Wrath Domain, Beyond the Wall, September 11, 2025.
DING. DING.
Ashen was woken up by the bell signifying a monster attack.
Normally, he'd be feeling grumpy by now, but he still didn't feel quite like himself yet from yesterday's talk with his twin soul.
He really took the scolding like a man who'd been pinched awake from a dream. There was a bitter, small smile that wanted to curl and make a joke, and then he swallowed it down like bad bread.
'I deserve that,' he thought.
He finally felt the shape of what he'd been avoiding.
But then he remembered Alice. '...That's right, her. I need to focus on that now.'
His jaw set; fingertips fidgeted with nothing and yet found the map of what needed doing. Emotions were acknowledged and then politely told to wait in the hallway while he handled business.
The first thing he set out to do was master his mutated eyes and the hyper vision they unlocked.
This may sound unrelated to his final objective of reuniting with Alice and protecting her from whatever led to that nightmare, but it was actually one of the few ways to do so.
There were only two ways to go back to the Ashbastion before the six months of forced enlistment were up.
The first was to be ready to advance in rank. You, then, would be eligible to go back for a few days to prepare and finish your advancement.
A 6th step pathway walker was many times more precious than a 7th step, after all, so the higher-ups would be more accommodating if it increased the success chances.
The second way was through merit. Every kill, every fight, and every decision was cataloged and assigned its own merit and demerit for soldiers, and this was done through specialized officers in the army who had observation as their sole job.
Focusing and eventually mastering his hyper vision would allow him to excel in skirmishes and wars against the monsters, eventually accumulating enough merit to ask for a leave.
Of course, he would also do his best to advance, and whatever came first would be his ticket to return.
But to accelerate his advancement on his pathway, he had to regularly cast dreamweaving on others, and people didn't take well to anyone using their skills on them in Seravelle.
Seraphine was once again the exception and not the rule when she allowed him to freely mess with her dreams.
Then, there was only one path left for him: '...I'll just keep casting it on myself whenever I can.'
As he moved in line with the other soldiers, no one noticed as his eyes stirred with an emotion that could only be described as madness.
'...If I can force myself to dream every dream, sweet, vile, or grotesque... then maybe I'll finally deserve to be called a true Dreamer and advance.'
⛧
The Bloodwall army could be seen cleaning the battlefield after killing yet another Narkal tribe.
Among them, Ashen was also on duty, but he looked so much worse than the rest, especially with the long gash going from his shoulder to his chest.
"Soldier, you can go and get it healed; that wound's gonna get much worse if you keep it like that."
A passing officer ordered after glancing his way.
"Yes, sir..."
Ashen trudged back to the makeshift clinic tent, his thoughts still on the last battle.
'...It seems that this will be harder than I thought.' He thought bitterly.
Having hyper vision wasn't all about positives after all. It was as they said: Too much of anything is bad, and the same applied here.
Seeing too much turned out to be as bad as seeing too little. Details overwhelmed him; everything seemed to be amplified.
A grain of sand that he'd usually ignore was suddenly diverting his attention. Little cues that he'd normally miss were plastered in bold for him to see; everything seemed clearer than ever… so clear that his brain couldn't keep up.
His mind was simply not built to process that much information at once.
By the end of the fight, he considered himself lucky to have only ended up with a slash on his torso and a bad migraine.
But for the current him, it mattered little. This hurdle was only one of the many that he would overcome to see that woman once more.
That night, he dived into dreamweaving the moment he hit the bed, and the first thing he conjured in the dreamscape was that day's earlier battlefield.
The same soldiers, the same monsters, the same positions. Everything was a replica except for some small places that stayed white, as if they were glitched.
That was because a dream could never be about something that you had never seen. And Ashen had seen most of the battlefield with his hyper vision.
It didn't matter if he only remembered even 1% of the details. Everything a person sees or experiences gets stored in their subconscious.
And what was so magical about dreams was that they actually had access to that subconscious part of us.
Everything stayed frozen for a moment before erupting at once.
The soldiers fought just as they did in the day. The Narkals also responded exactly the same.
It was only Ashen that was different. But as he moved differently, his surroundings also adapted and responded accordingly.
The fight didn't last long. Only a single hour, and Ashen promptly recreated the same scenario all over again, only this time with fewer soldiers on his side.
He kept doing this every time the Narkals lost until it reached a point where it wasn't certain who would lose or win anymore.
He stopped changing the numbers after reaching that scenario and kept acting over and over again as just another soldier in the battle.
His primary goal was to adapt to this new vision. And he knew waiting for things to happen normally would never be enough. So the only solution he came up with was this.
Fight, fight, fight, and keep fighting. Use the vision to the limit, even as he bled from all his orifices. He could just reset himself in the world of dreams after all.
The second day wasn't much better.
No, it was even worse than the first, since he almost died three times if not for Paul covering for him.
The day after that, he was surprisingly lucky, for the day had passed peacefully since the scouts hadn't spotted any Narkals.
That day, he spent almost all of his time in the dreamscape, simulating every war and skirmish he had been through.
On the fourth day, things started to get marginally better, but Ashen wasn't satisfied.
It seemed that no matter what he did, he couldn't go faster than this. There were only twenty-four hours a day, and he was already using most of them to adapt to the mutation since he could negate sleep.
'The only way would be if the day somehow stretched beyond twenty-four—' Ashen abruptly halted his train of thought in favor of an idea that occurred to him.
'Normally, in a dream, time matters little... You could feel like days passed, or it could pass in a blink... can't I take advantage of this?'
