For the tenth time, Keynes had eyed the boss’ corpse. It was full of delicious meat.

“Master, stop it,” Alice snapped and then used their spiritual connection to jolt him. “At your current level, your Purified Body buff isn’t strong enough to stop the poisoning induced by the rift meat.”

“That makes no sense,” Keynes shot back. “According to you, I can eat plants that grow inside a rift but I cannot touch the rift meat.”

“That’s not what I said!” Alice replied irritated. “Rift plants that are native to the rift can also be poisonous but not to the same degree as the rift monster meat. So no, you cannot eat it.”

“I must eat it,” Keynes replied. “I have spent twenty hours here already. My food has run out and I am on my last bottle of water.”

“You still haven’t mastered the aura control.”

“Because the things you’re asking for are impossible!”

He hadn’t had such issues before gaining the Medium Stage. He hadn’t had any issues with the aura control at all. Why was this such a problem all of sudden?

“That is because learning the aura control should be done at Level 1 but you didn’t wait and levelled up.”

“How could I know?!” Keynes snarled. “No one on the planet knows a damn thing about the things you’re saying … or if they do, they don’t share it publicly.”

“Sit down and repeat the exercises!”

“I am starving, woman!”

“I am a spirit, not a woman!”

For a spirit, she started showing a true temper as well. Nonetheless, Keynes sat down and began doing her stupid exercises. He’d already been close twice, but his irritation only grew with each second his stomach remained empty.

The aura control required him to take complete control of every shred of his aura. At first, he’d blamed his Mind and Will but Alice had assured him that neither attribute had anything to do with learning the aura control.

It took him additional three hours of excruciatingly boring and slow exercises that allowed Keynes to manipulate his spiritual aura.

The Technique of Lesser Aura Control learned!

At this point, Keynes collapsed. He had no more strength to keep going. He’d used up his every mental reserve.

“Finally,” Alice’s voice sounded weary. “All this effort and still, only a lesser variation?

He glared at her.

“I guess this is better than nothing.”

***

When they left the rift, it was a day outside. Keynes used his lesser aura control to wrap his aura as close around his core as he could. He’d still leak some aura but if the hybrid didn’t have a super keen spiritual sense or didn’t stand next to him, he’d be fine. He still had [Spiritual Ghost] and Alice for emergencies.

Apart from the Cloak of Shadows, Keynes had found a common dagger with +2 damage, three Scrolls of Identification—of which two he’d already used—and a slab of Level 2 aluminium. Not the most exciting haul but Alice had told him that he shouldn’t expect fortune from a single delve—as she’d called his excursion into the rift—and needed to repeat it many times to find anything useful or ideally find rifts with the Explorer buff. He asked her about that and it turned out that the Explorer buff simply meant that no one else had been inside the rift.

The area around the rift was clear of the wild bears.

“The rift’s already recharged,” she said.

“It has recharged while we were inside it.”

“Yes. You’ll still have to leave it to enter the new instance.”

Interesting. The rifts completely ignored the laws of physics, which meant they had to follow a different set of laws. Alice had mentioned spiritual laws, although she didn’t know how they work. It made sense. Keynes didn’t need to understand physics but when he throw a stone, it was going to fall anyway.

“Let’s find some food,” he said. The animals from the hunting ground were all edible, even the reptiles. The only problem was the absence of said animals. Keynes had attributed it to the presence of rift monsters, which had disappeared. That, on the other hand, had to be the work of the hybrid and the animals he’d seen prowling around while he’d been inside the lookout.

They went north, heading to the area Keynes hadn’t visited. If they failed to find a game there, he’d forage again. He now ate everything he’d found in the hunting ground before entering the rift.

By midday, Keynes ate any edible plant he could find. But it seemed he made the right choice. The northern area showed less destruction associated with the rift monsters. Birds were everywhere but catching them turned out impossible as the elusive creatures always fled from him.

They also caught the sight of squirrels, and some amphibians not included in the hunting guide. Keynes was ready to take the risk and try eating them but Alice explained to him why this was such a bad idea. Risk of poisoning.

By evening, Keynes pondered releasing his aura and attracting the predators. Another idea Alice persuaded him not to pursue.

An hour later, they reached the northern edge of the hunting ground, a hundred metres high natural wall. There were fewer claw marks here and he found SOMETHING interesting.

“Are these goats?” he asked, forgetting that Alice didn’t know the animal species, although she had an innate ability to sense danger.

“I don’t know.”

Several goats were standing on almost a vertical wall. He was aware that mountain goats could climb almost vertical slopes but why would the mountain goats be here?

Without waiting for a plan, Keynes charged them. The only issue was that these goats were over twenty metres above the ground. Not a single tree in the area could reach them.

Keynes tried to climb at first but failed horribly. His hunger-gnawed body was weakened and he couldn’t get higher than four or five metres.

“You should use projectiles,” Alice advised him.

“Projectiles?”

“Stones, for example,” she explained.

“Oh.”

***

“That’s a mistake,” Alice snapped.

