I had been staring at the white ceiling for a long time now.

I wasn’t sure exactly how long, somewhere between a few hours or maybe forever, and I hadn’t moved or spoken or done much of anything except breathe and stare and let the dull, constant throbbing from my arm stump and the place where my leg used to be and the stab in the side of my stomach and the cold, itching wrongness of the curse in my eye wash over me in slow, overlapping waves.

It didn’t feel like battle damage anymore.

It felt like the deep ache of wounds that had been cleaned and bandaged and treated and were now in the long, grinding process of being endured rather than addressed, which is a very different kind of pain than the sharp, immediate kind.

And in some ways, they were considerably harder to deal with because there’s nothing you can do about it except lie there and wait and think about things you’d rather not think about.

Like the fact that the white ceiling above me looked almost exactly like the white ceiling I had spent years staring at in a different kind of bed, in a different kind of room, in a different kind of world, and with different people sleeping in chairs beside it for the same basic reason.

I turned my head to the left for what was probably the hundredth time.

Nom-Nom was half-slumped over the side of the bed with her upper body sprawled across the blanket near my shoulder, her dense black hair fanned out across the bed and catching the dim light with that particular deep violet sheen it had.

Her seven-foot-two frame was folded awkwardly between the chair and the mattress in a position that was going to result in some serious complaints from her back when she woke up.

She was snoring, softly and completely without self-awareness, the way people only snore when they’ve been awake for too long.

A bit further down, by my leg, Peko sat with her back perfectly straight, and her eyes closed, deep in meditation, probably comprehending spells and stuff from her inheritance. She had been sitting like that every time I had turned my head in that direction tonight. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

I looked at both of them for a while.

And then I looked back at the ceiling, and my mind couldn’t help but recall...

Recalled how my mother used to sleep in a plastic chair beside my bed because the hospital hadn’t provided anything better, and she hadn’t had the money to arrange anything better.

Recalled how she’d come straight from a double shift at whatever job she was working that month to sit in that chair beside my bed to make sure nothing happened throughout the night before getting right back up at dawn to go back to work.

I had spent a significant portion of those eight years feeling like a stone tied around the neck of the one person in the world who deserved it least. Like a weight she couldn’t put down or wouldn’t put down, while she destroyed herself daily trying to carry without complaint.

The feeling I thought I’d never have to feel again... well, it had followed me into this world too, apparently.

I let out a long, slow breath and kept my eyes on the ceiling.

[I can’t live like this,] The though that had been going around the same loop for the past few hours. [I won’t be a burden. Not again.]

-Ding!

{You’re not.

You can lose every limb and both eyes, and it wouldn’t make a difference.

You are the destined hero, you command Time itself, you will never run out of mana...

And you have the Chronos Protocol.

You can be many things, but even if you tried, you cannot be a burden.}

I stared at the ceiling for a while after that, genuinely surprised before letting out a soft, quiet chuckle that I kept small so as not to wake either of them.

[And yet you walk on thin ice throughout your every waking moment in case something happens and Infinity leaks... but fine, I’ll take your word for it,] I both chuckled and appreciated the gesture.

[But even so, I can’t stop moving... so let’s move. I cleared the quest, didn’t I? Let’s see the reward.]

-Ding!

{

Reward Received And Stored in the Inventory.

Skill: Trace (Unquantifiable)

Description: Analyzes a target object, substance, or construct down to its fundamental structural composition and imprints the complete blueprint into the user’s long-term memory. Includes material structure, internal layering, and functional relationships.

*Note: Does not work on subjects with a soul or ego.

MP Cost: 60 (Scales with complexity and resistance.)

Awaiting Authorization for Integration...

}

[Well, consider yourself authorized.]

And the warmth hit immediately, spreading from deep inside my chest and climbing through my ribcage and up my neck and into my skull in a wave of hot, pervasive itch that settled into something in my brain that I didn’t even have a precise word for.

It felt exactly the way Eyes of Relevance had felt during integration, like something fundamental about the architecture of what I was had just been submitted to a renovation it hadn’t been consulted about.

