《Obstinate Han》


 Chapter 1

    As my consciousness gradually returns to me, I realize that I am somehow suspended, and I cannot see anything. I probably should have expected as much if I were to be honest with myself, how else would I expect this to work? Did I think I would just appear, alive and well and in a body likely to be unsuitable for this world? Yes, yes I did. But I shouldn''t have. On a cosmic scale, humans have a very narrow band of parameters in which they can survive, so a new world would most likely kill me even if there were other forms of life already present.


    This is pure speculation of course, and I''m already sleepy beyond belief. I know why, consciousness is likely to be fleeting for some time given my current physical state. That''s ok, for now. I let my consciousness drift away¡­ I drift in and out like this quite often, so much that I cannot even begin to guess its frequency or how long I have been here.


    Ok, so the temperature feels neutral rather than warm, and I cannot open my eyes at all. That wrecks my expectations for what it would be like to be a fetus, but once again, that should probably have been my expectation in the first place. Acclimatization is perfectly normal. A man living in a desert would likely feel very comfortable at 30 degrees Celsius, while I would have felt that same temperature to be hot, more than enough to curtail any thoughts of endeavoring outdoors without strong cause. Right now, my "normal" environment is based on someone''s core body temperature.


    There isn''t much for me to perceive. I still can''t see anything. I don''t know what level of development my eyes have reached, but it cannot be very much as I am still unable to even open my eyelids, or if I can the lack of sensation is simply tricking me into being unable to make the differentiation. I cannot hear anything either, though based on some of the vibrations I am feeling, there probably is something to hear. The periodic vibrations seem irregular, so probably not a conversation. They woke me up, but right now I really have no idea what they are¡­


    So what is there? No sight, no sound, just touch really, and there is precious little for me to be able to sense in that regard either being as I''m suspended in fluid, leaving this rather similar to a sensory deprivation chamber. I¡­ There is something. Something different. It''s not a liquid, and it''s not a wall of flesh, what is that? I collapse back into sleep, exhaustion having once more overcome me.


    Ok, I''m finally able to see a bit of light, it''s whitish and kind of grainy, and I''m not seeing anything else yet. Are my eyes open? They should be since the color of the light isn''t orange or red, right? But since I''m awake, what was that thing that I was feeling before, however long ago that was? I do my best to cast my awareness once more to the odd sensation I''d felt before. It''s not something physical, perhaps more like plasma, the substance of fire? Whatever this is, it''s all around me, light, and kind of¡­ It''s almost ephemeral. It''s everywhere and nowhere, and I feel like I can see it even without my eyes functioning correctly. This is¡­ Not something I''ve experienced before. Clearly it''s not a plasma, but I truly have no words to describe what it actually IS.


    I try "swirling" it a little with a finger, and nothing happens. I try swirling it again and again, focusing on it, pushing against it. Is it some form of illusion or hallucination? As I continue concentrating, trying to make it "swirl" with my finger, I finally manage to give it a light mental tug, an-


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    When my consciousness returns, I try to recall what happened. When I did the "little swirl" that last time, it felt like I''d run into a brick wall, and my consciousness evacuated with a heretofore unseen immediacy. I''m not sure if it was real or some sort of hallucination, the memory itself is fragmented, but I think I may have caught a glimpse in the corner of my nonexistent vision of some sort of text, strange green symbols, which looked vaguely similar to the Persian alphabet.


    If that was real I have no idea what that text meant, but if it were real that would have been the most color I''ve seen since becoming self-aware. There is no light at all this time around, I am guessing it is probably night time. It is still and quiet. With nothing else to do, I return to my previous efforts. I can be a bit dense at times, and beyond that there is literally nothing else for me to do. It doesn''t take me nearly as long to create a small swirl this time, and I once again find that doing so utterly overwhelms me.


    I''m not sure how long it takes, but each time I wake up, I investigate. I see what changes in my surroundings. I begin to regain a very loose grasp of time, and it takes a while before I stop just feeling and finally start "hearing" things. I do my best to pay attention when I am aware of sounds. I''m a fast learner and I generally pick written languages and most other things fairly easily, but that changes completely as soon as the verbal element of a language comes into the equation. Spoken languages have never been a strong point for me, so I need to get familiar and comfortable with the language as fast as I can. I begin to see light more frequently, and the light becomes less grainy over time, though it is still nothing more than variations of light and dark. Why is it that I''m seeing light as white and grey rather than orange even when my eyes are definitely closed? Am I colorblind? I can''t be, I still remember the green writing¡­ I don''t understand what is going on with my vision.


    I learn to differentiate when she is walking because it creates a small amount of actual sensation for me, the world swaying around me, and I think I can tell when she sits or lays down as well due to an associated falling sensation followed by a sudden stop, coupled with a rather mild reorientation when she does. I also learn that the majority of noises I have the honor of hearing are various bodily functions being performed, and I increasingly find myself bouncing lightly against fleshy walls, and eventually I even grow enough that my present "home" begins to feel increasingly tight. I know it won''t be much longer.


    Throughout this period, when there is no conversation to listen to, or new observations to make, I will return to that strange sensation. This¡­ Not substance, because substance implies a form which doesn''t exist. This awareness though. I come back to it, and I swirl it, and eventually doing so stops knocking me out, instead just leaving me mentally exhausted. I continue to practice and see what I can do with it. I twirl it, drag it, slide it, pinch it, rub it together, and anything else I can think of. Motion helps to properly focus, but the act of manipulating this stuff turns out to be triggered by mental effort. It is not compliant or helpful, it actively resists any changes whatsoever, you have to focus on what you want to accomplish and WILL it into doing what you want.


    By the time I am born I cannot do much else, but I can freely manipulate this substance.


    Being born, if you were unaware, isn''t fun. You are squeezed and pressured everywhere, and then when you''re finally out into the world, everything is insanely bright, and blurry beyond belief, and everything is still black and white and shades of grey, and above all, it''s absolutely freezing cold.


    I knew I was supposed to cry, and considering that I was being blinded by the ridiculously bright light while also freezing, I certainly wouldn''t mind playing along, it''s pretty important that I do a function check of the lungs after all, but I''m so shocked and disappointed by how very bad my vision is and how terribly cold it is that I forget to do so until a large gray and black shape gives me a solid smack. That hurt too, but mostly just because everything feels so unnaturally cold. It did its job and reminded me of my role, and I give a couple solid squeals so they know I''m alive.


    Why is everything in grayscale, I already saw green at least once so why is there no color now? And why is everything so blurry? I hear them chattering, and I do my best to listen. To learn. It would be a lot easier if I could at least follow visual clues for context, but it seems I''ll take even longer than I expected learning the language.


    It doesn''t really matter. I''m here now, alive, in a world with a magic system!

 Chapter 2

    To answer a question that I kept asking myself time and again in my earliest days, I am not in fact colorblind, but I was at the time. Colors came in slowly and unevenly. In hindsight I vaguely remember having read that babies are born colorblind and near sighted, but it''s one thing to have read that a long time ago and another thing entirely to live through it. As for the reason I could see green while everything else was white, black, or shades of grey? That''s because the green was the system, not light in a real sense but rather some form of mental projection.


    At this point I''d love to tell you about my loving family, but it seems I drew the short straw on family this time around. It turns out that my dad BOUGHT the service of a woman to carry his child, and then he hired a wet nurse after that to keep me fed.


    Over the next few years I never did find out who my mom in this world was, and even asking would just lead to a black eye and a few bruises, so I stopped asking pretty early on. One thing that is made clear to me is that she had no legal rights to me; there aren''t even any records of who she was, and my dad had no interest in letting me know further details. I don''t think he even remembers who she was, though that impression may have been a deliberate deception on his part. He''s a good actor.


    It takes me a few years to accomplish a noteworthy linguistic capability, though in the end I seemed to be learning the vocal portions of the language at pretty close to the same rate as everyone else does, despite being rather dedicated to learning to how to read, write, and speak it as quickly as I could. The simple truth is that learning languages is still not my strong point, and I figured out how to read long before I became competent enough to speak conversationally and without an obvious accent. Aside from learning how to read much earlier than normal, another thing that I didn''t learn at a comparable rate to everyone else was skills, though for a very different reason.


    Ever since I learned how to perceive and manipulate that weird omnipresent substance, which it turns out is called "Aether", I''d been experimenting with it. I was thrilled at learning some of the ways I could use it, for instance learning that I could cause it to mimic the Aether in other areas, leading to an "Earth Conjuration" skill and a message that I''d gained a point of Intelligence, while the skill itself allowed me to create actual and real dirt that would melt away back into regular Aether once I stopped concentrating on it.


    Similarly, I could use Aether to force actual dirt to take different shapes, and unlike the Conjuration ability, a change I made this way was persistent, not requiring any sort of attention to be paid or Aether expended after bringing it to the desired shape! Not only that, that experiment also unlocked a different skill, called "Earth Molding". When I''d spent some time practicing condensing Aether into the Earth, I learned that it would make the already frighteningly dense and resilient earth become even tougher, which also unlocked the "Infuse Earth" skill.


    At this point, immediately after learning Infuse Earth, something crazy happened. I saw notifications saying that each of the previously mentioned skills had been removed and, in its place, I gained a single skill called "Earth Manipulation".


    I spent days testing the new skill out and ended up deciding that it was essentially just a continuation of what I''d already been doing. I could move earth around, feel through the earth to see which parts of the earth were not earth at all and what their shapes were, I could pick out rocks, and essentially everything else I''d already been doing still worked the way I expected it to.


    As described by the skill name, I was able to manipulate Earth! It was still exhausting to do anything, but my daily practice had been bearing fruit not only in providing me skills which would increase my attributes, training in general was enough to increase attributes as well, so the more I used Aether, the more I could use Aether.


    Once I''d become comfortable with earth, it seemed obvious to me that I should try other elements and see if they worked too: They did. Water, Fire, and Air could all be similarly manifested and manipulated. I wasn''t done with my skill related surprises, though. Infuse Air took the longest for me to get the hang of, but after weeks of effort I finally unlocked it, and exactly as I''d expected I saw my Air related skills get replaced by Air Manipulation, but then Earth, Fire, Water, and Air manipulation were removed and replaced by "Elementalist".


    Having thought that I''d managed to unlock a class when I was still a toddler I was more than a little excited, but I decided to keep it to myself for a while and bring it up for discussion on one of the days when the old man wasn''t drunk or angry.   Unfortunately a few days went by without me having seen him in a condition to engage, when my hand was forced.


    One evening the old man had a guest over for dinner. It was a stew using the meat of a rabbit like creature called a Chobit, laden with vegetables. By our standards it was a solid meal, and it even came with a hard, dark bread made from a wheatlike grain to dip into the soup.


    Not that I was at the point I''d get a full and proper meal, I was still a toddler after all, so my portion of the meal was just vegetables and a few torn pieces of bread laid out in front of me on the table. I hadn''t grown up enough he was willing to risk letting me use proper silverware or even a plate, yet. It''s not like I was a messy eater, but coordination is pretty rough right now even for me.


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    As previously mentioned my ability to read had come along nicely, but I''d been comparatively struggling when it came to the spoken language. I needed people to repeat things often, speak slowly, and often ask what a word meant, but the gist of this conversation wasn''t hard to grasp. The old man would say something in a grandiose fashion, he''d clearly be bragging about something or other, and the guest would laugh and agree.


    It was nothing special as the old man was well to do compared to the people around us. Far from rich, at least I didn''t think we were, but we were still clearly better off than the rest in our immediate vicinity despite having no apparent source of income and the absurd amount of money we must have been spending to feed his habits. At one point though, the guest pointed at me and said something, obviously he wanted to ingratiate himself by bragging on the old man''s son. Pretty sure he asked for my name, and I volunteered it "Han Kenta". I thought I''d been acting politely¡­


    The old man glanced briefly at me in annoyance before turning back to his guest, whose jaw had dropped open. He said some stuff sounding excited, and after replaying the noises a few times I realized that he''d said something about their word for "Elementalist".


    I didn''t know people could view my class, but by the look on Han Seoul''s face, he wasn''t as pleased by this as the guest was. He adopted a tight smile and steered the conversation back to bragging about something. He kept his cool for another 20 minutes before finally escorting the guest out. After that, he came back, screamed at me for a while, smacked me around a bit, and squeezed me so hard it broke my arm.


    To this day I can only speculate on the reasoning for why he was so angry and what he was actually yelling about; the lesson at the time for me was that I needed to learn more about the skills in this world before I did anything else that might result in similar outcomes. In a world with magic a broken arm isn''t actually a big deal, aside from the pain you experience in the moment of course, but that experience prompted me to keep my advantages as secret as possible for as long as possible.


    The answer to how that guest came to know I was an Elementalist, by the way, ended up being because of an ability people are able to learn pretty easily when they are finally able to access their soul scrolls. It''s called "Identify", and though I''ll explain a bit more about it at a later point, the short version is that if you are significantly stronger than someone else, you can see whatever their highest tier skill is. It''s a pretty limited ability, but any adult is going to be significantly stronger than a toddler, so my highest tier skill would effectively be an open book for the world no matter how desperately I would want to keep it quiet.


    After that the old man actually started hiring people to help me improve. Not at magic, but he hired a speech therapist to help get rid of the worst of my accent (which he thought was related to a speech impediment), a vocal coach to  teach me singing and storytelling and how to use Aether to reach a larger group at a consistent volume, Aether infused sketching''s and paintings which would provide minor temporary attribute bonuses, and more. Maybe we were more rich than I''d realized, or perhaps there were many people who owed him favors.


