Cassandra’s journey through the rift felt simple when Diven was reading it. Thanks to her ability to sense mind-attuned mana, she could spot ambushes from far away. Of course, since it was a journal, it was difficult to infer all the details of her fights. But she didn’t report any injury, so he assumed she never received one.
The tone of her writing had shifted to what Diven recognized as annoyance. The rift wasn't as good a place to practice as she had expected. The monsters were too dangerous for her to lose herself in Mind Manipulation. Staying near the stone was pointless since the guardians drove all the wildlife away.
That was until she found the cavern.
Diven could feel her relief when she finally found a reasonably safe place to settle. He was still riding that high as he was examining her journal.
Thus, from the safety of her cave, Cassandra kept running mind magic experiments on both herself and the few creatures wandering near her hiding spot.
She ended up concluding mind-controlling a beast and her own body simultaneously was impossible in her current state. Perhaps her Mental Dominion bloodline made the skill too overwhelming. As always with bloodlines, it was hard to say.
Anyway, she started looking for alternative solutions. She had an idea that had been blooming in the back of her head for a long time. Since the issue she was having was that her mind was too focused in one direction, why not split her mind in two?
She had the tools to do that. Her Mind Magic skill was level 5, she had studied what a mind was for more than a year now. She felt like she could do it.
Furthermore, having more than one mind would greatly accelerate her progress and bolster her strength.
That said, it was easier said than done. She admitted she lacked the knowledge to devise a spell that could achieve it. It was just too dangerous to take the risk. One mistake and she risked turning her brain into a mush.
No, she planned to unlock a mind-splitting skill. She didn’t know if it was possible, but she could try.
Having reached the end of the second volume, without hesitation, Diven picked up the third and final book.
There, she described the training regimen she put herself through.
Diven found it somewhat random and doubted it would lead to anything. But the gist of it was that Cassandra had come up with plenty of exercises to improve her ability to multitask.
Juggling with pine cones while doing mental calculations. Reading while sculpting a piece of wood with her knife. That kind of thing. Each new idea was carefully noted in her journal and added to her training regimen.
And so months passed as she practiced and practiced.
By her own admission, she became very good at the things she was training. Her juggling skills were top-notch, and her sculptures were beautiful. She even cast her thought-slowing spell on herself to intensify the challenge.
But no skill appeared. To be fair, she didn’t claim a skill would appear out of nowhere. While it was possible, she feared she would simply unlock something like Multitasking rather than the mind-splitting skill she sought."
The goal she was aiming for was a facet that would give her the skill she wanted. With her bloodline and the fact that she already had two mind-related facets, it seemed more probable.
Thus, the day came when her Facet of the Mind Manipulator was finally completed. It took a painful grind on the rare defenseless critters hiding in the forest and by the river to make it this far, but she succeeded.
Her efforts were rewarded by Facet of the Multimind and the Multimind skill. After what she aptly described as a head-splitting headache, she had two minds operating simultaneously.
She wrote that she had no idea how to describe the sensation. Diven couldn’t blame her, he couldn’t even imagine having two minds. All she could say was that it felt very natural, like the two minds were acting in symbiosis. She was still herself, her mind capacity had just improved.
After familiarizing herself with her new state of being, she wrote that she was going out to see if all her work to make Mind Manipulation useful had paid off.
Diven turned the page.
The next one was blank.
He turned another page, and another, before flipping through the rest of the book.
There was nothing else.
This was Cassandra’s last entry inside her journal.
Diven was left with a sense of emptiness. He had known she was dead since the beginning, but he hadn’t expected to be left without closure like that.If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
It made sense, if she was mortally wounded on her final trip outside, writing in her journal couldn’t have been a priority. Even if she had made it back to the cave…
It was hard to reconcile. He wanted to know what had happened to her. Had her Mind Manipulation skill worked with her two minds? What had killed her?
He would never know.
Closing the book, Diven was left motionless. Sitting next to his fire, he ruminated on his thoughts.
Cassandra had been dedicated to her magic to a degree he found both admirable and somewhat unnerving. She had completely abandoned any thoughts of returning home. The only thing on her mind was magic.
Was it her domineering bloodline influencing her? Was his own bloodline influencing his line of thought?
Examining himself, he found that he was split between the desire to return to his previous life and a festering anger pointed at everyone who played a part in his exile.
If he wanted to, he could make this contradiction fit his Rot Heart bloodline. But he could very well be chasing shadows with this theory.
Regardless, he didn’t find what he was looking for in the journals. All that came out of them was sadness when faced with the fate of his fellow exile.
