Chapter 28. Merge

I called up my status.

[Status]

Name: Howl Aridis

Tier: 2, Level 1

Strength: 104

Agility: 98

Stamina: 102

Mana Pool: 612

[Active Skills: 4/8]

Mana Manipulation: Level 22 (41%)

Fighting Sense: Level 18 (12%)

Focus: Level 8 (58%)

Still Mind: Level 3 (89%)

[Passive Skills: 1/8]

Mana Sense: Level 24 (7%)

[Special Skills: 1/?]

Spirit Sight: Level 1 (0%)

Whoa… the numbers had moved. I now had one more slot on both my passive and active skills, while all of the stats came up at once, and Strength climbed past a hundred for the first time in my life.

The pool was over six hundred now. I had spent the last year watching my reserves crawl from three-fifty to four-hundred by ten and twenty points at a time, and a single morning had carried them to six-twelve without me noticing the climb.

The Tier 1 me would have needed a month of hard quests to cover half that ground.

Beneath the status, the prompt was still waiting.

[Skill Merge Available]

[Focus] + [Still Mind] → ???

The conditions are met. The skill produced by the merge will replace the two source skills, raise the rank category above either of them, and free one active skill slot. This operation is irreversible. Proceed?

I had never seen that before. Not once. The System had given me skills, raised their ranks, increased proficiency, in a couple of cases let me choose between two options at once, but it had never offered to fuse two skills into a third. I had not known that was a thing the System could do.

Then again, I had also never had two skills that worked together the way [Focus] and [Still Mind] had.

“So?”

Master Saoren was still on the wall, watching.

“Sorry. Sorry. Yes.”

I accepted the prompt.

[Skill Acquired]

Greater Focus — Level 1 (0%) — Rank S

I looked at the text for a long moment.

…Rank S?

“Finally!”

I wanted to test it on the spot.

“What are we doing today, Master Saoren? Forms? Sparring? I want to see how it feels during the water pull, I think it might finally let me hold the shape for the full sequence, and there’s also an earth pull I’ve been thinking about, I know I failed it before, but now that the reserves are where they are and the skill is where it is, I think if we went at it again this afternoon I could—”

“Nothing, child.”

“…What?”

“Today is your last day here. You leave this evening or you will not reach the academy on time.”

I sat down on the flagstones without meaning to.

Now that I thought about it, how long was here for? Had it already been seven days? I had been on the mountain for seven days… Oh.

The ride to Sartheon was a day and a half at the pace the Greymanes held, which meant if I did not leave by sundown I would present myself at the academy gates after the summons expired.

“…I’m not ready.”

“You are as ready as you need to be for the next part. What comes next is not a thing I can teach you. The academy is not a place I can follow you into, and the lessons there are not mine to give. I have given you the fundamentals. You have done the work. There is nothing I can put in front of you this afternoon that would be worth the hours you need for the road.”

“I… I could come back later? Before I leave for Sartheon, I could ask my father for a delay, I could tell the council the training—”

“You could not, child. And you will not.”

…I did not know how to put it.

The last five days had been the worst days I had put my body through in my life. I had said fuck more times in those five days than I had said it in the previous sixteen years combined, and I was reasonably sure Saoren had heard me do it on at least four separate occasions without commenting.

I had almost thrown up after the second set of duck walks on day three and I had thought, on day four, somewhere between the eighth pull-up and the ninth, that I was about to actually die.

…And yet, I did not know the last time I had felt this at peace.

The keepers had fed me simple food, asked me simple questions and listened to the answers like they mattered. I had eaten dinner with them every night of the week, and Mireth had told me three stories on three separate nights about previous keepers who had tended this garden before her, while I listened to all three of them the way I used to listen to Nana.

And Saoren, for all that he was short with me, called me child or told me to stop talking about things and start training, had sat on that wall and watched, and the watching had felt, more than anything else I could name, like Nana’s presence.

He was harsher than Nana had ever been. He did not bring me books or laugh at my jokes and he did not once pet my head the way Nana used to pet it when I had done well in a theory lesson.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

But he was there. He stayed on the wall when I did the sets and he corrected me when I needed correcting and he did not leave, not once, and the staying had done something to me I had not had a word for until this moment.

For a long second, I considered staying.

Just staying. On the mountain. Giving up the academy, the summons, the four years of structured instruction ahead of me, and sitting on these flagstones for the rest of my life while getting stronger.

Nobody had ever pushed me the way I had been pushed this week, and I had liked it. I was stronger for it. I could be so much stronger still, if I just—

“Stop making such a face, we will see each other again, child.”

“…Huh?”

Saoren tilted his head a fraction.

“I am an elder spirit. My attention is required elsewhere in the spirit world, and I cannot always be there when you come looking. I am not a dog to be called to the door. But if you wish to train, and you wish to train with me, the bell remains where it has always been. Ring it once. Only once. I do not want to hear it twice, and if I hear it twice I will not come, and we will not have this arrangement again.”

He cleared his throat, as if embarrassed by the digression. It was almost funny, I didn’t know he could get embarrassed.

“If you ring it once,” he continued, “I will make my way here, and if you have prepared for my coming the way you have prepared this week, perhaps we will even sign a contract then, if I deem you ready and worthy of one.”

I did not say anything for a moment.

“…Have you lost your ability to speak, child?”