    Beyond the people he hired to teach me, he also started giving me some personal coaching. I didn''t know it right away, but it turns out that the bastard was a Rogue, which means that he''s good at lying, stealing, stabbing people in the back, and generally being a horrible person. He was demanding, pushy, unreasonable, and of course abusive, both of the emotional as well as physical variety.


    With that in mind, for his personal lessons he had me practicing skills like hiding, moving quietly, ambushing and assassination, and much more besides. He taught me to get better at lying too, after I''d become sufficiently eloquent for elaborate falsehoods to be conveyed convincingly.


    Credit to the man. He was a real piece of work, but he knew what he was doing, and he didn''t shy away from having me learn as many skills as I could get my hands on in a frontier village. It was only a year or so after my arm had been healed that I was using my Aether to soften the sounds of my footsteps and bending the light around me to darken my profile,  and over the course of about 5 years I''d turned my performance related skills that he''d been hiring people to instruct me on into the "Bard" skill, as well as learned a number of skills ranging from first aid to lumbering and carpentry and, most importantly in his eyes, I''d picked up what was needed to learn the "Rogue" skill as well.


    Identify would only show the highest tier skill even if it worked on a person, so even though I''d always be revealing my "best" skill, as long as I had other skills of the same tier and a higher skill level I''d be able to keep my real abilities hidden.


    Of course, that meant that the old man wanted me to be a Rogue who displayed as a Bard, just like him. Bards aren''t very useful in a war. As terrible of a person as he was, he didn''t want me dead. Having the world think I was a bard was his way of trying to protect me.


    Unfortunately, even though I''d been learning a lot and growing quickly, a Lord appeared. I don''t really remember that much about my first home or the people in it, my intelligence attribute wasn''t high enough back then to have the kind of recollection that I do now. Most of the things I do remember are in snippets, but it wasn''t a very exciting life.


    I would wake up in the morning and quietly try to see if I could unlock a new type of magic skill, I even succeeded at uncovering a couple tier 1 magic skills, then I would perform some calisthenics, go for a jog, cook breakfast, spend some time with an instructor singing, drawing, memorizing some story, felling trees, or otherwise working to unlock new skills with about half of them being geared towards increasing bard related skill tiers. After that I would prepare lunch, spend some time getting my ass kicked either by an instructor or an angry alcoholic father who was pissed off about something or other, then I would spend some time recovering by reading the newspaper or any books I could get my hands on, cook dinner, then spend some time learning whatever vaguely rogue related skills the old man felt I needed to learn.


    During these years I kept the most obvious of my secrets deeply hidden. On the rare occasion the old man would wake up from his drunken stupor early enough in the morning that he would find me exercising, I would simply claim that I''d just been playing, or when learning the combat skills of this world, I would be careful not to accidentally slip into habits I''d learned from Muay Thai, MAC, or MMA unless someone showed me an identical maneuver here. My dad might not have wanted me dead, but he wasn''t someone I''d be willing to trust with the knowledge that this wasn''t my first life.


    You don''t trust someone like him. You also don''t love someone like him. I do respect that he was trying to care for me in his own way; but he was a terrible person, and he doesn''t deserve my own or anyone else''s love.


    In the end though, it wouldn''t have mattered if I had let him in on who I really was. Like I said, a Lord appeared, and whatever plans he had for me burned to the ground, along with the place I once called home.

 Chapter 3

    This world is hardly some peaceful and idyllic medieval setting. People here use magic rather than our version of technology, but since everyone can use magic in varying but repeatable ways, it is fairly advanced and follows a similar template for research compared to our world. It might not look that way at a glance because many of the things I would have taken for granted as being evidence of an advanced civilization are either ineffective, inefficient, or obsolete, and those things which are not are niche. But, advancement is ubiquitous once you know what to keep an eye out for.


    One example would be air conditioning. That''s a pretty simple and obvious quality of life enhancement, and yes, they have it. Enchanters create runic plates which can maintain the temperature of an area, and which can be maintain their charges via monster cores and by having someone periodically injecting their own Aether into those cores to maintain a steady power supply between recharges. Ergo, no problems with internal temperatures, so clunky air conditioning units are unnecessary. Never mind whether or not it''s "needed" given the physical abnormality of the people of this world compared to my old world, comfort is comfort.


    Refrigeration? Same concept, actual refrigerators are a product of our need to containerize and carefully seal the food we want to keep cool. They don''t have the same shape and style here, because they don''t need it. If you can just designate "This shelf/Larder/Etc." and make the air there extra cool, you don''t need to use the same rectangular behemoth, so refrigeration tends to just manifest as shelves or in cellars where you put your food.


    Well what about things like tractors? The benefits are marginal when the farmers have superhuman strength, endurance, and special abilities to produce exceptional harvests in comparatively small areas. That''s assuming a modern tractor would even be able to plow the incredibly dense soil, though some artifice could resolve that readily enough should you add some Aether infusions. The point being though that if there are tractors I haven''t seen them, but they also don''t appear to be able to fill the same function to the same degree here.


    Hospitals? Well, they kind of have something similar, but they''re more like clinics, and outside of a military facility or somewhere you might expect mass casualties with regularity¡­ They are an awful lot smaller than I am accustomed to, more like clinics, often with only a single doctor in attendance. These clinics even tend to look rather rustic, but then again there is little that our modern medical equipment can bring to the table when the doctor can literally magic away traumatic injuries¡­ So does it actually matter if the "hospital" in this tiny village is just a dirt floor hut? You''ll get equal or (usually) much greater quality of care in that dirty little hut than even brilliant doctors on earth can accomplish. Not that most buildings are straw huts with dirt floors¡­ But I think it makes the point.


    In other words, while this isn''t a world that a person on Earth would be likely to recognize as modern at a glance, it''s mostly stone buildings with few apparent appliances, they''d likely think it''s not far from an ancient society somewhat similar to the Greeks or Romans but with a midevil flair. That perception would be a mistake though, attributable to them not understanding what they are looking at. Magic is the Technology here, and although it lags behind in some areas, in many ways Grendel is far more advanced than modern Earth.


    I don''t think anyone knows where Aether actually comes from. Some people speculate that it comes from the Dungeons, while the priests of course say it comes from the gods. For once I think the priests might be right about it, but only because it was a god that gave me the chance to come here. Not an omniscient and omnipotent god, definitely not, but sufficiently far beyond humanity as to make bothering to differentiate them from our idealized version of a god a pointless philosophical exercise.


    Dungeons though, are real, and the primary purpose of any nations military is to police and patrol the dungeons in a region. Periodically there are Aether surges, and those Aether surges sometimes cause new dungeons to be created and old dungeons to stop producing monsters, so while it''s somewhat stable you always have to be careful because any unchecked dungeons in your vicinity are an enormous threat.


    Dungeons produce monsters organically, which is already enough of a problem, but many types of monsters, once produced, can continue reproducing on their own. If left alone, a dungeon population may soon go out of control, leading to a monster surge.


    As a rule an actual city will be sufficiently militarily prepared to withstand an unexpected monster surge; but a monster surge doesn''t end on its own unless it''s coupled with an Aether surge which causes the dungeon feeding that surge to stop producing creatures, and even if that does happen and the dungeon responsible for the monster surge stops magically producing monsters, unless the population is eliminated, the reproducing monsters will continue reproducing even in a defunct dungeon or the townships their future generations build.


    If it weren''t for the fact that so many species of monster are every bit as hostile towards each other as they are to humans, humanity would''ve long ago been wiped out due to the difference in numbers alone. It is fortunate for humanity that monsters don''t like monsters, either. Unfortunately for humanity, Monster Lords exist.


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    Monster Lords are only produced from a dungeon, not born, and they are very rare. Every dungeon will have a dungeon boss. Not one in a hundred Dungeons will produce a Monster Lord in the entire dungeons life. Monster Lords are stronger than their brethren, and are far more intelligent, and far more charismatic. They are the villain''s of this world, and the reason humanity has no true chance.


    Any dungeon which has creatures capable of reproduction might attempt to create their own cities or even kingdoms, but Monster Lords are something special. They don''t stop at trying to establish their own nation for themselves and their people; they''ll subjugate other species, and turn those species into a part of their fighting force. When a Monster Lord takes over an area, it is exceedingly difficult to reclaim the area later. Sometimes impossible.


    How strong is a Monster Lord? I can''t be too precise because I''ve never actually seen one in person; but the one responsible for the destruction of my village was supposedly a Goblin, and even though I never saw him personally, he had Minotaur''s among the minions which destroyed my village. Those, I did see. From what I''ve read, Minotaur''s are typically close in strength to a level 400 human fighter.


    I have no way to know if it''s actually true, but from what I understand there''s only one group in all of humanity that can fight a Monster Lord on even footing, the Sky Marshal and his army. They are humanities most elite fighters, funded by annual donations from every country we have left. If the Sky Marshal is unwilling or unable to engage, the Monster Lord is free to continue its assault until its army is wiped out around it, or it decides to stop attacking on its own for reasons I am not clear on.


    "The System" seems to have appeared around 20,000 years ago, though records from that time period are poor so it''s not an exact number. At the time the system appeared, humanity was the dominant species on the planet. The priests claim that the system appeared as a result of the monster invasion, as the gods chose to arm humanity with tools appropriate for resisting the monster invasion.


    The Goddess I met hinted that the system might have originated with the invasion rather than as a response to it, but frankly it wasn''t a long talk and she wasn''t terribly clear in her responses to the questions she did answer, so I might be misunderstanding. She was¡­ Odd. She did suggest that she''d defanged it though, whatever that is supposed to mean. It looks like a pretty good tool to me regardless, and I didn''t actually get the impression I was supposed to be avoiding it.


    Regardless, after the monster invasion began humanity experienced a period of crises, with kingdoms collapsing all over the world. No one knew where dungeons would appear or how to deal with him, or even how important it was that they be located quickly and controlled, or anything else we now take for common knowledge. It was a period of immense destruction, and the loss of life must have been staggering.


    To deal with the monster invasion, a number of steps ended up being taken to ensure humanities survival. Among those steps an evacuation system was created, allowing people to flee to the cities in the clouds as they are sometimes called. Whether referred to as the "Cities in the Sky" or "Cities in the Clouds", either way it is something of a misnomer as they are actually distinct pocket dimensions, making them extremely difficult to invade.


    Each of these special cities has 3 portals, 2 of which connect to some of the other cities in the sky, while the third leads to the ground somewhere on the actual planet of Grendel. When a monster invasion occurs which cannot be driven back by the available forces, the evacuees get to flee through the nearest portal, with that portal being destroyed when the monsters get close.


    A new portal to the ground will eventually be created, either to the same area if they decide to retake it, or deeper into human territory if the powers that be decide it is better to retreat. Once a particular City in the Sky has been opened, it will remain open from then on, though only those who meet the requirements are allowed to stay and live there beyond an initial evacuation period.


    What are the requirements to live in a City in the Clouds? Apparently there is some sort of a chart for each city. I don''t know which specific person or group is responsible for the cutoffs in any given chart, but in general prepubescent children are allowed to stay, and those who have reached puberty but have not yet reached 16 are allowed to stay if they possess a Tier 3 skill, and beyond that it is a combination of age and level.


    It''s harsh to say, but children born with some form of physical or mental deformity are an exception to this rule. Even though they do not make any claims relating to genetics, and even though they do not use the same terminology or seem to be aware of the morality concerns associated with doing this, humanity has accidentally stumbled upon and actively practices both positive and negative eugenics here. The weak are abandoned or outright culled, and the strong protected.


    As an example of how it works, if you are an adult at level 100, you''ll be going back to the ground at the first opportunity, and the same holds true for a 200 year old adult who is level 200, while a 20 year old at level 150 would be allowed to stay. The actual number of potential residents and the respective cutoffs for a particular city are determined by the capacity of the city in the sky at the time of invasion, with infrequent updates to the chart after that.


    Cities in the Clouds are prepared far in advance of being needed, but then, they have to be. Once a new City in the Sky is opened it stops growing; and even if it were a large sized city when it opens, the cities in the sky don''t have naturally occurring resources, not even soil or water, so everything needs to be imported, and even once soil and water are imported, the areas are simply too small for any food production or water recycling techniques to sustain the entire city in perpetuity.


    It''s not nice, but there''s no real choice either. Humanity must stay connected to the ground or it would die off, and staying connected to the ground means they need to continue fighting, and to continue fighting they prioritize the well-being of the people who are capable of fighting.


    I''ve drifted a little bit, but the cities in the clouds are as close to safe as anything gets in this world. I was 7 years old when I found myself, most likely an orphan now, living in the City in the Sky known as Virtue.

 Chapter 4

    Not long after I arrived in Virtue, mass importation of stone and soil began and the construction of the city began in earnest. With the help of Aether, establishing one building after another following some sort of cookie cutter template based on the area the pocket dimension had expanded to reach, was quickly and efficiently accomplished. Being as I possessed a Tier 3 skill and was significantly under the age of 16, my ability to remain up until the age of 16 was never in jeopardy.


    When the barracks-like orphanage was completed, I moved into the room I shared with 3 other children of similar age. Plain, 2 bunk beds and 4 wardrobes and a square table with 4 chairs, but it was a larger room and nicer accommodations than I had any reason to expect.


    I wanted to earn some money by helping with the construction efforts, though my contributions were limited as I didn''t want to out myself as an Elementalist at my age, so I only used the skills I would see stonemasons and carpenters and similarly innocuous people using, and I would only assist with a particular type of work until I''d unlocked its associated skill.


