The Way Ahead

Chapter 72b: Training Wills

Almanac wasn’t the only Skill that Edwin was working on improving. Firestarting had been a consistent problem for him since he first realized the Skill’s limitations. It affected something like a thirty-foot radius around him whenever it was enabled, which was great for keeping all his fires going at full blaze, less so when he wanted to make something specific burn, and nothing else.

Like, for instance, if he was trying to make incendiary grenades.

He’d figured out how to make what mostly amounted to firebombs through use of Firevine extract- two rocks inside a clay ball, along with a small measure of the ivy’s oil and a number of the same plant’s leaves would break apart into puffs of fire. He didn’t have enough extract to make anything like a Molotov cocktail, unfortunately, but if he could find some lamp oil or something he could remedy that.

It didn’t hold quite the same punch that he would have wanted, though. Sure, fire was great and all, but he was skeptical that setting someone on fire would really cause lasting harm. Actually, he had evidence that it would, given how often he did set people ablaze as a finishing move with Firestarting, but he still wanted something with more force.

So, he turned to pinecones. If he soaked them in a mixture of sap and firevine extract, covered up the stickiness with firevine leaves- leaving a stem poking out to function as a fuse- then covered that with a thin layer of clay, he could set the ‘fuse’ on fire with normal Firestarting, and it would reach the main body quickly enough that the entire pinecone would be on fire mid-flight. Testing in non-flammable areas showed that if he managed to apply Infused Firestarting to it, the grenade would detonate violently, resulting in an explosion of burning smoke and shrapnel.

He had two major obstacles to that goal. Firstly, that trying it anywhere other than on barren ground would probably set everything on fire. Secondly, he could only apply Mana Infusion to things he was touching, or nearly touching.

The former he was slowly making progress on. He’d managed to bring the area of effect for Firestarting down from a sphere to a hemisphere through a colossal effort of will and Visualization, and he was confident he might be able to shrink that into a narrow cone in time. It was just a matter of accomplishing it. In the meantime, he could offset the problem by just pulsing Firestarting, kind of like how it was originally intended to be used, but it wasn’t perfect as he still ran the risk of starting unrelated fires. At least he was able to shrink the radius it applied in, so he didn’t have to worry about a stray ember sending his garden up in flames.

The second was a much bigger problem. Infusing the grenade beforehand actually proved detrimental, the mana from his Infusion presumably washing out some of the natural fire mana in the Firevine. Infusing the sap just made it stickier, and Infusing the pinecone had no apparent effect. No, he needed to Infuse it through Firestarting, the Skill apparently making his mana fire-attuned.

Eventually, he came across a… mostly workable solution.

As it turned out, he could Infuse Bomb Throwing. It had been an utter nightmare to figure out, and was the result of many, many days of doing nothing but trying to make the two Skills work together, but the results were mostly worth the effort and complexity, and when the explosion actually worked, the result was always super satisfying.

However, even just doing the Infusion itself was tricky. He needed to Infuse whatever his ‘bomb’ was first, then feed it through Bomb Throwing- specifically instead of Throwing Weapons, the two felt very similar- then back into the Bomb. In that last bit of feedback, he could slip Firestarting in as an effect. What that meant was that after a semi-random amount of time, Firestarting took effect and ignited whatever his bomb was. Even then, it usually wasn’t Infused Firestarting, just the basic Skill, meaning that after all that work, a good 3/4th of the time it wasn’t a proper explosion so much as it was just a tiny fireball with a bit of clay shrapnel.

He had more work to do. He always had more work to do.

It took even more work to figure out how to sustain two Infusions at the same time, and even once he did it still took intense concentration to actually pull off- and thus not terribly useful under pressure- but when he did manage it, he was treated to the wonderful sight of his makeshift grenade exploding midair. Or on the ground. Or right after it left his hand.

….So he still had some work to do. Well, as the end of summer rolled around and the biting chill of autumn set in, he was happy to be playing with fire.

While Edwin had originally expected that he would need another trip or two into Vinstead to get supplies, he hadn’t accounted for two- well, really three- variables.