“You’re a mistake!” Keynes snapped back. He stood above the body of two goats, realising that he didn’t have a lighter or a way to make fire, nor dry wood. Most of the hunting ground was covered by damp moss and muck as the ground.

Keynes’s idea was to kill all the goats and take them back to the lookout, which had a working oven, designed for cooking the game. He’d then put the cooked meat in his dimensional space for future consumption. After short experimentation, he’d learned that dimensional space slowed decaying by 50%. It was the perfect solution.

“You’re driving me mad,” Alice zigzagged before his eyes. “You’ve spent an hour here and you only got two goats. Because of your hopeless aim, the rest fled higher. If you want them all, we can as well starve to death here.”

“I thought you said you’re a spirit.”

“So what? Cannot have a spirit its own needs?”

Keynes was going to say something witty and snippy but their argument was rendered moot when a three-metre long feline jumped out of the woods. Its black fur was iridescent and kept Keynes’s attention for a moment too long.

The creature wasn’t in the hunting guide and Keynes assumed it, too, had to be a hybrid.

The feline snatched the dead goat and blurred, returning between the trees where it became a shape and eventually disappeared.

“It stole our food!” Alice shouted at Keynes.

“No kidding, genius.”

Without waiting for another attack, Keynes placed the second dead goat into his dimensional pouch. Eying the goats on the vertical slope, he decided that Alice had been right after all. The hunger muddled his mind and he couldn’t think straight. The hybrid came and went so quickly, Keynes could only watch. What if it attacked?

“Let’s go back,” he said and didn’t mind her tiny triumphant expression.

Their way back was swift but nervous. Alice could sense the feline hybrids trail them. Keynes wore his Cloak of Shadows and kept his dagger at ready. The hybrids didn’t attack them, neither Keynes nor Alice knew why but they were glad. Maybe the hybrids had the general idea of where Keynes was but couldn’t pinpoint him due to his Untraceable buff, which sounded like a plausible explanation.

They reached the lookout. Inside they found two cracked windows. A clear sign of a heavy assault on the lookout. It had to be the work of the flying hybrid.

“It seems that it got desperate after the wild bears stopped coming out of the rift.”

“Stop prattling and prepare the meat!” Alice was desperate.

***

The kitchen in the lookout was stocked with generic seasoning and a few books that helped Keynes turn the goat into something edible.

Two hours later Keynes stopped. He was stuffed and needed—

Alarms started blaring, rousing his mind from falling into a slumber. He hadn’t slept for two days.

Back in the surveillance room, he checked the monitoring and found the six feline hybrids circling the lookout. Some were testing the ladder but the passage between metal bars and the ladder was too tight… or maybe it wasn’t.

Holy crap. What are these things made out of?

One of the hybrids squeezed its body into way too small passage and rushed fluidly upw—

BANG!

The trap door exploded and the three-metre long creature entered the surveillance room. Keynes lunged at it before it got a good grasp of the surroundings. The dagger scored a deep cut and Keynes felt its fury as it roared.

Whatever it was made of, it moved with unnatural fluidity as if it was made out of the water but when its tail hit Keynes, it felt like an iron bar.

Keynes didn’t need to check his health bar to know that 20% of his health just evaporated, Alice screamed that at him.

He asked her to sod off while he danced with the beast inside the surveillance room. It seemed like it didn’t have enough space but this thing wasn’t natural. Its body was too long and its mass to liquid-like.

If he only had a katana or any weapon longer than a freaking dagger.

“If there isn’t anything you can do,” he said between breaths. “Then at least don’t get in my way.”

After a second tail strike almost took his head off, Keynes retreated out of the surveillance room into a much smaller kitchen. The monster surged after him.

Desperate, Keynes grabbed a salt container and threw it at the monster, which dumbly snatched and crushed it in its jaws.

It didn’t like salt.

That was Keynes’s cue. He attacked before the creature could recover. Even though the dagger was a common quality, it still was Level 2, which meant it was studier than the chef knife and the feline’s skull.

Keynes slumped when the monster went stiff. He was exhausted.

“What about the others?” he asked.

“It appears they don’t have the same ability.”

He looked down on the dead feline hybrid. Only half of its body was inside the kitchen but took almost two-thirds of space.

“We must get rid of it.”

“Good luck with that,” Alice replied with an innocent smile.

“What was that supposed to mean?”

She shrugged and soon Keynes learned the hard truth. He couldn’t get it out in one piece, and why cutting a carcass into pieces right after eating was such a bad idea.

After a gruesome hour, Keynes managed to remove the hybrid from the lookout and threw it down the hatch. In a matter of seconds, the large chunks of meat were snatched by other feline hybrids but none tried to climb the ladder.

“How long can you stay awake?”

“Indefinitely,” Alice replied. “Or as long as you get proper sleep.”

“Will you wake me up in case of an emergency?”

“I … can do that, master.”

***

The goat meat was going to last three or four days. He was definitely going to have to make one more trip north before he’d depart the hunting ground.