    Han Seoul never explained why he was angry I became an Elementalist, if I had to guess the real problem was probably his pride, but he was cunning enough that I didn''t want to act on that assumption and expose myself without better understanding the ramifications of doing so. As for why I would change my job as soon as I became qualified to perform it, I''ll explain that shortly.


    Low quality food and water, mostly bread and hardened wheels of cheese, were provided by the linked cities while we were building, and once the construction push slowed down I started taking up odd jobs such as helping to load or unload wagons of goods, running messages, cleaning, and so on as a means of making a little money and training up enough to learn new skills.


    Initially, there were few among the other young orphans seeking out work the way I had been, but I saw a number of the older kids and most of the adults similarly trying to come up with a way to earn money even though our immediate needs were being met via handouts. When the majority of the infrastructure was in place, we were still given a place to sleep for as long as we met the requirements of living in Virtue, but everything else became our own responsibility, even feeding ourselves.


    Needless to say crimes of every sort were rampant in the early days, and even later when guards would actually investigate some of the more serious crimes, the dynamics of allowable crime within Virtue merely changed along with the city. A comparatively small number of extremely powerful people were essentially free to do as they pleased, while the majority of the population struggled to get by until they were eventually replaced by someone from the ground who might be the same age but was at a higher level.


    Believe it or not I don''t hold any sort of a grudge or particular resentment as a result of the way the cities in the sky were being managed. No one wants to die, and humanity itself is struggling to get by in this world. As horrible as it would be when a particularly powerful individual would committee a heinous act and get away with it purely due to their level or association, the fact of the matter is that even the cities in the sky weren''t entirely free of the risk of invasion. They were merely more difficult to invade.


    The higher level people would be the ones called on to retake lost lands, to rebuild cities, to create new cities, they were even key to producing food in bulk, and so much more¡­ And there simply aren''t enough high level people to do everything that they are needed for, so the favorable treatment they are given is more a matter of necessity than desire.


    As for those who were slow to recognize the changing dynamic, or those who thought just because they were rich they could do what they wanted? Suffice it to say that those attitudes were only appropriate in the early days of the evacuation, when everyone was getting away with terrible crimes.


    In this world, power trumps wealth because humanity needs power, while wealth can be effective in anyone''s hands. Perhaps not all rich people will be effective to the same degree, but even a fool who stumbles on wealth will serve to enrich someone else better qualified to manage it. In other words, while you can be too powerful for someone to force you to do something, there is no such thing as being too rich to do something; even hiring people more powerful than yourself is only a limited form of protection. As for someone who lacked both wealth and power? Little more than an accusation from someone higher in the social hierarchy would be required for "justice" of one form or another to be served.


    For the next decade I immersed myself in the combination of coming up with ways to earn money, and coming up with ways to learn new skills. Learning new skills was simultaneously both very simple to do, and incredibly vexing.


    How would I learn new skills with my father and trainers gone and my mother essentially never existing? There are 3 major methods that I took advantage of. The first and most convenient method would be to find some work helping someone else, getting advice on how to learn the appropriate skills along the way. Developing a new skill will often require many different attempts applying Aether in an appropriate manner before the system grants the associated skill, but using this method you get a known working method to get the skill, coaching, and some practice time where you''re actually being paid to improve yourself.


    The second method of learning new skills, which is by far the most time consuming and difficult method of learning skills, is experimentation. Whereas learning a new tier 1 skill while assisting someone else might require a week, learning a new skill that you know exists might take a month or more if it even exists and if you are actually applying techniques that end up being appropriate for gaining skill experience.


    I never stopped training for attribute improvements, and I never stopped experimenting to find new magical skills, but after my first couple of years where I got some wins in, almost every subsequent magical skill I was able to unlock I was only able to do so after finding out information about that skill from some other source, such as a former adventurer describing how he''d worked with a mage that was able to influence the thoughts of monsters using Aether. His description was imperfect, but that conversation was enough to put me on the trail of mental magic, which led to eventually uncovering how to create compulsions, charms, and so on, eventually leading to its own tier 3 skill despite not having had someone to "show me the ropes".


    The third method which I would frequently utilize to learn a new skill was to hire someone from the Adventurers Guild. While powerful people can get away with heinous crimes as long as they are not egregious in quantity and severity, not everyone with great potential or ability is a good fit for the military. The Adventurers Guild is a popular fallback career for those who didn''t want to join the military, but still wanted to be able to put some of the combat skills they''d been learning into practice. The Adventurers Guild is the perfect home for those who are capable but don''t fit elsewhere, and is a perfectly viable route to attaining power and influence without having someone telling you where you have to go and how to lace your boots.


    The primary purpose of the Adventurers Guild is to remap the land, to recover lost technologies, to explore old crypts and return with wealth, and so on. In other words, their primary purpose is to Adventure. The reality however is that those types of work are generally speculative, often dangerous, and rarely will an adventure of that nature result in a payout. So? Most Adventurers pay for their day to day living expenses by accepting posted jobs.


    If a particular city or kingdom needs to move its army somewhere, the Adventurers Guild might have postings for dungeon clearing to reduce the risk to their local populations while the military is stretched thin. If an enchanter wants a special material found from a certain type of creature? If a wealthy merchant wants a guard for a specific period during a dangerous journey? Or, and this is why they are of interest to me, anything else that doesn''t involve running around and assassinating people. Like, say, training.


    I don''t have much in common with people my own age, and while I didn''t yet have a way to keep up to date on my own level, nor a desire to constantly have other people check on my behalf, it was extremely safe to say that I wasn''t high enough level to hang out socially with people who would have skills that I''d need. Since experimentation is a poor way to pick up new skills, learning how to apply Aether to common tasks so that I can count a skill as having been learned and acquire the associated attribute boosts is pretty much the only thing I have going on.


    So, I continue chasing information through books and using that to inform my decision making, and when I have enough money to get a tutor, I''ll hire an Adventurer to spend a few hours going over the basics of a skill with me so that I can learn it via self study after having been taught techniques to acquire the skills.


    A few hours isn''t nearly enough to learn a skill, but it''s enough to learn what I need to do to learn the skill; and after a few hundred or thousand attempts I''ll generally get the desired skill. Beyond that, I would even take it to another level, occasionally teaching my roommates how to use a particular skill.


    It turns out that even teaching is a skill, and you can get credit for it by using your Aether skills to demonstrate techniques, or creating learning aids such as illusionary diagrams, and teaching was one of the skills used to qualify for higher level leadership related abilities.


    This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.


    Obviously the classes and timing I would choose to teach to my fellow orphans were determined by skills I was working on unlocking or upgrading, rather than being based on what would do the students the most good, but formal education is really only a thing for the rich, or for those willing to sign away noteworthy chunks of time in the service of large organizations, so it was a win-win even if it wasn''t optimized.


    Speaking of skills, I never explained what actually goes into getting a Tier 3 skill. I started writing down what skills I knew I had when I started learning about how the skill system worked, but honestly without being able to see my Soul Scroll there are going to be mistakes in there. It wouldn''t be as bad if it weren''t for the merges, but when you include them, keeping track of which skills were learned to get to which skills, trying to keep track of them would be ugly even if you didn''t have to rely on single sentences that appear without warning and then disappear a few seconds later. Put together, even though I''m rather meticulous, it still gets pretty ugly.


    Here''s an example of what I mean:


    To gain the Rogue skill, which is tier 3, you need to pick up a series of tier 2 skills. Let''s look at the tier 2 "Deceit" skill. To get that, I had to learn the Deception skill, the Palming skill, as well as the Impersonation skill. Once I''d learned the three of them; how to deceive someone with my tongue, with my hands, and with my mannerisms, those skills automatically merged themselves into Deceit. Where Deception, Palming, and Impersonation were all tier 1 skills, Deceit is a tier 2 skill. Presumably, that means that someone identifying me if I only had those skills would see something like "Deceit Han 10". Yes, "Deceit", not even "Deceiver". They don''t start sounding like class names until Tier 3.


    Speaking of Tier 3, to get to Rogue I had to learn Stealth (which required Hiding, Moving Silently, and Shadowing), Acrobatics (which required Tumbling, Jumping, and Balance), Trap Mastery (which required Disable Traps, Create Traps, and Trapping), and Assassination (Poison Use, Ambush, and Scheming). In other words getting the Rogue skill required that I first learn 15 tier 1 skills, which would then merge into 5 tier 2 skills, before finally culminating in the tier 3 "Rogue" skill.


    In general, no less than 3 skills are required to become a higher tier skill, though I''m not aware of any that would require more than 5, and there are often multiple skills that can unlock the same higher tier skill, though I don''t always know what the acceptable substitutes are.


    For Rogue though, one example is that rather than learning Impersonation as a tier 1 skill to get to Deceit, I could have just as easily learned Disguise. I felt that having more practice mimicking a single specific person would be a better practical experience for me than using Aether to appear as a larger number of generic individuals, though after acquiring Rogue it is a fairly simple matter to disguise myself should I choose to do so. Once you have the higher tier skill, everything that could be used to qualify for the skill falls under the umbrella of things you are capable of performing if you think to do so and have an appropriate skill level.


    Similarly, if you learn a lower level ability due to a different skill, it counts when and where it could qualify you for something else. For instance I never actually learned the "Acting" skill when I was working to unlock Bard, because it is also a possible qualifier for Rogue, so I counted as having the skill by the time that I would have needed it to learn Bard.


    If I were to later try and unlock any other skills where acting were a requirement, that requirement would still be met without needing to do anything to expand it. What that ended up meaning in practical terms is that several times I''ve been surprised to discover unlocking a tier 1 skill ended up snowballing into higher tier skills without me actually expecting or intending that they do so.


    So how does one learn a skill? Well that''s the thing about skills, is that it can vary quite a lot. Using a sword isn''t actually a big deal, pretty much everyone has at least some weapons training, but just swinging it around and hitting people doesn''t learn a skill, much less level it. No, the skills aren''t based on your physical ability to do things with it, but rather your ability to apply Aether in the execution of that skill.


    It''s theoretically possible for a person who doesn''t even officially have a swordsmanship related skill to be a better swordsman than someone with level 100 swordsmanship, however the person with level 100 swordsmanship can do incredible things with their sword that require Aether. What exactly they can do varies by the person and what they are most comfortable with, but some examples might be that their sword is impossibly sharp, and that they can swing their sword and have a wave of sharpened Aether come from it, cutting monsters in half from dozens of meters away.


    In a real fight of course the ability to seamlessly incorporate magical effects into your attacks is usually many times more than enough to make up for any differences in nonmagical ability, but if you somehow convinced that hypothetical level 100 swordsman to avoid using Aether skills entirely, there''s a real chance he might get decimated by someone who''d practiced a bit of nonmagical swordsmanship.


    So I mentioned levels before, and then I also made it sound like skills have levels: That''s because they do. Like the levels a person has, skills also have levels, though the numbers for skills don''t get nearly as high as the overall persons level. In general increasing skill levels will increase your personal level a little at a time, but not very much and not very fast. If you go your whole life without fighting any monsters and only training in a normal array of skills, you''ll probably die of old age somewhere around level 200, with your skill levels somewhere in between 50 and 100.


    Aside from being more proficient in doing the thing the skill does, what makes skills worth leveling up is that skills sometimes give attribute points depending on the specific skill and the skill tier. I can''t see my attributes until I hit 16 years old, but I can still increase them via training and skills, and the better off my attributes are, the better off I am.


    Even if that weren''t the case though, the more practice you have implementing magic while doing something, the more likely that thing is to be amazing, so even though chasing attributes is definitely high on my list of interests, day to day magic would have been a worthy goal in its own right.


    Similarly to how higher skill levels tend to result in better outcomes, so do higher tier skills tend to be an advantage that you want to get established sooner rather than later. While you can get your skills merged basically at any point, when the skills are merged together you won''t be able to acquire the attribute boosts associated with the higher tier skill leading up to your merged skill level until you''ve caught up to the highest level your associated subskills reached.


    One might think it would be better to get 3, 4, or 5 lower tier skills all to rank 100 and then merge them, rather than counting on a single skill for their attribute increases, but honestly the attribute boosts from skill levels are rare and far from overwhelming at lower tiers, enough so to offset the difference in quantity in most cases. You''ll usually get an attribute when you get a skill, and then again every 10 levels, with a few milestones where you get a particularly large bonus.


    When I first got Earth Conjuration, the tier 1 skill, I received + 1 Intelligence, and the same was true for the rest of the tier one Elementalist related skills. That''s pretty much the case for every skill, when you first learn a tier 1 skill, you get 1 point in an associated attribute. Realistically, at level 11 I would probably receive another +1 Intelligence from each, same for 21, and at 31 which is where you move from a beginner to an expert, I would probably gain +2 intelligence for each of the 12 tier 1 skills that were used to eventually merge into Elementalist.


    That''s a lot of Intelligence, right? And all the attributes matter, so that''s very nice. For instance, by the time your Intelligence reaches 1,000, you''re supposed to be able to remember basically everything you experience from that point on. I would expect those 12 tier 1 skills would, over the course of 31 levels, add 60 to my Intelligence Attribute, which is a pretty noteworthy step towards 1,000 Intelligence. So let''s look at why it''s preferable to merge them. Let me compare that to the Tier 2, and finally Tier 3 versions of the skills.


