Ashen had always considered himself a careful man.
Especially since arriving in this new continent, teeming with danger and death at every corner.
And for such a careful man, sleeping almost defenseless to train in his dreamscape had always been a sore spot.
It was practically trusting his safety to luck, which wasn't the wisest choice. But for him, it was either that or slowly rotting away, and he made the gamble.
Nevertheless, it didn't mean that he had completely given up on his safety.
After racking his brain for a solution, he finally came up with something: Keep some of his senses active, even while asleep.
Hearing was the first sense he chose, and it didn't take long for him to get the hang of it.
One of Lucid Dreamweaving's core uses was putting the body to sleep so that a person could actually start lucid dreaming. Ashen only had to tweak it to exclude parts of his sensory system from the skill's effects.
Hearing sounds from one place while mentally being in another had been disorienting at first, but for the sake of his safety, he endured it until his mind finally adapted.
But then he had a thought. Why stop at only hearing?
With that crazy idea, he started experimenting with his other senses. Taste and smell had been the easiest to adapt to.
Next was the sense of touch. Having to move while constantly feeling himself lying down had been one of the most confusing things that had happened to him. But getting used to that had been somewhat fun, unexpectedly.
Lastly, it was sight's turn, and it was obviously the most disorienting. In fact, he hadn't been able to adapt to that, no matter what he did in the end.
The overlapping images—one in real life and the other in the dreamscape—made absolutely no sense to his brain.
So he could only keep switching between the visions, shutting one while triggering the other.
And when all his senses were able to stay active in sleep, as if by instinct, Ashen wanted to move.
Controlling Lucid Dreamweaving to keep the sensory system and the nervous system for bodily movement awake left only the cortical areas of the brain to follow the skill's command to sleep.
And to Ashen's amazement, this wondrous state allowed his body to keep cellular and systemic rest going even while moving, as he was technically still asleep.
Not to mention the instantaneous access to the dreamscape with only a switch in perspective.
So Ashen wasn't even shocked when this new use of his skill catapulted his mastery all the way to Basic+, only a minor upgrade away from Skilled.
Ultimately, he coined this peculiar state as… Daydreaming.
⛧⛧
They came like a storm: a black tide of Narkal bodies, hooves and claws eating the ground, horns scraping the sky.
The Bloodwall line held, shields grinding, spears bristling like a metal forest.
It had been a while since his twin's voice rang in his head, and Ashen felt that hearing it again would not be any time soon. But every word was already etched in his mind, especially the last line.
Now, standing shoulder to shoulder with a dozen men, the air thick with sweat, smoke, and the tang of iron, he kept his gaze forward.… small, impossible things lit up in thin, electric threads only he could see.
He let the Interpreter fold over him like a hood.
Details snapped into relief: the way a Narkal's shoulder blade slid under hide before a hook-swing, a tendon flexing a beat too soon, a frayed seam in the rot-stitched pauldron of the big one at the center.
For a fraction of a breath, the world slowed and spoke in tiny, traitorous tells. 'Half a second—aim here,' they told him. 'Now, there,' they whispered, all while unaware.
Ashen moved like he had practiced a thousand times. No, he had.
The puppet's grafts lived in his limbs now: the marksman's breathing steadied his pull, the scout's weight distribution made his footfall a whisper, the medic's hemostatic focus made bleeding out obsolete.
He slipped between a shieldwall and a fallen banner, a single, clean blade finding a thin gap where brute force would have surely failed.
THUD.
The Narkal went down in one motion; its pack shifted as if the tide had lost a keystone.
That small fracture mattered. A hulking Narkal, larger than the rest, armored with layered plates, was the pack's spine.
Ashen saw the way its neck tensed before it barked orders in guttural clicks. The Interpreter painted the seam under the lower jaw, a soft place masked by hide and gore.
He didn't charge straight at it; he baited instead. A glance, a subtle shove from his elbow, a loosened guard; simple theatre that pulled the monster's attention.
Ssssk—
Then he stabbed the slot between teeth and armor where the blood pulsed. The creature's roar cracked the air; without its leader, the Narkal push stuttered.
Around him, the battle tightened into a knotted, violent dance.
Spears snapped. Men fell and were pulled under. And Ashen started feeling the sting in his eyes.
The Interpreter demanded mana to keep parsing those razor-minute motions.
Mana burned like a fever in his temples; his vision smeared at the edges. But he ignored it.
Not only that, but he pushed the state to its limits, until he felt like he had touched a completely new realm.
With each dodge of the crude weapons and bloodied claws, he no longer felt like he was predicting; he felt more like he was responding.
His eyes started reading the Narkals with so much accuracy, so much detail, that to him, their body language felt more like regular vocabulary that he perfectly understood.
The muscles only twitched and moved, and the posture looked random and savage, but to Ashen, it was like the beasts were speaking to him through these tells. 'I'm going to move there,' 'I will hit here now,' 'The next strike is a feint,' 'then I will go for a bite,' 'I will use my claws here,'
It wasn't only that; every emotion—rage, hesitation, arrogance—all of it was perfectly visible to him.
It looked absolutely ridiculous from Ashen's perspective, but the strain on his eyes was also equally ridiculous.
