The Way Ahead

Chapter 77b: Taking Things to the Next Level

Mana 28 33

You have completed the Fey Scion path!

You have learned much from your fey mentor, from lessons on magic to Paths to how to utilize your Skills. Already, you have taken some steps to more fully embody the nature of your Arcadian teacher, and with your previous endeavor in comprehending the nature of reality from the physical, you have taken the first steps needed to comprehend reality from the metaphysical.

Alchemical Scion

You may evolve your Nutrition skill into the Arcadian Elixir skill!

Accept Evolution? Y/N

Arcadian Elixir

Once one has sampled perfection, well they can settle for what you make

That which you make is like unto ambrosia

Potency increases with level.

Are everyones skill notifications as sarcastic as mine? Edwin asked Inion. She perked up, looking for clarification, and Edwin read the Skill box to her.

Okay, you can stop laughing now. It wasnt that funny, he finally decreed. Now are you going to answer my question or not?

Fine, fine. Its just funny, Inion wiped away an imaginary tear from her face and composed herself. To answer your question, no. Its not normally like that, at least for me. I dont know what determines the Skill descriptions, but its not consistent between everyone who gets the same Skill.

Great, Edwin grumbled, Im so glad I alone have to deal with this sort of thing. Would it kill the System to consistently give me useful Skill descriptions? Edwin shook his head and started trying to figure out what it did.

.

It took a fair bit of trial and error, but he eventually felt like he had it figured out. Anything edible he made now tasted better- particularly noticeable when compared to the same thing hed made prior to getting the Skill- and was more filling. That seemed rather lacking, so there had to be some kind of further hidden effect he wasnt seeing. It did have the side effect of making his previous food taste like cardboard in comparison, but he could live with cardboard so long as it was filling enough. Hed just have to remake a bunch of his supplies, figure out what the bare minimum amount of work needed to get the Skill to activate was, and see if it worked with potions, too.

Oh man, that would be awesome if it worked with healing potions and the like. Better-tasting and possibly more effective potions would be so nice, way better than the vaguely bitter and medicinal taste they usually ended up being in any case.

When she sampled it, Inion agreed that his food tasted better now, as well, and that it reminded her of home. Overall, a win! Perhaps a boring Skill, but one that would at minimum make his trail rations far more tolerable.

Breathing and Sleeping to go, and Explorer and Adventurer to combine with them. He was getting so close he could practically taste it. Pity it didnt taste as good as his venison jerky soup.

Stamina 23 29

Perception 13 18

You have completed the Explorer path!

The path you have taken is not one many have trod before; going places unseen for generations and finding all the forgotten corners of Joriah. You boldly venture into the unknown, blazing your own trail through calm and storm alike, the only thing murkier than your past being your future.

Alchemist-Errant

You may evolve your Breathing skill into the Fresh Air skill!

Accept Evolution? Y/N

Fresh Air

Nothing like the smell of a newly-discovered toxic gas in the morning!

Breathe in fresh air

Purity increases with level.

Edwin felt a dramatic shift in the air the moment he took a breath and collapsed into a coughing fit. He had not been expecting such a sudden change from a new Skill, what was causing ah. Purify must have affected it, didnt it? Yeah, that would make sense, if he functionally just had a level 75 Skill suddenly appear out of thin air.

His explanation of the air being too pure as to why he suddenly doubled over coughing drew an amused giggle from Inion. Overall, Edwin wasnt sure how the Skill actually functioned, as he could still smell his surroundings, and it was as though pleasant odors were allowed through, whereas anything even marginally unpleasant was filtered away though it was still present if he thought about it, just not obvious.

It was very cool being able to stand in the smoke from a campfire with no issues breathing, but further confusing matters was the fact that his eyes didnt seem to be affected by the smoke either. There was clearly a lot packed into the Skill which the description didnt adequately describe, but he had no clue where to start testing its limits. Although maybe he could breathe underwater with it?

So he, as it turned out, could not breathe underwater. At least, not yet. His trial run had still had him inhale water, but far less than a mouthful. Probably, as the Skill leveled, he would be able to just hang out fully submerged, but that day hadnt come yet.

For now, hed have to settle for being highly resistant to airborne hazards. It probably worked on diseases and inhaled poisons, though he couldnt exactly check- nor had he gotten so much as a sniffle since hed arrived on Joriah, come to think of it. Weird. He hadnt considered that fact, but if he had, he would have thought that his immune system, being wholly unfamiliar with all the plagues and viruses to be found on Joriah, would fare about as well as that of the Americans when faced with Europeans.

