"I... don't know." Zoe answered. She hadn't even considered the thought of using her Beheld skill on a dungeon item. What would the origin of a dungeon item be? Even if it was twisted, and warped because of time. Or some other factor, if it wasn't just time doing it. Maybe it was the mana twisting the item's memory — and a dungeon item would certainly be overwhelmed with that.

  Though, there wasn't much way to know whether it was ambient mana causing the memory fluctuations or if they were caused by the simple passage of time. Nor was there any way, as far as Zoe knew, to tell whether or not a dungeon item was created recently.

  Some people thought there was, at times. People would get excited about some item that they received from a dungeon that was supposed to be fresh and new — others would get excited about an ancient relic they'd found.

  Zoe's own personal theory was that every item was new. Dungeon items weren't brought over from somewhere else, but manufactured on the spot. Even if they seemed old or ancient, that was just because the dungeon created them to look like that.

  Even she could do it, if she wanted to. She could create some enchantment and wear it down so it looked like it had been sitting in the mud for hundreds of years. There was no true method of determining the age of dungeon items, in Zoe's opinion.

  Not when dungeons were system creations, and when the system was an intelligent, deceptive actor.

  Eliza summoned a small golden ring, shining with pale green light and handed it to Zoe. "Here, I got this one from one a few years ago. What does it show you?"

  Zoe pushed mana into her skill, and her perspective twisted as she was brought into a new memory. A short older man leaned over her, huffing and puffing in the frigid environment he was working in. Sweat beaded on his brow, contrasting the thick clouds of breath that escaped him with each fluttering gasp. He smiled as mana rushed from his form, flooding Zoe's vision and bringing her back to reality.

  "Again," Eliza said after Zoe shared the story.

  A similar story repeated. A frigid environment, a flooding of mana. But this time with a tall, younger man not struggling quite so much against the aggressive cold.

  ”Again,” Eliza said.

  A frigid environment with a stout young man covered in several layers of shoddy fur clothing passed through Zoe's vision.

  "Again," Eliza said.

  Zoe sighed. "Eliza."

  "Again!" Eliza's eyes lit up.

  "It's cold, and probably a man made it. I think that's all we're going to get from it." Zoe said.

  "But what if—" Eliza started to say.

  "No. You know as well as I do that it's more important to figure out how the memories get warped than it is to just keep throwing myself into that. It's not very comfortable, you know?" Zoe crossed her arms, staring at Eliza with a stern face.

  Eliza's head rocked back in frustration. "I know. I know. But you're probably seeing some other world right now! Or, the system's interpretation of another world! Or something. It's so fascinating."

  "It is," Zoe agreed. "But it's also disorienting. I'm not just seeing the visions, I'm in them. I live through them. It's a strange feeling."

  Eliza sighed. "Alright, alright. Fine. You can stop losing yourself in that ring. I need it back, though."

  Zoe chuckled and tossed the ring back at Eliza. The ring vanished the instant she caught it, whisked away into whatever storage item or skill the woman used.

  "You going to head off then? To stalk a school full of kids?" Zoe asked.

  Eliza giggled. "Something like that I think, yeah. I need to see Beheld, and you need to see my soul. Or my whatever that thing is."

  Zoe nodded. "Well stay safe then. And good luck. Let me know when you get the first of the classes."

  "You too, Zoe." Eliza smiled, and then vanished.

  Zoe leaned back in the wooden chair she was sitting in. The laundry list of tasks to do was enormous — even after Eliza had helped work through a couple of the more complicated ones.

  There was the tedious process of stealing skills from all four of the sub classes — not to mention all of her Omniscient skills. There was testing to do on all of the skills, enchantments to figure out. And once all that was done, she had to make a difficult decision.

  Enchanting classes were just bad. Enchantrith was a powerful enchanting class, the most powerful she'd seen definitive proof of. Maybe somewhere in her list of classes was something better, but of the ones Zoe had seen or heard of, Enchantrith was right at the top.