This was the new state that he recently developed, a state that evolved from the Interpreter as he kept relentlessly pushing his hyper-vision.
Ashen ended up calling it the Conversationalist, since instead of interpreting, it felt more like he was having a conversation.
But Ashen didn't truly need to enter this state to kill mere regular Narkals anymore; the Interpreter would have been more than enough.
Why he triggered this state was for another goal.
Ashen felt the unprecedented concentration of the new state of his hyper-vision, and instead of focusing it all on a single monster, he spread it outward.
His awareness spread across the battlefield until it almost covered half of it, with him as the center.
With this, he was able to see patterns of groups, enemies and allies alike, predict troop formation by the squads' shift, and identify where he needed to be and who he needed to kill exactly to bring the Bloodwall Army to victory.
In short, he was bestowed the ultimate spatial awareness.
But even with his hyper-vision granting him this supreme, almost omnipresent point of view, his brain was only human in the end.
And a human brain would simply not be able to process the enormous influx of information, no matter how much it tried to adapt or feed on mana.
Ashen, of course, had an answer to this issue; he wouldn't have dared to spread his vision this far otherwise.
And the answer to that was to simply… 'Daydream.'
The moment he silently uttered the trigger word, Lucid Dreamweaving sprang to life, putting his brain in a dual state of dream and reality.
Ashen took advantage of this to filter all the influx of information directly to his unconsciousness, and while in the dreamscape, he used that same information to reconstruct every detail, from monsters to allies to even the dirt on the ground.
Now, whether in the dreamscape or in reality, the visions were identical.
This synchronization allowed him to exist on both planes simultaneously.
But in the dreamscape, things were… quieter.
There, time was syrup—slow, heavy, and obedient.
Every flicker of movement in reality became a clear ripple in the dream realm. Every Narkal's move, every shift of a blade, unfolded like a dance he'd already seen.
He was standing in two worlds at once: his body drenched in blood and chaos, and his mind wandering through a lucid reflection of it… a second battlefield painted by his unconsciousness.
His attention loosened. This was bound to happen since the Daydream state was essentially him daydreaming.
His focus became fluid, slipping between dream and wakefulness.
And yet, somehow, that only made him faster.
The world's noise faded to a hum as he drifted through the Daydreaming state, half drunk, half divine.
The duality blurred so completely that he no longer differentiated between thought and action, dream and reality. Every enemy he saw in one world, he struck in the other, the results bleeding seamlessly together.
THWACK.
A spear split a skull.
Ssssk.
A throat opened, blood gurgling like rainwater in a broken pipe.
He was still fighting, yes—but not thinking anymore.
In the dreamscape, he walked through illusions of himself, cutting down shadows that mirrored the Narkals he'd already slain.
In reality, his body mirrored the dream's rhythm perfectly, killing with eerie precision, like a marionette guided by instinct older than thought.
Hundreds fell.
His senses drifted between lucidity and delirium; his vision shimmered like heat haze, his hearing thinned until all he caught were the grunts of dying monsters.
And through it all, he quietly laughed, almost peacefully. Not out of madness, but because it was beautiful.
The perfect stillness of chaos, the absolute harmony of fantasy and reality.
Daydreaming made him loose, unfocused, almost absent… but that looseness birthed freedom.
{Activated Path Skill: Trance}
His blade didn't pause anymore. His instincts filled the gaps where reason used to be. It was like he had shed the burden of mortality and become a creature of pure response.
Reality continued. Dream replicated. But both seemed to bend around him.
By the time the Bloodwall horns blared to signal victory, the battlefield had already turned silent.
The ground was a graveyard of grey flesh and twisted limbs.
Ashen stood at the center, eyes half-lidded, breath slow, still lost somewhere between both worlds.
"Madness…"
The nearby soldiers who witnessed his deeds refused to believe that he was the same as them. Some others refused to look at him altogether.
As he blinked, the dreamscape peeled away like fog, revealing only the cold, gray dawn… and the realization that he had been fighting in his sleep the entire time.
Ashen exhaled, his expression unreadable. The skill faded, leaving him with nothing but exhaustion and the sharp sting of his eyes.
Sigh.
'That was closer than I expected.' He quietly noted as he saw the less than two hundred surviving soldiers. 'Can this even be called an army anymore?'
But soon he shook his head and thought about something less depressing.
He had mastered the art of existing between two worlds. Awake enough to kill, asleep enough to dream.
'Hmm, should I give this new state a name? I feel like it deserves it.'
⛧
⛧
"Truly fascinating… his growth nearly eclipses your own from that stage."
The voice was soft, melodic, and ethereal, but it made the man who wore the same face as Ashen, though far colder and more timeworn, open his eyes with a slow, tired motion.
"Miratheris."
Miratheris, in all her angelic poise, tilted her head ever so slightly, feigning innocence, as though she hadn't just breached the boundaries of his mind, but had merely stumbled into idle conversation.
Old Ashen exhaled through his nose, settling into his usual posture.
Elbow on the armrest, fist propping his cheek, one leg crossed in a figure-four. Even drenched in blood and ruin, he carried the air of a man who once believed the world was his.
"Why are you here?" he asked, voice gravelly and stripped of patience.