes and focuses on the feeling of the spell within him, and then something clicks into place. A tearing sound resonates within his mind, and he hurriedly opens his eyes to see his body be split into two from the middle. It doesn’t even hurt.

  A very creepy second later, a doppelganger of his stood in the room by his side.

  No, not a doppelganger. An avatar.

  Adrian circles his avatar, the avatar’s eyes following him. It also has clothes on it.

  How does it have clothes?

  He tries touching them, and it has a very weird feel to it. It does not feel like cloth at all, but rather human skin. He pinches the shirt, and the shirt squishes just like skin would, revealing boundaries like skin cells that he didn’t notice earlier. Just that the cells here are much larger, and they seemed to move. Like worms.

  Creepy.

  Adrian had wondered if the avatar produced would have a split mind of its own, or perhaps a personality separate from his. But this is different. He can certainly feel a connection to it, and perhaps there is a proto-mind in the avatar, but it can only follow his commands, and do the work to the best of his abilities.

  Jump.

  He orders, and the avatar jumps. Adrian notes its posture, the way its legs move, the way it lands, and all of it is a very convincing replication of his own self.

  At least I don’t have to feed him every bit of knowledge like how to lift your leg and all that.

  Next he tries punching it, and orders the avatar to defend itself. Taking a boxing stance, Adrian’s fist blitzed forward, tearing through his avatar’s defense, and sending it sliding back. The avatar does not even flinch at the attack, nor at the pain on his hands. If it can even feel any pain.

  The defense seems a copy of my own.

  Adrian orders the avatar to punch him, preparing his defense, a tingling sensation on his arms before the blow even comes. This is weird. Getting attacked by my reflection.

  The avatar does not waste a second after the command is given, running forward and hitting his arms with the meanest looking punch it could deliver. Adrian should’ve expected this.

  Now it’s Adrian’s turn to go sliding back, collide with his bed, and then fall off right into his wall, injuring both his hands and head.

  As he lay there groaning and moaning in pain, he couldn’t help but accept that the avatar carries quite a punch. If it is copying his own strength, then perhaps investing more into Strength would be a very good idea.

  Ideas for his build, the strategies, adventures to come. So many ideas flashes through his mind at that instant, but all of that is destroyed when his mother knocks on the door.

  He hastily cancels the avatar, the creation vanishing in a wave of energy, and says, “Come in,”

  The door clicked open, and his mother peers in. With the same judgmental look on her face, she asks, “What was all that noise?”

  “Nothing. I was just testing my new abilities,” Adrian mutters.

  “Do not even try that next time! I don’t want you burning my house mistakenly. You might be a climber now, but you still live under my roof. Do you understand?” She yells.

  “But my powers don’t burn,” He mutters under his breath, but nods at her anyway.

  “Nonetheless, that is not why I am here. Mat’s here. So get along. He’s here with the rest of his team, so make sure you perform well.”

  But I don’t want to perform well in front of people like a clown!

  Adrian wishes he can say that outloud. To refute his parents. To use his powers and imprison her and her loudmouth. The thought flashes through his mind, and he entertains the thought for a few seconds, until it all crashes away.

  He gets up with a sigh of defeat, and walks behind his mother.

  #