    By merging those 12 skills into the 4 tier 2 elemental manipulation skills, I gained an additional +1 to Intelligence, one for each new skill. Most likely, at level 11, I would have then received a + 2 to Intelligence, and an additional +2 to all attributes, same at 21, and then at skill level 31 I would most likely gain a + 4 to Intelligence and an additional + 4 to all attributes.


    Since there are a total of 7 basic attributes, this would mean that over the course of 31 levels I still gained the initial 12 points from learning the T1 skills, then an additional 4 from learning the T2 versions of the skills, then 16 points at levels 11 and 21, and an additional 32 points at level 31, for a total of 80 attribute points gained rather than the 60 I would have seen if I''d left my skills at tier 1.


    By merging those 4 remaining skills to T3, I received 8 Intelligence. At level 11 I can expect to gain an additional +10 Intelligence as well as another 10 to all attributes, and the same at level 21, and then at level 31 I can expect to gain 50 Intelligence and an additional 50 to all attributes for moving from Beginner to Expert.


    Meaning that in total, by merging to a Tier 3 skill, by the time I hit skill level 31 I will have netted the 12 for learning the tier 1 skills, another 4 for learning tier 2, and another 8 for learning tier 3, for 24 total Intelligence at level 1. By level 31 I will have gained 80 attributes at each of levels 11 and 21, and another 160 at level 31, for a total of 344 attribute points.


    Tier 3 skills tend to sound like classes, and this is also the tier where the skills begin to align with how people identify themselves, because the difference in the value you get out of a T3 skill is simply incomparable to previous tiers, which is why leading up to the age of 16 I''d been prioritizing learning new skills rather than honing existing skills. Putting it bluntly, my intention is to take the fullest possible advantage of this protected environment to set myself up for long term success, even though I fully expect difficulties in the near term for doing so.


    I''ve been diving through books to learn about the world in general, but also about the system, and the results so far have been exceedingly diverse. Even I don''t know what my Soul Scroll will reveal to me when it finally becomes available¡­ But I do know that I''ve been training, hard, ever since I entered this world, and I also know that I intend to combine the skills I''ve been able to pick up into as many tier 4 skills as I can before I change my focus towards improving what I''ve already learned.


    I''ve already learned a few tier 4 skills, mostly by accident rather than deliberate machination. Remember what I said about previously merged skill umbrellas qualifying me for unexpected skill upgrades and creating snowball effects? Well, there you go. I didn''t even know Erudite was a skill, much less tier 4, but I know to expect it to be one of my skills when I can finally access my soul scroll.


    Before you get too excited about me having a tier 4 skill, I actually have several, and the attribute bonuses are fantastic even at level 1. Long story short the first one I gained was Erudite, and I gained it while focusing on the Aether surrounding one of my room mates while asking him some questions.


    I was hoping to see if I''d be able to observe any changes using a variety of Aether related techniques, which could then help me to determine if he was lying. Did his temperature increase? If I create a concave lens using a thin layer of water Aether, and also suspend a convex lens to serve as the objective, focusing on his jugular vein, would I be able to tell if his heart rate increased? What about if I check for pupil dilation? Can I do it discretely?


    These are the sorts of tests I was performing when I gained the notification that I''d picked up the insight skill. As soon as I unlocked insight, it was promptly removed, along with Deduction and Induction, which were then replaced by Perception, which was promptly replaced by Detective, and finally Detective too was removed, leaving me with Erudite and a completely unexpected boost of 50 total points to my Intelligence attribute (1, then 1, then 8, then 40).


    You might think that since most people stop at Tier 3, having a tier 4 skill makes me untouchable in some way, but it doesn''t. They aren''t super common, but they aren''t particularly rare either. Almost all Adventurers have tier 4 skills, as will most famous people. Tier 3 skills are something of a minimum baseline skill level to get through life, but tier 4 skills are the norm for anyone who expects to test themselves in life. I don''t have solid numbers, but I''d guess that probably somewhere in the range of 30% of people have one or more tier 4 skills.


    What about Tier 5? As far as I am aware there is no tier 5. If there is one I certainly hope to find it, but with twenty thousand years of publicly accessible history to draw from, it seems likely that tier 4 truly is as good as it gets.

 Chapter 5

    The day I turned 16 ended up being a few days later than I''d expected. My fathers love and concern has once more shown through, having actually told me the wrong date for my birthday. Father of the year, right?


    Like magic, I see the notifications I was waiting for.


    Congratulations, Soul Scroll is available!


    Congratulations, Identify is available!


    Congratulations, Righteous Rage is available!


    Congratulations, Heroic Spirit is available!


    I don''t give Righteous Rage or Heroic Spirit a glance. They''re abilities that I only need to mentally call on to activate, and they make for very "anime" moments, wherein you get particularly angry and willful and dig deep and BOOM for a little while you are super extra awesome!


    Everyone gets them, and I hate the very thought of using them. In short, Righteous Rage is a 10% temporary bonus to a physical attribute, and Heroic Spirit is a 10% temporary bonus to a mental attribute. You can apply them to multiple attributes simultaneously, and you can even apply them multiple times to the same attribute if you are truly desperate.


    The reason I hate those abilities is because after the ability ends, the attribute you boosted is permanently reduced by 5. Not 5%, just 5. And if you use it a second time on the same attribute while the first one is still running? Yes the attribute bonuses stack, and the duration even resets, but once it wears off it becomes a permanent -25. Do it a third time while the effect is ongoing, and it''s -125, and so on.


    There is no doubt in my mind that once you start calling on those abilities, you''ll have to continue using them in the future to be able to continue competing with those around you. It''s an enormous trap, suitable for a final glorious showdown at the end of an epic story, but little else¡­ I don''t intent to commit suicide via Shonen protagonist envy.


    The notifications received are all completely normal, but I still spend a few moments buzzing with excitement. I''ve tried to avoid leveling up older skills, minimized even the amount I''ve stolen or conned from people even when they deserved it, and though it has taken immense willpower, I''ve even limited my magic use outside of Aether manipulation techniques, which is a way to directly increase attributes via training rather than indirectly via skills, and is no more a distinct skill than calisthenics without Aether has manifested as a skill. Or at least, I don''t think I have accidentally been increasing my skill levels that way. But now, now I can know, and that makes all the difference.


    "Status" I think to myself, and for the first time a translucent scroll appears in my vision before unrolling. Overall, my attributes and skills are absolutely excellent, or at least I think they are, but my level is sub par. I would assume this was a direct result of me actively avoiding leveling up skills I''d already learned. If nothing else, it can at least be inferred that higher skill levels almost certainly collate to higher experience towards personal levels. With skills doing so little to increase level, it''s not a commonly touched subject beyond acknowledging that they will do a little to increase level.


    Looking at my level, I release a dramatic sigh. I''d thought it likely, but now I do indeed know. I''m not going to be able to remain in the city. I''d been planning on leaving soon after unlocking my soul scroll anyhow, but it does sting a little to realize that I won''t have a choice in the matter.


    Leaving the attributes I''d earned from leveling up in their unassigned state, I head to the Adventurers Guild and post my final training request. It''s less money than I''m normally able to offer so there''s a real chance the request will need to be withdrawn prior to my departure, but there are some remaining skills that I know I still want and which I might potentially learn here, so I decided to give it a try regardless of whether or not there would end up being any takers. No harm if no one fulfills the request, something new to practice if they do.


    This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    After that I head back to my room and begin to pack. One of my room mates, Mike, is present. He nods at me, and I nod back. We''ve known each other long enough that he has figured out I have no interest in being an actual friend of his. I pull my weight and occasionally pass along some knowledge, and that''s enough for an assigned room mate. I''d decided to take the day off, but I barely even know how to do nothing for an entire day.


    "President?" I ask.


    He looks back over his shoulders as though expecting there to be someone else in the room that I had been talking to, before replying "Sure, when Tom gets back."


    I stop packing long enough to pull out my deck of playing cards. Bridge, Twenty-Two, Hearts, Spades, President, Canasta, Solitaire, even Poker and Go Fish are all games I''ve taught to my room mates over the years. Of those, the most popular in our room were Twenty-Two and President, with Twenty-Two being the most popular of my games in the building.


    Once again, it''s not simply recreation for me. Back when I was on Earth I''d occasionally search out random pieces of information, and one of those searches related to ways to increase your own intelligence. You can increase neurogenesis many ways such as such as exercising, or eating fish, broccoli, nuts and blueberries, and so on. You can also increase neuroplasticity by doing new things, or by performing old things in different ways.


    What is one of the best low cost high efficiency methods of doing old things in new ways? According to some studies that I read, taking 52 cards and sorting and rearranging them in millions of possible combinations while attempting to accomplish dozens of objectives fits the bill very well. So I made my own deck of cards and taught my room mates some of the common Earth games, though naturally I pretended I''d made them up or learned them back in my home village and thought they might be fun.


    There are cards in this world too, and local games, though with different card counts, suits, face cards, and associated games. I play them too. Why wouldn''t I? Attribute gains from training aren''t easy to acquire, but I''ve confirmed that card games are one of the viable methods of improving Intelligence here, and it''s one of the downtime methods I use to passively train while also having a bit of fun.


    "How long until he gets back?"


    "He just went to the market to get some bread, he should be back any time now."


    "Cool."


    "Is it that bad?"


    "Level 30."


    "As much as you work I''d expected you to be close to 100 by now. That''s actually kind of scary. I hope I''m¡­ Sorry, I shouldn''t be talking about me right now, I''ve still got a couple weeks. What are you gonna do?"


    "No it''s fine, I''ve told you before that I was planning to leave regardless, and honestly I think you''re going to be a fair amount higher level than I am. I don''t know exactly what level you''ll be, but definitely higher than I am."


    "Why do you say that?"


    "Because you''ve been more focused. I might have more skills, but your skills are going to be at a higher level than mine, which means more experience."


    "Can you see what level I am?"


    "You know identify doesn''t really give you anything if you''re within a hundred levels of each other" I say, even as I focus on him and try to activate the identify ability. It takes a little bit since it''s my first time, and he begins to look uncomfortable under my gaze, but eventually I''m able to will a small window into existence above his head.


    Michael Miller - ?


    "Confirmed, you''re a single question mark for me. The only thing I can be sure of is that you''re not above level 130, and you''re not below level negative 70."


    "Smash a mans dreams, why don''t ya?"


    "Oh? I didn''t realize your aspirations included being the first person with a negative level?"


    At this point Seth opened the door and let himself in.


    "Canasta," I say grabbing my deck and beginning to open it. "Want me to deal you in?"


    "Hell no. How''s about Three Houses?"


    Seth Despises Canasta, though he likes card games in general.


    "Nope, he promised President!" Mike interjects.


    Within a few minutes Tom returned, and we settled in for hours of card games. Aside from asking about my level and what I was going to do after I was officially kicked out, the conversation stayed light. No one wants to dwell heavily on bad news, and the guys in this world are similar to 1940 Americans. They don''t talk about their feelings, or comfort each other via platitudes.


    They acknowledge that something is wrong, and then the support they provide is to keep you company and keep your mind off of the problem. I remember how much the culture changed over the years, until the refrain became how men not talking about their feelings was a terrible thing, but honestly¡­ I think this is a perfectly healthy way to deal with bad news and problems. The problem still exists, but it''s not like there''s anything to be done about it. Maybe that''s why I always got along so well with older generations even in my old world?


    Two days later I got a bite on a trainer who was willing to give me two hours of his time for the money I was offering. In my opinion, that should be enough. He showed me how to draw a conjuration circle, and then he went step by step through a lesser elemental summoning so that I could watch and ask questions. Two hours meant the drawing class was very rushed, and the step by step walkthrough didn''t really leave extra time for questions, but I copied the circle into my notebook alongside the other circles I''d been able to find in various other books.


    Seeing the slow motion summoning for a lesser wind elemental coupled with the commentary on what he was doing when and why was what I''d really needed, I felt like I had a good enough starting point after that. The summon was weaker than I''d been mentally expecting, and I had known not to expect much in the first place, but that''s fine. Even if I don''t use summons often, a new skill is a new skill, and I want as many of those as I can get.


    Seeing no benefit in waiting until the next official reading, that night I joined my room mates for some drinks for what should be both the first and the last time, and I left well before the lights were turned on. There might be three portals per city, but for someone of my deficient level, I would only be allowed to go through one of them. I was heading to the ground, and it would be a one way trip.

 Chapter 6

    After arriving in the resupply city, the first thing that struck me was how much larger this city was than Virtue. I don''t mean in terms of population, it is probably a fair amount smaller in that regard since the primary purpose of this city is to facilitate supplying Virtue, or at least the population would be comparable, but in terms of actual area of operation, actual size. The buildings are still mostly stone: with elemental manipulation being accessible stone is the primary building material used everywhere, but this city was more spread out, flatter, with wider roads and squatter buildings.


    I quickly resumed walking as the soldiers guarding the portal waved at me to keep moving. Even this early, the through traffic is continuous. I didn''t bother asking for directions or touring the city. It might not be nice to say, but Virtue was a city of refugees and cowards, while my assumption regarding this city is that it''s nothing more than a soulless shell, whose only purpose was to feed the maw of the beast which called itself Virtue.


    I''d probably be back here eventually to fill out more requests or sign up for the Adventurers Guild or find some materials I would need or for something else entirely, eventually. But I''d been waiting to be able to stretch my legs and breathe natural air, see using natural light, and feel the breeze against my skin for nearly a decade, and I couldn''t wait to get far, far away from this mass of humanity.


