Zac eagerly filtered out all the gear that had belonged to the leader and started to go through them. His first guess was the inscribed bracelets as they were the only things except the sword and chest plate that had fractals engraved.
He looked over them multiple times, and tried pressing different parts of the bracelets, but nothing happened. He tried putting them on and focusing on them, but there still was no response. He could only helplessly put them aside for now, and continue to look through the other gear.
Zac picked up the pouch and opened it up. Strangely the insides were pitch black and he couldn’t see anything. His heartbeat sped up and he felt that he had found the jackpot.
He first took one of the small knives and plunged it halfway into the darkness, then pulled it out. There was no damage on it at all as far as Zac could tell. He planned to do the same with his finger, but as soon as he barely put it into the darkness he felt a burning sting.
His fingertip had been singed clean off, and blood dripped down over the pouch. Maybe flesh couldn’t enter he surmised. So he tried the same with a piece of dried meat, but this time it reacted like the knife.
‘Maybe it’s live things…’ Zac thought. He had no critter to try this theory out though, so it would have to wait.
The next task was how to activate the pouch. He had noticed some hints when he had fought earlier. When he had slammed his axe into the chest of the leader, he had felt that cosmic energy had entered the armor from the demon.
Zac had always only circulated the energy internally, and wasn’t sure how he’d push it outside. He tried circulating some energy into his fingers, then tried to push it out from the tip. The only result was that the concentration of energy got too high at the fingertips, and they started rupturing.
He tried many different things for a few hours until he finally gave up. Zac guessed that there was an inherent problem with how he handled the energy. He had followed an image of a circulatory system of his blood when he had started bending cosmic energy to his will. Of course he hadn’t imagined it to have outlets where it could flow out.
He started mulling over how to improve his system. He tried imagining a hole at his palm where he could let cosmic energy flow out.
But as he changed his energy circulation a blazing pain erupted in his hand and it looked that a bloody stigmata had appeared where he had imagined his exit.
A cold sheen of perspiration appeared on Zac’s forehead from the pain and he had a sinking feeling. Just a small change like this and the pain had been this bad. If he wanted to improve the system on his whole body, how bad would it hurt?
He knew that the circulatory system he had devised in no way was an optimal method of using cosmic energy, it was just something he had whipped together. He had planned on getting some skill or method for it later when he had the opportunity. But he hadn’t imagined that the pain would be this bad.
He was even more dismayed when he noticed that the hole he had created in his hand was continuously leaking cosmic energy and draining him of power.
Zac could only reluctantly change his circulation pattern back, bringing forth another wave of torment.
He sat for a full thirty minutes feeling lost at what to do. He was afraid that he had somehow crippled his future prospects. The more he thought about it the more he felt that it was extremely important to be able to project energy. The skills the demons had used all had projected energy in different ways. The mysterious mist, the black arcs of lightning and the root control. They all relied on manipulating cosmic energy outside of the body.
If he was stuck with this defective system where all the energy was stuck inside his body, would he even be able to use the skills he got in the future?
He needed to find a way to rectify this, even if he had to take the torture of rewriting his pathing. However, the hole he had made didn’t work, and even if it did he was hesitant to use that method anymore. He didn’t want to haphazardly get himself deeper and deeper in the hole by making a crappy patch-work circulation method.
He went over to the Nexus Node once more to scour through the skills, in case one of them actually was a circulation skill or something similar. Of course, he subconsciously knew that wasn’t the case, he had looked those skills over many times by now, and knew there were no such thing there.
The skills available generally could be categorized into offensive, defensive, movement and support as far as he could tell. The [Eye of Discernment] would fall into the support skill.
But as he moved his hand away from the crystal he suddenly froze, struck with a realization. All things connected to the system had one thing in common; the fractals. He still had no idea how to make sense of them, but they were present on the array flags, the weapons, and even the skills used them.
And it just so happened, he knew a pattern that was the exact size of his body. It was the fractal pattern that he had seen when he chose his class. Many details of it was muddled at the time, but the parts he could make out made a full circuit.
When he got the idea he couldn’t let it go. The more he thought it over, the more it made sense. He could still remember the pattern clearly, and it flowed through every part of his body. It was a far more complicated system compared to the one he had devised himself, but he saw no reason that it wouldn’t work.
As for the parts that were hazy and blurred, they might show themselves at a later point when he leveled up or completed quests. At which point Zac could use the new information to improve on the existing pattern.
The only problem was the massive undertaking to change the circulation. Just adding and removing a small hole in his hand had felt like putting the palm in an imp’s fire. He wasn’t even sure he’d survive such an undertaking.
But at the same time he didn’t dare wait. When he first devised the energy circulation he made some small revisions quickly after. At that time he hadn’t felt any pain whatsoever, and assumed that the circulation pattern was just a mental aid for using cosmic energy.
Zac was afraid that it might mean that the pattern gets harder and harder to change, as though it was fusing with his very being. It was still possible for him to change it, but judging from the pain it might be impossible soon.
Zac was no stranger to pain by now, and wasted no time. Ideally he would have wanted to wait until all his wounds were healed, but he had a sense of urgency. He started with his left hand to try if it even was viable to reform the patterns.
A blazing pain far worse than when he opened the hole engulfed his hand. It felt like his whole arm was dipped in burning acid. His whole body was covered in sweat in just seconds, and his eyes were completely bloodshot. Still he pushed through, and kept imagining his crude system in his hand slowly transforming into the fractal he was given by the Hatchetman class.
After what felt like an eternity the transformation was done. His hand was a mess, almost looking as if it had been pushed down into a blender. But where there once was a simple pathway for cosmic energy, now was a sophisticated pattern that had substituted it.
Zac tried moving his fingers, and while it hurt it seemed there was no permanent damage. He then tried to circulate cosmic energy through his arm and into his rewritten pathways.
It was a weird feeling. He had thought his circulation had been smooth all this while. But after pushing the energy into his hand it felt like the energy came from cramped pipes in his arms into the open ocean in his hand. The level of smoothness of handling the energy was incomparable.
Zac knew he had guessed correctly by now. The class change had provided him with a complete pattern to utilize his cosmic energy. It would likely tie in with his skills as well he reckoned.
He also knew what that meant, and with a shudder started converting the rest of his body.