After I bumped my shin twice on the low furniture, and bonked myself on a wooden beam, he took pity on me and brewed me what he called “a waking brew”.
I’ve had black tea plenty of time before. Back home it was a nice alternative to coffee that I could normally brew straight in a thermos and have it with me for those long days that started at sunrise and generally ended at sunrise the next day. It kept me awake.
This thing that Eklil brewed could have stripped the lining off my thermos.
It didn’t so much wake me after my sleepless night, as injected acid into my veins. If I focused, I was pretty sure I could see smells and taste sounds after the first sip. I could’ve probably used it to clean rust.
It got me awake!
And ravenous.
Eklil’s breakfast spread was delicious. It consisted of fresh fruit—selected with Eternity’s help—and a few chunks of roasted tubers, similar to what I ate the previous day. I was hungry enough that it didn’t matter where the calories came from, just as long as they filled my stomach. As I sat and ate in silence opposite Eklil, I reviewed the night’s conclusions.
My stats were, indeed, a guideline to development. They each had rather straightforward explanations that outlined their purpose. Strength made me build muscles, constitution developed my inner workings—heart, lungs, the general wetware of my physiology—while intelligence was set to develop my understanding.
That one had stumped me for a while, until I realised that I was already making use of the class attribute boost. This whole system would’ve been absurd to me when I woke up on Oresstria, but with the context of what I’d seen already and the hints from Eternity, it became clear that a small bump in the smarts area was making me far more receptive to how things worked here. Subtle.
I wasn’t going to become a genius, but the world would make more sense to me. I thought back on the training wheels analogy from before and it seemed even more fitting now.
Wisdom, for its part, worked as a catalogue. It would help me remember lessons. It was in the description. The higher the stat, the deeper the lessons would sink in and easier to use the conclusions.
In an interesting way, these first four stats worked together in twos. Strength and constitution. Intelligence and wisdom.
That only left willpower.
That one was an odd little thing since it worked more directly than the rest. It was related to mental fortitude and affected how I would handle… challenges. Those two points I’d dropped into the stat had gotten me past the shock of what I’d witnessed. Now, thinking of the bear and the possibility of meeting another like it didn’t fill me with dread anymore. I was afraid, yes—the wisdom of experience—but not terrified silly.
If this was the actual stat having an influence on me, or just morning bravado after a sleepless night, was impossible to tell. I chose to believe the former, and didn’t dwell on the fact that my mind was alterable. If I gave that idea any room to sprout, I’d never sleep again.
Eternity said I could even expand the stats list and gain more such attributes that I could level. The first five had been generated based on what would help me directly, though I couldn’t get more information than this. Why these specifically? Was it based on me? Was it based on some requirement of me? No idea. Eternity remained tight-lipped and a pain in the arse
But, at least now I had an inkling of understanding for my stats. Yay, me!
I’d spent the hours of the morning looking at skills. There were a lot of them, and I only had one skill point to spend. The first choice had been panic-driven, like everything so far, but I resolved not to let it become a habit.
[ADRENALINE SURGE] had proven far more powerful than I had anticipated. I know people can do amazing things when their adrenaline runs high, but to experience what I did when using it was… well, fantasy. What sort of biology was Eternity actually catering to?! Still, if that was so strong, I could only anticipate what some of the others could do.
The quiet time after breakfast, where Eklil and I sat in silence and sipped our steaming-hot battery acid, was given over to choosing on what I’d spend that skill point.
The options were varied enough.
[CLING]
[BECOME ATTACHED TO ANY REASONABLE, FLAT SURFACE]
[COST: 5 MP / activation + 1 MP / second]
Gotta love that reasonable thrown in there, like it would make the description clear in any way. This was the first available skill in my [TRAVERSAL] set, and it precluded all the others. Okay, I thought of Spider-Man the moment I read it, but I somehow doubted it would be that straightforward.
[IRON FLESH]
[HARDEN A PART OF YOUR BODY IN ORDER TO MITIGATE INCOMING DAMAGE]
[COST: 5 MP / activation + 1 MP / second]
[3 MP to change targeted area while skill is active]
I wasn’t mature enough not to smirk at this one. This was coming out of my [SURVIVAL] stack, which meant it would be aimed at keeping me alive… in theory, at least.
But the one that had caught my interest was a rather less interesting sounding one.