    Humming a light tune, I followed major thoroughfares until I reached the city gate, and I kept on walking. As long as I stayed near the roads I''d continue running into humans and towns periodically, and although I did have some specific goals that would benefit from interacting with those humans, for the moment I wanted to get out and see the stars and feel the sun and run my fingers through the grass. When I got bored of the farmland I switched to a steady, mile eating jog until I finally reached a forest. I double checked my bearings, and walked into the woods. The forest was exactly what I''d hoped it would be.


    As a random aside, and though it should be quite obvious, I''ve already noted that the language here is different from my original language. Please understand that I''m performing translations as I go; for instance I referenced The Sun just now, while in the most prevalent language here on Grendel, the actual primary body of light for this solar system is actually called Illustrae¡­ I will differentiate between the planets of Earth and Grendel because it helps to let you know when I switch contexts, but for the most part it is simply easiest to refer to the ground as earth and the sun as the sun when there is no specific need to differentiate.


    After my initial scouting, I returned to the road and followed it until I found grass path, nearly wide enough to be called a road, which broke away from the main road, and which I then followed until I found a village containing about a dozen houses. I talked to a few villagers at random and I was able to confirm that there was indeed a blacksmith in the village, but even though I found the building that should have belonged to them, they were currently closed.


    As it was approaching night time and I''d been awake and traveling, often at a jog, for the last three days, I once again took stock of the village location and got my bearings so that I''d be able to return. I then headed an hours walk from the blacksmiths shop, aiming deeper into the forest. There were a couple skills I wanted to start working on while it was convenient.


    I infused and strengthened the Aether in two rocks, and then used one to break the other, creating a sheer edge. I already had a conventional knife, but making your own equipment is part of basic wilderness survival, and besides, stone rocks are practical because they are easy to make, easy to replace, and are both sharp and easy to repair when they chip.


    After that I created a moderate size lean-to, and then used Aether to slowly transplant some nearby foul smelling weeds beside the shelter, which I am hoping will help keep away undesirable insects and animals, then I broke off some tree branches and stripped them down before sharpening and hardening one end, creating improvised spears and javelins.


    When I became thirsty I would crush plants and use Aether to draw purified water from their bruised leaves, and so on. It had been a while since I''d gotten to exercise some of my survival knowledge, and trying to incorporate Aether into basic survival tasks was a fun twist on an old skill for me, albeit a fairly exhausting one. With the exception of accessing clean drinking water, trying to use Aether for everything means every task requires several times the effort that it would if I were just doing it conventionally. Still, my goal behind doing this has nothing to do with efficiency, and some of the techniques I''m experimenting with here will actually be useful should I ever find myself trying to survive in the wilds with no other choices.


    Within a day I felt like my shelter was sufficient for staying in for a few weeks, and even though nothing had unlocked yet, it would have been a miracle if anything had unlocked in so little time, I felt confident that if I kept at it most of my goals for coming here would be met in a reasonable timeline. I slept, much more deeply than I probably should have considering I didn''t know if there might be some stray monsters in the area.


    When I woke up and handled my morning needs, I did my calisthenics and used my morning jog to return to the village. I expect that I''d probably slept for more than a day, especially considering how hungry and thirsty I''d been, and how pressed my bladder had felt. I''d probably woken up sometime as close to night as morning, but even after reaching the village I could see I wasn''t alone; even in the predawn I could see signs of activity, such as light peeking out from windows and doors, and people moving around to milk their Joeys, the large Bison-like animals which served as the primary source of milk here.


    Sadly, the house and shop I''d been waiting on were not among these early risers, so I entertained myself by chewing on some flowers I''d picked the night before and practicing with my impromptu spear until the Smith finally opened the doors to his shop.


    "Morning." I called.


    "So it is," he replied with a grimace as he leaned back and began examining me. "You a customer from another town or something?"


    "Just turned 16, hoping to unlock smithing."


    "Why would I want to train future competition?"


    "Because I''m not competition. I stay here a while and learn, you get someone doing the manual labor for a while, I go somewhere far away. We both win."


    "Smithing ain''t something you can learn overnight, and those stick arms ah yours ain''t gonna do me much good on the manual labor front, neither. Feed ya, house ya, train ya, and you turn around and leave as soon as you got what you want? That''s a shite deal for me."


    This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    "Ok, lets talk terms, then. One meal a day, lunch, since I won''t be able to forage while I''m physically here. I already made a shelter an hours walk from here, so no need for lodging, either, I''ll just need to be able to work short enough days to handle my own needs in the mean time, so 12 hours a day tops, and those concerns aren''t a concern at all. Throw in a week off once a quarter so I can visit the portal city and I''ll be right as rain. As for the stick arms, what would you say the minimum strength to be useful would be? I haven''t assigned my attributes yet so if I need to I can."


    The smith finally looked at me as though he was seeing me, and I was confident that he was using identify in the process.


    "What the hell is a Erudite?"


    "An academic, it basically means I read a lot and try and learn new things as a hobby."


    "Boy you''re level 30, and I ain''t never even heard of someone so gods fersaken useless they got a skill from reading books. Any less than a huntret and fifty strength is less than useless to me, and honestly you''re gonna hate me if you got less than tree huntret. Same for toughness. You''d be a damn fool if you put all of your points in strength and toughness just ta pick up a toughness skill when all you know how to do is read books. You''ll live longer that way, but you''ll be cursin the four the whole way."


    "150 is the minimum? Ok, I can spend the points to get to 150 in strength and toughness, and then spread the rest around. Erudite is actually a tier 4, so it wouldn''t be as hard on me as you think."


    "What, reading books is physical now? Or are you sayin yer an expert? You still ain''t talked about me not getting my value out ya, neither. Ain''t no good trainin someone up and thems walkin away just as soon as they get worth having round."


    "Ok, two to one when it comes to time, then. If it takes me 6 months to unlock smithing, I''ll stay another 3 months helping you do whatever smithing related jobs come up."


    "6 months eh? You got any clue how many skills it takes? Smithins'' Tier 3, son, might not be as fancy as yer Erudite, but it''s not something you''ll be learnin in 6 months. Ya gotta learn iron an copper an silver an tin an pewter an swords an armors an guns an¡­ Boy you''ll be lucky if yer a smith in 6 years."


    "You know gunsmithing? No of course you know gunsmithing, you''re a smith. Ok, if it takes 6 years it takes 6 years, and I''ll stay on another 3. 2 to 1."


    "Whatcha want fer pay?"


    "Nothing for the things I work on without an appropriate skill, 10% of the things I work on when I have the right skill, but you''ll be responsible for getting the materials needed to practice and learn the skills in the first place."


    "I guess them books ain''t all bad. As long as you weren''t asking somethin like a gold a day I was plannin to gree, but you''d owe me a few extra years just tryin to pay yer debt back. Thems materials are expensive, boy."


    "Ok how''s this? If it''s your materials, the finished products will also be yours to sell, won''t they? If I buy the materials myself I''ll want to be able to keep what I make, but I''m not wanting to make money off of you, my reward would be the skills, and I''d much prefer to merge my skills at the lowest possible levels, so as long as you can get the material value back from any given sale you won''t lose anything, and I expect even low quality finished products are worth more than just the materials."


    "Alright boy, you got a deal. Get your points assigned and get in here, Nelsons got their hands on some horses and are wantin them shoed, and the Lathriens are wanting a nother batcha nails, and I gotta get the bloomin started. We''ll get you started the old fashion way, shoveling and haulin, and you can watch an learn and do the next batcha nails."


    I left my attributes unassigned, of course. My thought process was that Daily calisthenics and jogging, combined with the attribute boosts from learning various physical skills, would be good enough. The entire reason I left my attributes unassigned is because I want to be able to get as much value out of training as possible, because attributes are easier to increase via training when they are lower. I stand by that decision being a good one, but I will say that smithing turned out to be a very, very physical job.


    Over the following months I would perform my daily attribute training in the mornings and then, exhausted, I would jog back to my shelter at night, where I would try and learn some of the skills I''d moved out there for. I would enhance my vision and my sense of smell when I found animal tracks, and then I would try following them for as long as I was able to continue identifying a particular set of tracks. On the occasions I actually found the creature I''d been following, I''d use the javelins, reinforced and sharpened, to try and kill them. With a single bigger kill being enough to keep me fed for months, I actually ended up periodically bringing Sol, the Smith, extra meat to eat or sell at his discretion.


    Considering that I already knew what I was supposed to have to do to unlock the remaining skills I would need to upgrade to Ranger, the process was fairly smooth¡­ Getting Thrown Weaponry wasn''t bad at all, and switching over to a bow after that was a far more comfortable experience for me. Tracking, Survival, and so one were a given considering that I''d been going out of my way for them as well. The only skill I expected to get in the forest but which I''d not been able to make meaningful progress on was the Spears skill. Although my hopes were initially high, it didn''t take me long to realize that it would be far easier to learn the Spears skill if I trained it via sparring, and with how overloaded I was at the smithy I didn''t feel I had enough time to spare to find a sparring partner. Not right away, at least.


    Sol was thoroughly shocked as how quickly I was able to learn the various smithing prerequisite skills, and in 9 months'' time I''d learned the smithing skill, which immediately combined with my Carpenter, Engineer, Weaver, and Mason skills to create the Artisan skill. I expect I probably could have been done in 6 months if there''d be enough materials, but getting materials isn''t terribly convenient in a small village like this one, and we would end up having to visit the city to collect key materials on our own as often as the merchant would be able to fill materials requests in a timely fashion. In a way this worked out well for me, because the third time we ended up having to break the training cadence to visit the city, I''d scraped together enough money to get a session with a Diviner.


    For the first time, I ran into a set of skills that would require multiple sessions. Diviners are rare, they are even less common than Necromancers, but after a 4 hour session I came to understand why that was the case. The Diviner skill set intersects with not just Divinations, Scrying, Fate, and Portents, but also Space, Time, and Luck magics. I took notes to the best of my ability, and naturally I paid close attention to everything he said and did, but even after seeing multiple demonstrations I''m not sure how long it''s going to take me to be able to actually learn any of the associated skills.


    The diviner himself explained that from a conceptual standpoint I would likely have an easier time grasping the subject if I were to learn the basics of soul magic first, and he suggested that I engage a necromancer before trying to hire another Diviner. I''m pretty sure when he said that he was thoroughly aware that it could be perceived as an insult, and I think he even enjoyed getting to say it, but since it is likely also true I didn''t respond to the barb.


    After that, with the summoning and binding skills I''d learned sufficiently well for self-study while I was still in Virtue having been learned and upgraded into the Conjurer skill, I enlisted the Lathrien boys to join me in spear training and firearms practice while I worked off the remaining time I owed to old Sol.


    As expected, once the spear skill appeared it immediately rolled into reach weapons which rolled into melee weapons and combined with Athletics and Unarmed Combat to create the Fighter skill. I have more work to do before I have enough gun related skills to roll into firearms, but once that happens It should immediately combine with Archery and Thrown Weaponry to turn into the "Ranged Fighter" skill, after which I''ll stall out until I can learn more vehicle skills and combine the piloting skills with the survival related skills and get the Ranger skill.


    Carts, Wagons, and so on aren''t a major issue, but sea and air vehicles are going to be hard to acquire, I might never actually get Ranger¡­ Although to be honest, I''m only lukewarm about the idea of picking that skill up anyhow, I''d really only want it because it''s a tier 4 skill so the attribute bonuses would be excellent, and it should be fairly easy to level up compared to many other tier 4 skills.


    I''m not sure why, but not once did I run into any actual monsters despite camping out in the woods an hours walk from the village. They are out there on the ground, I even remember them being an irregular threat from before I went to Virtue. Even the seemingly safest areas will have occasional wandering monsters. And yet, the most dangerous thing I ran into in that town was an obese traveling merchant named Rudy, who I''d see from time to time and whom thought I''d make a good match for his equally obese daughter.


    I ended up convincing the oldest of the Nelson boys to court the merchants daughter when her dad wasn''t around. He was still working up his courage when I left, but I expect that if I were to come back there in a year or two, I''d be likely to find that he''d been forced to marry her after a meetup led to a child the fat merchant didn''t know he should have been expecting.


    It was surreal bidding old Sol farewell. He wasn''t the sort that would complement a person without also insulting them, but his compliments would be genuine and his insults rarely contained more than a grain of truth to them. If he had a real problem with something, he''d address it seriously and in a mostly respectful manner. If I''m being honest, I almost wish it had been Sols roof I''d found myself born into rather than Seouls.


    Thus it was that after spending a little over a year in the village of Lathe, I returned to the feeder city alone.

 Chapter 7

    As I''m returning to the city which serves as the nearest staging point to Virtue, a city I''ve now visited 4 times while still not bothering to learn the name of it, I try to reorganize my thoughts after my tear free parting with Old Man Sol. We''re men, so a firm handshake and a heartfelt thank you are a good enough goodbye.


    As I take the long jog back to the city with the portal to Virtue, I run my current plan through my mind. There are still a few more skills I feel I need to acquire before I allow myself to start practicing the many skills I''ve been learning. After that, I¡­ After that I what, exactly?


    Honestly all I''ve actually cared to do after coming here, the very thing that convinced me to come to this world in the first place, was the desire to learn magic. I still want to pick up the tier 3 Diviner and Necromancer skills, and I still want to learn alchemy so that I can upgrade into an Enchanter, though that one is supposed to be rather expensive to get started in, but¡­ Right now I''m still trying to ensure that my magic practice goes towards learning new skills rather than leveling up. 17 years now of not doing the thing that I want to be able to do, all because I want to get the most out of skills while I''m living on this world?


