“This sucks,” Elina said again.

  I ignored her… again. She stared at me for several moments, and I looked back at her blankly while putting a slice of pork into my mouth.

  I flinched as her knife shrieked against her plate and she gave me a victorious grin. Perhaps it was understandable that Elina did not have many friends.

  Though her attitude was also quite understandable, I too would be upset if I had yet to open my Dreamscape. Especially after we got news of our field trip.

  “I mean, you get to go north to some magical forest and what do I get? To be sent to an abandoned island right as summer is beginning.”

  “You will also be there for a month,” I added helpfully, glancing at the mailman entering the cafeteria and beginning to call out names.

  She scraped her knife on her plate again.

  “Hopefully we at least do something interesting on the island. Like exploring some hidden Script Lord ruin,” Elina said offhandedly, as if she did not just assault my ears.

  I resisted the urge to get up and leave, instead taking off my bronze button to practice my Intent Fashioning with one hand.

  My clothing rippled as if I stood on a windy hill, pure white Intent flowing out of my body. Over my palm floated my bronze button. It swayed, my Intent pushing it unevenly, and nearly fell off.

  In my mind I pictured a rock, solidity, the ability to hold things up, and my Intent began to stabilize. I quickly found that while this did make my Intent more sturdy, it did not stop the Intent from flowing off of me. The button bounced off the faux hard surface and rolled underneath the table, myself following begrudgingly behind it.

  “Monty Gao!” the mailman called, causing me to hit my head on the underside of the table.

  I heard Elina stifle a giggle.

  “Are you okay?” she asked with amusement as I exited from beneath the table.

  “Fine,” I muttered.

  “Monty Gao!” the mailman called again holding a letter up.

  I ignored the various looks from others in the room as I took the letter from the man and sat back down with Elina.

  “Is it from your grandfather again?”

  “No, I gave him an up…date…” I trailed off, reading the name of the sender at the top left of the letter.

  The Gao Family

  818 Fellow Tree Road

  Agate District

  Zuva

  Sun State

  “Monty?” Elina asked softly, an unfamiliar tone to her voice.

  “...Yes?” I replied after a moment.

  “Are you okay? Who is the letter from?”

  A rather obtrusive question, but I felt the need to say the answer. To make it real.

  “My parents.”

  “Your- that’s a good thing right?”

  I looked up to see a concerned and confused look on Elina’s face.

  “Of course,” I said with a smile.

  “It looks like it is a bad thing.”

  Maybe smiling wasn’t the answer.

  Unable to meet her eyes, I flipped the letter over, tracing the wax seal of a spider, the insignia of my family’s business, before peeling it off and taking out the letter inside.

  Dear Monty,

  We are so happy that you were accepted into Daybreak Dreamer Academy. It brings our family great pride to have you attend such a unique and prodigious academy. Unfortunately we were unable to see you when you arrived in Zuva, as we had some personal business to attend to. However we wish for you to come and visit us soon. Please reply as soon as it is convenient so we can meet and talk. There are many things to discuss that would be inappropriate to address via letter.

  With Love,

  Grace & Guo Gao

  I just stared at the two words. With Love. They fell into my empty skull, knocking hollowly inside. It meant nothing, but they still branded themselves into my mind. Igniting a hope that I spent seven years trying to snuff out.

  My parents wanted to talk to me. There was more to it I knew. For more than two months I had been at the academy and not once had I received anything from them. No, they had ignored me far longer than a couple of months. The answer was obvious.

  I was a Dreamer, more useful than Sun Stones and more precious than diamonds.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  “Where do your parents live?” Elina asked.

  I looked up at my friend. My first friend. There was a desire to know in her eyes. To pick apart my familial relationship and inspect it like you would a broken gear. A part of me wanted to let her in, to see if she’d stick around and tell me none of it was my fault.

  “Zuva.”

  “Oh! Did they ask for you to visit?”

  “Yes.”

  “... Are you going to?”

  But I couldn’t let her in. I didn’t know how to open the door.

  “I can't, we'll be leaving soon,” I said before getting back to my meal.

  —

  I could say I threw the letter out contemptuously. That I dismissed it from my mind just like my parents dismissed me. But I would be lying. Instead I carefully folded the letter, placing it in between two pages of my journal. Over the next several days I would re-read the letter like one would a sacred text, and after each read I would be filled with a gruesome sludge of hopeless hope.

  To distance my mind from it I began experimenting with my Dreamscape.

  The more mundane items had been tossed to the side in favor of objects that took a few more creative liberties.

  A paper crane flew around the groundless Dreamscape, swooping and diving leisurely. A pair of floating hands juggled knives. A knight and horse made of water galloped around chasing a bunny made out of twine. A ball of glass broke on command to form whatever image came to my mind.

  But for every success there were a dozen discarded failures fading in a pile. A rabbit twitched as if seizing, blood pouring out of its twine skin and human eyes pleading for death. A horse made of water struggled to form itself, constantly drowning in its own liquid. Two hands with most of their fingers cut off had knives embedded in them, pulling them out with one or two remaining fingers only to fail catching them again.

