Added Scene in Ch 4. (Patreon)
Content
This scene is in Chapter 4, between where Sam sees the strange lightning vision and then makes the defensive amulet for Altey.
It should help to bring the "cosmic pressure" of Sam's job home near the beginning of Book 2.
It also gives a heads-up that the "journey to Highfold" will be a training arc.
I'll copy it here for you.
---
When he fell asleep that night, streaks of multicolored elemental lightning flickered through his mind.
He'd felt a dangerous pressure from the two gazes that had touched his soul. Now that feeling returned, like daggers held against his stomach, as a cold wind began to swirl around him.
The Guardian Star on his hand flickered softly, a bright white light coming from it as it pulsed in time with his heart.
The stars in the sky above moved closer, hanging low over his head as the dimensional space of the world warped.
Sam tossed on his bedroll as vivid, cataclysmic dreams flowed through his mind. Flickers of the world appeared in his mind.
A vast expanse of stone and mountains, stretching beyond sight.
Above it, a wind with no warmth blew and darkness stretched out beyond the horizon, speckled with the distant light of stars.
Then a shattering krrraaAAack echoed across the stone as a great rift appeared in it. The earth heaved, rolling beneath the distant stars, as it fractured into pieces.
A second great kkrraAAaccckkk echoed through the stone, throwing him out of the dream as the stone began to fall apart, revealing a glowing, rainbow cloud of brilliant energy that had been lying beneath it.
Space around the crack warped, pulled toward that cloud of energy.
A tug on Sam's soul pulled him toward it as well, irresistibly drawn toward the energy that was swirling there, both in this realm and in another.
The sound of another great kraaAAacckk suddenly threw him back to consciousness.
When he woke, his body was covered in cold sweat.
Nexus.
The word whispered across his consciousness, a harbinger of the past and the future.
---
It took more than two days for the storm to end. The party spent the time studying, and Aemilia started to write in the books that she had, gaining experience in her Historian class.
When Sam asked what she was writing, she told him it was an account of her life, since that was the easiest thing to start with.
She also continued working with Krana to advance her Seer abilities, and she started a second book to record what she could see on their journey. It would be an account of their travels, although she didn't plan to include any information about Sam's transformation or the specifics of his class.
The main focus of the Historian class was recording and transferring information. She’d tried writing on stone and clay before, but it had never worked for her, perhaps because she hadn’t seen it the right way. Class requirements were sometimes in the mind as much as in reality.
It was possible that she’d never seen those materials with the right perspective to make them work. The books were already designed to be read and transferred to others.
The lightning hadn’t formed any other images after that first one, at least not that Sam had seen, but the dream that he'd had was still hanging on his mind. It was somehow connected to the elemental storms, as if they'd triggered it.
Or perhaps it had been the gazes of those things in the vision, the demon and the elemental.
Nexus. It was part of the world, perhaps its history. He could feel it. He felt a slow pulse of energy from the Guardian Star on his hand as he muttered the word to himself, like a confirmation.
The images of the dream were vivid in his mind, and he turned them over again, frowning.
If it was connected to the world, to the Guardian Star, and to him somehow...then the only thing that made sense was that it was part of his job.
That glowing cloud of energy had felt a lot like a Flaw.
The first Flaw...or the first Breaking?
He wasn't sure, but it felt like he was on the right track. The Nexus had something to do with the origin of Outsiders and of Aster Fall.
He looked down at himself and at his hands that ended in sharp talons. He curled them into fists and relaxed them again.
He needed to know what was going on...more about the world itself.
Perhaps something else would come in a dream, but the only thing he could do right now was to keep training and improving his class.
That meant becoming better as an Enchanter and Smith, the two main focus points of it, and preparing for his eventual Evolution at 100.
If he wanted the best Evolution possible, he needed to maximize all of his current skills, and to try to get them to the Epic tier by the time he hit 100.
He nodded slowly as he looked at his hands again, uncurling them. It was time to train his skills and to work on understanding his Class better.
Whatever the Nexus really was, he was nowhere close to understanding it yet, much less being capable of dealing with it.
The Guardian Star on his hand was a reminder that he needed to become better.
Fortunately, he knew exactly where to start to improve himself.
They were heading to Highfold, which was a higher level area than Cliff's End or the Storm Plains. It was also cold and high up in the mountains.
This journey would take a month and they would need a lot of enchantments to help them survive there.
There should also be some opponents on the way to hone his class abilities.
With the goal in mind, he set out a training plan for himself, reviewing his abilities as he searched for the most effective way to increase his strength and live up to his responsibilities.
Whatever happened, he had to make sure that his family was safe in the world.
He couldn't allow another Breaking.
As they continued to ride along the road, runes formed from crystal flame burned in his mind, changing into one enchantment pattern after another.
When they stopped again the following night, he started work on a shielding amulet for Altey based on the other monster core he had.