Aster rounded the corner nearly at full speed, her feet pattering quietly on the stone floor. Her spear was held tightly between her arm and her side, leaving her off hand free.

  The rat startled at her appearance and started to run, but she wasn’t having any more of their bullshit. Aster could now sense the animal with a new sense, and knew instinctively where it was in relation to her. This let her know the moment it began to jump through space, and where it was going.

  It wasn’t so much that she could feel the space magic, although she thought maybe she could? It was more that the monster felt as though it was partly in one place and partly in another, so when Aster came to a stop, using her momentum to pivot on the balls of her feet and thrust her spear forward at nothing but air, she wasn’t surprised when her spear made contact with something that hadn’t been there a moment before. These rats were tough, but their main strength was in their mobility and the unpredictability of their actions. That is to say, a spear through the face took the rat down immediately.

  *You have slain [Labyrinthine Rodent - Level 19] - Experience earned. TP Earned.

  “Hell yeah!” Aster cried out as the beast fell in two halves, its space magic collapsing on itself and cutting it in two. That was way easier than earlier, she thought. If these rats can’t hide and can’t teleport around randomly… Aster grinned.

  It was then that she noticed something in the corner of the corridor. It was another loot box like the one she’d gotten her bracers from. Loot!

  Aster’s grin broadened as she approached the box. It was larger than the prior one, about as large as a travel size suitcase. It was only the second one she’d seen in the dungeon, though the fact that she had multiple keys for boxes like these suggested that there were more. Or that whoever built this place added extra keys to make people waste time in here…

  As Aster leaned down to unlock the box she felt another presence. It didn’t feel like a rat, but another shadow beast. It was almost like a different flavor, making her think of the shadow beast she’d just fought. Why would it have a different feeling to it like that? It was more than just that it was a different creature. The different “flavor” had a substance to it.

  She wasn’t sure what that meant, so she ignored it for the time being and instead opened the box.

  System Message: Do you want to expend one (1) Labyrinthine Lootbox Key to open this Lootbox?

  Y/N

  “Come on, lootbox,” she muttered. “Give me the good shit.”

  The lootbox unlocked and did, in fact, give her the good shit.

  [Meteor Cuirass (Rare)] - Long leather armor made from the hide of a space-wandering beast of unknown origin. This material is strong against both physical and magical attacks, and can be infused with mana to create an aura of heat around the wearer. Infusing this armor with mana outside of combat will allow it to shape itself to the wearer and also to repair itself.

  Enchantments: Meteoric Aura, Self-Mold, Self-Repair

  +10 Strength +10 Agility +15 Vitality

  Aster’s grin was radiant. This was exactly the sort of thing she needed. Well, this and some better boots. And maybe a helmet and some gloves. Probably a new spear…

  Alright, she needed a lot more gear. But this was a good start!

  She studied the armor. It was shaped to cover her entire upper body, but left her arms bear. That’s fine, she thought. The leather was a rich brown and smooth, creating a gladiator-style skirt at the bottom of it. The bottoms of each leather strap that made up the skirt were blackened, like they’d been burnt. Metal studs rested in these black areas.

  Aster quickly stripped out of her top and the light leathers she’d had from the initiation and donned the armor. She failed to hold back a moan of pleasure as the added stats flooded her system. Adding life to herself, and then strength and agility? It was like she’d experienced all the benefits of a deep-tissue massage, a vitamin-b shot, and several months’ worth of conditioning and training all at once. It was evident— this piece of gear was a game changer for her.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Looking at her status, she divided her 21 remaining free points across Strength, Intelligence, Perception, and Willpower, with six to strength and five to everything else. So far, Aster hadn’t had a need for the Intelligence stat, but she didn’t like the idea of it being her lowest stat, as if the System was calling her stupid.

  “Alright, now how do I do this?” Aster tried moving around a bit in the armor, but it didn’t feel right. It was too boxy, not conforming to her shape at all. What had the description said again?

  Infusing this armor with mana outside of combat will allow it to shape itself to the wearer and also to repair itself.