The feline hybrids stayed in the general area but didn’t approach the lookout again. Keynes easily sneaked out of there, relying on Alice’s spiritual senses. One of the biggest drawbacks of having his aura wrapped around his core was that it made him spiritually blind. Alice assured him that with better control would come the ability to have a keen spiritual sense and a hidden aura. But for now, Keynes didn’t want to go through the aura training again. Alice had promised to teach him how to move beyond the Medium Stage and train his attributes the correct way.

But first things first. Keynes needed equipment, weapons, armour. In other words, he needed a few days of hard delving.

The first three delves were a disappointment though. Two Scrolls of Identification, a cloth, a herb, a shield with +2% physical damage reduction and a pauldron with +1% physical reduction.

It was crap but that wasn’t what mattered though. Alice had talked him through the steps of improved cultivation. Now that he could sense his core, cultivation revolved around it. Alice was also able to tell him more about the whole process of levelling up. The essence made a body stronger and that drove the attributes up upon levelling. The way the system was designed, it ‘awarded’ the attributes upon gaining a level. So, a Level 3 with 0% progression and a Level 3 with 99% progression were physically and mentally equal until the latter gained 1 extra percent and gained the attributes.

Maxing out attributes was slightly different; it actually increased attributes between levels making a person stronger. Alice called these attributes phantoms as they wouldn’t last for long. But at the same time, it was a trap. Once a person crossed the 80% mark in maxing out an attribute, difficulty increased. The phantom attribute was meant to support the ascender in gaining the last 20%. However, if the ascender failed to do so, the phantom attributes were lost while the difficulty remained, making the process many times harder.

“The system is cruel,” Keynes said as the reached the northern wall. He needed to hunt down another goat. His—and in extension Alice’s—food reserves were running dangerously low. He even considered starting a garden but one common rift wasn’t worth it. Keynes didn’t just want to level up, he wished to get as strong as possible and levelling was only a part of the process.

“It is, master,” Alice agreed. “But it must be for a reason.”

“It would help to know the reason though.”

“I am sorry.” Her temper returned to normal after Keynes had eaten. It looked like Keynes sustained her as well. If she only didn’t get so crabbit when he was starving. “I don’t know what that reason can be.”

They spied two goats almost halfway to the top and found an excessive number of claw marks.

“It looks like the feline hybrids grow desperate,” Keynes noticed.

“I wonder what happened to the flying one.”

Keynes looked to the sky and a shiver jolted him.

“It left in search of easier prey.” It was very bad news. That thing needed to be stopped. “After we are done here. We may try to hunt it down but first, the goats.”

***

Keynes kept the essence circling his core while he fought a wild bear. It was a distracting process as the essence’s nature was rebellious but was doing progress with that. Unlike progression, which was inhibition of the essence by a body, cultivation was a process of strengthening of Spirit. Spirit didn’t behave like an attribute, a massive misconception on the part of ... everyone. Spirit was many things but it wasn’t an attribute. Its true nature was for Keynes and Alice to discover as there were no ready answers but since the appearance of Alice, Keynes’s knowledge had grown unimaginably.

To move to the next stage, Keynes needed to make his core stronger. It required him to compact the essence so tightly it was like turning air into water. The core was there to help him with the process.

As he finished off the last wild bear, Keynes sat down with crossed legs and started squeezing the essence inside his core. After a few minutes, he was shaking from spiritual exhaustion. It was freaking difficult. The essence didn’t wish to be compacted and it resisted like hell.

“It will be worse the closer you are to the next stage and of course halfway through you will have to learn a better cultivation technique or won’t be able to make any progress.”

“Why are these techniques so important?”

“No idea, master. Just another way the system works.”

“Right, can you at least stop calling me a master?”

“No, master.”

Keynes sighed.

“Fine, but we still have to discuss the attributes training.”

Without hesitation, Alice said, “Only after you’ll upgrade your current technique or you’ll learn a new one. Otherwise, you’ll struggle with your Spirit control at higher levels.”

***

The World Government troopers were hauling Level 2 rift monsters out of the rift in large metal cages. The rift was populated by monsters that showed very little aggression unless attacked, which boosted their attack damage by 50%.

It'd been decided to use the rift to extract rift monsters for research purposes. A provisional base was quickly built around the rift and the extraction started.

Joseph had guard duty that night and he was bored. The war with the Old Blood was like fighting wildfires. There was no front, no territory to invade or defend. The rebels came out of nowhere, attacked a building or a town and were either driven back or killed off.

He wouldn’t mind getting a chance to fight those bastards.

THUD!

Joseph whirled around, feeling his heart racing. Did the rebels…

His eyes fell on a massive monster, at least the size of an elephant, with wings, three tails, and the face of a bat.

Joseph’s Talent was an interesting one – 10% of total (magical and physical) damage inflicted on him was turned into a Dexterity attribute. Some higher-ups had consulted him about it and he quietly expected a promotion…

The monster’s alien eyes turned his way and Joseph’s will just drained away. He couldn’t move even when the horrid creature came up to him and its jaws closed on him.