[DETECT ENERGY FLOW]
[YOU CAN SENSE THE FLOW OF ENERGY AROUND YOU FOR A RADIUS OF UP TO 5 (FIVE) METRES]
[COST: 5 MP / activation + 1 MP / second]
My MP pool was low and I didn’t yet figure how to gain more—which was something I was determined to wring out of Eternity. The first two skills sounded awesome, but with low MP they would only be active for just a few seconds. [ADRENALINE SURGE] stretched my perception of time so it was cheating its short activation window.
Could I use skills in combination, I wondered. [ADRENALINE SURGE] to help me react, then [IRON FLESH] to guard against some incoming blow? There was too little information for me to make a good decision.
But the [DETECT ENERGY FLOW] was just what I’d like to have on hand always. Okay, energy was a rather loosely defined term. Kinetic? Potential? Magic? It didn’t specify. But, given what I’d seen of [ADRENALINE SURGE] I could probably expect this to do a lot more than what I’d imagine. Getting that one would be a gamble, but my gut was telling me to go with it.
If nothing else, I could maybe see where Eternity’s blob was drawing its energy from and follow it to the source. There was never a shortage of reasons to punch Eternity in the blob.
“You are very introspective.” Eklil’s voice shook me out of my ruminations.
I had been staring out into nowhere for a while now. The tea had gone cold in my mug, only drunk halfway. I chugged the rest of it.
“Was just thinking on things,” I wheezed out as the brew clawed its way through me. “I have so many questions to ask. I don’t even know where to start.”
But there was one that I expected would happen. Someone would need to go back for the body. I wanted to do that, at least as… I don’t know. There was no way I was responsible for that iepurran’s death, but I felt like I was.
“I want to go and help recover the body of your kinsman,” I said, forcing myself not to think on the scene. “I want to help.”
“It has already been done, honoured guest,” Eklil said without looking up at me. “Kleopt has been laid to rest in his garden, next to his honoured father.”
My eyebrows shot up.
“Already?” I looked out through the slits in the shutters. It couldn’t have been more than an hour since dawn had broken properly. “And buried already?”
“Yes. His family has gone out in the dark to recover his body, protected by guards. They have performed the rites. He will be remembered, for he was well-loved.”
I had no idea what to say to that. There had been no wake, no wait, nothing… just a summary burial. For me, it didn’t feel quite right, but who was I to have an opinion on this? It was their way.
“Eternity?” I summoned the light. “Are there more of those things out there, do you think?” I asked, thinking on what to do next.
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“Define things,” Eternity said without a hint of humour.
“Monsters. The kind that we fought last night.”
“Unknown. The probability is, however, high. We may see by day’s end.”
I waited for it to continue but it did not.
Eklil rose from his chair and took away the empty bowls from which we’d eaten, and the mugs. “Others have gone searching already.” When I opened my mouth to protest, he raised a hand and shushed me. “We learned. Our groups are bigger now. They travel armed and will not fight the monsters, only find them. We are making ready for a surge before the festival.”
Well, that left me twiddling my thumbs. I would’ve liked to go help with making the surrounding area safe, but I would’ve probably slowed down the groups who already knew the lay of the land.
Part of me also wanted to go and fight. It was a nascent thing, some ember that had caught a spark from that desperate splashing about and was now slowly growing. I wanted to fight and to gain more levels and test more skills. The project that was me would need a lot of those and, for now, I didn’t know of other ways of getting those levels aside from fighting.
The wall I ran into with my planning, and the reason why morning had found me so tired, was lack of information. Stats made some sense, but the lack of skill descriptions was a whole different issue. When I tried to get into the rune related skills, I had simply given up on trying to understand anything out of those vague descriptions.
[RUNE SMITH: BASIC ELEMENT]
[GENERATE BASIC BUILDING BLOCK FOR A WORD OF POWER]
[COST: 30 MP / activation]
What the bloody hell did that even mean?!
“Eternity, would insight give me better skill descriptions?” I asked.
“No,” came the answer. “You may gain more detailed descriptions, however.”
Right, language precision. I glared at the light until my eyes teared up. It didn’t seem to care
“Eklil, do you have an… interface?” I asked the old iepurran as he moved to fuss over his plants.
“I do, yes.”
“Does everyone?” I asked, picking at the thread. “If that’s alright to ask,” I added quickly, not wanting to upset my host. Far as I knew, asking about this stuff could be some insult that wouldn’t be forgiven for generations.
