Burgo's Burgeoning Book of Beauty

  Men, have you never sat idly by, feeling the pain of your disgusting visage burning through your skull in the mirror behind you? Have you felt the shame of arriving to a gala, only to be reminded of how much better all the other men are through their shining, glorious forms?

  Fret not, for I, Burgo am here to share with you the secrets to beauty. When you have finished, your ladies will glee with delight on arriving home to see you. Their joy at seeing the work you've put in for them palpable on their faces...

  Zoe skipped ahead a bit. The book was interesting, to say the least. Awful, if she were being honest. Some abomination written by somebody far too concerned with being beautiful. It was amusing at times though, to read through some very normal looking paragraph about beauty and makeup, only to be hit with the culture shock of the best way to use one's manly knives to cut their hair, or realize that what was being described was the best way to replicate the appearance of blisters.

  Many of the skills mentioned in the book were quite surprising to Zoe, too. Whatever culture the book came from, the pinnacle of beauty seemed to be a rugged, seasoned man. Though, from what Zoe read the same culture didn't actually let men work in jobs that would make that natural. Or at least it incentivized them not to. So to get the same rugged look, men resorted to using a variety of skills and tools to artificially season themselves automatically.

  Cold skills that chipped the skin, skills that caused friction for blisters and calluses. Different ways to apply different materials to make their faces appear worn and tired, like they'd come home from a rough day at the mines. Strange was an understatement.

  She flipped to the first page of the Inner Beauty chapter and started reading.

  Men, it is no small secret that our ladies can feel our very essence. They peer into our minds, our bodies. They know us, inside and out. Our physical appearance can only take us so far.

  True beauty comes from what's within. No, I don't mean some frilly junk about your love and your heart. I mean your soul. We need turmoil, we need movement. We need action and power, resonating within us. Today, we turn our attention to our souls.

  This will be a painful process, men. But in the pursuit of true beauty, pain is but a measure of your dedication...

  Zoe skipped ahead a bit, again.

  The work is deceptive. It fears us. It hides, it lies, and it cheats. But we are men, we are powerful. We are strong, and I, Burgo, will tell you of the secrets I have learned for breaking past the work's efforts.

  Our souls must be honed, must be tumultuous. The work maintains a strict structure, an organization. But this organization is not necessary. It is simply the preference of the work, it is the ideal of that which tries to govern our lives.

  Look inwards, feel your souls. Feel the skills and the power lurking within yourself. These are the structures that define us, and they are far too stable. Much of these structures is a part of the work's insistence on perfection, on stability and meaningless ideals.

  Bit by bit, we will tear these structures apart and rebuild them in our own visions. More powerful, churning with greater strength and action. But men, this is a struggle for each of us individually. It is a commitment that we can not take lightly. Our souls are bound to ourselves, formed to ourselves. Each of ours are different.

  I could describe to you, with exact detail the layers of scars and depths of rippling muscles that makes up my soul. I could explain the feelings of flexing those muscles, and shaping those scars to form the skills in my vision.

  But it would be of no help to you, as I'm sure you've realized from my description of my soul. Instead, I will teach you the process. The work is our greatest teacher, bound to our souls in the same way and formed to each of us in the same way. It knows our souls, it knows our creations, and it tailors its creations to us naturally.

  To understand these modifications, you will need to study the work. I will walk you through the process that has been successful for me in stages. Each stage is important, dragging you along closer and closer to success.

  The first step is to look inwards at your soul. It is extremely important that you read the entirety of this first step before you attempt anything. Look at this beautiful landscape that makes up the essence of yourself. You have power over this space, you control this space. This is yourself. You can not manipulate it as easily as you breathe, but it is a part of you. Forming your soul is done through the use of your mana.

  We touched on mana earlier, and will be assuming you have mastered Mana Manipulation at this point. If you haven't, return to chapter seven: Masculine Manipulations and practice until you have. This will require you to be an expert at this. You should be able to at least feel the flow of mana through yourself, and even push it from your body without losing control.

  Look inwards again, at that landscape within yourself. Feel the mana flowing within your body, within each of your limbs and each of your fingers. Every speck of mana drifting within yourself. Meditate on it. Feel it. Appreciate it, without leaving your soul.

  And then, breathe it in. Don't force it, don't push past a wall. Resist your manly urges to break something, and simply breathe in your mana. Feel it rushing through your body, through your peace, and pull it into your soul.

  Now this part is very important. Within your soul will be something, some form that does not like interacting with mana. That outright rejects your mana. This is your actual soul. The essence that makes up yourself. And touching it with mana will both be necessary for our later steps, as well as incredibly, existentially painful. You need to grow accustomed to weaving your mana through your soul and avoid interacting with any of these bits.

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  It will be necessary to, but you need to get used to avoiding them. You need a break, as you work on your soul. And the only way to get that, is to focus on pulling the mana through your soul without touching anything.

  This is your first step. Bring mana into yourself and master moving it around without overwhelming yourself with pain. There is no safe way to do this. Pull as little mana as you can in to yourself at first, and gradually increase the amount as you get more experience with the process. When you're confident, move on to the second step.

  When you are done practicing, repeat the same process in reverse to remove the mana from yourself. Breathe it out, pull it through yourself and back into your body. Gently, and carefully.