The whole thing lasted for several minutes.

And then a wave of cool spread through my body from my core outward, calming everything it touched.

I exhaled through my nose and lay there in the aftermath of it while the new understanding bloomed inside my head as though it had always been there, but simply hadn’t been accessible before.

-Ding!

{Integration complete.}

I immediately reached into my inventory and pulled out a gold nugget.

I had worked with gold before, had been manifesting it through Metal Manifestation for long enough that its properties were familiar territory, but familiar and understood are different things, and Trace offered me the latter.

As a precaution or call it a survival instinct, I sent 65 MP/s of Ice Reinforcement straight into my brain, feeling cognition soar to heights beyond human while an icy calm descended over my thoughts, before I activated Trace with a single focused intention and felt my consciousness slip downward into the nugget.

And I immediately understood I had made a significant... underestimation.

A head-splitting pain erupted inside my head as the skill unceremoniously burned the knowledge in my head.

The information that constituted every aspect of that small lump of gold, its atomic structure, the precise relationships between every particle, the layering of material properties and functional interactions all the way down to levels that human senses had never been designed to perceive, hit my brain all at once in a single enormous wave, that even with the Ice Reinforcement enhancing my cognition, the impact was like trying to swallow an entire library in one breath.

I gasped, gritting my teeth, forcing myself not to let out even a single peep because Nom-Nom and Peko were right there, and I still had some dignity left.

The pain peaked, and then the ice reinforcement clawed it back, and after a few seconds that felt considerably longer, the ache subsided, and the information made itself home.

I lay there breathing carefully while a, frankly, ludicrous amount of precise, perfectly recallable, and perfectly structured knowledge down to the subatomic composition of gold sat in my head, somehow feeling natural.

[Dude, you could have warned me!]

-Ding!

{Did you seriously think you would activate the skill, sit back, and instantly know everything about your target down to its subatomic structure... just like that.]

[I mean, yeah... It’s magic, isn’t it?]

And I felt the system giving me a silent and incredibly judgmental side-eye.

But the information was there, all of it, perfectly accessible and perfectly organized, every correlation and relationship and structural property available for recall at the speed of thought.

And with the enhanced cognition running it felt as effortless as reading a page I had already memorized.

I lay there in the quiet, dimly lit room, turning it over in my head and feeling genuinely awed, which was not an emotion I had felt since Temporal Step.

I had been excited with every unlock, but not genuine awe.

But this was different, this was-

[This is powerful... like insanely powerful.] I thought, and meant it completely.

I activated Metal Manifestation in the second Spell Splicing slot and began from memory.

And with the entire atomic blueprint of gold burned into my long-term memory, it felt like I was doing simple multiplication, manifesting it felt less like casting a spell and more like thinking a thought.

And within a second-

-Pop-!

A gold nugget burst from my palm.

[Hot damn!]

What had previously taken anywhere between ten and thirty seconds, even with enhanced cognition, had just happened in less than a single second.

I stared at the nugget sitting in my palm for a long moment before the smile began spreading across my face that turned into a-

"Hehe~"

-Pop-!-Pop-!-Pop-!-Pop-!-Pop-!-Pop-!-Pop-!...

Gold nuggets began overflowing my palm before dropping onto the blanket while I kept going, cackling quietly to myself while a mound of pure gold built up around me on the bed, gleaming in the dim light.

More of it had accumulated in thirty seconds than most people saw in a lifetime, and I was lying in the middle of it like the world’s most battered and bandaged clichéd dragon.

And that’s when a huge yawn sounded from my left while a hand large enough to engulf my face rubbed at violet draconic eyes.

Nom-Nom’s groggy eyes looked at me.

Then looked at the gold.

And then looked at me again.

"Master!" She snapped fully awake and lunged forward, arms wrapping around my head and pulling my face directly into her chest in a bear hug that had no regard whatsoever for my current structural integrity. "You’re awake!"

-Mkhpf!

While my one arm and my one leg flailed in the pile of gold nuggets... not just because I was suffocating.