I woke up in a tent in the middle of the woods. The ground was hard, the air slightly moist and sun barely starting to rise.

Today was going to be a good day.

Breakfast took the form of my first cup of noodles. I had a few problems getting it hot enough at first, I screwed up in my planning and forgot a proper pot, however I quickly figured out a work around utilizing the smaller of the two canteens I'd brought to carry water with. Though I did singe my fingers in the process.

Nothing big, not even worth wasting cold water on honestly. They were already healed by the time I started eating.

Making sure everything was good and secure, I set out at a jog, partly to warm up partly to get a bit of safe distance between my stuff and where I was going to be practicing, and partly just for the fun of it.

The terrain was uneven, the grass long and doing it's level best to trip me, I wasn't even wearingshoesand I still glided through it faster then I'd ever moved in my mortal life. I leaned down, picked up the pace, and the grass parted before me like the wind as I slipped between grasping roots, and low hanging branches, swaying to avoid the threes they'd come from.

I flipped off of a tiny cliff of dirt, jumped clear over a stream, then ran up a half fallen tree onto the branches of it's fellow.

And just, kept, running.

I could feel the branches bend under me, sense when they'd reached the limit of what they'd support, then with an effortless flick of my ankles flick myself to the next better suited to carry me.

It was crazy, it wasn't like a movie, I couldn't even describe it right. It was like running on the wind, insane, liberating in ways I never ever thought of before.

Was this what it meant to be Exalted? To do such insane things as easily as you would stroll down a boardwalk?

All I really cared was that it was amazing. I wanted to just keep...running to forever.

But I couldn't.

I had other things I had to do.

I switched my steps and started shooting for lower branches, moving my way down until my feet again touched the ground, toes digging into the tightly packed dirt under the grass.

Running could wait.

Right now I needed to learn to fight.

Or rather... how to turn myself into something that could fight on a whole new level.

"Okay... how the hell am I supposed to do this?" Somewhere in the back of my head I knew how to learn charms. Unfortunately I mostly knew how to learn solar charms, which were just natural extensions on normal human actions. Infernal magic on the flipside was much more abstract in how it worked being the powers of eldritch beings that were more concepts then anything material, much less human.

I paused for a moment.

"Well?"

~What are you asking me?~

"Which one of us has learned Yozi charms before?" I questioned.

~You~

I blinked, "What."

~You have. I'm a demon, I know spirit charms.~

"I don't know how aware you were in the pod but this isn't quite the same situation," I rolled my eyes.

~Not that, you did a thing where you toughened your body~

I blinked, "No I am pretty sure I did that back when I was in the chrysalis."

~No not that that. A different thing, think less 'tougher' and more 'resilient'. You can literally take more punishment now~

I blinked, "Okay... let me see if I get this right, so it's... something that made it more that I can take more punishment without actually increasing how much punishment I can take?" How the hell did that work?

~Okay let me try this again. Think of it like the difference between wearing armor and undergoing iron body training~

"Oh!" okay I got that. I'd picked up more health levels.

...Which meant I picked up a rank in Hardened Devil Body...

Huh, wasn't sure if I was happy about that or not. For most exalts extra health level charms were kind of a waste. Slayers could make very good use of them, but only after they'd gotten their soak, the ability to outright shrug off certain amounts of damage, up to a certain level.

My soak wasn't great. I knew another charm known as Scar Writ Saga Shield, which outright made my body into tougher stuff. At my current ability it was more like I was made of hardened leather then flesh and that'd increase dramatically as I build my stamina up but it still wasn't much on par with actual armor.

Which was why I was out here now, to fix that. Mostly because getting shot hurt.

"Okay so I've learned a Yozi charm... probably just from getting beaten up a lot. So what do I do to learn this one? Get angry a lot? Try to flex my muscles until they bulge out of proportion? Glare at something until it explodes?" I snorted.

Then paused, if I could glare at someone and make it explode...

~That one's a little advanced for you~

Damn it.

"Wait how do you know that if you don't know Yozi charms?"

~Just because I can't use them doesn't mean I don't know them. I lived in Malfeas~

"Point," I consented, "Okay neither of us has a full idea of what we're doing, but both of us have part of one. I know about this charm from the game, it's probably the most powerful bit of low hanging fruit I can theoretically grab right now and offers a lot of options. The trick will be figuring out how to do it..."