I was half asleep when I was suddenly picked up. Hands pressed down on my wings and lifted me slowly. My eyes shot open and I looked at grey and purple cloth. Ignas. I opened my beak and screeched at him. Not an [Intimidating Screech], just a normal one. Though with my metal and glass body it sounded like a fork pulled across a plate. The hands let go and screaming joined my screech. I spread my wings as I dropped but still landed with a ringing sound on the stone. With a stumble, I caught my balance. My wings had somehow slowed my fall even with this heavy a body.

I got some distance and carefully eyed the ork. He was standing bent over, hands on his ears. His eyes were scrunched up in displeasure. He looked as annoyed as I felt. As he realized the noise had stopped, his eyes slowly opened.

“Do not do that again” he demanded. I clicked my tongue against my beak, spread my wings and lowered my head. He would not grab me like that again.

“Do you hear me, bird? I will stuff you if you ever do that again!”

What was so difficult about letting me have some space? What had he even wanted from me that he decided picking me up like a pet was a good idea?

“Come over here. I need to study you some more.”

He turned around and walked to his desk. I stayed where I was. No way would I follow him there. Not without an apology.

As he sat down and pulled up some fresh parchment, he spoke again. “What are you waiting for?”

I checked my status. Specifically one line. Good. Flux overcharge was gone. Carefully I stretched my wings. They felt a bit sore and made some scratching sounds I was not used to but otherwise, I felt fine. A few test-flaps and I was confident in my ability to take off. I had gained a lot from here. I could just leave. But the magic book was enticing. Could I take over this place? Or could I take his book with me? Different from the ork guards in that cave, I actually had a reason to attack him. Or rather, to protect myself. I did not want to be his guinea pig.

But I wanted to be better. Less murderous. Maybe there was a chance to reach an understanding? I took off. It was a bit difficult but I managed to fly over onto the desk he was not sitting at. Ignas turned to me as I landed.

“Come over here. I need to examine you more closely.”

The telltale prickle of [Identify] washed over me. I shuddered and glared at him.

“Overcharge is gone. Not even two days. From a major node” he murmured and started scratching away.

I shook my head in exasperation. This would not go anywhere. I hopped off the desk and walked around the ork. As I got into position, my shadows started to form once more. Oh, how I had missed these. I was already so used to them as if they were an additional limb. Tendrils snaked up to the desk and carefully picked up the magic book. As I held it floating in front of me and started to walk off, Ignas finally noticed what I was doing.

“Huh? What are you doing? Stop that! Bring it back!”

I shook my head and placed the book on the ground, starting to page through it. I wanted to look for something on my other status effects. If I was fully metal I might have ignored it but with all the glass it was most likely not a defensive upgrade.

A chair scraping over stone distracted my research. I looked up to see a disgruntled ork grab his parchment and inkwell and walk over. He plumped down on the ground next to me as I carefully eyed him.

“Go ahead and read. I need to take a closer look at your feathers.”

I tilted my head. Was he unable to apologize? Or did he just not see a need to? I pointed my wing over to the shutdown stabilizer and hooted a metallic sound. Ignas blinked at me and then made to grab my wing. I jumped back and flapped once, then pointed again.

“What? What do you want?”

I hooted once more and pointed, this time with both my eyes and wing. I looked at him and back to the stabilizer.

“What about it?”

This guy was stupid. He had to be. I took off and flew to my resting place. Picking one of my moulted feathers off the ground with a shadow I waved it at him. It was still glass with a metal frame. Mana swirled around inside in the colours of what I had absorbed.

“Oh. That’s good and all but I need to study them on you.”

What? No. There was no need for that. This guy.

I flew over and handed him the feather. Then I dragged the book away a few steps and went back to looking for information.

Ignas had picked up the feather and was studying it through his weird purple-tinted glasses. Huh. That was easier than I thought.

The ork was kept busy for hours just looking at my feather from all angles. He was like a baby having found a fascinating new toy. Only with a much higher attention span. He had not even moved from his spot on the ground to sit in a more healthy position. It was almost endearing if not for the tusks sticking out the corners of his mouth. And his muscular build and bald head. Okay, the bald head helped the baby image.

I had read up on warp a few days ago and now I could look into advanced discussions on the topic. Someone put forth the theory of warp being a measure of knowledge which the book used to determine what you could read. Obviously, that was wrong. I had probably the most warped mind of any living being this side of the veil and there were lots of topics for which I could only access the most base chapters.

Sadly, there was nothing on my conditions. Not even a predecessor chapter had been pulled up. It looked like nobody had researched what happened to me or at least no thaumaturge had. One interesting thing happened after reading about a few basics of alchemy. A notification popped up.

~ding~ Requirements fulfilled! For learning about the basics of thaumaturgy through a Thaumonomicon you have unlocked the [Thaumaturge] class. Only one class can be equipped at this time. Do you wish to replace your current class with [Thaumaturge]? Note, all progress will be lost in your current class.

So it actually existed. And the magic book was a requirement. I was interested at first but I quickly decided not to take it. Losing all progress in [Assassin] was too dangerous. I might not be able to fight back or even just escape without the Skills it gave me. Maybe once I unlocked a second Class, this could be it. For now, it would be fine to just satisfy my curiosity.

I had brought over some parchment for myself and found myself a feather and inkwell. Using shadows my writing was almost as if written by a normal hand. I only needed to hold the parchment to prevent it from being shoved around. This was very good practice for my fine control. Looking over my notes there were a few ideas of what my status ailments did and how I might fix them.

The first question I had asked myself was if I even needed to fix myself. Aside from glass being prone to shattering and the uncertainty of how I could heal myself I found a major argument for trying to go back to normal. Whenever I absorbed metal or glass like in yesterday’s experiment it built up flux. And not a small amount. I had the idea of letting a sword hit me and the blade just being absorbed but looking at the effects of a small bar of steel anything larger than a shortsword would instantly knock me into overcharge. I would need much higher capacity to ever fight like that.

Before being able to fix myself I needed to understand what was going on. My best guess was the node collapsing had filled my body with its aspects to the point where they had changed my form. If I wanted to return I had to somehow change my essence to be what it was before. It looked like animals usually held essence of beast and movement with some more specialized for their species. Birds had flight, nocturnal animals darkness. People had the essence of ‘person’. It was called humanus in the Thaumonomicon but rather than ‘human’ it seemed to actually mean ‘humanoid’ with orks and goblins also holding it. I probably did not need that. What I did need was to understand the essences my body currently held. Metal, crystal and order were obvious from my status. They were unnatural and had to be removed.

More important was to figure out if they had replaced what should normally make up my body. My current understanding was, they had not. I was still eating normally, I could still fly and I was still primarily nocturnal. I still wanted to know if there was enough of my normal self left in my body or if I had to replace what was lost. There was no very simple way to figure out what I was made of. I had tried to sense Ignas’ essence but I only got a very faint feeling of person. My [Owl Senses] was not good enough to see the details. There was however another Skill that could help me. I carefully prepared myself mentally and physically. I could only use it for a tiny amount of time. I had to make use of every moment it gave me. Then I activated [Eldritch Shift].