    "Status", I think.


    Well, my life expectancy is high enough now that 17 years isn''t as massive of a burden as it would''ve been on Earth, but really, what''s my long term goal? What, I ask myself, Do I want to be when I grow up? I came here for the magic, and after I finish developing the Diviner, Necromancer, and Enchanter skills to tier 3, and let''s say that I get Ranger to tier 4 while I''m at it, I''ve been saying I''d go ahead and start trying to improve my skill levels.


    But why? For the attributes? What good do those do? Increasing toughness would increase my life expectancy, but right this second I''m not really seeing the value in pursuing a long life for the sake of having a long life. Sure, a long life would be nice or whatever, but¡­ Why?


    I realize at that point what it is. Leaving old man Sol is bothering me, and I''m feeling lonely. I didn''t ask how old he was, and I didn''t ask how much time he has left, and I didn''t make any promises I''d see him again. Quite the opposite actually, leaving the village entirely was among the conditions we''d agreed upon when he accepted the task of tutoring me. But in him I found someone I could relate to.


    Unlike the people my age, unlike the children I was practicing spears and guns with, or even the roommates in Virtue who I''d lived within a few feet of for nearly a decade, I actually felt comfortable around that cantankerous old man. I''m not a 17 year old, I''ve just been here for 17 years, so older people think I''m little more than a child, while people my own age generally don''t mesh well with my personality.


    I can get along with people of any age, it''s downright easy to get along with the vast majority of people, all most people in either world I''ve seen care about are getting high or drunk, or having sex. But that''s also why dealing with people my own age feels to me more like suffering the attention of belligerent children than having fun and hanging around with peers. Don''t get me wrong, I like sex. Everyone likes sex. But talking about it, getting drunk, consuming or talking about drugs¡­ Look, you gotta grow up eventually, and the number of people who simply never evolve beyond the point where their animalistic urges consume their every waking moment is disheartening.


    But old man Sol? With the way attributes affect aging and his profession greatly increasing the most important stat for determining life expectancy, he may well have been older than me. As to his opinions on booze and drugs? He spends too much time near the forge, and considers them to be a safety hazard, so beyond urging me to avoid them any time I''ll be near the forge and thus more prone to issues like dehydration, it simply wasn''t something we''d bother talking about. It was a nice change from the more general population; he''s the first person I''ve met in this world I actually became comfortable with.


    I shake my head and clear my thoughts. My motivation isn''t ideal, but the questions of "why" and "what will I do after I''ve finished learning the skills I want" are fair. Aside from learning magic for the sake of being able to use magic, what exactly do I want out of this life?


    This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    Unfortunately, this is a problem I had in my last life, too. I don''t want anything out of life. I''m not particularly attached to living, so I let my mind decide my goals, and I push through relentlessly to see them made reality¡­ But the sense of a greater purpose, the view that my life has meaning? I don''t have something like that. I live, I do what I believe to be most correct, and I will eventually die. Half the time I want to end things by my own hand, though I never will.


    I know how I plan to die. Plan A is for me to die fighting; doing my utmost best to kill someone before they can kill me but, despite giving it my best, they succeed at killing me first. I don''t want to go easy, I want to make them EARN their kill. Failing that, should I accidentally prove too difficult for someone else to overwhelm me, plan B is that I die of old age, mentally sound but physically decrepit. Failing that, when my mind is compromised and understanding the world around me becomes a struggle, only then will I take my own life during a moment of clarity. Suicide is only plan C, no matter how apathetic or disenchanted I become with life, the one and only exception to my "no suicide" rule is if my mind is compromised.


    That''s really all that I have to work with, though. I live, and then I die. I learn new things and push myself to improve and even take insane risks for a truly trite reason. I have nothing better to do with my time, because I don''t believe anything I or anyone else will ever do will actually matter. No matter how well I fight or how long I live, even if I accomplish things that other people find extraordinary, it doesn''t chance that over a sufficiently long period of time, it will have been meaningless. Even if I were to somehow remove the threat of the monsters entirely, even if I could fly into the heavens and destroy the four, "Yay I saved humanity!" Woopity doo dah. Even that wouldn''t really matter to me.


    Humanity is doomed no matter what I do. If it''s not monsters, there''ll be some form of nuclear war equivalent, or climate change, or a giant meteor sends us the way of the dinosaurs, or an alien species invades, or something, SOMETHING will absolutely destroy all of humanity, and the only way around that is¡­ Well that''s the problem, isn''t it?


    Even if I''m underestimating the "goodness" of humanity and we have no role in our own destruction. Even if we do everything right, even if we spread to multiple worlds and span the galaxies, entropy will eventually come for us all, and there is nothing whatsoever that I can do about that. Nothing we do matters, and no matter how great our accomplishments, no matter how many people we save, how large a nation or empire we found becomes, no matter how advanced technology becomes, the very laws of the universe have inarguably and inescapably determined that all of humanity will end.


    And when we do end? We''ll end so hard that not so much as a single scrap of information of any type or format will ever be discovered by anyone else. Our existence will end, as pointlessly as it began, and with not so much as a whimper or an echo for the future.


    Bearing in mind that my outlook on life is that dark, the secret to my ongoing survival and effectiveness is mostly just a matter of discipline. I choose the thing I''m going to do, and I do it, and the only thing that I''m willing to let stop me is me. But that''s just it, isn''t it? I recognize that this little mini creed of mine is a cry for freedom and purpose, but not only do I lack purpose, I see little value in adopting a higher purpose beyond alleviating boredom.


    This is a pointless line of thought, so I decide to return to the question of "why" some other day. Today I choose to keep moving. I will learn the skills I plan to learn, and then I will improve those skills. Even without having a better reason, my will alone is reason enough, because it has to be. As for what comes after? I''ll come up with something to keep me busy. I always do.


    When I reach the city this time, I ask one of the soldiers at the gate for the name of the city.


    "Hialeah", he says.


    I almost start laughing before asking him to repeat himself, which he does. I ask if there''s any history or story behind the name, and he says that it''s "Hi" because it''s a transport city, taking us to a city in the clouds, where the leaders of humanity, our rulers, continue to try and find solutions to the monsters and the ever growing threat they pose to humanity. As for "Leah" he''s less certain, but he thinks it was a founder or explorer or something. He also explains that it''s common for these portal cities to adopt names which somehow relate to their role in keeping the cities in the sky from turning into mass graves.


    I have to admit, I''m seriously underwhelmed by the reasoning in use here. Maybe the guard is mistaken¡­ I hope he is, because that''s the worst explanation of a city names meaning I''ve ever heard.


    I thank him for his time, and then I set about various establishments trying to find either a necromancer or an alchemist. Perhaps once I''ve finished collecting the skills I have in mind, I will join the Adventurers guild and pursue a more conventional route towards empowerment and excitement. Having put in numerous job requests, I''m struck by a rather glum suspicion that I would find trying to use the Adventurers Guild to fill the void would likely be underwhelming as well.


    I''m fortunate enough to locate an alchemical shop with a minimal of fuss. I walk in and introduce myself. Here''s to hoping it''s as fruitful as my experience with old man Sol.

 Chapter 8

    "You''ve got to be kidding me, 7 years just for Alchemy?! This is the last prerequisite skill I need to be able to learn enchanting, 7 years is way too much just for a prereq!"


    "Take it or leave it, kid. I don''t give a damn about what you get out of this, but for me training an alchemist is an arm and a leg in materials, and the mistakes you make learning the craft are likely to kill people, so I couldn''t care less if you think 7 years after finishing your apprenticeship is too much. That''s what it''ll take to make it so I can earn my money back, and if that''s not good enough for you, then get your ass out of here. Dumbasses like you are a dime a dozen, there''ll be another one of you here tomorrow asking for the same thing, and he''s gonna get the same answer!"


    "Ok ok, I see your point. 7 years really is too much for me, though. What about some books I can use to try and learn via self-study?"


    "Kid the books never end, and if you try it that way you''re just gonna kill yourself either trying to get ingredients, or after botching one of the tinctures or potions. Formal study is the only way to learn Alchemy."


    "How long would it take, on average, to learn the actual skill and start working the time back off?"


    "Depends on the student, but most take 2 years or so."


    "Ok, so how about the prereqs? Maybe I could learn about the needed herbs and materials and lab safety procedures and so on. I should at least be able to start with some books on those, right? And then after I''ve read through those a few times, I could come back to get the hands on experience in an apprenticeship?"


    "Hah. Yeah kid, sure. If you''ve got some coin I can get copies made of some primers. You''re not fooling anyone, but you''re welcome to get yourself killed if you really want to."


    "Ok, how much to get a set of appropriate books?"


    "Give me a week and come back with a gold."


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    "That''s¡­ A lot for some books. Why is it so expensive?"


    "Cause getting the originals cost me an arm and a leg, that''s why. No reason I can''t make a bit of profit from making copies."


    "Fine ok, I get it. Thank you. I''ll be back in a week to pick up the books."


    I didn''t stay in the city while waiting that week. With less than 5 gold on hand I couldn''t afford to waste it just for a comparatively comfortable bed, so I once again made a shelter a few hours away where I could stay for the week, and I continued trying to find a Necromancer.


    Unfortunately for me pure necromancers aren''t very popular while Saints, who are the most common tier 4 evolution which requires the necromancer skill, are very popular indeed, typically getting extremely preferential treatment for military and governmental roles.


    Precious few Saints would deign to work as a freelancer, and fewer still would deign to train random people for the sort of money I am able to offer. I''d been thinking about it for a while, but I probably will have to agree to some sort of service period with a larger group if I want to gain the necromancer skill, and I do want the necromancer skill both because I want to be able to learn the diviner skills, and because I''ve already learned Infusion Priest and Healer, which would combine with Necromancer and Diviner to get the tier 4 Saint skill.


    I don''t want to work for a military or government but Saints are very popular, and frankly the self-buffing and healing components alone would be enough to make me want to increase those skills extensively, so it actually does make sense to pick up the extra skills and grow them as part of a Tier 4 skill for the extra attributes. I know it''s a long shot, but I still throw 3 gold towards the training request, and I spent the week essentially sleeping in a ditch (hasty shelter) and doubling down on my attribute training since I''d hit a wall with skill training.


    When the day finally arrived, I was able to collect a fat stack of reference books with a minimum of hassle. Skimming through them I confirmed what I''d suspected, that he''d try giving me reference books that were little more than lists of materials and their properties while trying not to provide me anything that would let me actually attempt any of the techniques that would allow me to learn any of the associated subskills. I''d expected as much, and was fully anticipating that I''d need to combine notes on drawing out certain material properties with inferences on processes from sections detailing lab safety.


    Most of humanity is fairly forthcoming when it comes to skill acquisitions, but those skills which aren''t as common are often deliberately so, often to create artificial scarcity and ensure personal well being. Keeping how to apply Aether to create some sword abilities a costly secret is simply not as effective when the prospective student can ask literally the next person he sees for comparable quality training.


    For something like Alchemy though, where the market for temporary benefits is sufficiently limited that there''s really only enough room in a market of 1,000 people for one or at most two alchemists? They have little interest in creating large quantities of competition for themselves.


    It''s ok. It''ll be a long and painful slog, but this should be enough to get me started. Since thus far no one has taken up the training request for necromancer, I withdraw the request and collect the bulk of the money I''d had to leave as the offered reward.


    Finally, I visit a building that I try to avoid religiously. Pun intended, because it''s the church that I''m paying a visit to.

 Chapter 9

    "I have Healer and Infusion Priest."


    "That''s great, child."


    "I want to learn Necromancy and Divination."


    "I am father Ewing, and it is a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I''m always happy to meet new prospective members of our order."


    "No, I definitely do not want to join your order."


    "You don''t believe in Ishmael?"


    "I don''t believe that humans are well suited to interpreting the thoughts and opinions of divinities."


    "Divinity. Ishmael is the only god of goodness and light."


    "See, that''s what exactly the sort of thing I''m talking about where I won''t always come to the same conclusions. I mean, you say Ishmael is the only god of goodness and light, but what about his sister?"


    "She died creating the system and giving us a chance against the invasion."


    "Does Ishmael bleed?"


    "I would expect not, he''s a god, not a human. And you can stop now, I see what you''re trying to do."


    "Indeed, if a deity doesn''t have a body in the same sense that we understand it, how can we be certain of any details regarding their life and death, much less their thoughts and opinions. I''m not even qualified to represent your personal opinions, much less the opinions of a being that I''ve never spoken with and who is inherently unknowable. I''d be a terrible addition to your order."


    "We speak to him and he speaks to us, that''s why we pray."


    "And somehow you''re certain that this great divine being can be bothered to personally respond to every little question you have, rather than accepting that we all have internal voices and the ability to hold entire conversations with ourselves. Yes yes divine guidance, I know, I''m just not sold on everyone who believes they have spoken with a god actually having done so. I would imagine a deity would either be able to communicate with us rather clearly, or there was some form of barrier or cost associated with direct communication. Either way, it''s my opinion that an assumption of our internal conversations being deific intervention is something of a stretch."


    "You''re clearly not here to learn anything, so why are you here?"


    "I want to learn Necromancy and Divination. How can I make that happen?"


    "As you currently are, you cannot. Necromancy is the study of the soul and, to a much smaller degree, its unification with flesh. As for divination? Even the name itself makes it clear that the acceptance of divinity is a core element to the skill. If your faith is lacking, no amount of training will be enough for you to learn the skill."