  Infusing the armor with mana… Well shit. How was she supposed to do that? What even was mana? Like, what was it supposed to do? Thinking to herself, she decided to spend a few minutes on the problem before moving forward.

  Now, mana hadn’t existed before the System. At least, it hadn’t been measured or utilized in any perceivable way. The fact that her System menu listed mana along health and stamina… it was obviously a resource of some sort. So it could be spent, and… it had to be internal, right? That made the most sense to her. Her health and stamina were both measures of internal factors, so mana was likely one, too. It was spent and refilled, the speed of which was measured by her wisdom stat. That must stand as the apparatus through which mana enters the body.

  Wait. Enters the body? Was it external as well? Why not both, she thought. Food was processed by the body to create energy, (stamina), so maybe external mana was processed by… something… to create mana? Her wisdom stat? No, that doesn’t make sense. My health isn’t processed by my vitality, though it’s correlated to it definitely.

  If her vitality stat gave her her total health pool, then it was representative of her body’s total vitality, yes? So then her wisdom stat, giving her her total mana pool, had to be representative of something else. Not her body, as that didn’t feel right. What else is different between vitality and mana? Well, one was physical, and the other… Metaphysical?

  Aster’s eyes narrowed at the thought. Was mana a resource of a metaphysical part of her body? Or perhaps her metaphysical body? Could that be a thing now? What even is a metaphysical body— and then she got it.

  The soul.

  Aster had a soul. Did she have a soul? Do I have a soul?! No, there had to be some other explanation—

  ’DING!’ Profession [Novice Naturalist] has reached Level 9 - Stat points allocated, +1 free point*

  Nope. She’d nailed it.

  “Holy fucking shit!” Aster yelled. There was no way she’d get a level for coming to the wrong conclusion. That meant she had a soul. That meant souls existed. Had they always existed? Was there an afterlife? Assuming the System wasn’t the afterlife, that was.

  Too many questions flooded her head, so she did what she did best in these sorts of situations: become hyper-focused on something and grab onto it like a rock in a stormy sea. Right now, that rock was how to get the armor to work right. To do that she had to infuse mana into it. Mana came from the environment and was processed by her soul through whatever biological, (metaphysical?), function her wisdom stat represented, or perhaps mana was made by her soul itself, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that she thought she knew where it was and how to access it.

  Aster sat on the ground, using her stripped clothes as light cushioning, and closed her eyes. Then she focused on her breathing and the way her body moved when she did so. She felt her heart beat and tried to visualize it. She felt her pulse through her arms and fingers, her thighs, her lips, her head, and before her mind’s eye she saw her circulatory system, then her nervous system, then her bones and muscles.

  And then she focused on the feeling she’d experienced while in that weird evolution space, the feeling of mana itself populating her surroundings. She tried to take the feeling of that, the flavor she could almost taste, of how mana felt, of how it sounded, of how it affected her sight, and she layered it all over her image of her own body, and…

  Bingo. She felt it now— something that hadn’t been there before. It was real, as real as her heartbeat, and sat somewhere outside of her physical body. It was like her body existed across X and Y vertices and this mana was along the Z axis. It intersected her body in such a small way, but if she reached for it she could feel the way it spread out. She could feel the shape of it and maybe even move it.

  Aster calmed herself even further and placed a third image in her mind’s eye of the armor she was wearing and then imagined the mana entering the item. Then she willed it to be so.

  Suddenly the leather shifted all across her body. Aster rose to her knees as the skirt began to pull against her skin. She opened her eyes and stood up as the previously boxy armor conformed to her body, fitting snuggly against her waist, with thicker leather across her shoulder blades and other areas that didn’t move that much.

  She tested it, stretching and squatting, finding that it didn’t impede her range of motion in the slightest. Once she’d finished and concluded that the armor was not only very effective but also hella comfortable, she put her two new free points into endurance, then pushed the idea of having a soul to the back of her mind and left at a comfortable pace that would have been on par with the fastest of Olympic athletes back on Earth.

  She didn’t give her old, earthly clothes a second glance.