Even so, he was interested in the multitasking training Cassandra described. He didn’t think he could gain a skill or a facet that would split his mind. He didn’t have the prerequisite bloodline or attunement. But a skill like Multitasking was definitely possible.
What could go wrong?
Worst case scenario, he wouldn't get a skill but he would improve his coordination. It was worth a try.
But first, he had to sleep and take care of his needs. Food, water, firewood, he was the only person he could count on for his survival.
After a good night of sleep and his tasks completed, he tried the exercises Cassandra mentioned in her journals.
The first was a rhythmic game where, with a stick in each hand, Diven had to play two different rhythms at the same time. One with his right hand and one with his left hand.
It was a lot harder than it seemed, every time he tried desynchronizing both hands, they automatically tried to follow the same rhythm. He needed intense focus to even approach the easiest pattern described in the journal.
Another exercise was juggling while doing math at the same time. Two things he had no talent for separately, so doing them at the same time seemed almost impossible. Cassandra suggested several variations that swapped math with poetry or the use of a skill. All harder than the last.
He had picked up a heap of pinecones to practice juggling, but he barely managed with two while his calculations were mostly wrong and the verses he had to come up with on the fly were broken and disjointed to the point of incoherence. Let alone using a skill. The only one who fit the bill was Echoes of the Rot Heart. But like Cassandra’s Mind Manipulation it demanded his full concentration.
Despite his struggles, Diven could see the benefits these would have on him in the long run. Being so bad at something that only relied on his own ability was embarrassing. It wasn’t a knowledge gap; it was his physical ability to perform those tasks that was lacking.
Aside from this, Diven spent his day reviewing the Martial Manual and learning a few words of Linien. The latter wouldn’t be useful in the rift but since learning a language took time, he had to start now to be ready when he eventually met a barbarian. On the other hand, the martial manual gave him a lot of insight into the techniques of spear combat.
He did study a more recent version of the Martial Manual back in Kheiron, but now that he was seeing it with the eyes of someone who had gone through the fire of combat, it cast the teachings of the book in a different light.
He had been focused on surviving the fights more than on improving his ability. He wasn’t blaming himself for it, but he believed refining his moves would help him in his future encounters with monsters.
His Spear skill was helping him, but it wouldn’t progress if he didn’t put in the effort. Especially if he wanted it to evolve after reaching level 10. It was already level 6, still way off the threshold, but if things continued as they were going, he would get there sooner rather than later.
His days went on like this for a month as he waited for his Facet of the Exile to complete. The monotony was only broken by the occasional progress in the exercises Cassandra had left behind.
As he got better, he added more exercises to his training regimen, each more uncomfortable than the last.
He even tried doing them while Echoes of the Rot Heart was active. A deeply unpleasant experience that hadn’t yielded any result so far. It just didn’t seem possible. Even Cassandra, with all her genius, didn’t manage to do it with Mind Manipulation. Who was he to succeed?
A few of his skills leveled up, surely boosted by his application of the Martial Manual. He didn’t even encounter a monster.
Skill leveled up: Spear lv6 -> Lv7
Skill leveled up: Spearfishing lv2 -> Lv3
Surveying the entirety of his inner garden filled him with pride. He had progressed so much since he had been left alone in the Wildlands.
Name: Diven
Bloodline: Rot Heart
Titles: Rotten Sun
Current Facet: Facet of the Exile
Previous Facets: Facet of the Hoplite, Facet of the Survivor
Skills:

Spear – Basic – Lv7
Shield – Basic – Lv4
Spearfishing – Basic – Lv3
Trap Detection – Basic – Lv4
The Fifth Direction – Basic – Lv3
Echoes of the Rot Heart - Basic - Lv3

His Shield skill was stagnating at level 4. There was nothing he could do about it. He could maybe try to make a new one with the tools Cassandra had left behind in the cave. But it wouldn’t match the necessary quality.
Not that he didn’t have a use for a shield. If he encountered the pinecone rodents or another similarly small monster, it would be a lifesaver. However, the Martial Manual insisted on a shield being reliable. It wouldn’t do for it to break under the weight of an opponent’s blow. It was something Diven agreed with wholeheartedly. He needed to be able to trust his shield if he was to stand behind it.
If he couldn’t, it would only hinder him.
Seeing that at the rate his facet progressed, it would still take at least a few months to complete. So he continued working on his projects with all his energy.
He welcomed the respite from being a vagrant. Having a place to call home was maybe slowing his facet’s progress, but it was only a temporary shelter so Diven reckoned it would never completely stop.
Cassandra’s tale was still heavy on his mind. Even with all the power he was accumulating, things would always be dangerous inside the rift.
Prudence was key. Even at the cost of speed.