Flight had the benefit of being a continuous skill. Unlike Heal, where I could only observe the skill as it activated, I was able to watch it as it continuously worked. It was a different perspective. It let me see the skill with a critical eye and get the whole picture—rather than just a short glimpse. I was able to put together a lot more of how it worked before my blood ran out.

  Flight was a complicated fractal that was built from energy—blood or faith. From it came two thin connections where the energy was continuously added to keep it active. The longer I stared at the fractal, the less I understood. It was like some higher-dimensional object existing temporarily in mine.

  Of course, I tried to make sense of the incomprehensible. Every little nugget of understanding was another step towards my goal. That it was a fractal was my first clue. The two connections to my blood was the second. Now that I knew the shape of the Flight skill, I wanted to draw it so I could compare it to the others. Without paper, that was a serious challenge. But it was one I was able to solve by going to the nearest town to pilfer some food, paper, and mechanical pencils.

  At my table, I placed the paper against a solid and flat surface to begin writing. I activated Flight. Looking inward, I did my best to copy what I saw in my mind’s eye to the page in front of me. It was… a disaster. For all my years alive, I was a terrible artist! Still, that was the kind of thing I could fix with a skill or two.

  Steady Hand and Drawing were the two I went with. Steady Hand was like Flight in that it would remain active when I began to use it. Drawing was different. It was a passive effect that made any drawing I did just that much better. Besides allowing me to get what I saw on paper, the two would be another good source of data to compare to the other skills I had. I raised both to tier 2 so I could benefit from them enough while also not spending all of my experience.

  I watched the skills when leveling. As the levels increased, the fractal became more complicated in a linear fashion. When it ticked over to tier 2, there was a large increase in the complexity compared to the relatively simple fractal at tier 1.

  Now that they were both tier 2, I tried again with Flight. This time, I had a much better representation of the fractal. It wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t look like it was drawn by a child with crayons! I did the same with Steady Hand, Drawing, Toxin Resistance, and Disease Resistance. The continuously cast skills and the passive skills. Those were the easiest to sketch because I had the time to carefully observe and reconstruct them.

  My other skills—Heal, Toxin, Contagion, etc—those I would have to repeatedly cast to get glimpses of the fractal. Each glimpse would get me closer to replicating the whole thing. But it would take a while—and a lot of blood. Part of the problem was that I didn’t have any good targets for the skills that I could repeatedly use. This was particularly true of the offensive skills.

  And I needed those skills sketched out. After all, how else would I figure out the structural difference between active, passive, and channeled skills? Plus, each skill would—presumably—have a different interior that instructed it on what to do. Just from the skills I had, I could see a small amount of similarities and a whole lot of differences. The skills I possessed might not be enough to fill in the blanks to modify the two or three skills I’d need to modify. But I figured that was a future problem. The first thing I had to do was copy over the active skills.

  I started with Heal. That was the easiest one I could use without accidentally making a mess. It had a clean and organic-looking fractal that I was able to piece together after several days of casting—when I had the blood to do so. Spark was next. Its fractal was much easier since it wasn’t leveled as much. Even so, it still took me the better part of the day to jot down its fractal. Compared to Heal, it was much more aggressive looking.

  While I drew the fractals of my skills, I continued my everyday life. I hunted small animals, I gathered acorns and wood, and I kept a wary eye out for the cat. Just in case. It wasn’t a fearful eye, but a respectful one.

  During one of those outings to collect firewood, I remembered the very first tests I had done with my skills at Dad’s house. The answer to my problem of how to use my offensive skills over and over was staring me in the face: plants! I dug a small hole next to my hut and transplanted a nearby sapling. Using it—and its many, many replacements—I was able to map out the diagrams for Disease, Toxin, and Contagion.

  Now that I had the skills I actually cared about, I needed to compare them with the others and see what I could figure out. As it turned out, very little. There were small bits in common that I guessed were for the type of the skill, but otherwise everything inside was a mystery. I saw repeating patterns between the skills, however it wasn’t enough to go on.

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  The first breakthrough came when I compared Remove Toxin and Toxin. The two skills had the active tagging in their shape, of course. But it was what was inside that was most interesting. The patterns were different, but the shape and color of the pattern’s building blocks were the same! I figured that was some kind of key marker for toxin-related skills. Sure enough, the experience I got from the discovery confirmed my suspicions.