I doubted it… but better safe than sorry.
Eklil laughed.
“It is quite alright to ask, honoured guest,” he said while he clipped some yellowing leaves from a hanging plant. “Many of the town folk have renounced their interface once moving out here. We came here to enjoy simpler lives.” He let out a long, contented sigh. “We settled here, on the shore of the Ocean Eternal, to escape the trappings of modern life, and the dangers of the inner continent. Dungeons this far out are rarely dangerous.”
Rarely did not mean never, unfortunately.
“So, do you also have a class?” I asked.
“I do, yes. I am a Herbalogist.”
Huh, that was a neat-sounding class. Didn’t seem like a fighting one, though.
“What skills did you need to choose?” I asked, curiosity piqued. “To be given that class, I mean.”
Eklil looked at me with his head tilted to one side, as if confused.
“My class did not require me to select a skill,” he said after some time. “Our interface connects when we come of age. The profession we practice determines our class. We do not choose skills, we are gifted with them once the class becomes active.”
Well, that was a completely different experience from my own.
“Does that mean you can’t change your profession once the class is unlocked?”
Eklil shook his head. “No, no, honoured guest. If we grow tired of a class, we can abandon its path and select another. But we lose all the progress we have earned and it may not be regained.” Satisfied with whatever he’d been doing to that plant, he settled into the chair next to me and tapped on the table absently. “Our class is often our passion. Few want to change it once it’s unlocked. You are not from here so your experience might be different. Not every species interacts the same with their interface.”
It gave me some food for thought. In the meantime, just for something else to occupy myself with, I dropped my skill point into [DETECT ENERGY FLOW]. It seemed more useful for now in a general sense and, if I went into other dungeons and they functioned similarly, I could explore what made them tick.
As a bonus, my MP bar doubled in size.
Neat. I get MP every time I learn a system skill?
I made a mental note to check that with Eternity. For now, I was curious of what the skill actually did. It sounded safe enough to test indoors, even if I would probably not see anything at Eklil’s table. Safer, at least, than testing it out when I’m facing some half-crocodile-half-machine-horror beast in a river.
What was the worst that could’ve happened?
One mental command later and the world turned to static.
I woke on the floor, in a pool of my own vomit, with Eklil dabbing my forehead with a wet cloth. I came back to my senses with a gasp, rising as if from the grave itself. Eklil, to his credit, barely flinched as I screamed in panic.
“Wh-what happened?” I asked, head spinning. My MP bar was flashing red, completely drained.
My shoulders and hips hurt, like I’d been writhing about on the floor. There was cotton in my mouth, and razors, and a taste like I’d eaten dead skunk. I coughed and it hurt the back of my throat.
Eklil let out a sigh and dabbed the cloth on his own forehead.
“Gave me quite the fright, honoured guest,” he said as he picked himself up from the floor. “What skill did you activate?” He walked away from my mess, to return with a bucket and a bristly brush.
He handed those to me as I came to my feet and shrugged off the ruins of my already mangled t-shirt.
Aside from the fact that I had the morning’s tea and breakfast all over the floor, I didn’t feel… terrible, I guess. All the aches and pains subsided as my head cleared. They did leave behind a wallop of a headache. So, I hadn’t hurt myself, but gone in some kind of epileptic fit… well, more than that, I guess.
“Something called [DETECT ENERGY FLOW].” I got down on my knees and started cleaning Eklil’s floor as he went and perched back atop his chair.
He poured himself a fresh cup of tea. I wasn’t tempted.
“Which energy flow?” he asked.
“Uh… I’ve no idea.”
“Ah. So you’ve just tested a skill you did not know how to use, with an effect you were not aware of, inside the home of someone who is hosting you. Most unwise, honoured guest.”
Well, that would explain why my initial assessment had my wisdom at near nothing. I sunk my head, feeling chastised like a child. It had seemed safe, but the interface seemed to have its own concept of what safe meant.
“Everything is energy, honoured guest,” Eklil pointed out patiently. “Energy is in everything. In sound. In light. In the magic that flows through us. Some believe we are energy.”
“Not a completely incorrect assumption,” Eternity said from where it floated above the room.
