Despite not having visited the waking world for a while, he still didn't leave the dream realm.
He was satisfied living at the jade palace.
Especially because of how intricate his essence control was getting with all the training Moon was putting him through.
Still, he needs to eventually go there.
Since Moon had spent nearly twenty days on him, so she couldn't spend more time in strengthening him. Since there wasn't much left to teach him, it was just upto him to improve the essence control and build his feel for it better.
In the near month he had spent since coming from the forgotten shore, his strength had increased massively.
The difference between a new awakened, and one with somewhat intricate essence control was massive.
Even though Caster couldn't use his awakened ability properly, he was still certain that he'd be the strongest awakened. Even if you take away his echo and book of books.
'Eh, I shouldn't be certain of that. Sunny and Neph are both monsters too.'
Especially because Caster does not have a physical augumentation ability.
Sunny as an awakened demon while augumented by two of his shadows, that is three times his strength, was as strong as a newly ascended or maybe even middle tier masters physically.
But Caster, as a titan, was only about as strong as a newly ascended master.
This just goes to show how incredible their, Sunny and Neph's, augumentation are.
In terms of speed though, no one compares.
Caster specializes in that after all.
Still, the physical weakness is what stops Caster from decimating master's by his own strength.
Moon also compared Caster's physicality to master's at one point. She said that Caster is not quite as strong, physically, compared to masters.
Caster suspects that she meant the true, veteran masters and not the newly ascended ones. Because he does think that he compares to master's physically.
Currently, Sunny is a demon, almost a devil, Nephis is a Devil and Caster is a Titan. So, with the augumentations, their physical strength is probably about the same, or at best slightly above or below him.
But soon...
They will leave Caster in the dust in this regard.
'Oh well, what can I do? Let's focus on what I need to do.'
Caster could have focused his all into learning more about his aspect and train it rigorously, but he didn't.
His flaw didn't allow him to.
He had always restrained in training his aspect and using it more than his charm could handle. Because of this, he wasn't particularly skilled with his aspect.
The one thing he did get skilled at though, was his essence control.
Because of that, he was able learn to use his aspect in precise bursts.
Many awakened do the same thing without an aspect like his, by sending bursts of essence to whatever part they wish to accelerate to momentarily get faster. And it works, but Caster has a speed type aspect ability.
And upon learning that essence trick, combined with bursting his aspect for speed as well... his instantaneous speed reached speeds that even seasoned master's would have difficulty in stopping.
That was the only thing he trained with his aspect.
However, it was only instantaneous.
He wasn't able to replicate that level of finesse for longer intervals of time.
Because of his flaw.
He had considered Weaver's mask initially, but his flaw says "[Lifespan shortens every time aspect is used.]" meaning the opposite could be "[Lifespan shortens every time aspect is not being used.]".
He could have taken it, but he didn't. He knew it would save Sunny's life multiple times. He also judged that his charm would be good enough for him.
He had judged wrong.
It was good as a sleeper, but its effectiveness decreased greatly after awakening.
He had judged wrong!
Still, the essence control and aspect burst technique he created for himself was a leap forward in being able to use his aspect more, more effectively I mean, without using up his charm majorly.
His skills in swordsmanship also improved, not as much as his essence but definitely a major amount.
Due to his constant spars with Moon, he was bound to learn despite not focusing into it. He wasn't an idiot who wouldn't learn from his mistakes after all.
Still, his skill with sword couldn't be said to be at a prodigal level.
It was simply, impressive for his age.
If his essence control hadn't improved leaps and bounds, his sword skills would barely be in the above average range.
He had really gotten too dependent on his memories.
There's usually four types of awakened.
The first type relied on skill, the second type relied on a powerful Aspect, and the third type relied on excellent Memories.
While the latter two were tricky to deal with, only the first type was really dangerous.
The fourth type, of course, was the most deadly — these were fighters who had both formidable skill and powerful Aspects, as well as an arsenal of fearsome Memories at their disposal.
Unfortunately for Caster, he falls in the third type.
He wasn't dangerously skilled, only dangerously battle intuitive.
Nor was his aspect abilities particularly strong, despite having a divine aspect. His abilities would probably fall in the ascended to transcendent range.
Despite having such an incredible ability, grazing, he couldn't even utilize it properly. Currently, it was at best a disorienting ability upon usage.
Barely nicks the souls of others and doesn't even have the ability for his main function.
The mess his soul was in, due to the weird transmigration, was really freaking hindering!
It really soured his mood, and made him immensely dissatisfied.
But he did figure out something that elevated his mood immensely.
He had figured out how to store abilities in the book of books!
It took him a lot of trial and error, but basically, he needed to flow his essence through the memory and activate an ability at the same time, to store it.
Of course, not every ability could be stored in it, like passive abilities or active ability that fall under some exceptional case.
