Even with his remarkable endurance and super-human vigor, Vin needed another full day of recovery before he was feeling up to moving about again. His friends wanted to sit with him and keep him company, but Frank threatened to fight them there and then, insisting what he really needed was some good old-fashioned bedrest. It had taken him and Vin working together to convince the others to leave, but in the end, Vin found himself alone and without anything to do as he stared at the boring wall of the hospital.

  Normally he would have jumped at the opportunity to delve deep into his own mana and start working on a new spell, but for the first time he could ever remember, the thought of messing around with runes made him almost queasy in a way. The Goddess had told him he’d be fine, so he figured the feeling would fade before long. But in the meantime, it meant there wasn’t a lot for him to do.

  Without any other idea of how to pass the time, Vin pulled out his journal and began adding more details here and there. He'd already drawn the monsters and settlements associated with each fragment within his journal, but he began sketching some of the specific people as well. Nohral, for the dwarven Crater. Forpurt, for the capillans’ arctic village. Even Telin, from the avisuls’ sky fragment. Once he’d more than filled up each page and was struggling to find space to add information, he swapped tactics.

  With only minor grumbling, Frank brought him some paper and something to write on, and Vin got to practicing another one of his lesser-used skills. He had his own personal map in his journal, but he figured Terra having multiple copies could only benefit the town. The act of sketching the same map over and over again should have been boring and tedious, but after Vin’s recent events, the mundane action felt almost meditative, and he smiled as he worked. Occasionally, he’d swap to drawing out maps of specific fragments rather than the explored area of Edregon as a whole. He could actually sense himself getting better as the hours passed, not just from Cartography leveling up, but from his own experiences compounding on one another. By the time evening rolled around and he’d had the blissful realization that the hospital food was the exact same stuff they served in the mess hall, he’d made quite the series of improvements.

  Drawing improved to lvl 9! 900 exp gained.

  -----

  Drawing improved to lvl 11! 1,100 exp gained.

  Cartography improved to lvl 8! 800 exp gained.

  -----

  Cartography improved to lvl 11! 1,100 exp gained.

  Level up! Adventurer of the Arcane lvl 43!

  +3 attribute points

  The skill increases were a small victory, but Vin appreciated the fact that he’d finally advanced all of his skills out of the single digits. Not to mention they’d been the little bit of extra experience he needed to officially bump himself up to level 43, his latest grand arcane discovery doing most of the heavy lifting for that level as well. With the speed at which he was still leveling despite hitting his second prestige, Vin felt like he should have been celebrating.

  Yet each grand arcane discovery he encountered seemed to add even more weight to his already weary soul.

  He slept hard and fast that night, having finally managed to get his shimmerwing mattress under him and situated on top of the drastically inferior regular mattress hospital patients were expected to sleep on. Come morning, he felt better than ever. As the Goddess had promised. whatever craziness he’d inflicted upon himself seemed to have officially passed.

  Leaving him with one final surprise.

  New title unlocked! Survivor. Reward: Dramatically increased resilience against anything that would seek to claim your life.

  Warning. You have filled 6 out of your 5 allotted title slots. You have twenty-four hours to choose which title to be removed from your interface. Continue prestiging to unlock new slots.

  After having already almost-killed himself time and time again, Vin hadn’t expected to get any sort of title from this latest use of his divine boon. Because his boon generally prevented the injury from occurring in the first place, he never had to deal with the adverse effects of whatever it was that was about to kill him, other than some general soreness or a headache. It seemed this time around, however, he’d really put his body through the wringer, even with his divine boon in play. The Goddess had mentioned that his body had been rapidly deconstructing itself as the magic worked to escape him, which was more than a little terrifying to think about.

  The fact that he hadn’t gotten the title for surviving being heavily dosed with radiation, but he did for this, was even more horrifying.

  Just what would have happened to him if the Goddess hadn’t used his boon to save him?

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Regardless, Vin suddenly had a decision to make as he got dressed and prepared to put the hospital behind him. He now had six titles to his name, and seeing as he was a far cry from reaching level 60 and increasing his available titles by one, one of them had to go.

  The question, of course, was which one?

  Human Vessel (Lesser): 20% of inhabitant’s stats added to your own while serving as a vessel. Allow inhabitant partial body merger for one minute twice a day.

  Common Ally (Minor): Gain an innate understanding of other races.

  Generalist Mage: Sense the affinities of your fellow mages.

  Epic Monster Slayer: Increased resistances against monsters and their unique attacks, scaling with the rating of the monster. Sense when and where epic monsters are going to attack.

  Spell Weaver: Gain an innate sense of which runic formations can be combined into new spells, and which ones are impossible for you to merge.

  Survivor: Dramatically increased resilience against anything that would seek to claim your life.

  Each of his titles had performed well for him during his time on Edregon.

  Human Vessel had saved his life more times than he could count, allowing Alka to literally fight his battles for him and giving the Slayer something to latch onto back when she’d been trapped as a ghost.

