The effects of Mind Palace continued to take root in my mind even as I began to work on the next skill. It was a strange feeling, having your mind doubled. It wasn’t that there were suddenly two streams of thought in my head, but I could feel the passive effects of the skill immediately. I also knew there was a deeper layer to reach once I was out of the woods here.

  As I had gained levels, my physical senses had become far more powerful. By now I was able to hear the tinkling of sand pushed by the wind. I could feel the tiny particles flicking onto the exposed portions of my skin. I tasted the sweat brought on by the heat before it even rolled down my face. I was unwilling to open my eyes and deal with the headache the glare would bring, but I expected I could watch the granules tumbling in the breeze with my naked eye at this point. The smell of my friend’s fear, weakening with every second of continued life from myself.

  The additional control of energy I had gained with the arrival of Mana Manipulation did a lot to calm them, it seemed. Like my more mundane senses, thanks in large part to the new form of Mana Savant, my magical senses were sharpening to a rapier’s point. I was able to tell that Merownis was keeping some energy prepared, though I couldn’t tell exactly what for. It was just possible for me to sense the churning mana within him from this distance.

  When I first awoke, the world outside of my body was nearly impossible to pay attention to. Even answering Merownis and Naea, or looking at my System prompts had been a struggle. Now, I could finally breathe again.

  Separately, neither of these things would have been an issue. Had I simply had a high Perception, the stimuli may have been overwhelming, but manageable. Between my improved physical faculties and the sensations felt through both ambient mana and Spirit, it had been difficult to keep my attention on any one thing. Thanks to the development of my first repaired skill, my mind could now truly be in two places at once. It was as though someone had turned down the volume of a white noise I didn’t even know was there.

  Mind Palace had immediately alleviated issues I had barely been cognisant of. Having stronger senses wasn’t bad, but when everything around you is as noticeable as you choose it to be, actually picking something to focus on was a challenge. With the new skill, I no longer had that issue. It was not as simple as having my personal mental capacity doubled, but rather that answers and decisions both came much faster. Superfluous information and curiosity was shunted to a deeper portion of the skill where analysis and planning took place.

  No point in putting it off, I reasoned with a mental shrug. Activating Mind Palace in full, I felt myself sink into my inner world. The process wasn’t always easy, but this time it was like falling asleep under anaesthetic. Once the skill activated, I was pulled away from the real world and into my own. I opened my eyes, knowing there would be no headache, and still regretted it.

  My inner world was having a few issues, it seemed.

  Continuing the dreamlike aspect, I couldn’t remember how I had ended up where I was but I recognised it by feel, if not by sight. I found myself standing upon a ravaged world, looking upwards at the bright light of my core and Spirit Well. I tapped my foot on the ground, frowning at how hollow it sounded. The dragon world had seen better days.

  The work I had done making the planet feel “real” had all been blown away by the effects of the poisonous mana. The sickly white looking ground which remained was fragile and I cautiously began to walk across it. The floor never gave way, but it felt like it might at any moment. The desolate planet howled with screaming winds, stripping whatever was left of the barren landscape to shreds. The only sight as far as the eye could see was more empty wasteland.

  “Are you going to mope forever or can we get to work?” A very familiar voice called out. I spun around quickly with a yelp, finding the source in the doorframe of a massive, decadent building which had certainly not been there before. Stretching into the distance to both my left and right, the beautiful place was as immediately familiar to me as the man who stood in the doorway.

  Red hair, long and messy. A slightly stooped posture which we both fixed at the same time upon seeing each other. The smile which people had described to me often throughout my life as “mocking” grew wide on the face in the doorway. Damn, I shook my head, walking forward. They were right. It is an arrogant look.

  The Mind Palace was exactly as I expected it to be. How could it have been any other way? The tall building stood defiantly on the ruined world, its pristine appearance at complete odds with the surrounding area. Slightly loath to be goaded into motion, even by myself, I took an extra minute to inspect the design. All of the stone looked freshly carved that day. The arches, columns and reliefs etched into the palace were intricate and masterful.

  “Ahem,” the Mind Palace version of me cleared its throat and raised an eyebrow. It was the look I gave someone when I was at the edge of my humour with their antics, and again I found myself supremely uncomfortable at being on the receiving end.

  “Nice place we got here,” I quipped, taking a single step and appearing inside. It was nicely decorated, with wide windows and interesting artwork. Pieces I had seen once and enjoyed were on show, but the layout was more interesting to me. A complex maze of hallways, each housing many closed doors which I instinctively knew were full of ideas and memories. I tried to open one, but it remained firmly shut.

  “They’re not for you,” the Mind-Me explained patiently. “Those rooms are for my storage, and they open when needed.” I shrugged, having known that already. What I had just done was the equivalent of trying to intentionally have a spontaneous thought, after all.

  “Let’s fix this then,” I said. While it was a true, full copy of myself standing opposite me, neither of were unclear on the dynamics here. Every action the Mind Palace version of me would ever take would be to help the main body. It was only being curt now because we were short on time, and even I knew that I could procrastinate with the best of them. “I will have to come up with a name for you though, maybe.”

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  “Let’s go with Tag,” the copy said with confidence. Others might not have understood, but I got it immediately, and the memory brought a smile to my face. Tag was a nickname I had taken for myself, formed by flipping my name backwards and removing the letters R and N. Exactly why I had chosen that as the foundation for all my future usernames, I wasn’t sure, but it definitely worked here.

