Chapter 51: Cultivating Experience

  “He still hasn’t finished his trial yet?” Emma asked the girls behind her as they all climbed back into the helicopter after they had it refuelled. Like last time, they had landed in Marseille to refuel before flying further, this time north into Europe instead of crossing the sea.

  Erik was still trying to absorb the quartz when they landed, but the rest stretched their legs when the opportunity arose. It had taken about an hour to get their helicopter refuelled, much longer than last time, but they didn’t mind so much.

  Jessie climbed up into the helicopter as they were about to leave, seeing Erik still under.

  “Still at it? This one’s quite the doozy, huh?” Angela said, climbing up behind her, also noticing Erik’s still form.

  “He’s fine. I think he might be having fun in there,” Jessie said, feeling his rough yet calm aura.

  “Maybe he’s doing the wink-wink with the spirit,” Emma joked with a grin.

  “Oh, didn’t he say the earth armour one was kind of putting the moves on him?” Angela asked.

  “Why do you always say something sexual, Emma?” Sophie complained as she seated herself next to Erik again. The rest had taken their previous seats as well.

  “I have literally not said anything remotely sexual the entire time we’ve known each other,” laughed Emma. “Oh, that being said…! Jessie,” she snapped, saying her neighbour’s name in a sing-song manner.

  “What?”

  “You’re into women, right?”

  “When I feel like it… Why?” Jessie answered, suspicion sneaking its way into her face.

  “So, like… which one?” Emma asked, tilting her head towards Angela and raising her eyebrows up and down in case the meaning wasn’t already obvious.

  “What are you doing?” Angela asked in a loud whisper.

  “I’m just curious!” Emma groaned.

  “Sorry, girls. I’ve got a thing for elves now,” Jessie teased with a grin.

  “Oh, that’s right! Tell us more about her!”

  “Ack! Urgh! Spit! I have been…vanquished! Pant pant! How far I’ve… fallen! Fair Lady of Spiritsky, take me!”

  “Spiritsky?”

  “Aye, Spiritsky. Oh, ‘tis a silly place.”

  “Okay. This was fun. Are we done now?” Erik breathed, holding the ghostly fire-in-a-bubble in his hands.

  A wide gash along his torso was stitching itself back together, but all the blood, sweat, and dirt from what felt like days of fighting and struggling was still there along with the tattered remains of his clothes.

  He’d be able to fix it once the trial was over…except the spirit was dragging things out by dramatising its own death. His dying monologue had been going on for ten minutes already, most of it being just vocalising death-adjacent sounds like ‘ack’ and ‘hark’.

  Before this he had explained the visuals of the scene Erik had to imagine to excruciating detail—though it didn’t even seem that important to the spirit, as midway in his visualisation of a melee arena, he started adding drapes ‘crimson like wine and of the finest silk’ and ‘carpets one would joyously roll on with a flirtatious lover’.

  “Well, no! However, I do understand you have other business to attend to. I shall take my leave!”

  “Wait!” Erik said.

  “Yes, my liege?” the spirit asked, hope and something bordering on desperation in his voice.

  Liege? Erik mouthed the word to himself in confusion. When did that happen?

  “I don’t want to call you Competence Possessor. Can I call you something else?” he asked.

  “Of course! You can call me by my name; Jack.” Jack bowed as if he’d been called on stage.

  What…?

  “Halt!”

  The familiar, bossy tone of his rather commanding Core spirit sounded from behind him yet again, an order that was becoming her signature move.

  “Again, Cross?” the Titan sighed.

  “I understand your last trial was… quite the trial,” she started. Was that a joke? No, it couldn’t be. Cross wasn’t the type… he thought. “But that is all the more reason you need to hear me out.”

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  “I guess a little while longer shouldn’t matter much. Back to the lake?” he asked, and she poofed away. Erik followed.

  “Look around you. What do you see?” she asked.

  Erik looked. At first, he noticed little else than the still water below them. That was until he saw a near-invisible, blue-tinged mote rise from it. Upon noticing the first, he saw an increasing number of the thing, both rising and already filling the air. Their transparency allowed Erik to see through each, finding more behind them that were just a touch bluer than the ones in front.

  “What are they?” he asked, taking in the beautiful sight of bubbles filling his world.

  “Experience. Since the last battle you were in, your world has been filled with it, though all this time fighting in your most recent trial has increased it many-fold.”

  “Uh… I think our definitions of ‘experience’ seem to differ.”

  “I have no other word for it. When this happens, it is a clear sign that your Realisation is falling behind. You have trained much, yet you have not Contemplated on your experiences. The longer between your contemplations, the more of your experience gained in between will be lost. Every one of these wisps signifies an experience that is eluding you. They are still pale—almost clear, which means they are not too precious—but there is no such thing as unneeded experience.”