  Common Ally gave him a massive amount of information on new races he encountered, and saved him the trouble of having to ask certain awkward questions a lot of the time.

  Generalist Mage allowed him to detect mages and get a sneak peak of their magical affinity, although even he had to admit it was generally pretty obvious what the answer was going to be.

  Epic Monster Slayer was one that hadn’t really come into play just yet, and had frankly failed miserably in terms of warning him against the World Eaters. But seeing as the effect scaled based on the rating of the monster, it seemed he would still benefit from the title even when facing standard or elite monsters as well.

  Spell Weaver was almost certainly his favorite at this point, as despite the fact he’d only used it twice so far, its ability to confirm which of his stupid ideas had merit and which were impossible was a literal godsend. He had a hunch that title was quickly going to become one of his most frequently used as he began creating more and more of his own spells.

  And now, Survivor. Obviously, he hadn’t gotten the chance to use the title himself just yet, but he did have at least one piece of knowledge about the power of the title. Tiffany, Alka’s wounded Slayer, had received the title in exchange for surviving the touch of an epic monster which functionally ate her lower half in another dimension, or however the hell that worked. The title was so powerful that even as it had been destroyed, it had allowed Tiffany’s soul to survive the meriders’ merger almost entirely intact, preventing her from becoming one of the constantly happy spider-folk. If that wasn’t a stress test for magical defenses, Vin didn’t know what was.

  Really, the choice was between two of his current six titles. Four of them were either remarkably useful or showed massive potential for the future, while two of them didn’t really do much for him at this point.

  The decision was between giving up Human Vessel, or Generalist Mage.

  Vin frowned as he worked on lacing up his magical boots, weighing the pros and cons of each option in his head.

  On the one hand, while Human Vessel had been remarkably important to him back in his early days on Edregon, now that Alka was no longer a ghost, it was the only title that did absolutely nothing for him. He didn’t want to keep that title over others just due to a sense of nostalgia, but he struggled to even imagine giving it up after all he and Alka had been through.

  What if something happened and the effects of Madam Trebella’s binding ritual finally collapsed? His Human Vessel title had been the only thing keeping Alka anchored to this world. Without it acting as an anchor, Alka would simply fade away for good.

  Generalist Mage was a different story. While having the ability to detect mages and their affinities sounded useful, in reality, the title hadn’t really done much for him up until now. With every society they’d visited so far, mages tended to be obvious and front and center, and for good reason. His title informing him someone was a mage with earth-aligned mana didn’t really do him much good when the mage in question was walking around summoning rocks out of thin air or creating walls of stone with a single glance.

  Not only that, but Vin was pretty certain his focus and magic attributes were slowly reaching the point where he was beginning to be able to detect the deeper mana pools of fellow mages. It was subtle, but his repeated exposure to Shia and Lumel’s impressive mana pools had acted as fantastic practice. He had a feeling he’d be able to pick out an experienced mage from a group of people in the near future given a bit more time.

  A title that literally does nothing for me but might once again in the future, or a title that functionally does nothing for me? he thought, scratching his chin as he went back and forth between the two. At this point, he was fully dressed and ready to dispatch himself from the hospital, but he remained on the corner of the bed, struggling to decide. He briefly contemplated asking his friends, but already knew what they were going to say.

  Skills and passives were one thing, but titles were an entirely different ballgame. They’d talked about them in the past, and it seemed as if everyone viewed them as sacred, personal things, and for good reason. Earning them was remarkably hard, most of the time, which meant it was up to him to come to a decision. Technically, he had an entire day to mull it over and try to think about what the best choice would be, but Vin didn’t want the decision weighing on the back of his mind all day. He’d just spent three days in a hospital bed too sick to even practice magic, one of his favorite things in the whole world, and he had some lost time to make up.

  Making a snap decision, Vin pushed himself to his feet. In that same moment, he selected which title to keep and which to give back up to the universe, deciding he was happy with his choice. Waving goodbye to Generalist Mage, he nodded as Human Vessel cemented its place on his interface once more. He could go round and round in circles over the decision, but the fact of the matter was that Human Vessel was not only a remarkably rare growth title that could potentially keep growing stronger, it was also Alka’s only lifeline in the event something ever happened to her. He never would have been able to live with himself if the magic binding Alka to her golem body destabilized and she found herself adrift without anything to hang onto because he’d thrown out his old title. Of course, the magic binding her should be completely stable and entirely fine.

  But Vin had recently witnessed firsthand just how chaotic and unpredictable magic truly was, and he’d rather be safe than sorry.

  Glad that’s out of the way, he decided, thanking Frank one last time for his help and getting a standard grunt in return. Throwing open the hospital doors, Vin took a deep breath of fresh air.

  Alright, time to see if anything exciting happened while I was out.

  after doing something. In this case, surviving. That's why Vin doesn't unlock the title until the System judges him officially out of the woods haha.

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