I came back heavier than I had ever come back.

The wake was the kind of wake that begins as awareness of weight rather than awareness of self.

My body was where it was supposed to be, attached at the joints, attached at the soul, the attachments better than they had been at any previous wake.

But, I was carrying a weight inside of me, of all the information I had earned, and the death I had paid for it.

I could almost hear the pulsing of Caelith Mourne, somewhere beyond the canvas of my tent.

In a short time, the pyramid would be breathing red across the sky.

Somewhere, a few dozen meters from where I lay, the cookfire was burning, and across the camp, Bari was alive, Dara was alive, and Aldis was cooking the bland abomination he calls porridge.

I let that be true for a moment without doing anything with it.

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

Mel’s voice. This silly phrase was the first sound I heard when I woke up.

Maybe I should have chosen a different catchphrase, but this was the price I had to pay for the loop; everything else returned to the way it was... except me.

Even if I changed the alarm’s voice, dying would reverse my effort.

I am a lazy cur, and I will not stop being a lazy cur until I am strong enough not to die again... until I can no longer be killed.

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

Three phrases. Three repetitions of the wake-up I had heard now thirteen times.

I sighed and switched it off even without opening my eyes. I just reached across, and it went silent.

It was then that I realized that my feeling of being heavy was not a mistake. Mortal Shell had grown again, and I was feeling the difference even before I read my status screen.

I opened my eyes, and as always, the notifications were already waiting. If I had perished like I was meant to, then all of this progress would have vanished, but I was cheating death and stealing from its coffers.

Hmm... What is the fate of thieves?

Shaking my head to push aside that grim thought, I read the first line that mattered the most to me.

[Soul Condition: Stable]

I let myself breathe. I had hurt my soul in the last casting, and Mortal Shell had healed it.

Even the cost of enduring a spell that had been severing my flesh from my soul had been repaired across the reset. I did not yet know whether the repair was complete or partial, but the system had returned my Soul Condition to Stable, and the system was known for always being precise.

I read the next line.

[Mortal Shell 30 → 47 (Acolyte) — Broken-Celestial]

Seventeen ranks!

None of my skills had ever grown in this manner, and it was proof that what was happening to me was not normal.

I suspected that with this loop, I could be the one who was ranking up this skill more quickly than anyone else before.

At this point, I was enduring spells from beings at the Adept level, and this skill had to endure stress beyond anything an Acolyte should have been able to put it through.

The skill that had crossed into the Acolyte tier at the previous wake had now climbed almost to the upper edge of that tier.

Mortal Shell at forty-seven was three ranks from the next tier threshold, and the threshold for the next tier at Adept was going to be the next major qualitative change.

I had told myself that this skill would be the core of my power system, and so far, it seemed that I was not wrong.

The skill had grown by making me survive what should have killed me, and in turn, it was making me harder to kill.

I felt it in my chest. The fabric of Mortal Shell had become something denser. Not just woven and re-woven, the way it had been at thirty, but bound with cords I could not see, anchored in places I had not previously known the body could be anchored from.

Mortal Shell at forty-seven was an architecture, the kind of structure a builder lays under a house when the house is going to have to stand against the weather that the previous houses did not stand against.

I read the next line, and I stopped.

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

A new Discipline.

I had not been expecting a new lightning spell, but on reflection, I should not have been surprised. Lightning Resonance was an Adept Tier level Attunement skill that enhanced a mage beyond anything an Acolyte could dream of.

With Lightning Resonance, my body was beginning to change, as the raw elemental forces of lightning were becoming part of my being.

The burst of power I had released in the last loop had been the primer needed to unlock a deeper understanding of Lightning, and I had been rewarded with a new spell.

It sat in the same category as Arc Lightning, and I felt for it.

The shape of it was already inside me. Disciplines appeared with a sort of internal blueprint, not the full skill, but the seed of it, which contained the pattern of how the spell wanted to be cast.

Arc Lightning had emerged from Spark with a clean sense of how to discharge a single arc through the staff at a single target.

Lightning Cascade was different. Its blueprint was a sustained discharge that branched into multiple arcs across multiple targets simultaneously, the way a tree’s roots branch through soil, finding paths, splitting, finding more paths, the cast continuing to spread for as long as the channel remained open.

It was a channeling Discipline.

A burst of excitement filled my head, and I could not imagine the impact of this spell if fully unleashed.

The channel-shredding cast I had used to sever Rex’s arm had been my first crossing into the channeling tier for lightning, and the system had registered the crossing.