  And it was still just bad, from a more general sense. It, or a class like it, was irreplaceable only because of one fundamental flaw. She needed the mirrors. Life without being able to flash enchantments onto objects in an instant was just not life, in the end. Most of the skills she could steal, but that one she couldn't.

  Which was a particularly large flaw, Zoe felt. It was just the one skill in this class, but it might be an entire subset of new classes that she's not getting because she's never been able to accomplish anything with her soul. Soul enchanters, soul mages, soul warriors. An entire element comprised of the most powerful skills she'd seen, lost on her because of her fear.

  Zoe put the decision to the side for now. One day, she would need to step past her fear and conquer it. But for now, there was plenty to do that wasn't terrifying. She turned her attention back to her current work. Arcane Beholder would be the first class she'd steal everything she could from.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  The system wracked its magic through her body and soul at Zoe's request, ripping her Enchantrith class out and replacing it with Arcane Beholder. A significant downgrade to both her combat capabilities and her quality of life, all because of a single skill she was now lacking. Pathetic, Zoe thought to herself.

  Arcane Beholder had a few skills she wanted to steal. She'd try to steal all of them — she had the time, after all. But Mana Cloak and Obnubilate seemed particularly interesting for her.

  Recreating skills was something Zoe hadn't actually done seriously in quite some time. For almost a thousand years, she stuck with the same class options she had. Never wanting to step out of the power they granted her, addicted to that intoxicating might. She'd found some skills that were interesting that other people had, and recreated them, at least early on.

  But after a few hundred years? Zoe just couldn't be bothered to care much for the next variant of fireball that some mage wandered in with. Yet another shoddy implementation of a teleport. In the first place, having somebody willing to sit around for a day or even sometimes two and use their skill over and over was rare. Or expensive.

  Not to mention that it meant Zoe had to also spend a day or even sometimes two with that person, and that wasn't always a pleasant experience.

  Zoe's time had been turned to refining what she already had. Testing out new enchantments, training new enchanters, defending Foizo from attack, building new gates for them to travel to. Escorting officials to potential new expansions or acting as some underlying threat when they had dealings with neighbouring countries.

  She'd taken quite a liking to experimenting with new skills, too. Taking each one to a point she could be proud of. Whittling, weaving, sewing, stonemasonry, fishing. Skill after skill acquired, experimented and played with.

  Not to mention that without Enchantrith, Zoe was now relying on an entirely new sense to identify her skills. Omniscient Beholding was probably better than Mana Sight. There was more information, more details, more depth to the mana she could see.

  But all of that meant that as Zoe cast her Mana Cloak and watched the mana rush to surround her, she felt almost like a child witnessing the ocean waves crack against the cliffs with a sense of wonder and awe. It was overwhelming, it was powerful and it seemed impossible to truly understand.

  Zoe sighed, and got to work relearning how to break apart each piece of the skill with her new sense. The mana wrapped around Zoe, twisting and winding in steady, patient patterns. The ambient mana that surrounded Zoe brushed up against the steady swirling mana of her skill, pulled around her in a smooth, intentional movement. Not even the faintest bit of the mana surrounding her penetrated through the thin barrier her skill formed, with each ray of the moons light dragged along with them.

  Every wisp that drifted towards her was ripped around and let to carry on its way after it passed.

  She turned the skill off and closed her eyes, focusing on the individual wisps that drifted around her. Colourful lights that floated through the dim moonlit night. They passed through Zoe's body, drifted through the ground around her, congregated in the branches and leaves of the trees.

  Zoe reached out with her own mana, gently nudging the wisps of light aside. One by one as they tried to intersect her, a small tendril of her own mana would reach out and pull it around her.

  It was simple, in theory. Manipulating ambient mana was almost second nature to her at this point.

