And in front of this animated painting stood Silvia. Her hands and her clothes were covered in splotches of paint. She had even accidentally smudged it through her hair yesterday, and though she had washed most of it out, there was still a soft shade of blue shining through her already-dyed pastel-purple hair.

  During the creation of this painting, Silvia had leveled up twice. She was completely locked in, letting the magic flow through her fingers into her brush, clinging to the paint as it was placed on the fabric. Somehow, though Silvia had painted things many times in the past, this was different.

  Silvia had always loved painting, sculpting, knitting, and sewing. Ever since she was a child, since her father had bought Silvia her first paint and brushes, she never put them down again. But somehow, this was different. Her paintings in particular had always been an escape for her. A place that she used to dump her pain and sorrows, a way for her to process her emotions in a way that wasn’t self-destructive.

  She had been praised for those paintings. By her parents, by her sister, by her teachers. Everyone said that they were amazing, and that she was some sort of prodigy. So, of course, Silvia had them put out into the world. She had them put into galleries and made quite a bit of money. All of that money was, of course, almost completely put into a savings account that she would be able to access in a few years. Technically, she could have had it already, but she pushed the access date back until she would be done with university. It was just too much pressure.

  Not that Silvia didn’t use plenty of that money to buy herself some things. Fabrics, toys, games, literally whatever she wanted. She had the money, after all.

  But then, at some point … things dried up. Painting had become a burden. Silvia had grown strong enough to not let her past keep dragging her down every single day of her life. She wasn’t able to get herself to keep painting anymore. At least, she couldn’t paint the sort of things that were expected of her. Somehow, it was always just painting. Even sketching or drawing digitally never felt the same to her, not to mention all her other projects. But there was something about painting that just used to make Silvia feel an intense, visceral pressure that was hard to put into words.

  But this? It was … different. It wasn’t art born from trauma in the same way that her old paintings were. It wasn’t a place where she dumped her pain or fears. She was using a sort of hope that she hadn’t felt in a while.

  Silvia had a wonderful girlfriend and two best friends that she connected with more and faster than she ever expected. Plus, she was now working with, or rather for, a group that was causing actual positive changes in this world. Not to mention awakening into a power that truly allowed her to live her passions. The fact she awakened as a type of artist somehow gave her validity.

  What part of all this exactly had allowed the spark to come back to her wasn’t really clear, but Silvia was glad. She was so, so glad.

  Carefully, Silvia picked up the canvas, carrying it downstairs to the living room. The sound of the wind whistled through the stairway together with the soft flapping of the Forge elemental’s wings as it flew through the skies. Silvia could hear her parents talking to each other downstairs, watching some TV show together, lounging on the couch.

  But when they noticed that Silvia was the one approaching, they hurried to turn the TV off; after all, they hadn’t really seen their daughter for the past few days. She had been completely engrossed in her process in a way that they had never really seen before.

  “Honey! Are you alright? Are you done with that painting?” Silvia’s mother, Athina, immediately asked, not even looking at the painting itself.

  Silvia slowly shrugged. “Sort of. The paint still needs to dry, and then I need to put on a layer of varnish for it to be completely finished. But I’m done painting for now.”

  Slowly, Athina looked at the painting itself. Her husband, Dimos, was already staring at it. This was something that neither of them had really seen before. A painting that was moving on its own in this way, letting out wind and even producing sound, no matter how faint either was. That was something neither of them expected, and they especially hadn’t realized that something like this could be made by their daughter.

  “Silvia, this is … I don’t even …” Dimos muttered, unable to move his eyes away from the canvas.

  Both of Silvia’s parents were staring intensely to the point where she didn’t even know what to say anymore. If anything, she felt a little awkward, almost exposed, at the painting being stared at like this.

  “Isn’t there something like this? In that super famous museum in Gardia?” Athina asked, and slowly, Silvia nodded.

  “Yeah, it’s the Advent of the Cosmos. The one that’s basically an animated meteor shower,” she responded. “I looked into it, and apparently, the one that painted it was also a Soulspark Artist. Of course, Soulspark Artists aren’t the only ones that can make paintings that move, or even ones that make sound or produce wind like this. The paintings created by Soulspark Artists are said to produce the emotion placed into the painting within the person that looks at them.”

  “Really? Is that why I feel so … excited?” Dimos asked, but Silvia just chuckled.

  “Maybe. But it depends on what you’re excited about. I just wanted it to show freedom, feeling unbound, and being yourself. If it’s that kind of excitement, then yeah, that might be why.”

  Athina and Dimos looked at each other for a few moments, then turned back to their daughter. Dimos asked, “Is this something that you want to display somewhere? It’s very different from your usual paintings, but I’m sure you could get it a spot in a gallery.”

  Silvia thought about it for a few moments, but she didn’t know how to answer it. Of course, she felt excited about the idea of showing this to people. But at the same time, she didn’t really feel a need to. She was content just having created it, and even if nobody else ever saw it, she would be happy. Maybe getting others to see this would make her even happier, but she felt no need for it.

