I came back wrong.

That was the first thing I knew, before I had opened my eyes.

I came back with weight in my chest that had not been there in any previous wake, and with a cold spot inside me that I could not place.

It was as if Death Touched was registering a threat, but this threat was not coming from outside. It was already inside of me.

"Up, up, lazy cur. Elric, I say, wake up!"

Mel’s voice... My annoying little munchkin, only you would make me want to rise from the dead.

I let the orb finish its phrase, and it rang a second time, and a third.

My hand did not move toward it, and my eyes did not open, and the sound of my sister’s voice repeating the wake-up phrase three times washed over me without producing the lift it usually did.

That was the first sign that something was wrong inside of me.

Mel’s voice in my alarm was the same, but somewhere in the chain that ran from my ear to whatever part of me responded to her, somewhere along that chain, something was missing, and the missing piece meant the voice arrived as sound rather than as her.

I had brought back what was reset and lost what was not.

I opened my eyes, and the notifications were already waiting, as I had unconsciously pushed them all aside in the last loop.

They arrived in a list, and I slowly glanced at the first one.

[Soul Condition: Strained]

Mortal Shell had not been enough. Not for what I had asked of it. The skill had absorbed what it could absorb, and what it could not absorb was now a permanent part of my soul, and the system was telling me, in two flat words, that I was carrying it forward.

My soul was strained. A word that no mage wanted to see, but I was seeing this word too many times in such a short period.

The word felt thinner than I expected it to.

The last time my soul was strained, I had escaped into a memory, a vision, or a dream... I cannot really tell which, and I did not fully experience what this condition meant.

I had imagined Strained, in the vague way I imagined any future cost, as something that would announce itself with weight.

The reality was a quietness that I could not properly define. A small absence where small somethings used to be, and the knowledge that the small somethings were not coming back.

I sat with that for a moment, but I did not panic, because I knew that I would recover; after all, I came back the last time, right?

As if my thoughts were the trigger needed, I heard a small click inside my mind, and the world came back with colors again.

I gasped a little as I felt whole again. Should I be able to easily recover from soul damage like this?

The last time this happened, something must have triggered this recovery ability.

My eyes went down my status screen, and I saw the most likely suspect.

[Mortal Shell 17 → 30 (Acolyte) — Broken-Celestial]

I stopped breathing for a moment before slowly releasing it with a faint hiss.

Thirteen ranks in a single loop for a skill as powerful as this was insane.

The skill had crossed the Initiate threshold and stood now at the bottom of the Acolyte tier.

Looking back at the memories of that fight, I was no longer too shocked at the outcome, because of what I had asked of it.

The absorption I had demanded had pushed every fiber of the binding to a place it had not been designed to reach, and the skill had grown by surviving the demand.

I felt it in my chest, the way I had felt it in earlier loops. The weave that had been a thread, then a fabric, was now something denser. Something woven and re-woven and pressed flat into a sheet.

Mortal Shell at thirty was no longer a skill. It was a layer of defense, and I am sure that this Broken-Celestial Skill had been the reason I was able to recover from having my soul brought to the edge of destruction.

I sat with this knowledge for a while and thought about what this could mean to my path ahead.

My eyes went down to the next line, and I paused in slight disbelief.

[Lightning Resonance 0 → 1 (Initiate) — Rare]

Attunement skills were the bread and butter of the Adept Stage, and they were one of the necessary conditions for reaching the sixty in your core discipline.

Staff Resonance was a relatively easier Attunement skill to gain, because from the moment we became an Acolyte, one of the first items given to us was a staff.

We never went anywhere without our staff, and it was normal that in the fourth to fifth year, the more talented of us would begin to gain Staff Resonance, and I know of multiple Acolytes that even at their tenth year had not gained an Attunement Skill.

Like my first Attunement Skill, Lightning Resonance had been granted to me because of accumulated work, not because of standard progression.

I had cast lightning without a staff at the end of the previous loop. I had pushed soul-cast lightning through my bare right hand with nothing to focus it but the bond between Elric Voss and his discipline.

The bond was now a skill.

I should have been happy with this progress, but the weight of my memories dampened every bit of light in my eyes... I had made progress, and I will always stand, but it was not enough.

Pushing these thoughts to the side, I focused on what I could control. Lightning Resonance did not come with a description, the way Mortal Shell had come with one.

It was a good thing that Attunement Skills were something I had studied while in the Academy, and so I had a pretty good idea what it could do, and what was even more important than that knowledge was that I could feel it inside me.

I sat up, shut off the alarm, and looked at my hands; they had been restored to a pristine condition, but I knew they were different.