The first was Survival. He could go a week without feeling so much as a pang of hunger so long as he wasn’t too active. The second was his activity level. Once he finished building up Obairlann, he just wasn’t as physically active as before. Sure, he still went for runs- and always took his stick with him, just in case- but those were rapidly becoming almost trivially easy as Athletics and Walking boosted his physical efficiency to incredible levels. The third was how much food he and Inion managed to grow in their tiny little garden.

All in all, it meant that with the addition of a few deer’s worth of jerky slow-roasted over his fire, Edwin had plenty of food as fall slowly drew to a close. There were a few minor things, like yeast, that he could benefit from, but nothing was critical enough for him to take the multi-day trip it would take to get there and back. Plus, he didn’t want to put Inion through that ordeal again. She’d steadfastly said that it wasn’t so bad that she wouldn’t go with him again for whatever reason, but Edwin couldn’t believe that literally losing color was good for her.

Inion wouldn’t tell him what her plan was when he finally left for good, whether she was staying back at Obairlann or tagging along with him somehow, and he didn’t press the issue. Odds were decent she hadn’t made up her mind yet.

Yeah. On one hand, she stays here and is bored, the other way she has to put up with me.

Another part of Edwin said that it wasn’t that bad, and that she did like him well enough that traveling with him wouldn’t be “putting up” with him. Edwin hoped it was more the latter. He’d been in this position before, where a ‘friend’ was just trying to humor him because they were nice and he wasn’t sure that Inion wasn’t in a similar position. He was willing to try, though.

He had many flaws, but a lack of social persistence wasn’t quite one of them. Or so he liked to think, anyway.

Inion would most likely abandon him as soon as she had a viable alternative, but… he didn’t want to think about that. He was probably just worrying over nothing, anyway.

Where was I? Oh, right. Trips to Vinstead.

There was no real rush to return to civilization, not with all he already had, and enough reasons to avoid it that Edwin figured he could just buckle down and try to survive the winter. It had actually rained a few times over the summer and fall, wispy clouds forming and sprinkling water across the land, but he could still count the number of times on one hand.

So, probably not going to be a harsh winter. At least, no snow. It might get chilly, but nothing like Edwin hadn’t dealt with many times before. Honestly, if he wasn’t trying to be productive, he could most likely legitimately hibernate, just sleep the winter away with a use of Sleeping, Survival, and Nutrition.

He had something much better to spend his time on, though.

He wanted to fly.

Now, while the ideal case would be to unlock a Skill for it once he succeeded, letting him improve magically, he couldn’t accept it before he finished his tier-up. So, he’d have to figure out how to unlock the Skill now, then dismiss it and re-earn it once the year was up, then train it up until it hit level 60 or more, evolve it, and then level its evolution up to whatever level the rest of his Skills were at by that point.

…Yeah, he wasn’t looking forward to that. There was a reason he needed to be so selective about his Skill choices, now more than ever. He wanted higher-tier Skills, darn it, no matter how much every Skill ever might give him something amazing once it evolved. Something that was amazing from the start would just keep getting amazing. That’s what everyone told him. Even Lefi, for that matter.

But he was getting ahead of himself. First, he needed to learn how to fly. And to do that, he would need to level Packing.

So far as he was able to tell, Packing currently reduced the weight of whatever he carried by about 95%, so he had to actually carry 1/20th of whatever he lifted. Air was about 1.2 kilos per cubic meter, and humans were slightly more dense than water, putting him at a thousand kilos per cubic meter.

That meant he still had some ways to go before he could properly lift himself with Packing and potentially fly (or rather, swim through the air), but if he was able to assemble a backpack that was about 80 cubic meters in volume, so long as the average density of the backpack and him combined was less than 7 kilos per cubic meter, he would be neutrally buoyant in the air.

He’d tried assembling a really big ‘backpack’ by making a canvas-covered cube and strapping it to his back, then jumping off the cliff above Obairlann and trying to see if it slowed his fall at all. It wouldn’t be enough for buoyancy, sure, but if he could lighten the air he should at least feel the effects as he fell.

It seemed like it couldn’t be cheated like that, sadly. He’d plummeted to the ground about as fast as he should normally, once you adjusted for a massive wooden-framed backpack/parachute on his back anyway.

Inion had enjoyed the resulting splash into her pond, and Edwin enjoyed the fact he had spare clothes to change into while his other outfit was drying.