    "What do I need to do in order to be allowed to try and learn the skill?"


    "You''d need to embrace the faith. When you felt you were ready, you could then request to join the clergy, and if you were a member in good standing, the bishop would determine your suitability, as well as -"


    "Stop." A deep and sonorous sounding voice interrupted.


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    Both the priest and I turned to face a true antediluvian, his face covered in wrinkle tracks so deep they could have been ploughed into place. We continued watching patiently as the elderly man performed a dignified amble from behind the pulpit and into the main chamber of the church, gracefully skirting around the altar to Ishmael. He wore a loose fitting and regal white and gold threaded robe, and his measured approach carried with it a deep solemnity, as though his every motion or word might contain profound wisdom and inestimable significance.


    "What is your name, child."


    "Han Kenta or Kenta Han, it seems that customs differ depending on location and culture. May I know your name?"


    "I''m the Archbishop Canrise. It is a pleasure to meet you, Han Kenta or Kenta Han. I apologize for interrupting so late, I''d been looking for something around here and was sufficiently distracted I''d not realized you were in here asking favors until the last few moments. Why do you wish to learn to be a Necromancer and a Diviner if you have no faith?"


    "It''s not that I have no faith whatsoever, it''s that I simply don''t view things in the same way as your clergy or church would. For instance, I do not believe that any human church would actually be qualified to consistently and accurately represent a deities thoughts and opinions, nor do I believe that if there are any true deities, they are omniscient and omnipotent, nor do I believe that they would be particularly concerned about most of the things we might think they should be concerned about."


    "So you don''t believe in any gods? Not Ishmael, and not the Four?"


    "If I were to hazard a guess, I would suggest that there likely are incredibly powerful beings who may have a lot in common with our characterizations of those figures. I''ve never met any of the deities you mentioned, and if I''m being honest I''d prefer not to meet anyone who could convincingly portray one of those figures."


    "Why are you being so evasive, my son?"


    "Because I don''t know the truth about anything related to deities, and I''m just as happy not to convince myself that I have learned the truth about them. Unless one of them appears before me and announces themselves, I''m perfectly content going through my life ignoring their existence, just as I suspect that the majority of beings we might consider to be gods would be happy to ignore my existence. I see little potential gain in drawing their attention directly to myself, if attempts to do so even stood a chance of success."


    "That''s a better response than I''d expected, actually. I find your choice of words particularly interesting."


    A few uncomfortable seconds pass in silence, before I finally accept that he isn''t planning to speak until I respond.


    "Which words, I beseech thee do tell, hath drawn thy interest."


    "I found it curious that you spoke to the majority of deities ignoring your existence. A majority ignoring you implies that a minority do not, wouldn''t that be right?"


    "I think that''s enough mincing words, your grace. You know why I stand here. What exactly are you hoping to achieve in this conversation?"


    "I am a Saint, and as a Saint, I am also a Diviner. Even I am uncertain as to why I am here right now, but I divined that there was a purpose in coming to this city. I''d been at a loss as to what the purpose was, but now I believe that it likely relates to you."


    "So you¡­ Came here because your god told you to?"


    "No, I''ve never once heard Lord Ishmael''s voice. You were right about that, you know. That speaking with us directly comes at a price? I don''t know what the price is, but he is able to communicate, and in extremely rare cases he will talk to one of the Saints. But not this time. This was a run of the mill passive divination. It feels similar to any other hunch, but when it comes from a divination it provides hints of possible futures, and a sense of things to come. Let me ask you again, why do you wish to learn to be a Necromancer and a Diviner?"


    "Because I want to be able to heal myself when I am injured, and strengthen myself when I need to be stronger, and if I already intend to practice those abilities, increasing my skill levels as part of a tier 4 skill will result in higher attributes, thereby mitigating the importance of the skills I just described."


    "You have no interest in creating hordes of loyal followers, nor resurrecting a dead companion?"


    "Creating a follower without a mind is essentially useless to me at this time, though I won''t rule out the possibility that I might change my mind on that if I had good cause. A follower with a mind but no will of their own is not a follower at all, and I would view their existence as the greatest possible disservice to them. That''s a fate I''d not wish on anyone, though once more I''ll not unequivocally state that there is no chance I would ever do such a thing. I can only say that it''s not a decision I''d make lightly, and I hope never to find myself in a position where I might believe that enslaving someone else to my will is something worth doing."


    The Archbishop grimaces, it is clear he truly did not like those answers.


    "You are coming across as someone of questionable morals. It''s all too easy to believe that it''s ok to enslave others if it''ll save lives, and to believe that it''s better to force your enemies to your own will and have them die on your behalf than your friends, family, and lovers. Once you''ve started rationalizing those decisions, in short order you''ll have fallen."


    "There are few who would question their own morality as often as I do. I''m not offended by your interpretation of my answers, but I suspect it would be worse to lie than to tell you things I know you don''t want to hear."


    "You are not a follower of Ishmael, and the more I speak with you, the more I realize he would never want to use you."


    "Well, I appreciate your time. Do you have any suggestions for someone else who might be more willing to work with me on learning these skills?"


    "Yes you insolent brat," the archbishop calmly replied even as he turned and began his return to the back of the church, "Father Ewing will be your instructor in learning Necromancy, and he can take you as far as space and time magic as well. For the rest of the divination skill you''ll need to figure the details out on your own, those aren''t skills which can truly be taught, we can only provide some guidance. Aside from that guidance, everything else will be between you and God."


    Neither Father Ewing nor I moved until long after he was out of sight, at which point we shared a meaningful look. Although nothing was said aloud, in that moment we both knew exactly what was going through the others heads¡­ It''s not hard to piece together, we were merely wondering what the fuck, exactly, just happened?

 Chapter 10

    My time with Father Ewing was rather brief considering that I was trying to pick up 2 tier 3 skills from him, and considering that we had to time the skill training to work around his church schedule. We would meet up most days in the afternoon, and then we would begin the lessons. What exactly those lessons entailed varied of course, though luckily I already had some of the prerequisite skills, such as having learned anatomy while learning the Healer skill, and biology more broadly was sucked into my Erudite skill.


    We started with Space and Time, which required exercising a lot more of the math and physics skills I''d learned while becoming a Erudite than I would have expected from a type of magic. I thought the ritual and summoning circles were precise, and I''d further believed that artificing and enchanting would be at the pinnacle of the hard science requirements, but artificing required little more than some advanced Algebra to learn the skill. Space and Time, though? The barrier to entry for those is definitely an affinity for math and physics.


    Once those were learned, we moved into Telekinetic Manipulation, Taxidermy, Demisurgery, and Embalming, and finally we reached the skillset that Father Ewing believed would be the end of my path. Soul Magic. We started with guided meditation, which I found overrated but it was easy enough to unlock meditation despite my misgivings at essentially giving myself telekinetic massages in front of an audience while the meditation sessions were in progress.


    For the record, there''s no denying that my Aether point recovery speed was significantly increased by giving myself Aether massages along what I recognized were analogous to chakra points and meridians, but it was still creepy having a guy talking me through the process.


    Once meditation was unlocked, we moved on to aura detection, which once again felt entirely too new wave hippy for me to be comfortable with, but with a bit of practice and comparison I came to realize I was just exercising a skill subset I already possessed, as we were examining Aether density, flow, and type, which was an observation skill I''d learned probably a decade or so prior. Honestly I don''t even remember which of my many magical skills it first manifested under, but once I wrapped my head around the realization that the differences were essentially in preferred vocabulary, I explained we could move onto the next skill. Soul manipulation.


    Father Ewing did his best to explain that I shouldn''t feel bad about my upcoming failure here, that it''s quite impossible to manipulate a soul, yes even your own soul, without faith. He explained that soul magic touches on the boundaries of the gods, and that without the permission of a deity no one would ever be able to progress on this front, and this is the whole reason that Necromancers have such a bad reputation. According to Father Ewing, Priests of Ishmael would never do things like create undead, so those who wish to follow the Necromancer path rather than using it as a stepping stone along the way towards the priesthood would need to swear themselves to one of The Four in exchange for their power. He then demonstrates what it looks like for a person to remove their soul from their own body, leaving their flesh to collapse.


    It certainly was interesting to see; I''d never seen Aether of that type before, despite having done my best to separate Aether into the smallest and most varied components I was able to do. So why would it be present now? It looked and felt "light", even by the standards of Aether, but it was also clearly and easily identifiable now. When I tried to find that same Aether within myself, it only took a few seconds. I couldn''t have overlooked it, it was hardly invisible, or too fine to see, or anything like that, so why was I only now seeing it? When I gave that Aether a light shake I was immediately overwhelmed by nausea and dizziness, and I promptly lost consciousness.


    One try. This is the very first time in my life where my very first attempt to do a thing resulted in me learning the associated skill. Normally even if you have a technique to correctly practice a skill it will take dozens or even hundreds of repetitions before the skill officially unlocks.


    Not this time though; when I woke up, I''d only passed out for a couple seconds, a rather distressed Father Ewing went on a long tirade about how many people he has seen attempt soul manipulation only to learn that they would never receive Ishmaels blessing, and that he has never seen, that he has never even heard of a non-believer learning soul magic. I can''t explain it either. I''ve been quite thorough in my examination of Aether, that this Aether is suddenly visible is downright inexplicable. That I am able to manipulate it with ease after observing it for the first time is even more so.


    This was supposed to have been the end of my path in his view, but since I really did learn soul magic he had to keep going. From there he continued on to teach me how to use purification magic to purge the minds and unravel the bodies of undead. According to Ishmael, purification requires Aether which is also firmly in the realm of the gods, and learning how to see and manipulate it to destroy undead was also supposed to be impossible for a nonbeliever like me.


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    Except that it wasn''t impossible at all, and although it wasn''t as dramatic as the speed at which I acquired Soul Manipulation, learning the three subskills took me only a single day. Honestly, that sort of learning speed is unnerving and concerning.


    I''d long ago adjusted my mental gears to accept that it is normal for me to learn skills faster than others are able to do so.  Up to now I have largely been attributing that learning speed to my past life and the knowledge I''d gained during it laying a firm foundation which I really only needed to apply Aether to¡­ But this is too fast, and it''s touching on areas that I''ve had no prior experience with, and using Aether that didn''t even seem to exist until I was told to look for it just now is¡­


    To be honest, rather than taking my ability to learn these skills as evidence that the church has been lying to us all along, instead this reinforces those claims in my mind. Their claims about deific intervention being a necessity, that without divine favor you wouldn''t even be able to try to learn them¡­. I''d been very thorough in my examination. Soul magic isn''t something that I discovered previously, and the purification Aether appeared out of nowhere as well¡­ and if learning these skills really does require the attention and favor of a deity? I find that idea to be more concerning than I would have found being unable to learn these skills at all.


    I would''ve preferred to have left on better terms considering we''d been seeing each other almost every day for the last 4 months, but he was bitterly shaken and thoroughly distracted, and he did his best to usher me out as soon as he could, informing me that he''d taught me everything he could of the skills I would need. I asked him about the divination skills I still needed, but he explained that he doesn''t know anything more than I do about them, and that it''s supposed to be something we figure out on our own. He then wished me luck, and practically kicked me out.


    Honestly I felt rather bad about it. Space and time took the better part of 3 months, but handily breezing through all of the skills that he''d thought would be a problem may have caused a crises of faith in the man. He''s a bit arrogant, but he''s not a bad guy, and I take no pleasure in seeing this proud servant humbled. The emotional turmoil he is experiencing is real. I hope that he is eventually able to recover to a healthy emotional state, but he seems to be unraveling in a very real and disturbing way. If he turns into a serial killer or a rabid atheist after this, I''m going to get angry at the guy, especially since his fears are predicated on him accepting a conclusion that was nearly the exact opposite of my own.


    I really don''t feel like I have much to go on when it comes to learning the Divination prerequisite skills, little more than their names, vague references, and the description from the Archbishop about how divination manifested, but I did at least agree that it was well and truly time to move on.


    I''d skimmed through the alchemy books, but space and time truly had taken up the vast majority of my time these last few months, so even though I''d kept up with my daily attribute training, I''d not made noteworthy progress in any other areas, not even parsing prospective methods by which I might develop alchemical subskills.


    I take a seat and review what I still needed to be able to get the tier 4 skills that were on my list of known tier 4 skills which I might be willing and able to pursue.


    To get the Tier 4 Saint skill I already had the Healer, Infusion Priest, and Necromancer tier 3 skills, and only the Tier 3 Diviner skill remained. To learn Diviner I''ve already learned the tier 2 space and time subskills for it, but I still needed divination, and divination required Scrying, Fate, and Luck. I also have very little information to go on when it comes to learning those skills.


    To get the tier 4 skill Ranger I''d already learned the Ranged Fighter and Survivalist skills, but I still needed the Tier 3 Pilot skill. I''d already learned the tier 2 pilot ground craft skill, but I still needed to learn how to pilot a minimum of 3 craft each from 2 out of 3 between aerospace vehicles, flying vehicles, and naval vehicles to be able to create matching tier 2 skills and take advantage of there being multiple options for learning the pilot skill.


    Clearly Aerospace would be the hardest of these requirements to meet, so I''d need to learn to pilot air vehicles and water vehicles. I''ve been able to locate some towns and villages on a map that are near water, which would make boats and ships accessible, but the only methods I can think of to access flying vehicles are to either join a larger organization, or to create my own using my artificing skills. Unfortunately, I''m painfully aware of how expensive and time consuming that option will be, so aircraft are temporarily out of my reach. And yes, I did think saying aircraft are out of my reach was rather punny.