Now, he wasnt complaining that he hadnt died of the smallpox-equivalent here, but it was kind of strange. Then again, there was so much overlap in animal life (which was its own kind of weirdness for that matter), maybe there were similar connections in diseases? Asking Inion just confirmed that they did indeed have disease on Joriah, the System not wholly sufficient to snuff it out, but she wasnt terribly well-informed about what said diseases were.

Perhaps his genetics were subtly different enough, being an extraplanar human, that he got an exemption, as surely as if he were a human among chimpanzees? Well whatever it was, he was just going to be thankful and hope that he never had to deal with it. Something to worry about another day.

Meanwhile, he had one Skill to go, and one Path to complete with it. So, what would Adventurer do to Sleeping? Make him immune to needing such? Let him dream up training situations? Let him adjust a Skill he had overnight?

Health 24 25

Stamina 29 30

Perception 18 19

You have completed the Adventurer path!

Your path is your own, and no one elses. From your very first moments upon Joriah, you have broken conventions and defied expectations. Your very existence is unpredictable despite the best efforts of many, and you carry with you many valuable lessons for all who would seek them. You venture forth on your own terms, adventuring for the sake of novelty and excitement but to help and learn as well. Take care you do not lose yourself like so many before you.

Alchemist-Errant

You may evolve your Sleeping skill into the Watchful Rest skill!

Accept Evolution? Y/N

Watchful Rest

No more sleepless nights, just sleepless knights

Retain awareness of your surroundings while asleep

Awareness increases with level.

Or maybe it would help keep him from being surprised during the night. Well, it may not have been as glamorous as some of his other Skills, but perhaps he was getting overly hopeful for a 30-point Path. This would serve him perfectly well going forward, as Inion wouldnt always be able to keep watch for him. Something that reduced his need for sleep would have also been welcome, but this worked perfectly fine as well.

So he was to be an Alchemist-Errant going forward, was he? Well, it at least sounded cool, and did describe him more or less adequately.

It was still early-ish afternoon, his Skill experimentation having only taken a few hours, and that meant Edwin still had one last task to do before he started exploring all his new powers together in earnest.

You have unlocked the Flight skill!

Accept Evolution? Y/N

Flight (Magical, Tether)

Raw magic and will: significantly better than wax wings

Flight

Efficiency improves with level.

Congratulations! For obtaining a Skill that allows you to fly unaided while not having wings, you have unlocked the Aerialist path!

Using a dedicated Skill was so much easier than the way he jury-rigged Packing to lift him off the ground. To start, it was instantaneous. No more carefully getting into the right mindset, convincing the air it ought to support his weight. No, it just took a single flex of Flight to bring him off the ground. Mere inches off the ground perhaps, but off the ground nonetheless.

The tether referred to in the Skill felt like, well, like a tether connecting Edwin to the ground below him. In attempting to find the limits of his newest ability, he found that it could (after a couple levels) extend about six inches from him, and so long as it connected to something which could support him, allowed him to fly. It didnt matter if it was a ceiling, a wall, or a tree trunk, just that it was solid. Attempting to fly over the pond had just resulted in a very wet Edwin, and trying to fly over the edge of his cliff had just sent him plummeting to the ground. Hed faceplanted firmly into the dirt, not able to reactivate the Skill fast enough to catch himself.

What was really interesting was the way the grass below him bent out of the way, like he was surrounded by a powerful downdraft, but he hadnt figured out how to replicate the phenomena reliably. It couldnt be used as a force push, sadly. If the tether didnt connect to anything strong enough to hold Edwin up, the Skill just failed to engage. Fortunately, Packing didnt seem to count towards that limitation, and Edwin honestly wasnt sure what supported the boulders he lifted to test it. The branches he was using Flight off of certainly didnt look like they had to support several hundred pounds of rock in addition to him, anyway.

The rest of the day passed in more or less a blur. Edwin played around with all of his new skills, trying to figure out all of their interactions and limitations. Hed done some experimenting as he went along, yes, but now he was actually looking for the synergy.

The first one was pretty easy- Apparatus and Prototyping both worked off Visualization, so it was trivial for Edwin to figure out how to conjure an object he had prototyped. Apparatus still required him to be in contact with his new creation, but he was able to make some pretty interesting rock stacks by summoning new levels already balanced.