Dreams of flight notwithstanding, Inion had managed to come up with a number of creative ‘training’ regimes for him. She could be so nice at times he almost forgot he needed to not trust her, but that was a serious mistake. Now that his Skills had passed level 60, it, according to her, took serious effort and required him to push the Skills in new directions to actually level them at any kind of half-decent rate. Which was how he ended up with some utterly brutal weeks.

With no warning, Inion started waking him up partway through the night, held him under her waterfall with a cloth over his face, and made him breathe through her literal waterboarding and fall asleep while doing it. She blindfolded him and threw magical ice at him, making him try and puzzle out where it was coming from solely with Basic Mana Sense and dodge it. Once he had that figured out, she stuck his feet in place by burying him up to his shins in mud and freezing it, making him exercise Flexibility to try and keep avoiding being hit.

She once joked that she had a more ‘enjoyable’ way to train Flexibility, and while he nearly gave in and accepted, he had first joked that she’d need to twist his arm more than that to get him to agree.

Sadly, she took it literally, and didn’t ask again afterwards. Pity. He could have used some fun after he de-dislocated his shoulder.

Identify she trained in a similar manner. Apparently, using it didn’t actually require sight so long as he could, well, identify what the target was. So, as part of her ‘last’ level of training, he was forced to yell out to her which chunk of ice she threw at him, while he was blindfolded with his feet frozen in mud, then have to actually dodge the annoyingly accurate projectiles. Visualization helped there, actually, as he was able to slowly build up a mental picture of the space, and helped him process the input from his sixth sense. Supposedly Perception would help with that, but he didn’t have that attribute yet, but it was quickly moving up his list for what he wanted.

He was starting to regret not taking her up on her offer without sarcasm, but ah well. He wasn’t about to ask. Much too awkward, no matter the prize, which by itself was still probably not the best idea.

Once he had graduated from thatpermutation, she changed it up so her ‘final’ version of the training started mixing nonmagical projectiles in, which he had to listen for and Identify, then use that information to dodge the attack. She tried not giving him any warning at one point, just throwing her ‘training tools’ at him without shouting she had thrown something, but, well… he had at least gotten First Aid levels out of that debacle.

It was hard enough figuring out where to dodge from, never mind if.

Inion’s Walking training wasn’t as bad, but running across slick rocks up and down the cliff was not pleasant. Then Packing training got added in, and he’d have to do it while also carrying a full-sized tree.

Edwin dreaded what dedicated First Aid training would look like, but at least he didn’t have to worry about that… yet. Even his largest bruises faded overnight, and a broken ankle took a day to heal once he whipped up a basic healing potion from talsanenris berries and a miniscule amount of molai mixed with sinbalyne.

The former provided the basis for the magical healing by unleashing a massive wave of energy and speeding up his metabolism, molai absorbed and slowly released magical energy, preventing him from being hit by all the effects of the healing berries, and the last, when properly prepared and applied helped encourage blood flow to his feet, concentrating the effect there. It had been an experimental potion, but certainly a rousing success.

It did leave his foot swollen for three days after the break was healed, purely from the increased activity and blood flow, so it still required some work. Still, he got a whole Alchemy level for that discovery, and those were getting harder and harder to come by.

There was a large part of him that wondered just how much his Alchemy skill was covering for him, if it was filling in for poor technique, imprecise measurements, or even totally missing ingredients. Inion could rarely replicate his results, but she also, ironically, didn’t have the same level of patience for brewing that he did. She also claimed that her own personal magic would mess with things, and that just part of magic- including alchemy- was literally finding what did or didn’t work for someone.

He put his rant notes on that subject in his Almanac. Not that he expected the mods to somehow patch it or anything, but it didn’t hurt to give them the option to.

It was also about that time that he discovered his Alchemy skill hadn’t been applying to his sinbalyne knockout potion, resulting in the weaker product. That was remedied by adding a tiny drop of talsanenris juice and gently heating the mixture while he stirred for about a minute. Afterwards, if he got so much as a drop of the stuff on him, he’d pretty much instantly black out. It didn’t last long- a few minutes at most- but firmly knocked him unconscious nonetheless. If he actually swallowed any, he’d be out cold for a day or more.

Edwin wasn’t sure why it changed from being an inhaled poison to a contact or ingested one beyond ‘alchemy stuff,’ but he made sure to prepare vials of both versions. Maybe he could turn the normal liquid into a smoke bomb or something.

