Azaroth didn’t know how long, but he kept sending his mind out as if he would suddenly grasp onto something that would remove the pain from him.

Then his mind struck something: a darkness that first made him recoil. He flinched, but there was something familiar about the darkness, and his mind darted out again.

Azaroth gripped the darkness with his mind, and everything flipped again. He found himself in a familiar place: thick darkness of nothing surrounded him.

He wore a dark training robe, his sword rested beside him, and his eyes burned a red glow. Azaroth felt anger like a distant thing; the pain was still in him, but it was muted here. Kael Hound had lied about the pain. This was no pain.

"Show yourself," Azaroth ordered harshly.

An eye blinked open, and a voice surrounded him. "What was happening to your body? That’s an insane pain. Have someone torn your limbs from you?"

"No. We are doing forced attunement."

The eye blinked slowly. "I didn’t know you could do something like that. Of course, I know ways to hasten attunement, but not like this! This is more than attunement."

Azaroth shrugged. He knew his body was suffering now, but at least his mind was only feeling a small part of it. "So I brought myself here."

"Indeed. A surprise. The pain must have forced you to explore your own mind," the eye said.

"The eye," Azaroth muttered. "I should name you."

It blinked. "Name me? I’m the chaos technique, I’m the teacher. I’m the ves—"

"Yes. Yes. Still, I will name you, but not now. Let’s train that telekinetic skill," Azaroth said. The pain was still making him twitch, and he wanted something to do.

He sat down and started. He brought the essence in his chaos core out and started visualizing like the eye said. Think of his essence like a thin rope, but all his essence did was lay over his right hand as if it was forged.

Azaroth stayed like that, with his legs under him, but as much as he visualized, nothing happened. The pain his body was feeling kept building in his mind, and he kept twitching because he could hardly concentrate.

"Corvus," he suddenly said.

The eye blinked. "What?"

"That’s your name. Corvus," Azaroth gave it the name he saw in a book his mother was reading to him. It was a distant past now, long gone and forgotten, buried under a cold anger.

It was the name of a dark black bird, big with sharp beaks and claws.

"Corvus," the voice repeated. "I like it."

Then the eye disappeared, only to reappear as a bird, big and black—bigger than Azaroth thought it should be. Its eye shone a sharp red mixed with black. The beak opened. "I like this form too."

"Corvus? You can change form?" Azaroth asked. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

"Yes, you gave me a name and I took the image from your mind. See." A black tree grew, and he—Azaroth had decided to call it HE—landed on the branch. Corvus ruffled his feathers smugly.

Azaroth shrugged and went back to meditation. It was a simple thing to do, in theory. Think of the essence like strands of rope. Azaroth thought of the threads that his mother used to mend his old clothes.

He thought about how she would bend over them every night and mend the tear. Anger froze his limbs. Then something clicked in his mind suddenly.

Azaroth felt more than saw his essence thin, and then it lashed at the tree with a crack, as if it were a whip. A deep cut appeared on it before the essence collapsed and disappeared.

"You did it! You formed your first skill!" Corvus shouted, wings flapping wildly.

"Shut up." Azaroth swallowed a groan and grimaced. That little thing he did had drained him, as if he had just run a hundred miles. Maybe it was because his body and mind were previously under agony.

He waited until he was ready before he spoke again. "What’s the skill useful for? For beating?"

Corvus chuckled. "It’s more than that. The skill was originally a full telekinesis technique, but it has been tailored for chaos skill."

"That doesn’t feel like a chaos skill," Azaroth pointed out flatly.

"That’s because it isn’t. The core in you is a vessel. It’s not the real chaos core." He shook his head, beady red eyes on Azaroth. "As I was saying, the skill you just used is made for killing, for choking, cutting, crushing. It’s made for precision."

Azaroth narrowed his eyes. Interesting, he thought. He wanted a skill like that. But... "It doesn’t look that powerful," he told Corvus.

Corvus shifted. "That’s because you are still in the low rank. Every skill and technique grows with the ranks of the user."

"Right," Azaroth said. Then he ignored Corvus and went back to harvesting chaos essence for his core.

And that was how he spent the time he was getting attuned. He would harvest, then he would train until he spent all the essence in the core, then he would go again.

His body was getting tortured, that was one way to look at it, but his mind was somewhere else, training. Sometimes the pain in his body would peak so suddenly that it would reach him in the place he was.

He would tense and sometimes fall over, clenching his teeth tight so as not to scream as he rode the pain. Then it would pass, and his body would return to the normal pain level.

He suspected Kael had something to do with it. Who knew the type of experiment he was doing with their bodies as they lay immobilized?

"Are you sure this is attunement?" Corvus asked on the third day after Azaroth had managed to use the skill again. He was getting it now, but he was also using all his essence in one go.

Azaroth shrugged. "That’s what Kael Hound said. Attunement."