But nonetheless, he figured out how to store abilities.
This also made one thing clear.
He had wondered why the Puppeteering ability was in it, the terror from his first nightmare did not have a need to store her ability.
But now it made sense.
It was simply an experiment.
Like how Caster experimented.
Now, the stored abilities in it were: Lightning Strike, Telepathy, Puppeteering and Grazing.
He tried to store his dormant ability, Acquired Haste, but it didn't work for some reason. He had his theories on why it didn't, of course, but they don't really matter.
It was just a simple failure.
He'd have asked Moon to save her ability, if he didn't care about revealing the book of books.
Apart from the lieutenants, no one knew about the extent of his memory. Most just assumed it was an ability augmentation ability or something similar. So rumours regarding it were convulated to say the least.
It was of course way more than simple augmentation, but they don't need to know that.
Moon's ability would be useful, for sure, but he couldn't risk revealing it at the moment.
'Maybe in the future...'
Since Caster now had an incredible amount of knowledge about Chained Isles, he was ready to put his plan into action as soon as he gets to go there.
It was only unfortunate that Sky Tide kept delaying it.
Currently, Caster was just at the Jade Palace, training. He didn't have much else to do anyways.
It had already gotten late, and should probably go to sleep but he couldn't seem to want to do that.
And so... In the meanwhile, he decided to give weaving a try.
Over the past multitude of weeks, Caster had studied weaving a lot.
Ever since he got the [Apostle of Eternity] lineage attribute, he'd been able to see the weaves. Not just the weaves, but truth itself.
Of course, it didn't work like a lie detector, but more like a secret divulger.
Or, that's his theory at least.
He doesn't know the inner workings of that attribute after all. Only what it does.
He suspected that he was way off the mark with that theory, but he didn't care. The thing he cares about is that he can see the weaves, and maybe more than that, when he focuses.
And that's incredibly convenient for him.
While studying the Memories created by Spell, Caster was not able to fully understand the intricate purpose of the vast patterns of ethereal strings… but he at least could intuitively feel a hint of it.
Even if he asked the [Book of Books] about it, it wouldn't tell without an immense essence cost.
One that he couldn't afford at the moment.
Still, he had figured out a way to weave.
Caster straightened and sat cross-legged at the center of the training room. Raising one of his two hands, he stared at it for a while, and then commanded soul essence to stream forward, concentrating at the tips of his fingers.
Ever since he had become an awakened titan, the tactile sense of his whole body, which includes his fingers, went through a... upgrade of sorts. It was now much more nuanced, vibrant, and keen.
It was a strange familiarity with his body. Almost as if it was a qualitative change.
Well... it was qualitative, because of the awakening, but more than that, becoming a titan itself was a qualitative change of sorts.
As soul essence concentrated in the tips of his fingers, he felt a strange, ghostly tingling sensation. It was so real as to almost appear physical…
Tentatively raising another hand, Caster hesitated for a few moments, then pinched the air near one of his tingling fingers and tried to pull essence outward.
It worked.
In his mind's eye, a strand of blinding, radient light suddenly extended into the air, summoned by his hand.
It didn't look like one of the radiant strings he was used to seeing inside Memories, and neither did it look like the flowing liquid that essence was usually depicted as.
Instead, it looked way more volatile, with sparks of lightning seemingly flying out of it.
Almost as if it was covered by a fog of lightning.
It was simultaneously sharp, beautiful and... insubstantial and elusive.
Afterwards, he pulled the volatile strand towards him with one hand while trying to get a hold of it with the other, wishing to draw it taut, and thus more concentrated.
However, this small movement instantly caused the strand to break, dissipate, and disappear, blown away by a gust of wind.
'Aww.'
Caster continued to draw on his soul essence and try to form it into a thin and durable string, emptying a small portion of his reserves with each failure.
By the time morning came, he had not made any progress at all, and only managed to waste most of his essence in futile attempts.
But that was okay, he had all the time in the world.
He tried again.
Only this time, the string literally just exploded on his face.
"Ow... what the fuck."
The explosion wasn't too strong, but it wasn't weak either.
It seems his essence was way too potent and volatile.
'I mean I do have the Stormsong attribute, but still... It seems it might take me a while...'
***
In just a few days, Caster had advanced a lot in his ability to thread shadow strings and loop them between his fingers.
He knew how dangerous they were, so he was extra careful to not lose a finger or two, like Sunny did.
The strings were ephemeral and unseen to anyone except him, which also meant that they could not interact with the material world. However, they could interact with his flesh, which was why he was so incredibly dangerous.
He knew that his body provided no resistance against the weaves, he just hadn't exprienced it.
Yet...
He had another issue, one that Sunny didn't have. It was that his essence made the weaves explode for no reason often!
It was getting on his nerves.