    Finally, I still plan to learn the tier 3 Enchanter skill. For this I''ve already learned the tier 2 Artificing and Disenchanting skills, but I still needed Alchemy, and to learn alchemy I would need at least 3 among Herbalism, Potion Brewing, Poison Crafting, Transmutations, and Alchemical Infusions. Herbalism I expect to be the easiest to learn, but it is also likely to be the most time consuming as it would almost certainly require growing some relatively rare herbs. It may also count as I skill I already have based on my Survivalist skill, so prioritizing it may not be the wisest choice.


    Unfortunately, each of the other skills requires expensive equipment, and accidents may be dangerous. I think I can get them eventually via trial and error, but to really progress on these I''ll need to be in a single area for an extended period, buy the lab equipment piece meal, and then purchase or test materials as time and money allow for. I will also clearly not be able to set up any more than the most rudimentary of labs in one of my shelters, so I''ll likely need some form of consistent employment.


    In other words, each of the remaining skills I am pursuing has a number of blockers impeding noteworthy progress.


    I carefully pack up my gear and my books, and I pick up a mile eating jog following the road eastbound from Hialeah.

 Chapter 11

    Up to this point, I''d never fought a monster. I''d fled when my original home in this world was destroyed, long enough ago I don''t even remember what the name of that village was. After that I spent most of a decade in a City in the Sky, and then I''d found the area around Hialeah to be extremely tame, much more so than I''d been led to expect the surface world would be while I was in Virtue.


    One thing it''s impossible to be unaware of though; I am still a lower level than most adults, lower level than many children even. Another thing that it was impossible for me to be unaware of is that, even though I had yet to assign any of the attribute points I''d acquired for those levels, everything in this world, from the trees to the earth to yes the humans, is significantly tougher than what I was accustomed to on Earth. Even myself, as evidenced by my willingness to jog from town to town despite the often vast distances between them.


    But that inherent toughness lends itself all too easily to recklessness. Considering how long it had been since I''d laid eyes on a monster, it shouldn''t be a surprise that I was surprised when I ran into a monster on the narrow road leading to the port city of Shagon. Several, actually.


    It was somewhere around 2 in the afternoon on my second day running. I''d been jogging almost nonstop since waking up, only slowing to a walk to occasionally chew on some jerky or drink some water, and by this point I had a light sheen of sweat covering me from head to toe. Back on Earth I''d been a fantastic runner when I was in my prime, I''d run as much as 25 kilos in a day and then decide to start my workout. That level of activity did catch up to me eventually, but the point is that I was in great shape. But here? There''s just no comparison. I''d been trotting all day and well, like I said. I was sweating a little bit.


    My eyes were focused on the road in front of me, and my mind had long ago zoned out and focused on the act of running in the way that people who run often will do. I was practically on top of them when the shadows on the sides of the road finally registered.


    As I was thoroughly surprised, I wound down my run trying to stop quickly rather than try and put on a burst of speed and run through them. I would''ve been better off if I hadn''t been so completely and utterly shocked, because I was already too close to avoid them entirely, so trying to quickly push through them would have been the better call¡­ But, that''s not what I did. I stopped. Which of course gave them time to surround me.


    My mind was still trying to reel itself out of the runners'' high, and I couldn''t be certain of the count, but there were about 10 shadows in total, each of which was about 3 meters tall and retained a vaguely humanoid shape, but with elongated limbs and phalanges. The shadow closest to me lunged forward with its fingers clawed, and I certainly had a sense that if it struck me it would be fully capable of cutting into me as though it really were a real claw rather than a shadow.


    With an attack on the way, my mind finally snapped back into focus and I jumped back, smoothly dropping my backpack and grabbing for my pistol right after. Regular kinetic dependent firearms are of limited utility in Grendel; they are mostly used by and against people who are objectively weak by this worlds'' standards. For the most part, at low skill levels charging weaponry with Aether is reliant on touch, and anything outside of your touch will have the excess Aether dissipating back into the atmosphere at a much faster rate than if contact were maintained, though there is also the issue of charging up the ammunition with Aether being time consuming when you have to do it for each bullet. You get more effective at charging at range with higher skill levels, but no matter how good you become, the closer a thing is to touch the better you are able to manipulate it.


    Using Aether in fights is essentially a requirement no matter the weapon, ability, or range. You have to if you want the thing that you are doing to stand a chance of causing real harm to the monsters of this world, many of whom would be completely impossible to fight without the use of Aether. In firearms, the Aether loss is exceptionally high due to the ammunition requiring more Aether to infuse due to a lack of direct contact, Aether bleeding back into the environment even before the ammunition leaves the barrel, and for some reason Aether seems to dissipate more quickly when applied to a bullet compared to an arrow as well, though it''s hard to be certain I''m correct about that last part, and I don''t have any good theories on why that might be the case except that it might be mass related.


    The point though, is that the act of supercharging your weaponry beyond their conventional capabilities simply doesn''t work as well when the delivery mechanism is a gun. Which is to say that my pistol, which is probably fairly comparable to a Beretta M9 back on Earth, even on earth would have had difficulty being effective against a 3 meter tall opponent who lacked any particular defensive mechanism. Being as I am not on Earth, this is a strictly inferior weapon choice for this situation compared to even the sharpened wood spear I''d made with a rock back when I was trying to learn smithing from Sol. Relying on firearms when they are available over other forms of weaponry it turns out was a bad habit that I hadn''t yet fully trained myself out of.


    I quickly fired off three rounds before it sunk in that shadows are in fact quite impervious to standard pistol fire, not a surprise but there was too much pressure for me to care overly much about how effective my offense was going to be, and I quickly jumped further back to avoid another lunge from both the first creature to have attacked me and one of its companions who was coming at me from the side, before needing to do a side roll to avoid the grasping fingers of a third shadow who''d maneuvered themselves behind me.


    Realizing that I would have at most a few more seconds of life if I continued trying to fight at all, much less fight as ineffectively as I had been up to this point, I infused some light Aether into my next round while charging forward at an angle towards another of the monsters who seemed content to ensure that I wouldn''t try to flee. Well, I did intend to flee, and when he leaned down and forward to grab or slash me, I shot him in the knee, somersaulted forward and underneath the arm opposite to the knee I''d just shot, and took off at the fastest sprint I could manage, with the rest of the shadow monsters hot on my tail.


    I might be able to run fast, but so could they, and in less than 3 seconds I had to juke to the side to avoid another slash. Being thoroughly annoyed with these monsters, annoyed with my own personal performance, and annoyed with the fact that they had better reach and were faster runners than I, I resumed my sprint but this time as I ran I focused on and hardened the air in front of my feet, essentially using Aether to create "air stairs" to run up.


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    Unfortunately the shadows were still faster than me, but being able to incorporate a third dimension gave me enough wiggle room to, after a very frantic 20 or so seconds hopping and diving and rolling from one hastily constructed air platform to another, eventually get out of the reach of their arms, forcing them to jump, and a few seconds after that I made it clear of their  jumping range as well.


    To say that I was glad they didn''t seem able to fly despite appearing as shadows is an understatement, because I had precious few options left to me if I couldn''t even escape to the air.


    I wouldn''t be able to support myself standing on air like this indefinitely; there''s a reason I haven''t been flying or really using Aether for anything except attribute training and maintaining bodily health while traveling from one location to another: My skill levels have been kept intentionally low, so the Aether costs when using even relatively simple abilities are high, and I would probably only be able to hold my body suspended in the air on one of these impromptu platforms for another 5 minutes or so. Maybe that would be enough time to escape the rest of the way, but maybe it wouldn''t too, and if I were forced back to the ground due to a lack of Aether while they were still below and waiting for me¡­


    I holstered my pistol and pulled my rifle from my back where it had been secured using the sling, then I steadied my breathing as best as I could and filled my next round with as much light as I could compress into it, before shooting one of them approximately where its collar bone would be if it were a human.


    I was actually aiming for its head, thinking I''d have a decent chance of hitting it there since I was essentially looking down at it, but headshots are harder to achieve than a lot of people realize, and that becomes many times more true when you''re gasping for breath and your opponent knows you are there.


    In general, people do not like to be shot, so even though I would have preferred a headshot, the bullet hitting in the approximate area of the collar was more than acceptable, to be honest shooting at the head is only something I even tried under these circumstances was because of how much more likely it would be for a miss to hit something important anyhow. The angle was absolutely fantastic, I just missed the shot because he''d been moving around too quickly.


    The arms and legs of the shadow spread wide and its head tilted back in a shockingly convincing rendition of a completely silent howl of rage or pain. After it was given the opportunity to perform its dramatic little howl for another second or perhaps two, my second light bullet arrived, and this time the bullet landed where I''d wanted it to land. Thanks for the theatrics, shadow guy, that made it MUCH easier to hit you!


    The damn thing was still alive, but it fell over on its back due to the force of the blow, then scrambled back to its feet and took off running, and its companions soon followed.


    I wouldn''t have been able to stay in the air for long no matter what I did, so even though those bullets meant I would have to come down that much sooner, any creature with even an instinctual level of intelligence will know that it''s a bad idea to stay somewhere that a person can hurt you but you cannot hurt them. I knew I would run out of Aether within a few minutes, but did they? I''d gambled on them knowing little more about me than I knew about them.


    I watch for another 15 seconds or so to ensure they aren''t waiting for me before walking myself back down to the ground, retrieving my backpack where it had fallen after I''d dropped it. Not for the first time I find myself wishing that I had the money to afford a storage ring, or even the materials to be able to make my own using my artifice skill, but realistically even if I had the materials with my beginner skill levels there''s a greater than 0 chance I''d just waste them. Even if I didn''t it would likely be a poor quality ring with a very limited volume. Even so, it would be preferable to risking my life''s accumulations, shoddy though they may be, any time something unexpected occurred.


    I confirm that my alchemy books have not been ruined, and then resume my trip. A little less quickly this time, and a little more mindful of my surroundings.


    Although I''d initially expected my journey to Shagon to take a week, slowing down and exercising greater caution ended up adding an entire day to the travel time. In the end though, it was for the best that I''d slowed down, because the run in with the shadows didn''t end up being the only ambush I would''ve run into.


    Luckily, by regularly double checking my mental state and ensuring that I was remaining cognizant of my surroundings, I was able to consistently recognize when I would have been running into trouble, which allowed me to take detours around the ambush sites. Granted I wasn''t a Ranger yet, but even with all of my skills being in the beginner levels, the Erudite skill included subskills like insight and detective for good reason. I can be quite observant when I realize I need to be, and the Rogue and Survival skills both had stealth associations, so as long as I realize I should be hidden I''m fairly good at it, more than a regular human at least. There is a reason that Rogues are considered more desirable by the military than bards, and their ability to safely scout through dangerous areas is chief among the reasons that they haven''t been vilified to the same degree that Necromancers have been.


    Honestly, I found myself increasingly annoyed by the ambushes I was avoiding. If I were stronger, or if I had allies, it would definitely be better to kill the creatures that were lying in wait, because at least that way I would get some levels out of it. Instead of gaining personal levels though, I was having to use Aether skills to avoid getting into confrontations in the first place, which served to do nothing but increase skill levels, and up to this point I''ve been doing my best to avoid using any skills after learning them so that I could keep my skill levels low until they merged to higher tiers. Granted I have a number of tier 4 skills and it shouldn''t be a problem if I use skills associated with them, but I''m still trying to avoid using existing skills because of how much crossover there is. Take the stealth skill for example: It is used by the tier 3 skill Survivalist, as well as the tier 3 skill Rogue, and it''s always possible that it''s used in some other skill that I''ve simply not noticed, heard, or read about. The point being that just because a skill is used in one place, that doesn''t mean it''s not also used somewhere else, so leveling up my tier 4 related skills might accidentally end up increasing lower tier skills as well, with me only finding out when I merged into a significantly higher skill level than I''d expected.


    Trying to avoid leveling up skills is not always easy; especially when those skills fall under the "beginner" levels. Even without actually killing anything, my Elementalist skill gained a skill level after my "air platform" shenanigans while facing the shadow monsters. As long as I keep my skill below level 11 this won''t cost me anything even if I do later stumble upon something that Elementalist can merge into and create a tier 4 magic skill, but since I''m still trying to learn associated magical skills I don''t want to preclude the possibility of being the person to discover a tier 4 magic skill.


    The contemporary wisdom in this world is that the magical skills like Elementalist are capped at tier 3 because caster types are supposed to have lower attributes than fighter types, but I don''t think that''s likely to be true. Everything else has a tier 4 skill somewhere, so why wouldn''t the magic skills? There''s saint, but that one is essentially the flagship skill of the clergy.


    I''ve played video games and the "System" here is definitely game-like, so if there''s a divine style of spellcasting and an arcane style of spellcasting, and the divine spellcasting has a tier 4, there is almost certainly a tier 4 arcane version as well. I just don''t know what is needed to create it.


    All of the tier 4 skills have had something special that made them particularly difficult to learn, and Alchemy would be rather hard to learn by conventional standards, so I''m hopeful that alchemy will be the key leading to the upgrade of my artificing related skills, turning them into Enchantment, which I then hope will serve as the trigger to unlock a tier 4 skill. Even if I don''t know what that skill might be called, or which of the other tier 3 magic skills it might merge with in creating that hypothetical tier 4 skill. It''s just my best guess, and if it really does create a tier 4 casting type skill, I won''t really give a crap about what it''s called.