  “I’ve heard of this. By fighting, or otherwise using my abilities in different ways, I get Experience. That experience should be Contemplated to turn it into ideas, which I can then Realise to help my powers grow. I was under the impression I was doing that when I came here; during meditation and training with all of you guys. I also didn’t think Experience was something so…tangible.”

  “It isn’t wrong…but it isn’t automatic. What you do in your world is up to you, but training your aura control or sparring is not the same as contemplating. In reverse, it provides only more Experience. Sit. I will teach you,” Cross ordered, and Erik wasn’t one to refuse.

  “Meditate. Restart your journey. Experience all your tribulations until now again, in order. The more detail you remember, the better. Every hardship. Breathe it in. Deeper. Breathe it in so deep it will never leave your body. Experience makes us all what we are, who we are. Merge it with your mind, with your body and with your soul. Once you have experienced it all, do it again, then again.

  “Only after you’ve extracted everything from a prior time, can you start again from there. Keep doing this until you have absorbed it all into you. When you feel you are done with everything, I’ll guide you in the second step of the process.”

  Erik kept absorbing his memories, his experiences since arriving back in his burned down home. He relived the journey across the Empire, escaping the Hellbeasts, then fighting the Hellbeasts.

  He relived it all. His meeting with Angela, Emma, General Mathisen, and Amir. He felt little to gain from the memories of his personal relationships, but it made him smile all the while. It might be the worst kind of circumstance to be resurrected in, but at least he made many memorable friends along the way. He relived his meeting Sophie, how she teased him outside Jessie’s apartment when they first met, the slight tingle when Jessie drew near for the first time since both rose from the dead. He remembered Colson, MacLeod, Bumley.

  The experience he felt being merged with his being escalated from that point onward. His trials were an excellent source of the blue-tinged bubbles as they all had forced him to be creative with his powers. The first proper fight that gave a moderate amount of experience was the fight against the two beasts in Cambridge.

  With nothing but his uncontrolled aura and what he could find lying around for his Core ability to work its magic on, it had been quite the struggle. The end of that memory made his back hurt just from reliving it. He had been in the most pain of his two lives after that incident and that included the time he died. His death had been quick, though. That back pain had lasted until they reached Africa.

  Reaching that point in his memories felt like hitting a reverse bottleneck. The experiences just wouldn’t stop. Filling out all his major ability slots was just the start, as he for the first time had real alternatives to how he fought. Besides that, they all trained, both with magic and without.

  It seemed the hand-to-hand training was as rewarding as all the magical training was, and the next few hunts after that point gave only small amounts of experience, the single, or pair of Hellbeasts getting taken down almost without effort…until the attack on their camp. Erik could feel those exact memories having much more substance to them.

  Motes filled his entire mind-world without him knowing—deep in Contemplation as he was—though Erik’s will absorbed them all at some point.

  Whenever he reached those memories, only motes of a deep, solid blue were absorbed, vanishing from the air where they floated, becoming a permanent part of him. They took more time and effort to absorb, and there were so many of them that he felt stuck as he went through them in exacting detail.

  After this came the biggest, bluest and heaviest experiences of them all; a fight against Jack, lasting for days. In hindsight, Jack the Knight was the perfect opponent to fight for someone so new to all his powers as Erik was. He got the chance to fight against his own powers, finding every weakness in them to exploit it with his other abilities.

  He had already learned so much from those days spent fighting that he kind of felt like he was cheating when he was now using those same experiences to become even stronger still.

  Erik went through all the memories time after time after time, and at last, only his experiences since Africa remained. While it was still the largest portion by far, it was getting easier as the number of experiences decreased and seeing that he could skip his entire first week back from the dead, the loops went faster still. he got through everything despite starting to lose some of his focus by the end. How long had he been at this? Something else was nagging at him, like an itch he couldn’t scratch…oh…

  “Wait, second step?”

  “Oh, wow…” Jessie said, right as the helicopter was going in for its last landing. They were home. Even though Erik had absorbed the crystal a while ago, he was still unconscious. She had been pondering why he was still in there when she started noticing…stuff.

  “What is it?” Angela asked, pausing the packing of snacks and drinks back into their bags.

  “He’s doing something…again!” Jessie said, unsure herself whether she was complaining.

  Yes, Erik was quite jealous of Jessie’s abilities, but he kept playing down how much better his spirits and dilated time in his mindplace was. Those spirits were sure to know everything about magic, and they didn’t hesitate to train Erik in their magical ways.

  “What do you mean? Is he alright?”

  “That dirtbag is getting stronger right before my eyes. It’s like his presence is… expanding.” Jessie tried explaining but didn’t understand what she was feeling herself. “I think he’s ranking up!”

  “Really?” Emma looked at the devilish, wide smile that grew on Jessie’s face.

  “I can’t wait to learn that,” she said, and leaned back in her seat, keeping her eyes locked on Erik. This was how they would fight back.