Our return was celebrated by the entire village, the beast we had slain something many had considered impossible to defeat.

  “Slime butcher, Wyvern slayer, what else do the two of you plan on achieving?”

  Asked the elders, and we simply smiled at them.

  “We want to reach heights no one else has reached so far.”

  I explain to them, while Pale continued being quiet as she stood beside me, simply staring the elders down, a stark contrast to me, as I was mostly focused on this feeling I noticed when I almost died, which would have broken my goal of becoming immortal.

  The first to answer was the elder of the soul, his role the most prominent among them.

  “The shadow can come to me for training in the arcane arts, if she wants.”

  He offered, before taking a step back.

  “The undoer can join my training, though it will be hard with the amount of restrictions that are placed on his body.”

  This one joined in, and as both of us had learned everything we could in our personal disciplines, we agreed to the switch in teachers.

  Now, I would have been very reluctant if this wasn’t exactly what I had hoped to achieve, given my general aversion to anyone having power over me, but a chance like this was everything I could have dreamt of.

  Thus, they took us with them, bloodied and bruised as we were, and the call of a mutation waiting behind the next time I would sleep. After an hour of walking, the surrounding forest suddenly dissipated and instead revealed a particularly large clearing, the ends of it inlaid with rocks and sygils of gathering and disguise.

  As soon as I had put a step inside, my new teacher asked me to run in this circle, and despite my exhaustion and everything, I followed his command.

  After one hour of constant running, my flesh had started disintegrating and the life force within me rushed faster with every step, turning from a bog into a collection of drops, my heart releasing the life force in careful dosage as it infused my movements.

  Four more hours of driving my body to its limits had my flesh almost completely gone, and the drops increasing in frequency, not stopping their eternal march.

  At this point, I went feral, and I only remember it vaguely, but my teacher ran away from me in this circle, and somehow I followed until I collapsed.

  The next three months were spent in my feral shape, with him making me run circles, and me waking up every day to some weird brew that restored my body to a barely working condition.

  At the end of it, my life force turned into a continuous trickle, and I knew I had grown a bit stronger.

  I am unsure how he noticed, if it was some ability of his or simply watching me grow a bit faster, but he gave me a pig that day which almost restored me to a third of my power.

  Finally falling asleep did not mean I would get to rest, though, as many things had been waiting for this opportunity.

  I had spent long enough in this situation to be considered a child, which meant the second tier of my body had been unlocked.

  With this growth, many options were thrust in my face, and like the day I was born, I made sure to filter for things that actually made sense.

  This one was my only trait so far, and it had helped me immensely in the development of anything but my body. The human part of me was mostly useless, and the undead traits had a tendency on killing things in a general area or making the killing thing easier for me, both things I personally didn’t like.

  Instead, there was now a group I had not dared to touch earlier, because I couldn’t read it.

  I loved webbed and suction cups, but held off on buying them because I wanted to stay somewhat humanoid.

  Then, a prompt offered me to a page called achievements, and it was quite shocking to look at.

  The list overwhelmed me easily, with many offers I considered taking. Thus, I asked the system what temporary meant.

  When it confirmed that I would lose temporary traits at some point, I quickly chose early puberty, any increase in growth being important at this stage.

  Another trait I had to take was elemental, the opportunity it offered too great to resist.

  I decided against the hero stuff, because the priest had told me becoming a priest cleansed your soul of any affinities you had, which I considered a good reason to decide against it.

  The heretic traits were obviously traps, given that I would be every priest's enemy number one if I chose it.

  Not wanting to be on an eternal quest against myself, I quickly discarded revenant as an option.

  Monster and undead might be choices I do some day, but not until I had learned everything I could as a human. My last choice was between Devourer and arcane gaze, as every other option felt like a waste of my time compared to them.

  As the options settled and my body convulsed, I drifted towards the next dream, my body convulsing violently under the changes I was undergoing.