I grumbled. Yeah, I figured that and probably should have expected it. The system skills all seemed to have some effects that were far more powerful than what the text suggested. It reminded me of the joke with the dictionary, where an old version simply had “Everyone knows what a horse is” as a definition for the word “horse”. Except I was now the guy who’s never seen a horse before.
“Eternity,” I called out as I finished washing the disgusting mess I’d made. “Can I fine tune what energy I want to sense?” I asked.
“Yes,” it answered.
“How?”
“Practice.”
Could I hit a blob of light with wire brush? As usual, it did not volunteer information. Before I figured out what particular stream of cussing I was going to use to show Eternity my appreciation for its hard work in helping me, Eklil gestured for me to follow him.
“Honoured guest, allow me to offer you the use of my bath,” he said.
I couldn’t help noticing how, after we stepped out, he walked upwind of me.
“That would be very kind of you,” I said as I emptied the bucket in a ditch.
“Next time, maybe, warn me before you test a new skill? I may be of assistance in predicting the outcome.”
I expect guests making a mess on the floor wasn’t something the iepurrans looked too kindly upon.
“I promise I will,” I said, contrite.
The bath itself was a separate building, in the Japanese style. They had a big ol’ tub made of burnt clay, with a fire pit dug beneath it. It was tall and wide enough to fit me. I drew my own water from Eklil’s backyard well while he lit a fire beneath the tub and left me to bathe while taking my clothes to be cleaned. I told him it wasn’t necessary, but he insisted. Instead, he left me with one of their togas. This one was white.
“Eternity,” I said as I soaked in the warm water, “let’s have a clearer collaboration. Can we?”
“Depends,” the light answered.
“On what?”
“On whether or not I can provide you with the information you need. I cannot bypass insight restrictions.”
I stared at the [Insight Lvl: 1] in my attribute sheet.
“How do I gain more insight?” I asked. “Do I want to gain more insight?”
This time Eternity took some time to answer, as if figuring what it could tell me. “Restoring a corrupted dungeon will grant you an insight level. I cannot answer your second question.”
Okay, that was still something. Clear dungeons. Get insight. Learn what the fuck’s going on. Not that bad. It was doable.
Now, for something completely unrelated.
“Can you change your shape?” I asked.
It was honestly annoying to walk around daily with a light bulb above my head. Not for nothing, but I wanted something a bit more expressive to interact with, and not seem like I constantly had a bright idea. It was demonstrably false that I had any bright ideas whatsoever by this point of my adventure.
“I can, yes,” Eternity answered, its tone just a bit dubious.
“Can you be anything?”
“Within reason.”
“Something out of my memories?” I asked, already picturing myself followed around by Mushu from Mulan, or Syl from The Stormlight Archives. Okay, the off-brand versions, probably, but still.
“If you focus on an image, I may be able to reproduce it.” It waited for a moment, then added. “Please do not consider improper use of this function. I do not approve of frivolous aesthetic modifications.”
I thought it more prudent not to ask what it meant by that last part, or how the decision had come into being. Years on the internet had taught me that most safety tags had disturbing stories behind them. For this, however, I wasn’t going to ask for some lewd stupidity, just something to make communication easier. If I could put a face to Eternity, I could deal better with its bouts of cryptic nonsense. A face added a personality after all… and something I could imagine punching.
But who? Or what?
“Hmmm,” I leaned back into the tub. It did fit me, but my feet stuck out the other side. It was… nice to soak for a bit, given all that had happened. I tried not to let those thoughts creep back in.
I tried not to let a lot of thoughts creep in at all, the kind that always find you when you’re in a tub. Instead, I ran various figures through my imagination.
Eternity morphed as I thought. First it became a miniature copy of Cortana, but I got the sense it didn’t really approve to be a half-naked blue lady. I don’t care what anyone thought, the Cortana from the second Halo game was the best one and Eternity reproduced the visual to a distracting degree.
A mean thought almost had me asking it to be Gollum, but then I’d be stuck with the creature. I don’t know which one of us would’ve gotten the rawer deal.
After a few more tries, I settled on the image of a tiny, hand-sized black dragon, like a more three-dimensional model of the Heroes 3 sprite. I always liked that unit. Eternity even flapped its wings as it hovered around my head, ultimately landing quietly on my shoulder.
“A dragon is an acceptable shape,” it said, its voice deeper now.
Given the size, the effect was comical. But hey, I had a dragon on my shoulder. How cool was that?
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