Eli pulled the cloak out of his inventory to get a good look at it. The material was all grey and black feathers with a hint of white and when he touched it his hand came back with ash for a few seconds then the ash disintegrated. He focused on it so he could see its effects.
"Feathered Ashen Cloak of Consumption - Epic"
"Wearer of this cloak has increased magic regeneration"
"Once a day the wearer can turn the physical matter around him into ash, restoring magic."
He put the cloak on and clasped it around his neck, it wrapped around him completely and was long enough to barely touch the ground. It didn't have a hood but it covered his whole body. Eli was happy to finally have something resembling clothes but it did make all of his skin look grey with ash. Wishing he had a mirror, he paced around thinking about what to do next. There were about 5 days left and he had a couple options. First he could just move to the next volcano and try to get more levels. Second, he could scout around and familiarize himself with the area more so when people came back he could help them. Lastly, he could try to puzzle out how to level his soul so he doesn't accidentally explode while fighting.
Not knowing which one to pick he decided to walk out of the tunnel that led to the center of the volcano and take a look around. Just getting to the tunnel entrance, the heat was causing him damage. His new cloak helped a little but not being in combat, his regeneration was healing the damage as it happened since it was minor. He walked in a bit until he could feel that his regeneration was just barely able to keep up with the burns. Sitting down he closed his eyes, took a few deep breaths and brought his focus inward, just enjoying his magic's movements inside him. It was like a lava lamp and soon he was fully in a trance.
Without having a decision on which direction to go for the next five days, Eli preferred to not move until he could decide, then he would move on that choice with everything he had. One lesson he had learned growing up was that sometimes the best choice is to do nothing. The first order of business was to just clear his mind and watch his internal magic, letting his thoughts wander around to see if he could make a decision. His thoughts were quiet so he just watched his magic with his senses and tried to see if he could make sense of this soul stuff.
The pain from the heat and burns was focusing his mind and keeping him sharp. It took a lot of time, but something started to become clear, his body was not his magic container. There were a few spots on his body where there was no corresponding spot for magic, his ears, his nose, his tongue. After even more time, Eli noticed that the boundary to hold his magic was not the thing he thought it was. Magic flowed in and out from it freely but it wasn't something that he could try and move mentally with his will. It followed his body but he wasn't sure if this was because his body moved or because it was taking the same mental instructions as his body. The feeling was that it was a part of him, but separate from his body, he can feel how magic moves between them.
Eli felt close to figuring this out but he couldn't figure out how they were connected, his body and he guessed what was his soul, were passing magic back and forth. It wasn't a great deal of magic but it was happening, like passing between dimensions or phases of reality. He felt like maybe he needed to break through that connection and force his magic out, this was more of a gut feeling than it was anything else though. Not being sure why he felt this way he started going slow trying to push his magic out of himself like he had done before, but this didn't feel right. This felt more like something normal, like it was designed to do this. Without stressing his soul it wasn't going to improve so he needed to push more out than it wanted to allow.
Since he couldn't push to get the result he wanted, he decided to pull instead. However he needed a break , he was only at half his magic capacity so he needed it to refill and he had been sitting in this heat and burning for a full day already so he also needed to stretch his legs. He conjured his cudgel and began practicing basic moves just to stretch out his body. The movements felt smooth and natural at this point, maybe he was getting better at this martial arts fighting stuff he thought. When his magic was refilled he sat back down in the exact spot where he had been and relaxed his body and mind.
This time instead of pushing out he gathered his will and gave it everything he had to collapse his magic into his center beneath his belly button. It took a tremendous effort and he was constantly having setbacks, it was like a terrible game of whack-a-mole and he was barely able to keep his focus. It was taxing his mind to the extreme and he was trying to keep pushing and pushing, he got it down to about the size of a softball and felt a crack in his mind. While he had been pushing it in his magic regeneration was working overtime to fill in behind what he was doing. When he lost control of it and it exploded out there was just too much internal magic and it burst out of him tearing his soul shell open all over. The intense, instant, mind breaking pain made him pass out.
Waking up, he felt like his magic was different, in fact everything felt different. He could feel magic moving every time he breathed in or out. Before his magic felt like a gas, something that was not easily contained or moved, but now it was almost liquid, more dense and stable. It was still moving but more slowly and when it crashed into itself, its density was a liquid. There was a downside however, the magic didn't feel stable, or maybe more like it wanted to be used, in a raw state or in a spell. Even his magic nodes were filtering his magic at a higher rate now, leaving his internal magic to have a stronger flavor. The changes to him were obvious, but they felt like they would only increase his magic capacity and output by about 10%. Now that he got a feeling for everything he checked the system windows.
