'I'll give it all.'
The decision came abruptly, and Ashen didn't second-guess it. Why limit himself? He had three concepts available, and so, he shall use them all.
He started with Sloth Efficiency.
The concept's nature was precise in its irony: a sloth moving faster and more deliberately than its reputation suggested, not out of enthusiasm, but because finishing sooner meant returning to rest sooner. Making every movement supernaturally stripped of waste.
He let his understanding of it seep through the billions of mana threads already woven through his body, using his will as a medium, and directed them to temper what they touched. The process was slow by external measure; internally, he could feel his musculature beginning to change, each fiber gradually conforming to the concept's logic. Excess motion oozed out of the way as his joints moved. The mechanical redundancies his body had accumulated over decades of strain began to resolve, replaced by something leaner and more exact.
Three months later, the system responded.
Agility: B-
[You resonate with Sloth Efficiency.]
He opened the concept section. The mastery had moved past Glimpse and into Resonance.
[5. Conceptual powers]
—The concept of Sloth Efficiency (Resonance)
—The concept of Inertia (-)
"Harmonizing with the element and wielding it skillfully..." He understood the condition immediately. A Glimpse was knowing a concept existed and using a really small fraction of its might. Resonance was knowing how to use it without thinking about the using.
⛧
Next was Inertia, and he chose Endurance as its vessel.
The reason was straightforward. A body at rest resists being moved. Not through active effort, but through the simple physical fact of its own mass and stability. Applied to endurance, this meant a body that absorbed punishment the way the rock had absorbed his attempts to move it; that did not mean he was becoming impervious, but having no yielding point wasn't out of the question. The damage would arrive, distribute itself across the whole, and find nowhere to accumulate.
The concept proved significantly harder to wield than Sloth Efficiency. Where efficiency had a clear direction: remove what is unnecessary. Inertia's application to the body required him to work against the body's natural tendency to localize stress. Muscles wanted to compensate while joints wanted to shift the load. He had to press his understanding of the concept into every thread simultaneously and hold it there while the body resisted the change.
He held it for a year.
Endurance: B-
[You catch a Glimpse of Inertia.]
"So I hadn't even entered the first stage properly before this."
Three months for Agility, a full year for Endurance. The gap made the difference in his finesse with each concept obvious. Sloth Efficiency had been living in him long enough to be familiar. Inertia he had only just begun to understand.
⛧
The third was the easiest. He had always known it would be.
Sloth itself was his origin, the concept on which his entire path was built, so he understood it the best, not through study, but through years of simply wielding it. And the attribute he chose for it was Stamina.
The reasoning was personal as much as it was logical. Feeling constantly drained had been one of the more insidious cruelties of the rock; not the pain, but the sensation of depletion approaching, the body signaling that it was running out of time. Sloth, to Ashen, had always carried the image of rest alongside its laziness. A body that recovered. A state that replenished rather than consumed.
He pressed the concept into his stomach in the same way the others did; slowly, without resistance, until it belonged there.
Twenty-three days.
Stamina: B-
He checked his status.
[3. Physical Level]
Strength: C+ | Endurance: B- | Agility: B-
Perception: C+ | Stamina: B- | Mana: C+
Strength and Perception remained at C+. Everything else had broken through. He thought about that for a moment, then set it aside. Strength and Perception would require their own concepts, and he didn't have the right ones yet. There was no use forcing it.
⛧
⛧
⛧
The spear felt distant to him now.
Not in the physical sense, of course; it was still planted in the earth two arm-lengths away after all, smiling face and all. But his hands hadn't held it in decades. The muscle memory was still there. He didn't think his body would ever forget that kind of conditioning, yet he still felt himself going soft in a way that bothered him more than he expected.
He needed to train. The problem was obvious: dreamweaving loosened muscles, and loose muscles meant the rock crushed him.
The solution took less time to find than the problem.
He replicated the pressure. Before entering the dreamscape, he used Somatic Autonomy to hold his body at the threshold of maximum exertion; permanently primed, ready to fire without the wind-up a resting body requires, and anchored that state to persist independent of his conscious intent. The rock had always kept him there; now he simply kept himself there without it.
Then he entered the dream.
What followed was unlike any training he had experienced before, and he had experienced considerable variety at this point.
In the dreamscape, no rock and no resistance was pressing down from above. But his muscles were still wound to their absolute limit, every fiber contracted against a weight that no longer existed outside of instruction. When he reached for the spear and thrust, the energy went somewhere.
Everywhere.
The first thrust nearly took his arm off.
Without the rock absorbing the output, the force of a fully coiled body behind a spear thrust had nothing to push against. He overcorrected, the spear snapped past his intended line, and he stumbled forward three steps before catching himself.
He looked at the trajectory.
"..."
Then he tried a slash.
The blade moved faster than he had expected by a significant margin, the motion completing itself before he had finished directing it, the tip arriving at the endpoint while his mind was still somewhere in the middle of the swing.
'So this is what my full output feels like without resistance.'
He stood still for a moment, recalibrating.
The coiled state had always been a condition of endurance under the rock; something to sustain, not to use. Here, with nothing to sustain it against, it became pure output. Every form he had spent years refining was now running at a power level he had never actually tested, in a body that moved faster than his old reference points suggested it should.
He would have to relearn the forms from scratch.
The thought should have been frustrating.
Instead, he picked up the spear and thrust again, as if it were just a minor setback.
Perhaps, to him at this point, it was just that.