  However once we learned of the forest I had begun a new experiment. Specifically I wanted to see if I could create my own Wit. Professor Pure had refused to go into detail on how one was made. My idea was that if a single object had enough thoughts and feelings put into its creation, then I would gain a power based on said thoughts and feelings when I focused on the item.

  Because this was new territory for me I did not want to get crazy with the concept of the Wit, who knew what kind of repercussions that could have. So I decided to go as primitively simple as possible.

  Inside my Dreamscape a large grey object was in the process of being crafted. Standing up to my knee in height and as wide as my outstretched arms it was the largest thing I ever crafted.

  It was a rock. A huge, round riverstone, but still just a rock.

  Rock rock rock.

  During its creation I maintained the idea of sturdy strength. Being able to hold up entire buildings. Capable of crushing anything beneath it.

  While creating it I used weights to test the stones effectiveness. The first thing I noticed was the difficulty I had concentrating both on the singular object and moving in the real world. It did not feel as though it was impossible to do so, just difficult for now. I was like a newborn, only able to focus on a single task

  Noting down to practice moving while focusing on the large river stone I began my experimentation.

  “Test one. Deadlift,” I said to the room's sole other occupant.

  “Gotcha,” Elina said, writing in my notebook.

  “First I will start with eighty pounds, adding ten each time until I begin to struggle. Then I will begin to focus on the rock and try again. If successful I will continue to add ten pounds until I once again reach failure or my mind grows tired.”

  After a moment of silence I glanced at Elina who just sat on a stool watching me.

  “Oh right!” Elina began to write down what I said. “Uh, can you repeat the second half?”

  I sighed.

  Once I hit one hundred and ten pounds I began to struggle lifting the barbell. I then dropped it and focused on the rock in my Dreamscape, the familiar white mist flowed off of me as I reached down again. The first thing I noticed was that the rough texture of the metal grips didn’t grate against my palm as much. My hand didn’t grow more callous, but they still were seemingly less affected by the texture.

  It didn’t make logical sense, which in of itself was annoying, but I knew I had to accept that. My flesh was stronger from nothing but a magical mist from an imaginative world…

  It was indeed very annoying.

  Thankfully I was able to redirect my focus back to my experiments. Unlike before where one hundred and ten pounds made my knees shake; I was now able to lift the weights even easier than I had with eighty pounds. I continued adding weight in increments of ten pounds, only beginning to struggle when I hit one seventy.

  Elina was jumping up and down in excitement, and I lamented the half-assed notes she no doubt wrote down. Next time I would do it by myself. Perhaps I could create a Wit where a pen took notes for me.

  After the deadlift I moved onto other exercises.

  What I found was that my stamina had increased just as much if not more than my strength, however my Dreaming energy depleted before I had reached pushup failure. My speed meanwhile only increased slightly, and I wondered if that was because rocks were heavy and it didn’t translate well or if it was for some other reason.

  My favorite part was how much stronger my body was. I didn’t have a good way to test it unlike the previous ones. After all, how does one test the solidity of one's flesh other than to try and injure it?

  So I had Elina grab a hammer and hit me with it, lightly.

  “I don’t want to do this,” she said with a frown.

  “I do want you to do this, besides its not as though I am asking you to hit me with everything you’ve got, we’re going to go slow and ramp it up after each one.”

  “Can’t you just do it?” she asked.

  “No, my strength also increases while I use the rock so it won’t give reliable results.”

  She still looked reluctant, but after a moment of silence she sighed and agreed, lifting up the hammer slightly and bringing it down on my unprotected forearm. Lightly.

  Elina looked up to me, as if hoping I would say that was enough.

  “Continue, a bit harder.”

  I stopped her when I could feel the blow in my bones. No doubt it would leave a bit of a bruise, but nothing more.

  Elina still looked like she had been forced to stab a cat with a knife.

  “Okay this time I will be pulling from my Dreamscape, start off with barely any force like last time.”

  What we found was that while it looked and sounded exactly the same, there was no pain for quite a few blows. My skin was just as elastic as before, being warped by the weight of metal just the same, but it didn’t seem to damage anything.

  Fascinating.

  By the time I started to feel pain Elina was putting in some decent strength into the attack. Not as though she were trying to break by arm, but a bit less than one would trying to put a nail into wood.

  “Incredible,” I said, waving my arm back and forth as though expecting it to suddenly snap.

  “Unfair,” Elina corrected with a huff, tossing the hammer away.

  I flinched at the clattering sound and leveled a glare at Elina. She raised an unimpressed eyebrow.

  “I want to try one more thing,” I said. “Pinch and twist my skin.”

  I expected to have to convince her to do so, like with the hammer, so it came as a surprise when she did it without hesitating.

  “OW!”

  “What?” she asked innocently.

  “I wasn’t focusing on my rock yet.”

  “I thought you wanted to test before and after?”

  “... just do it again,” I said, letting the power of the rock suffuse my body.

  Hi, if you want to read up to 8 chapters in advance, here is a link to my Patreon.

  https://www.patreon.com/csdemers

  If not, ignore this and instead think about the wonders of centrifugal force