Chapter 68: Testing Dreamweaver

Arthur woke before the morning bells.

The residual ache in his ribs had settled into a dull, manageable throb. The stabilizer patch had done most of the surface work overnight; the deeper pathway strain from overusing Frost Sovereign would take longer.

He sat up, rolled his shoulders carefully, and opened the Eros Codex on his lap.

Three pages no longer looked the same.

The first page carried Frost Sovereign in clean, stable script. Mastery had edged upward again during the dungeon — the continuous high-density combat use and the prior dual cultivation work with Selene had pushed it to forty-six percent. The ability answered his will without resistance, cold and precise.

The second page was blank.

Heavenfall Cyclone’s temporary seal had burned out completely in the final exchange against the Nightmare Entity. The slot sat empty, waiting. Arthur felt no particular regret. The print had done what it needed to do.

The third page held Dreamweaver.

The text still carried the faint, shifting quality of an ability that had not finished evolving. Original Tier 8, rapidly moving toward 9. Mastery: 30 percent. Permanent.

When Arthur focused on the seal he felt the secondary sensory layer unfold behind his eyes again — the same awareness of dream-logic and sensory structure that had let him introduce errors into the entity’s core pattern.

At thirty percent it was a precision tool rather than a blunt weapon. That suited him.

Mimi appeared cross-legged on the edge of the desk, chin in her hands, watching him examine the book.

"You’re going to test it before breakfast, aren’t you."

"Yes."

"Try not to put a hole through the dorm wall. The prefects are already in a mood after five first-years made the cut."

Arthur dressed, stored the Codex against his side, and left the room before the majority of House Dawn was awake.

The early corridors were nearly empty. He took a side route toward one of the smaller private training chambers that upper-year students sometimes reserved and that most first-years never bothered to find.

The door accepted his mana signature after a moment and sealed behind him.

The chamber was a simple reinforced box of pale stone with adjustable monitoring wards and a basic terrain generator. Arthur set the wards to private, disabled external recording, and stood in the center of the floor.

He started with what he already understood.

Frost Sovereign formed a dense needle of absolute zero above his palm. Clean. Efficient. He dissolved it and formed a thin freezing layer across his forearm, then layered Mana Skin beneath it.

The interaction was smoother than it had been before the dungeon. Combat experience had tightened the transitions.

Next he reached for Dreamweaver.

The ability answered like a muscle that still needed conditioning. Arthur focused on a simple sensory overlay and imposed the brief sensation of sudden weightlessness on a training dummy at the far end of the chamber.

The dummy did not move — it had no mind to convince — but the air around it shimmered with the imposed logic for a little over a second before the effect collapsed. Mastery limitation. Duration and complexity were still tightly capped.

He tried again, this time layering the weightlessness effect on himself for a fractional moment while stepping forward.

His body interpreted the false sensory data and lightened the effective load of the step, letting him cover slightly more distance than the physical motion should have allowed.

The effect ended almost immediately and left a faint disorienting aftertaste. Usable in combat for micro-adjustments. Not yet reliable for sustained movement techniques.

Arthur spent the next hour methodically mapping the edges of the thirty-percent threshold.

Short-duration fear spikes. Brief false-awakening loops that lasted barely long enough to create a hesitation.

Targeted sensory static that could disrupt a single opponent’s timing if applied at the exact moment of commitment.

Each successful imposition gave him a slightly clearer internal model of how Dreamweaver structured its effects. Each failure taught him where the mastery wall currently sat.

The real value showed when he began combining the two permanent abilities.

Frost Sovereign created a spreading field of dense cold across the chamber floor. While the cold was active, Arthur used Dreamweaver to impose the contradictory sensation of warmth and safety on the same space.

The local reality did not know which instruction to follow. The frost field flickered, thinned, and then reformed with visible instability. In a live fight that kind of contradiction could force an enemy to waste time and mana stabilizing their own techniques or footing.

He reversed the interaction. Dreamweaver first — a short overlay of absolute stillness and silence — followed by a precise frost spike driven into the same target volume.

The imposed stillness made the cold land with cleaner structural effect, as if the target zone had been primed to accept the physical change.

Synergy.

Not yet elegant. Not yet automatic. But present.

Arthur stopped only when the pathway strain in his ribs and the low residual burn from Dreamweaver use started to affect precision. He dismissed the last effects, sat on the chamber floor, and opened the Codex again to review the seals while his breathing steadied.

Four slots were still empty. The Grand Magisterium Tournament was still months away. The gap Kira had described so calmly yesterday was still very real.

Mimi floated down to sit on his knee, wings folded.

"You’re quieter than usual."

"I’m measuring," Arthur said. "Dreamweaver at thirty percent is a surgical tool. Frost Sovereign is the reliable blade. Together they cover more situations than either one alone. But Kira erased a nightmare core with a single unenhanced strike. The difference isn’t just techniques. It’s the refined density of a mana pool and body that have been pushed through years of higher-order pressure."

Mimi tilted her head. "You’re thinking about the remaining slots."

"I’m thinking about the conditions required to fill them properly." Arthur closed the book. "Forcing a print produces weak or unstable results. The dungeon proved that the strongest seals come from real resonance under real pressure. I need bonds that are genuine enough to generate permanent high-tier pages, and I need the combat experience to use whatever I print without nearly dying every time something above my current level appears."

"And the princess?"

Arthur was quiet for a moment.

"The print is stable. The bond is real. What happens next between us is not only about the Codex." He stood and rolled the residual stiffness from his shoulders. "She absorbed residual dream mass that should have dispersed. Kira was right about watching for secondary instability. I’ll check on her after morning obligations."

Mimi grinned, small and sharp.

"You’re collecting dangerous women and permanent pages at roughly the same rate, Master. Try not to run out of slots before you run out of academy."

Arthur deactivated the chamber’s privacy wards and stepped back into the corridor. The academy had fully woken while he trained. Streams of students moved toward lecture halls and cafeterias, still trading versions of the dungeon results.

His name and Iris’s continued to draw glances and low conversations that stopped when he passed.

He ignored them.

The testing session had given him what he needed: a clear internal map of Dreamweaver’s current limits, the first practical synergies with Frost Sovereign, and a sharper understanding of exactly how much further he still had to go.

The gap was measurable.

Measurable gaps could be closed.

Arthur adjusted the Codex under his coat and started toward the main campus, already planning the next cycle of training, the next conversation with Iris, and the still-empty second slot that would eventually need filling with something strong enough to matter when the tournament’s real pressure arrived.ℯℯ𝑙.