  The second step is to look inwards at one of your skills and switch it away with the work's help. Study how the work tears your skill apart. The process it uses, the structure it leaves behind. Repeat this, many many times. Until you know the process like you know each of the calluses on your hand or the tears in your lips. And then, execute that process yourself. Bring your mana into your soul, and tear the skill apart with your own power, feel the strength of the skill as it leaves you. Feel the pain of the skill torn apart in your soul.

  The work will assist you now, to some extent. If you have made a mistake and can't recover, draw on the work to remove your skill. It will finish the process for you, leaving nothing behind but the mana you yourself have pulled in, no matter how terribly you ruin it. Continue this, until you can bare the pain, until you can tear the skill apart yourself with little effort. This process should feel effortless, and second nature before you move to the second step.

  ***

  Zoe stopped reading. She hadn't even considered trying that. This whole time, she'd been obsessed with trying to create a skill. That her first attempt at manipulating her soul would need to be a perfect, exact copy of her skill.

  The idea of practicing soul manipulation by removing skills, and relying on the system to clean up her mess? It hadn't even crossed her mind. Even if the thought had, she wasn't sure she would have trusted it without some kind of verification that it would work.

  What if she messed up so badly, the system didn't even recognize what was left as being a part of her skill? What if the system only recognized part of what was left as being her skill, and left some fragment of the scar behind?

  But if Burgo was to be trusted — and for some reason Zoe trusted the word of almost anything shared in a book she got from John, then it didn't matter how badly Zoe messed up her skill. The system would find the whole remnant, in whatever form remained, and rip it out like she'd never done anything at all.

  It would be painful, but it would be safe. Or at least, it would border on safe.

  Zoe summoned a thin piece of wood and used it as a bookmark as she slammed the book of beauty shut. She turned her attention inwards, to her Enchanted Mirrors skill. A familiar sight, now. One she had spent an unfathomable amount of time staring at. Dozens of books filled with her notes about how the system tore it apart.

  The thought of ripping it apart herself was terrifying. Her first real foray into manipulating her soul. Her very first attempt at genuinely making some change to herself. If it went well, she'd have some experience to draw on, a tiny step towards replicating the skill herself. If it didn't, all she had to do was push through the pain and beg the system to rip Enchanted Mirrors out of her.

  She took a deep breath, then focussed on all of the mana coursing through her body. It surged through her chest, through her arms and legs, then back up through her head and even reaching to her ears. Like torrents of power rushing through her in somehow both chaotic and consistent patterns.

  Zoe grasped at some of the mana with a gentle touch, pulling it deeper within herself. Not with so much force, as last time. A gentle pull, carefully nudging it through whatever space she was feeling within herself. Each time she felt it catch or snag, she'd pull it around, dragging it past whatever structures she couldn't see.

  One day she would investigate even them, more.

  And then with a silent 'pop' the wisp of light appeared in front of her. Drifting within the endless expanse of bubbling soul. It slammed into one of the bubbles, splattering the black something throughout her vision with a spike of pain. Zoe grimaced, but kept her focus on the wisp of mana she had control over.

  She pulled it through the space, dodging between the countless bubbles of soul for longer than she could keep track. In time it felt simple to keep track of everything, and Zoe pulled another wisp along the same path until it too popped into her soul.

  Bit by bit, mana was dragged into the space. Flooding the dark, bubbling expanse with colourful lights that floated along, avoiding each of the bubbles like magnets repelling each other.

  Zoe looked to her Enchanted Mirrors. The structures that stood in front of her, representing the skill she'd spent far more time trying to steal than any other. She knew the structure better than she knew her own home. Each corner, each crevice, each streak of soul described in painful detail in one of her many notebooks.

  She even knew how to destroy it. Every flow of mana the system used to tear it apart described in just as much detail. She'd replicated the process thousands of times, outside of her soul. Mana flowing around the world in front of her in the exact way the system did within herself. A helpful aid to try and see what the system did, to try and reverse it. A way to experiment with the patterns, and see how they'd react if certain things were removed or changed.

  Somehow, she'd just never thought to try replicating it within her soul itself. A sense of confidence billowed up within her that she shoved aside. This wouldn't be easy, no matter how well she knew the process. The difficult part wasn't replicating the flow of mana the system used to destroy the skill.

  No, that part was simple. What was difficult was doing it while she suffered through the pain of system shock. Or Zoe shock, she supposed, since the system wasn't involved at the moment.

  Zoe took another deep breath, and pressed a wisp of mana into her Enchanted Mirrors structure. Pain wracked through her body, threatening to rip control from the thousands of mana she had floating within her soul.

  Burgo understated the danger, Zoe realized. The system might rip the skill itself away, but all of this mana she'd brought in to herself? The system would just leave it. It wasn't a part of the skill, the system didn't care about it. And if she lost control of this much mana, she wasn't sure if she could wrestle control back.

  She'd have to finish the process in one swift move. One practiced movement, ripping the entire skill from her soul just as the system did. A brief instant of Zoe shock that she knew, and could handle.

  Zoe took another deep breath, and then pushed the thousands of mana through a practiced pattern. It tore through her Enchanted Mirrors structure, ripping it apart in a familiar sight. Pain tore through her mind in an instant, an entire section of her soul torn apart with violent force.

  And then the pain washed away, leaving only a sore memory of what she'd done. And in front of her was nothing but the colourful array of mana she'd brought in to herself. She pulled the mana back through her soul bit by bit, and then checked on her skill list.

  Enchanted Mirrors was gone.

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