  That was where I got stuck. The next steps before me were to finish decoding the important skills, figure out how to build a skill, and finally modify the skills to do what I wanted. With what I had already researched, I discovered that I did not have enough points to work from. What I needed were more skills to compare against each other to get a much stronger idea of how skills were designed.

  And that was before I tried casting a skill without the help of the system! I had a sneaking suspicion that task was going to be unbelievably difficult. Just trying to move my blood had been painful, so I imagined a skill would be even worse if I fucked up even just a little. I had to remind myself to take everything one step at a time. I would fail if I tried to do it too quickly—without the adequate research and preparation—just as I would fail if I took too long to make the chain reaction happen.

  For my decoding efforts, I chose a variety of skills to purchase. I kept them all at level 1 for the time being. My thought was that—if I could identify the various parts of the fractal—I could level up the skills to see what leveling did to the fractals so I would know precisely which parts needed to change for the skills to work as I wanted them to. And what to change them into.

  The skills I bought fell into a few specific categories. The first were magical attack skills. Things like Fireball. These were broken down farther into the distance in which the operated and their target type. That is, long distance, short distance, touch, area of effect, and single target. The second were buffs and debuffs. Those—I suspected—would be useful for understanding how the Toxic and Disease skills worked. At least in part. I bought a handful for each category. It cost me a lot, but I felt it was important.

  Getting the skills down to paper took time—almost a year. The problem was that attack skills tended to be rather destructive. I needed to shoot them off again and again without blowing up the area where I lived. At the same time, I had to focus on the fractal enough to copy down parts of it until I had the full thing.

  With a little over a decade to go, I finally had everything I needed. Or so I hoped. What followed was a flurry of activity that primarily involved my brain hurting as I tried to put together a puzzle with only half the pieces. Each attempt at understanding drew me closer. Each section of the fractal was uncovered until I could almost replicate an entire fractal from scratch.

  Almost—it turned out—was not completely. The outside edge—boundary, maybe?—of the fractal coded whether it was a passive, an active, or a channeled skill. The feeling or color and shape of the fractal was what determined what the fractal worked with—an element, like fire, or flesh, as in the case of Heal, or anything else like that. That essence of the element was then used to build the fractal.

  The fractal’s internal shape governed what the skill did. While I hadn’t figured out everything, I could now read a fractal and have a fairly good idea of what it did and how it worked. Sections of the fractal had different purposes. Some specified the target—a thing or maybe an area—while others encoded the delivery method. There was interplay between all of the sections, which made it all way more complex than I had initially thought going into it.

  Still, there were bits—especially near the center—that I didn’t understand. They were mostly the same in every skill. The problem was mostly and always were two very different things. I didn’t notice any patters or consistency between the skills. Seemingly different skills would have the same center while others that were very similar did not. I couldn’t understand it at all!

  Then I moved to the last segment of my experimentation: leveling. How did the skills change with each level—and especially when tiering up? I chose a small number of skills to test with and raised them one level at a time while capturing the resulting fractal. It was an easier task than making the initial fractals as the general structure stayed the same. I only needed to mark down the differences.

  It was in those differences that I finally got an answer about the center. The center of the fractal is what indicated the level of the skill. Though it was more than that. The other sections also changed slightly with level. It was an increase in complexity rather than a change to the fundamental shape. This was especially true when the skill ticked over into the next tier.

  With all of the information, I felt I finally had a grasp on what I needed to do to my skills. At a baseline, the way the Disease skill worked was to debuff the target with a damage over time attack. Contagion then allowed that debuff to spread to anything nearby. The problem was that the source of the spread was only the originally debuffed target. I needed Contagion to hitch a ride on the debuff it was spreading.

  The missing piece for this was something I discovered when looking at another skill combo—Fireball and Conflagration. Unlike Disease or Toxin, Fireball created real fire. Thus, when Conflagration was added, the fire would continue to spread so long as there was fuel for it to burn—and it would aggressively seek out that fuel rather than combusting what was nearby and slowly spreading like a normal fire might.

  The first thing I needed to do was have Disease create something real and not just a debuff. From there, Contagion would make the spread aggressive and less passive. Instead of allowing the debuff to spread, it needed to purposefully seek out new hosts to kill. That was the special sauce I needed in order to reap the harvest of experience I needed to finish the system.