Basic Thermokinesis was usable at range, as it turned out, but required him to have a focus point, like his hand were a magnifying glass concentrating heat on a specific object. From there, it was relatively trivial to focus the Skill onto small points, which could either ignite said point if he used Firestarting or just rapidly heat that specific point to the Skills maximum- something like 15 degrees (Celsius, naturally) above air temperature. Past that, and the entire object just started to heat up instead of the point specifically. Once the entire object was at maximum, it radiated heat into its surroundings.

If Edwin was able to channel more mana into the skill, he probably would have been able to then keep heating his target indefinitely, but as it stood, he wasnt able to heat it faster than it lost that energy to its surroundings.

Curiously, until the object reached maximum sustained temperature, it felt as though it stayed at or just barely above skin or air temperature. That, and a few other interesting quirks of the Skill led Edwin to deduce that Basic Thermokinesis consisted of two parts: one was directly adding energy to his target, and the other was almost perfectly thermally insulating whatever he used the Skill on until it was overpowered by a significant temperature differential.

For now, the two aspects seemed to be linked- he could only insulate an object he was also heating- but Edwin was hopeful that he might overcome that limitation in time.

It also opened up some interesting revelations about the nature of magic- was it a form of radiation, where it could be focused to a point? It could transfer energy, yes, and seemed to break conservation of energy given mana just appeared from seemingly nowhere, but how did it transfer that energy? Was it radiative? Convective? Conductive? Did the insulation manage to block all three types? Or just conductive (which would also block convective, come to think of it)?

There were so, so many questions that Basic Thermokinesis raised, and Edwin had to force himself to step away from it for the time being. Hed give it a thorough, thorough investigation at some point in the future, he promised himself. There were thermodynamics shenanigans afoot, and what kind of physicist would he be if he didnt tear into it as much as possible?

Something Edwin found quite interesting was that his Firestarting and Thermokinesis felt very different under his Ritual Intuition. The former felt like weakening, and change, for lack of a better term, whereas the latter felt more directly like fire. It reinforced his idea that Firestarting just served as a catalyst rather than an actual firestarter, but he still couldnt confirm it.

Curiously, Mana Infusion also felt vaguely like fire, Flight felt like a patch of still air deflecting rain, and Feys Caress reminded Edwin of well, like a mountain spring at night. He wasnt able to get a sense of what his Skills felt like, as the only mana present which showed up on his arcanoception when he Infused them was from Mana Infusion itself.

Curious. A bit frustrating, perhaps, but still curious. By a similar token, he was also unable to sense anything pertaining to his own mana.

Alchemical Analysis had yet to return anything but whatever an object mostly was, but with Numeracy leveling, he was getting a closer ideas as to how pure the substances he was Analyzing were exactly.

Numeracy was also growing more precise in other areas, too, and he was approaching 1 meter being his minimum resolution. Thanks to it, he was able to measure that Improbable Arsenal increased the volume of his unenhanced containers by about a third, and he was nearing a meter and a half per normal Longstride, in comparison to about one without using the Skill. Hed also gotten somewhat better with the Skill. He didnt trip over his own feet anymore, not that it had ever happened too often previously, and if he was careful (and double-checked distances with Numeracy) he could walk around without running into anything.

What made the Skill so complicated and annoying to use was not only that he didnt have the appropriate muscle memory for how to deal with such large steps, but he couldnt develop it either, as every time he adjusted, the Skill leveled and threw him off once more. Hed get there eventually, but it was going to be something of a process in the meantime.

Skillful Assessment took some getting used to as well. It created or allowed him to see a vague lightshow around Inion or himself when they used a Skill, roughly corresponding with the utilized ability. All in all, it reminded him of action lines in a comic or cartoon, where it was impossible to tell if a given effect was intended to be visible in-universe or was just there for visual clarity for the watcher or reader.

As if my life wasnt already enough of a fantasy story, he grumbled, The question is, am I the main character or supporting cast?

At least the Skill made the normally mundane-looking aspects of the System more exciting, and had some potential for him to leverage it to further understand its underlying mechanics. After all, most laws of the universe didnt have literal source code to peel back and stare at.

But the System? Well, that was just asking to be hacked.

Level Up!

Skill Points 145284

Adaptive Defense 1 7

Alchemical Dismantling 1 3

Alchemist's Analysis 1 8

Anatomy 1 6

Arcadian Elixir 1 5

Basic Thermokinesis 1 7

Fey's Caress 1 8

Flight 1 9

Fresh Air 1 3

Improbable Arsenal 1 6

Longstrider 1 7

Mana Infusion 85 86

Numeracy 1 14

Outsider's Almanac 125 127

Overcharge 1 3

Prototyping 1 9

Ritual Intuition 1 8

Sapper's Apparatus 1 13

Skillful Assessment 1 5

Congratulations! For spending 600 Skill points, you have unlocked the Journeyman Path!