  In practice, there were just so many more wisps of light than Zoe had ever thought of. She'd spent many years practicing her mana manipulation. Many years playing with the wisps of light almost passively, as she fidgeted mindlessly, distracted from whatever task she was focussed on.

  She'd never had to focus on every single individual wisp of light with as much focus as she needed now, though. And there were so many more than she'd thought. She would have guessed dozens of wisps would intersect her every few seconds, not the hundreds she was having to deal with.

  Keeping track of every single one was a challenge on its own. Moving them gently, without changing their course after she released them was an entire new layer of difficulty on top of even that.

  Zoe smiled. It had been so long since she'd felt this sense of admiration for the system. Somehow, the system had become this dull noise in the background of her life. A passing fascination, a familiar tinnitus.

  The system deserved so much more than that, in Zoe's opinion. The ease with which it manipulated these hundreds of wisps around her, all while concealing the specific patterns it used to do so with a complicated web of mana. The beauty of it all. It was perfection, it was beyond anything Zoe was capable of. Even at her peak.

  Which raised a question Zoe often thought about. Could somebody ever exceed what the system could handle? Was there some upper limit on the system's power? Some point, where the system no longer could improve a person?

  Zoe believed there to be. If somebody made the system — which Zoe firmly believed, then there needed to be some way to reach that level of power herself. Relying on the system to reach that level of power seemed contradictory, but Zoe couldn't see any other means of reaching that power either.

  Maybe that was the point, she often told herself. Maybe the whole point of the system was to give people some way to improve themselves without ever being able to threaten whoever made it. All the power Zoe and everybody else had, able to be ripped away at a moment's notice.

  Even rewarding them with skills almost felt malicious. The moment Zoe would figure out how to replicate a skill, the system would reward her with some shortcut.

  They were never incentivized to do things themselves. To feel the essence of reality itself twisting and warping around them, and to bend it to their will on their own power. They were incentivized to play along with the system.

  But what options did somebody have? Avoiding the system was tantamount to suicide. Disabling every skill, every class, every bonus and feat that she had would leave her possibly even just dead.

  What would happen if she disabled her immortality, now that she'd lived for so long? Would all of that age be forced on her in an instant, leaving her drifting in the wind as a pile of long dead ashes? Or would she just begin aging again, from this point onwards?

  Could she even disable her immortality, if she wanted to? Zoe had never tried. She'd never wanted to.

  She often fantasized about the idea, though. Shutting off everything the system offered her. Ignoring the entire creation, and pursuing power through her own means. How far could she make it, bending reality itself to her will, instead of through the system? Could she take on even the lowest level dungeon? Could she cast a single skill?

  Zoe wasn't sure.

  Days passed as Zoe continued studying her new skill, pushing and pulling at the wisps of mana surrounding her.

  *Ding* You have unlocked the Mana Cloak general skill.

  "Tsk," Zoe clicked her tongue. The skill was beautiful and powerful, a twisting surge of mana that so deftly moved mana and light around her with a deft, gentle touch.

  The abomination Zoe created was nothing like it. Tendrils of mana reaching out and twisting wisps around with difficulty. An ugly, brazen sight compared to the system's creation — and Zoe doubted it gave her the same level of invisibility. Yet, the system still gave her the skill.

  What she'd done was close enough for the system to recognize her attempt and reward her. Or as she was beginning to feel more and more lately, to recognize her attempt and silence her.

  She shrugged the thought aside. Sometimes she wished she had Eliza's raw passion for the system. Even if the woman recognized the system might be malicious, she loved it so much that she didn't end up caring anyway. As long as she could learn something more, figure out another piece of the puzzle, she was happy.

  Maybe it was because of where Zoe came from, maybe it was just because it was the kind of person Zoe was. But Zoe couldn't put those feelings aside on a moments notice. The system was amazing, but it was terrifying. It was beautiful, and difficult to look at. It was ambiguous, in every sense of the word.

  One day, Zoe would figure it out. She sighed. But for today, she had a lot more skills to trick the system into giving her.

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