Despite being careful with the weaves themselves, to not let himself get cut, he couldn't avoid the damage from the explosions unless he used his aspect to run away.
It would have certainly been incredibly helpful to have a tool to work the light blue strings, instead of doing it with his bare hands… like the weaver's needle perhaps.
But that would take a while to get to.
Since it was at the ebony tower.
Caster planned to get Cassie and the Gold Reapers to repair the ship and go down to the ebony tower with the others, allowing Sunny to get bone weave — and perhaps Caster could share the needle with Sunny — to get to the ivory tower and enter the second nightmare after Caster was done with his business on the Chained Isles.
But that would take months upon months.
Nonetheless, Caster was very talented at weaving.
Mostly because of his attribute [Weave Sorcerer], that he got from evolving his [Sorcerer] attribute by learning about weaving.
If he learnt about things like name sorcery before weave sorcery, perhaps his attribute would have become [Name Sorcerer].
So his [Sorcerer] attribute providing him talent for each sorcery was borderline fraudluent, because he could only get the benefits for one sorcery.
Had he learnt something else before, he would have likely lost his chance to learn weaving entirely.
In any case, the [Book of Books] proved to be extra helpful with this.
Even though it sometimes costed a lot, and sometimes more than he could afford, it still provided answers to alot of questions.
This made the memory practically his weave teacher.
Because of this not only was his progress at weaving incredibly fast, he was also catching the the recurring mistakes he was making before they turned into a bad habit.
These conditions made it hundreds of times better to learn weaving compared to Sunny's horrific start of the second nightmare.
That start was downright torturous for him.
'Maybe I should teach him weaving before we enter the second nightmare.'
Caster had already planned deeply for what he would do in the second nightmare.
He of course, didn't know where he would start, but he thought over almost every place he could start, and formulated a simple plan from there.
It wasn't anything ground breaking in his opinion, but definitely would make his life easier if he went with a plan.
Even if something out of ordinary happens to him, he'd likely be able to adapt and form a new plan.
After some thinking he decided against teaching Sunny about weaving.
For now.
'Sunny's extra paranoid, and despite him being trustful of me, he would never buy any excuse I make for teaching him how to weave. I'm already in the "beyond ridiculous" range for getting trusted by him for some things.
It will definitely make his start of the second nightmare harder, but he can escape from it by himself. I should teach him when it's a good time to teach.'
The decision was very logical, but it hurt slightly... having to decide to not help Sunny.
Getting back to weaving, Caster had been studying and practicing the three basic traits that all memories shared.
The ability to be summoned and dismissed, the ability to repair themselves unless completely destroyed, and the connection to the owner's soul.
Because of Caster's incredibly memory and extensive studying of memories he had been doing, he had pretty easily identified the traits from the memories, which weaves did them, and more.
The hard part was building them.
He had to rebuild the repeating parts of those weaves with nothing but his bare hands and his soul essence.
After thousands of attempts, and thousands of explosions, Caster was finally able to perfectly recreate one of the three patterns he had managed to isolate. But as soon as the pattern was complete, it instantly fell apart. No matter how many times he repeated the process, the result was the same.
For some reason, the weave didn't hold. It wasn't able to sustain itself.
And then he remembered... he needs an anchor.
There was one other thing that all Memories contained… not a part of the pattern of ethereal strings, but something different. A bright ember that served as the anchor and nexus for the strings, a point around which the whole pattern was structured. Memories of the first Tier had one, and those of the higher Tiers had several.
Now, looking at the cat's cradle of ethereal blue strings drawn between his fingers, he hesitated for a long time, and then carefully placed the gleaming crystal in its center.
Then, holding his breath, Caster slowly started connecting each of the strings to the shard, moving his fingers with extreme speed and nimbleness. Slowly, a bright blue pattern started shaping around the bright ember, strangely not permeating a different object, but instead looping back on itself.
And after something that felt like an eternity, with drops of blood rolling down his hands, face, neck and basically his entire body really… Caster finally let go of the strings and stared at the soul shard laying on his palm.
A beautiful pattern of tenebrous strings hovered in the air around it, stable, without a single flaw or weakness to cause it to fall apart.
He sighed, and then weaved the last string into the pattern, connecting its other end to the soul core in his chest.
He couldn't do that with the fourth wall in place, but he knew he could stop it for a bit. So he did that.
[The first fragment, 'The Fourth Wall' had been forcibly shut down.]
It felt like it was trying its best to turn itself back on, but Caster resisted it.
Only after it full connected to his core, did he give in and allow the fourth wall to turn back on.
Finally, Caster closed his eyes and gave the mental command.
In front of him, the soul shard disintegrated into a rain of white sparks, and then appeared once again, creating itself out of nothingness.
Caster let out a long, heavy breath.
...This was the first sorcery he had woven.