Congratulations! For spending 1200 Skill points, you have unlocked the Adept Path!

Name

Edwin Maxlin

Age

1 year

Race

Extraplanar Human

Class

Alchemist-Errant

Attributes

Health 25

Impact 7

Mana 33

Perception 19

Stamina 30

Skills

Alchemical

Alchemy 83, Alchemical Analysis 8, Refine 1, Alchemical Dismantling 3, Sappers Apparatus 13

(Purify: 75)

Magical

Flight 9, Basic Thermokinesis 10, Feys Caress 8, Ritual Intuition 8, Mana Infusion 85

(Basic Mana Sense: 82), (Basic Mana Manipulation: 9)

Physical

Overcharge 3, Longstrider 7, Fresh Air 3

(Athletics: 81), (Breathing: 76), (Flexibility: 74), (Nutrition: 73), (Packing: 92), (Seeing: 72), (Sleeping: 73), (Survival: 76), (Walking: 74)

Mental

Numeracy 14, Prototyping 9, Anatomy 6, Polyglot: 59, Memory 57

(Language: 36), (Mathematics: 74), (Research: 50), (Visualization: 80)

Combat

Bomb Throwing 49, Adaptive Defense 7

(Throwing Weapons: 48)

Utility

Outsider's Almanac 125, Watchful Rest 1, Skillful Assessment 5, Arcadian Elixir 5, Improbable Arsenal 6

(Firestarting: 94), (Improvisation: 14), (Status: 22), (Identify: 80), (First Aid: 82), (Harvesting: 76), (Construction: 77)

Paths

Skill Points: 284

Combat

Assassin 0/60, Bomber 0/60, Giant Slayer 0/60, Heedless Hunter 0/60, Hunter 0/30, Killer 0/30, Titan Slayer 0/90, Warrior 0/60, Way of the Empty Hand 0/60, Trapper 0/60,

Alchemy

Alchemical Medic 0/60, Demolitionist 0/60, Makeshift Alchemist 0/60, Potioneer 0/60,

Science

Chemist 0/60, Experimenter 0/60, Researcher 0/60, Purifier 0/30, Scientific Revolutionary 0/90, Scientist 0/60,

Magic

Aerialist 0/60, Fey Friend 0/60, Feybound 0/60, Feycaller 0/60, Mage 0/60, Magical Gardener 0/60, Micro-Biomancer 0/90, Primal Constructor 0/90, Primal Ritualist 0/90, Realm Traveler 0/120, Skilled Arcanist 0/60,

Mental

Dedicated Student 0/60, Lecturer 0/30,

System

Almanac Administrator 0/60, Forerunner 0/60, Outsiders Almanac Specialist 0/90, Pioneer 0/60, System Scholar 0/60,

Trophy

Blackstone Conqueror 0/60, Deepwoods Panther-Hunter 0/60, Stonehide Vanquisher 0/60,

Career

Brickmaker 0/30, Butcher 0/30, Diver 0/30, Gardener 0/30, Lumberjack 0/60, Merchant 0/30, Potter 0/30, Scribe 0/30, Woodsman 0/30,

Physical

Ascetic 0/60, Daredevil 0/60, Physical Alchemist 0/90, Survivor 0/60, Physical Laborer 0/30,

Traveling

Escapee 0/30, Exile 0/30, Traveler 0/30, World Traveler 0/60

Medical

Field Medic 0/60, Medic 0/30, Steadfast Medic 0/60,

Misc

Arsonist 0/60, Autopyromaniac 0/60, Burglar 0/60, Child 0/12, Expert 0/60, Imperial Ally 0/60, Novice 0/12, Pyromaniac 0/30, Razer of the Ruined Tower 0/60, Rebel 0/30, Slave 0/12, Trainee 0/60, Traitor 0/60, Journeyman 0/60, Adept 0/60

Completed Paths

CharLimitCanttalkmuchNocluewhathappenedDidmybesttohelpyouli, Mage, Skilled Arcanist, Physical Alchemist, Bomber, Linguist, Beginner, Warrior, Path Less Traveled, Athlete, Scout, Unkillable, Superior Alchemist, Adventurer, Explorer, Outsider, Skill Researcher, Wanderer,Alchemical Warrior, Novice Pyromancer, Novice Ritualist, Alchemist, Physicist, Engineer, Physical Arcanist, Biologist, Practical Alchemist, Fey Scion, Feytouched