The question was how. I had the building blocks. I could sketch the shape of the fractal I needed to work with for both skills. The issue was how to actually do it. Randomly circulating my blood was a recipe for disaster. I decided to try—but carefully.

  I sat in front of a tree and closed my eyes. My intention was to imitate the way to cast a skill—except using the fractal I had built instead. I pushed, pulled, and prodded the blood in my veins. The energy began to move according to my will.

  Almost immediately, I felt intense pain. Ripples ran through the blood. Even though I stopped as soon as I noticed, it was almost too late! The ripples crashed into my heart. I felt my heart skip one beat. Then another. And a third. Before finally continuing its rhythm.

  I opened my eyes and laid on my back. That had been a really close call. I laughed at my own failings, but I knew better than to continue down that path. That was the way towards killing myself and dooming humanity for no good reason. I breathed deeply. In. Out. All in an effort to center myself and overcome the intense fear I’d felt when my heart stopped. It was almost as bad as the cat!

  I knew that what I’d tried was the wrong path. It wasn’t just the near-death experience, either. I felt it deep in my still-beating heart. There had to be a way to do it, though. So I looked through the enormous list of skills to find what I needed. I tried many search terms before I finally found something that might be useful. It’s discovery is what lead me to finding more skills that tied into the idea of building and modifying my own skills.

  The first skill was the aptly named Skill Creation. Then there were others like Skill Cultivation, Cultivation, and Skill Analysis. Cultivation was one I’d stumbled upon after seeing Skill Cultivation. Unlike what I had guessed it would be about—growing crops or something—it was actually about building up some kind of orb inside one’s own body that manipulated chi. Given that I only had access to blood and faith this time around, I put it to the side as a curiosity. There was a similar one for mana—which meant there was a blueprint to follow to build the mana-equivalent if I chose to go that route.

  Skill Analysis only told me information I already knew from Help and from my own personal studies in understanding how skills worked based on their fractals. A waste of a thousand experience, I felt. Skill Creation and Skill Cultivation were more what I was after. Skill Creation gave hints about the correct structure of whatever skill I wanted to build, while Skill Cultivation was about doing the actual building. Skill Creation turned out to be more like Skill Analysis in that I’d already done all of the hard work. It confirmed that what I had planned was the correct thing to do. Another thousand wasted.

  Skill Cultivation—on the other hand—was exactly what I needed and so I put enough into it to bring it to tier 2. I was messing with tier 2 fractals, so I wanted the biggest advantage I could have when making the changes.

  I sat on my bed—now with a comfortable sheet-covered-mattress—and looked inward as I activated Skill Cultivation. The skill was both a passive and a channeled skill—something I’d not yet encountered. As a passive, it would improve my understanding of what to do. When channeled, it would work more like a translucent blueprint to make the fractal inside of. A much easier prospect than free-handing the process.

  Another thing I learned was something I should have seen coming a mile away. I couldn’t build a fractal using blood or faith—nor even mana or chi. I had to use experience to do so. It was no wonder that I’d struggled so much when trying to do it that way! The issue with using experience was that I couldn’t feel it nor see it. Unlike blood or faith—which were energies, and things I’d studied—I’d never thought much about experience and thus had no clue how it operated. Worse than that, I had no idea where it was! I was supposed to drag the experience—from wherever it was—and move it into the flavor and shape of the fractal I wanted to create or modify. Both of those—the finding and the moving—were operations I was completely ignorant about!

  Instead of jumping right into making the modified skill, I paused to learn more about experience. I had a feeling it would be important—not just for changing my skills, but also for the future. There was more to the system than I had originally understood, and this was the key to figuring it out.

  So I sat there on my bed with my eyes closed. I let my senses wash over my body from top to bottom. I was looking for something that felt out of place. The problem was, I couldn’t see anything that looked different! I could see the blood and faith energies where they were stored, but that was it. My body—bones, organs, blood, muscle, fat, skin—was as it had always been. There was nothing out of the ordinary for me to pick up on!

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  I almost gave up there. But then I remembered the daily bonus experience I got when the day ticked over. I could see the time until the daily quests expired, so I used that as a guide. Though tired from a hard day’s work outside—collecting wood, hunting, that sort of thing—I kept awake until it was time. I closed my eyes and watched the timer tick down.