  “Alright, Tag. Let’s fix these damned skills. That Scorpion Queen was a real bitch, huh?”

  “Well,” Tag answered, “if you had been more careful, you could have probably avoided the poison instead of taking a bath in it.” I aimed a withering look at the back of Tag’s head, the traitor. That was a thought I had tormented myself with during the most painful moments of my torture.

  “Yeah, just no confidence in my own magic,” I retorted. Tag turned around with an unimpressed look over his shoulder before opening the door they led me to. I nodded. It had felt resoundingly pointless to attempt to be passive aggressive towards myself. “Where are we?” I asked, hoping to change the conversation.

  “Welcome to the Observatory,” Tag answered with a theatrical flourish. The name was apt and Tag’s clearly prideful opinion of the room was not misplaced. This was quite possibly the most beautiful room I had ever stepped foot within. The walls around us simply disappeared, the act of entering the room like stepping into the outdoors. Not far from the door were two chairs and a table. Tag moved and sat down while I took my time getting over to him.

  In the sky above, and it was a sky, were dancing nebulas of mana. I knew each of them intimately, and looked at them with sorrow. They were my damaged and destroyed skills, fluctuating and warping even as I watched on. The ground here was the only thing which reminded me we were still definitely within the Mind Palace, the floor not changing from the stone it had been before. With a concerted effort, I altered the area around where Tag sat.

  A patch of grass sprouted from the ground in a single spot before expanding like ink in water. Within seconds, the fragile white ground was covered in dirt and foliage once more. Tag looked around with a bemused look on his face before smiling at me. “Take a seat,” he said, tapping the back of the other chair. Neither were ornate things, and upon looking closely, I pointed in surprise.

  “I know this chair!” I exclaimed.

  “Well, yes,” Tag replied. “It’s your Mind Palace. How did you think it would work?” I didn’t have an answer to that. Of course things in this place would be recognizable to me, but I hadn’t expected to sit on a stool from my past. When I was young, I spent a lot of time in the pub owned by my family, sitting on this exact stool very bored while the adults around me drank the day away. It wasn’t a pleasant memory, but the chair itself carried an innocent nostalgia, so I sat myself down. “Have you worked out what this room is for?”

  I didn’t answer immediately. It wasn’t to remind me of my childhood, that’s for sure. I looked up, into the vast clouds of energy in the sky above. “An observatory, was it?” I asked rhetorically, receiving no answer but silence. I followed Tag’s logic without a follow up, as it was my own logic ultimately. “Normally, those are for viewing the stars… not creating them.”

  “If you remember, you got close to something at one point and then let it drop. In fact,” Tag pointed a finger at me, “you’ve barely even scratched the surface of what we can do here.”

  “There’s a lot going on…” I murmured, not even bothering to make more excuses. This was a criticism straight from my own soul, and I took it on the chin. “Remind me? So I can continue ignoring the obvious place to spend my time.”

  “You’re such a dick,” Tag chuckled, shaking his head. “The imagery we have here works. It’s a little grand, but we’ll grow into it I’m sure. As something which is part skill, part you, I have a bit more knowledge about the background stuff. I can’t spill beans, but I can push us towards the right path.”

  “And what is the right path for us?”

  “For us, for now, the path is power.” Tag looked upwards, his eyes sad as they reflected the broken skills above. “We’ll have to sacrifice what might have been with some of these skills to turn them into something which can stand the stresses you put us through.”

  I was speechless once again. It was strange to think of Tag as a skill, but with the grief in his eyes at the idea of destroying the other skills, I saw it clearly. The phrase “there but by the grace of god go I,” came to my mind, and because it came to mine, it appeared in his. Tag’s sad look became wry as he told me to get to work. “The unformed mana up there is giving us some pretty nasty heartburn. We need to gather it and make it work for us.”

  I understood the assignment, and so the time for words ended. Bringing all of the power within Mana Manipulation to bear at once, I began by gathering the Haste skill together once more. Without the Mind Palace, fixing the skill would have been complete guesswork. This time, within the Observatory, I could watch the work. It was the difference between doing surgery in a well lit room or the pitch darkness. Tag was quiet, voicing suggestions when he felt my energy begin to falter or slip.

  Unlike Mental Fortress, which had been a level one skill with no alterations, Haste had already changed once. From the skill formerly known as Sprint, Haste was a much more complex tangle to unwind than Mental Fortress had been. Working on both the mental image in my mind and the more tangible mana channels within my body at once would have been impossible without this skill.

  With it, I knew I could do something amazing.

  With a thought, I began to gather other broken skills and draw them towards the framework of the Haste skill. While I did so, I also swaddled the main skill pattern with Spirit. Into that Spirit, I infused the intent for this repair. Haste was one of my favourite skills, if not my outright number one. Up until the fight with the Scorpion Queen, it had been my ace-in-the-sleeve to flip the tables in any fight. Tag urged me onwards, and I felt the presence of The Aspect of the Dragon watching from within the planet as I demanded the skill reform itself under my guidance.

  “It won’t be the same,” Tag murmured.

  “But that doesn’t mean it can’t be better,” I finished, losing myself in the act of creating a new skill from the ashes of my old ones. In relative silence, I worked with my other self to pull the chaotic threads of mana together in the sky. Sometimes they struggled against our attempts to contain them. Sometimes I struggled, my willpower flagging. However, in time, with the support of Tag, I didn’t give up.

  By the time I left my inner world, the stars were once more settled in their place in the sky.