  There was also another part to this, though. The subject of the painting was the Forge elemental, and she hadn’t asked for permission before drawing it like this. So, even if she didn’t feel the pressure to show this to people, it was better to ask Runar about it beforehand. Just in case.

  “I’m going to bring this back upstairs to let it finish drying,” Silvia said, walking back up to her room. She placed the canvas on the easel, stopping for a moment to feel the painting’s wind on her skin.

  “… I made that.”

  A smile on her face, Silvia kept staring at the painting. She felt simply invigorated by it. And then, though she didn’t know what exactly drew her to it, Silvia approached her window, taking a slight peek outside. There was a woman standing on the sidewalk next to the steps leading up to the front door.

  Immediately, her smile disappeared. But for once, she didn’t feel that sense of hopelessness that she usually felt when looking at that woman. Silvia turned around, rushing out of her room as if her very own painting was giving her a push on the back.

  She walked down to the ground floor, practically tearing the door open. The woman at the bottom of the steps looked at Silvia, startled, as the young elf looked at the woman who had given birth to her.

  “Fine. I’ll listen to what you have to say.”

  “Push! Come on, one last push! You got this!” Yanna’s booming voice sounded out, piercing clean through Ryan’s ears. He was currently in the university’s Awakened gym, doing a deadlift that broke his personal best. Or at least, he was trying to. His whole body was screaming in resistance to lifting something this heavy, but he still had to do it. It was part of making his Strength stat awaken.

  Ryan pushed through, trying his best to keep breathing as he tried to straighten his back. When he finally did, he had to just hold on to the bar for a little bit longer. It felt like his arms were about to be torn off, but he just had to do it.

  He had made such incredible progress over the past few weeks, much more than Yanna had ever expected him to. He was growing much, much faster than anyone else that she had seen try to awaken their stats. Then again, Ryan also seemed incredibly motivated to do this and had been coming there to work out every single morning for a few hours, and was eating and drinking all the supplements Yanna could think of, so maybe it made sense to some degree.

  “Come on, alright! Five, four, three, two, one, you can drop it!” Yanna exclaimed, waiting for Ryan to let go of the barbell. But instead, he just kept standing there. His pained expression was lifted in an instant. Of course, Ryan’s body was still shaking, but it was like he consciously forgot about how tough it was to hold onto the barbell.

  “There’s no way, right?” the minotaur muttered. Only one real explanation popped into her head, though it was one of the most nonsensical ones. “You can’t have awakened your strength stat yet … have you?”

  A broad grin formed on Ryan’s face as he let go of the barbell. It slammed into the ground, and Ryan looked at his friend with an excited, almost smug smile.

  “Oh, really, I couldn’t have?” he asked, turning back toward the system window in front of him.

  [Due to adequate growth and effort, you have unlocked the -Strength- Stat]

  Immediately, Ryan opened his status window, looking for it. At the bottom of the stats section, separated from the rest, a new line had popped up.

  -[Strength - 1.35 (New!)]

  Ryan let out a laugh of excitement. Of course, 1.35 wasn’t at any totally supernatural level yet; there were actually plenty of people who awakened with strength stats higher than that just because they’d been actively working out for a while. But awakening a bonus stat was about showing effort deserving of that stat. Maybe it was good that Ryan had never really worked out much before, because he felt fine with where he was. He heard that people like bodybuilders that awakened into a class without the strength stat innately applied had a much, much harder time to get it.

  “Alright, I guess now it’s time to continue trying for agility, stamina, and physicality,” Ryan said, waving his status window away. As the message disappeared, though, he just saw Yanna’s stunned expression peek out from behind it.

  “How … You seriously awakened your strength stat already? It’s been just a couple of weeks, so how …” Yanna asked, staring at Ryan with absolute confusion written on her face.

  Of course, Ryan knew why she was so confused. After all, the only reason Ryan was able to awaken the stat so fast was because Tiar boosted his growth, but that wasn’t something he could just tell her. So, instead, he used another excuse that he had thought of beforehand.

  “Well … I’m not entirely sure, but I think it’s possible that the Spirits I’ve formed contracts with affect me somehow. So, maybe Maximus’s physical stats helped me out a bit,” Ryan suggested, and Yanna let out a loud groan.

  “Seriously? What kind of a cheat is this unique class of yours? You get stronger faster just because of your spirits?”

  “That’s the best guess I have,” Ryan replied awkwardly, trying to come up with an explanation. “I mean, you see it when I use my skills, right? My mana is colored based on Gaia or Maximus, depending on which of them I’m interacting with at that moment. My mana is usually pretty colorless, so that might be part of it. I’ve thought that was weird for a while, anyway.”

  Though Ryan wasn’t actually lying about that last part. His mana was undeniably weird. Innately, his mana didn’t have any qualities. It was colorless and in its basic state. At first, Ryan thought that was just a quality a Spirit Keeper’s mana took on when they awakened, but that didn’t seem to be the case at all. According to Runar, the mana of Ryan’s father was recorded as a dark, brownish green. It was sharp and swift, like a flower’s thorns being pushed through the air by a storm.

  Well, it didn’t matter much to Ryan in the end, but it was still true that he found it a tiny bit weird. But for now, that wasn’t important. After all, Ryan’s workout wasn’t over yet. He still had to do cardio.