  The bonus of experience every day was a small one. At least when compared to what I gained from quests or discoveries. So I knew I was looking for something minuscule. The time came and went, but I didn’t notice a change. I went to sleep that night frustrated. It wasn’t going to be easy. And although I could have picked up a skill to do it for me, I wanted to have the requisite understanding to be able to do it myself at a later date. I still had time, and I was stubborn.

  For the next month, I kept up the routine of staying up until the day ticked over to see if I could discover anything with the small bits of experience that flowed in. On the last night of the month, I was rewarded with a much larger amount of experience than I’d gotten while I’d been watching. That turned out to be just enough for me to see what was going on.

  Whenever I got experience—something I was able to verify upon completing a yearly quest—that experience would suffuse through my body. That was why I couldn’t find the experience. It wasn’t concentrated in one location but rather it was everywhere inside of me as an even layer!

  Now that I had found the experience, I needed to move it into the correct shape. Well, I needed to move some of it. There was no way one fractal would use all of the experience I had. I had millions! Slowly but surely, I pushed and prodded my body in a spiritual way—similar to what I had done with my blood. Unlike that nearly-disastrous event, the experience moved without hurting me. It was a stubborn thing, though. Grasping it was like trying to hold water in my hand. Moving it was like coaxing molasses out of a jar—there was no fine control like I would need in order to build the fractal.

  I was happy just being able to sense and move the experience around as I pleased. It was a slow and tedious process—like all of this had been—and yet, I felt like I was on the cusp of being able to make the skill changes that would tear the world apart. Something that would let me save the people in my next—and final—loop.

  Slowly but surely, I got better at moving the experience around. Part of my issue was that I had so much more experience than I needed for the skill modification. Simply trimming down how much I was moving around helped tremendously. The other part was a lack of practice. That was something I rectified with many hours of meditation. Whenever I had free time, I worked to get better at moving the experience around.

  When I felt that I had enough skill to build the fractals, I set aside an entire day for the attempt. I hope up early. After a breakfast of acorns, nettles, and dried meat, I took care of any bodily business that needed doing. Then it was time to get as comfortable as I could and begin.

  With my eyes closed—and Skill Cultivation active—I carefully massaged the experience towards the translucent target. The experience began to fill it. Drop by drop, experience filled the fractal. When it had enough, I gently pushed, pulled, and prodded the experience into the shape I wanted. The harder part was the flavor. I could easily match the shape, but the color was a different thing. I hoped the shape would be enough to make it work. If not, I could always try again when I knew more.

  The experience locked into place as soon as it matched the shape of the fractal I wanted. I tentatively sent blood through it only to be rebuffed by pain! Looking closer at the fractal, I could see that it was—indeed—wrong. The shape was right, but the flavor was much closer to that of stone or earth than it had been to the sickly poison I needed. Well, most of it was. There were random flavors all over the place. The skill was a dud.

  Instead of leaving it there, I tried to pick it apart like I had built it. Maybe I could try again? The failed skill felt solid—for lack of a better term. It was no longer malleable like experience was generally. So when I nicked it, the fractal shattered into motes and faded away. When I checked on how much experience I had, I saw that I had lost a little over four thousand. The experience was just gone!

  I sat on the bed stunned. I had figured that making the fractal would cost experience. That was what the system was doing behind the scenes. It also made sense that I would be less efficient than the system was. But to this degree? That was insane! And each attempt was just a one-off as well… that really sucked!

  I shook my head. It was back to the drawing board. I needed to understand how to flavor experience correctly if the next attempt was going to work. I also knew it was possible I’d used too much—or too little—experience in the attempt. The fractal had matched, so I thought I’d done it as well as I could have.

  Month after month, I worked on the flavoring problem. If I could get the experience to set as one flavor, that would be a start. Figuring out how to pick the correct flavor was ultimately what I needed. As it turned out, I couldn’t flavor the experience at any other time than when building a fractal. Every practice session was thousands of experience down the drain. And yet—to create a custom skill—that’s what I had to do.

  Day by day, I improved. Flavoring the experience was as much an art as it was a skill. There were so many variables to parse through. Each would radically alter the outcome. Or not. It all depended upon some interplay between them all that I couldn’t quite figure out. At least not easily.

  The flavor changed depending on how the experience entered the fractal area. Density was another factor. Then there was the order in which I built the fractal—from the center out or side-to-side. Each one of those—and dozens more—all contributed to the final flavor of the skill.