And with that idea stuck in his head, Ashen added another activity to his mindless killing of monsters: Trying to stretch the time inside the dreamscape beyond his hours of sleep.
The experiment somehow succeeded after some tries. But the success was insignificant. The dreams prolonged for only a little longer.
Ashen discovered that the trick to extending time was to simply stop thinking about it at all.
Get lost in time, bury your mind in something so deep, focus on anything long enough, all while completely forgetting about time, and by the time you look up, you'll find that time in the dreamscape has really moved faster than reality.
But the paradox was that when one wants to prolong time, he has to first forget about time.
Ashen, after racking his brain for a solution, settled on a trick.
He would give a delayed command to the dreamscape to stretch time, and then he'd completely forget about the concept, and the delayed command would naturally trigger afterwards.
Forgetting completely about time had its own set of difficulties, but for Ashen, it wasn't that hard for him to let go as he immersed himself in training.
And by the time the twenty-four became forty-eight...
[Lucid Dreamweaving^ (Basic-)]
The skill had finally broken the Entry barrier.
From then on, Ashen had become like a man possessed.
He took every advantage of the double time. Not even a week later, and he had completely adapted to his new eyes.
Not only that, he also finally started taking advantage of his hyper vision effectively in battles.
Seeing details others missed had become a basic act—whether it was frayed armor straps, dried blood under nails, or even a twitch of an eyelid.
Hidden archers threatening to put an arrow through his skull became a thing of the past. Ambushing him became an impossible task. And most of all, weak points started appearing more easily in his vision: blood vessels under skin, tension in joints, hairline cracks in armor. It was almost as if the monsters were begging to be stabbed in those places.
From then on, one strike was all it took for one kill. This made him terrifying on the battlefield, and the praise and attention finally started pouring in.
But he didn't stop there; he knew this wasn't enough. After his brain got used to the new load of information, his eyes started seeing beyond just small details.
He began recognizing patterns in combat. The telltale changes of a monster's weight shifting before an attack, the muscles tensing before movements.
After observing the same creatures, constantly doing his best not to die under their blades and always giving his all to kill them, every day, day by day… he slowly started learning to predict their swings, until he could see the strikes up to half a second before they happened.
But Ashen was still not satisfied. He knew he could go further.
'...If only I could see how their muscles move better... but the ugly armor and thick skin won't ever let me...'
But then he remembered that he could actually see if he really wanted to.
That day, he had a dream of a bestiary.
The moment he reached the dreamscape, he conjured a Narkal and started peeling it apart like an anatomical mannequin.
He started with the skin, and then made it fight like that as he observed how its muscles moved and twitched without the thick hide as a cover.
He summoned soldiers to fight it as he kept memorizing its patterns from the side.
How the joints bent, how the expression changed, where the eyes looked.
He did the same for every Narkal species he encountered.
From the short and thin to the tall and thick. He didn't spare anything.
⛧
Another week passed, but it was two weeks for Ashen. Two weeks of staring at how Narkal meat moved by night, and killing those same Narkals by day.
By the end of it, he was numb to it all. Seeing those creatures began to stir a primal disgust within him.
But no matter what he thought or how he felt, remembering the nightmare where Alice died and the possibility of it happening for real wiped away every complaint.
But his efforts finally paid off. Now on the battlefield, Narkals rarely touched him anymore. They became like an open book to him.
Where they advanced, when they pushed, how they struck—it became laughably simple to dodge when you saw the hit before it even happened.
The constant display didn't go overlooked by the soldiers, nor did it pass unnoticed by the observing officers. The man was becoming akin to a ghost after all.
He even started contending with the 6th step soldiers in kill count. But no matter how hard they looked, they didn't find anything out of place.
He didn't suddenly get absurdly faster, nor did he gain sudden strength. He was merely getting better at killing.
Some soldiers even started calling him the Seer, after seeing how uncannily he could read the monsters and predict their moves.
But Ashen knew that he wasn't some kind of clairvoyant; it was just that he was able to see the flaws in the monsters and act on them, no matter how tiny.
But it wasn't all good news; it never was.
His new vision, no matter how powerful, still required his brain to process the information.
And every time he pushed it to the limit to see more details, his brain started madly drinking the mana in his brain circuits to keep up with the processing speed required.
But no matter how much mana he gathered with his ManaForge breath, it wasn't enough.
In fact, until now, no matter how much he tried to adapt, his brain couldn't handle more than half an hour in the hyper-focused state required to catch every flaw and roam the battleground like what the soldiers dubbed him as—a Seer.
He ended up calling this state the Interpreter since he felt that fighting in this condition was like reading the words of the monster's intentions hidden in flesh and bone.
And staying more than half an hour in the Interpreter state made Ashen feel like his brain was literally being fried. Nosebleeds, hallucinations, fragments of movements replaying endlessly—he tasted them all.
'It seems that mana is really my Achilles heel...' He concluded dryly.
If he fed enough mana to his brain, maybe it could go longer, or maybe it could adapt to the strain bit by bit.
But he didn't even have the means to try, so it was pointless to think about.
Ashen didn't plan to stop here, though, as an even more daring idea started taking root in his mind.
'If those monsters have this many flaws in their movements... I'm bound to have some myself. What if I removed those flaws? What if I learned to move in a way that eliminates every flaw? I wouldn't even need to use my hyper vision to keep that up afterwards...'
Ashen, in his tent, had a really wide smile, completely contrasting with the numb look of every other person in the camp.
'...Wouldn't I be unstoppable then...?'
"He...hehehehe..."