  Since he had awakened his strength stat already, he was sure that the other physical stats weren’t all too far away either. As a clearly jealous Yanna set up her treadmill properly, Ryan turned away and held his hand in front of his mouth, whispering to Tiar.

  “Good job, and thanks for the help so far. Let’s keep at it, alright, bud?” he said, already feeling the symbiote’s pattern wriggle happily on his skin.

  With that, Ryan got onto his treadmill as well, starting the cardio part of his workout. For now, Ryan just had to keep going at it. And sure, he was excited to have awakened his strength stat, but that didn’t mean that he was suddenly stronger than he was a moment before. It just meant that the system would give a certain amount of growth correction to him. Plus, from now on, he would not grow weaker. That was the other benefit of awakening. Even if you never grew stronger, you would never grow weaker than you were before.

  So, even if Ryan never did any more strength training in the future, his stat would not ever drop below 1.35. For now, that also meant he could relax on strength training and just focus more of his time on other stats without needing to be concerned he would lose all his progress.

  “Alright, let’s do this.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Reaching Out

  Ryan groaned loudly, stretching his fingers. They were feeling a bit tense after building all of these models all day. Since Maximus had reached level 10, his growth would slow down considerably with that, and that meant that it was probably a bit harder for Ryan to level up as well. He was going to still keep at it in the dungeon, since collecting points for the gift shop wasn’t a bad idea either, but once Ryan got the quest from Gregor, that became a secondary concern.

  Not only would it be much faster for Ryan to level up by completing this quest, then building Gregor’s body, and then helping Gregor level up for a while, but it just felt like the right thing to do in general. Since this quest would help Gregor wake up, completing it as soon as possible was the obvious choice. Plus, since Gregor was an Artillerist, he would be able to help out in combat and make collecting points much faster.

  So, Ryan had built models of cars, tanks, planes, and was currently working on a train engine. Of course, he had gotten a lot more used to these now, and his intuition was doing a pretty good job at guiding him along the way, helping him figure out the parts that he didn’t really understand. Even so, these models were a lot more annoying than the plastic models he was used to. His skin got pinched between metal bits, he was covered in grease, and he had even cut himself on a sharp edge earlier.

  Ryan clicked the last pieces into place and nervously tried turning the train engine on. It rumbled quietly, and at the same time, some system messages appeared in front of Ryan’s eyes.

  [You have completed the Quest -Gregor’s Machinations-]

  [Gregor has recovered his sense of self and has awoken]

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Ryan pulled Gregor’s spirit core out of the space between the domains, holding the stone between his fingers. It was giving off a soft glow now, and Ryan could tell that the spirit was actually there.

  “Gregor, I don’t know if you have a grasp of the situation here, but please. I’m here to help you, so—” Before Ryan was even able to finish his short speech that he had prepared in advance for this moment, some more messages appeared in front of his eyes.

  [You have become the keeper of the Artillerist Spirit Gregor]

  [The Temporary Domain has become a true Domain]

  [The -Spirit Domain- skill has leveled up]

  At that moment, a new space formed inside of Ryan’s mind. It was just as large as Maximus and Gaia’s domains. Filled with old tools and gadgets, steel and brass and copper, a small workshop appeared. Dust was floating through the air, and a sense that Ryan already had with the other two domains was strengthened.

  Particularly with Maximus’s domain, he felt like there was more to this space than its just being something that fit the knight’s personality. Of course, he wasn’t particularly indulgent and was diligent in his training, but that small, bare hut and training area didn’t seem to fit him quite perfectly. Rather than that, it seemed to have just been the reality of things.

  It seemed like the domains were snapshots of spaces that the spirits were connected to rather than simply accommodating them. That was extremely obvious with Gregor’s domain. It truly felt like a space that had been in use and had just had to be left at a moment’s notice.

  “Thanks for trusting me, Gregor,” Ryan said with a smile, running his fingers over the core for a few moments before putting it down on his desk. He picked up the model train and placed it on the ground with the others before holding his hand out toward the empty area on his desk. From his fingertips, metal tubes, or pipes, made of mana flowed out from his skin. They came together, forming a cardboard box. Though it was a little different from Gaia and Maximus’s boxes; it looked more like a mixture of the ones Ryan was used to and the boxes that these mechanical models came in.

  As he peeked inside, instead of just the frames that he was expecting, he saw a mixture of both types of models as well. There were frames holding wooden plates that were most likely Gregor’s outer shell, or rather, his skin. But there were also tiny screws, cogs, pipes, and many of the other parts that Ryan had gotten somewhat used to now. There were even bottles containing oil.

  Gregor was a robot, an automaton. He was made mostly of metal, at least his interior. Somehow, though, he was covered in wood as outer plating. Different from Maximus, who was represented just with his armor, it seemed like Gregor would still need to be built up from the bottom using the same method that the mechanical models needed to be built.

  “Well, alright, let’s get this started,” Ryan said, immediately pulling everything out of the cardboard box. Just as before, the box soon fell apart into mana again, and Ryan could get started with the process of building Gregor’s body.