"Your soul has leveled from 0 to 1"
That was a short window with almost no information, thought Eli as he once again scratched his chin in thought. So rather the system did not have a lot of information about souls or it didn't want to share anything. It was probably to stop people from doing what he just did, he was still healing from it and he could feel when it exploded that it could have killed him, destroying his soul forever. Eli's best guess was that he survived because of his second threshold wisdom and resistance stats, or maybe he just had a resilient soul. Again more questions and nowhere to get answers.
However, with his soul upgraded he felt it was safe to use his fire node and being where he was means he could test it without destroying anything. Eli tapped into his fire node and tried to use that magic by guiding it down to his hand and pushing it out. His hand caught fire, melting his skin and he cut off the magic, shaking his hand until it went out. It was still too strong to use without a skill attached to it, so he paced until his hand healed and he sat back down getting ready to search his node to find a skill to attach to it. Before he started he checked the timer and there were 4 days left, last time he did this it took over a day, so he hoped he would get it sooner rather than later and have time to do some scouting around. He was looking forward to finding people out in the wild and guiding them to the green zones, having someone to talk to and doing good at the same time.
Now he was ready for a fire skill, and was hoping for something to help him at range. He let his mind fall into the node, being his only level 2 node, it was not what he was expecting. This was dense magic, it had a more complex flavor and was a wonder all on its own. Eli got lost just being in it all the different aspects of fire coming in together. He could separate some of it into its components. There was an explosion or maybe it was expansion, heat, something like fire but only the plasma side of it, there was a lot of ash, so much so that he felt like he could taste the ash in his mouth and feel its grit on his teeth. And opposite ash, was consumption. It had more as well but they weren't as prominent and got lost in the mix, but it was fascinating to observe. The volcano magic he took in to get this node to level 2 clearly played a part in this.
For over a day he just let himself be in the node and let it become a part of him and him a part of it. He didn't think a skill was going to form without him putting in some of his will so he tried to push into the node an idea. He needed something to knock things out of the sky, that was his biggest weakness, if that Matriarch had been able to fight him while it could fly he would be dead no question. At first his mental implantation of the idea didn't do anything so he thought about his fights with the other vultures and put the idea there of him knocking them to the ground. Which created a seed that aspects of his fire node grabbed onto and contributed to. His higher wisdom allows him to observe the process more clearly than last time, so he could really see how a skill was formed.
The seed started to grow with expansion, ash, and consumption being the main contributions. The seed grew into a plant whose roots and branches took the shape of a complex rune that represented his new skill. However, it didn't seem done, he could feel it take a small copy of the edge of magic, what he thought might be his soul, and drag it into the rune plant. This altered its roots and branches in small offshoots and clusters, putting his personal mark on it, or rather, making the skill project a bit of who he was at his core. Several hours later and it was done and the system window appeared.
"You have learned a fire node skill"
"Fire Node - Air detonation - level 1"
"Spell - Rare - Instant cast"
"Target a spot in the air causing it to implode, ignite, then explode"
"The spell is powerful but takes 3 seconds to complete."
Well this put him at 5 nodes and 6 skills. Eli was smiling at his progress, he had 2 days left, which means he has spent only 2 months in this system and magic based existence and had come so far. He had paid for it with blood sweat and pain, but even if he wasn't strong compared to the tutorial people he could just keep pushing and barter for the information he lacked. He could catch up and surpass them, he knew he could. Then and there Eli decided that he would spend his last two days exploring and scouting around, getting familiar with the area around this volcano. This was going to be where he set up his base camp, or basically just a place to sleep or meditate.
Conjuring a cudgel, Eli smashed a huge hole in the side of the volcano where the crack had been that let him into this room. Now that crack was a 15 foot wide cave opening. He cast his new spell about 25 feet away and in front of himself, the spell used a lot of magic from his fire node, but being level 2 it could handle it. The effect of the spell was astonishing, it pulled in air from a 5 foot radius from where he was aiming, a bright white flash came over the compressed air in the second second, then in the third second it exploded extremely violently. Even being 25 feet away it almost knocked him on his ass. He even cast one 200 feet above his head and the explosion sounds like a gunshot and bits of ash fell to the ground and vanished.