That discovery only served to further muddle what exactly the Alchemy skill did. Did it just directly enhance the potency of his creations? It would fit with his observations, if potentially insignificant effects were magnified into appearing.

Inion made him train Survival with a combination of cutting down trees (She tried to get him to rip them out of the ground to help with Packing, but it didn’t work. So she just made him carry them one-handed while she rode on the branches instead.) and going without food for extended periods of time, then Nutrition by force-feeding him truly awful foods, utterly sublime food, literal dirt, and food that just looked like dirt. He wasn’t sure what the point of that last one was, though.

Actually, he wasn’t sure what the point of any of those had been, but Inion swore she was helping him train Nutrition. She refused to clarify when or how that was the case, though, so he was skeptical.

In comparison, Mathematics was a dream to level. He just kept running more and more complicated numerical functions into his mental calculator, plugging it all into Visualization.

Well, it was a dream to level at first. Then Inion had caught on and, as her ‘final’ addition to her stone throwing training, made him plot the trajectories of her projectiles on top of telling her which ones were which and still dodging them all. He eventually got very, very good at dodging projectiles, and as an interesting side effect, calculating where a given throw of his attacks would land became almost second nature.

It was because of that that Edwin realized there was some kind of force being applied to his throws, which just smoothed out their arcs regardless of wind or air turbulence, if he slipped while throwing something, or more. He so desperately wished that he could still be leveling Throwing Weapons, but he also didn’t regret his decision to evolve it when he did. Odds were good that whatever bonus it granted explosives was what helped him get out from the Blackstones as well as he did.

To level Purify, Edwin had to come up with new purification methods, whose required equipment conveniently tended to help with Construction. In particular, he vaguely remembered a spinning-wheel toy centrifuge that was being used to test for malaria or something.

He didn’t know how to do that, but his version was at least able to reliably separate oil from water without his Skill applying, and separate the different forms of blood with his Skills. It was kind of satisfying, explaining the components of blood to Inion who had no clue about any of it. He got a First Aid level for it as well, which was even nicer.

The ‘final’ level so far for Inion’s ice-throwing training now included Harvesting, and she would include some small trinket in each ice crystal, and he would (still blindfolded) have to Identify which projectile was flying at him, figure out where it was and where it would be, dodge out of the way, and now use his knife to cut out the prize.

He had no chance, at least not until Inion allowed him to catch the crystals and started throwing at a much slower rate than before.

“I take back… every nice thing… I’ve ever said about you.” Edwin panted after one particularly grueling training session, wincing as he dabbed healing salve on the hole in his hand.

Inion frowned, “Have you ever said anything nice about me?”

“It’s the thought that counts, so… I’m counting nice thoughts I’ve had about you.” He decided.

Inion just laughed. Edwin wasn’t sure whether he loved or hated that laugh.

Probably both.

It was, blessedly, a day off for Edwin. Well, as much of a day off as he ever gave himself. He was fully healed from his latest bout of training, Inion was off wandering the woods doing something, and the sun was shining. He sat by his kiln fire, reveling in the sounds of nature as he tended to the flames. Day off or no, he still had work to do. It was just a question of how painful that work was.

He actually had an idea for how he might be able to improve both Construction and Harvesting at the same time. Wood carving, and possibly rock chiseling, seemed like it might be in the conceptual overlap between the two Skills, and he was eager to give it a try.

Edwin reached down and grabbed a log to work on, tugging it free- hang on, it was caught on something. Ah, it was embedded in the ground, and Packing never helped with anything even partially buried for whatever reason. Most likely, trying to lift the entire planet was beyond the scope of its weight-reduction capabilities.

Edwin freed up his other hand and wrapped it around the wood, yanking on it. Oh come on, was it stuck on something as well as being buried? He gave it one last giant pull to try and clear it, and as he wasn’t expecting it to actually work, he was knocked off-balance as the tree trunk switched from being ‘not carried’ to being firmly affected by Packing, shedding several hundred pounds all at once.

He most definitely wasn’t expecting the action to save his life, as a crossbow bolt whizzed right towards his throat, only intercepted by the massive chunk of wood, striking and embedding itself up to the fletching in the bark.

Edwin reacted in the blink of an eye, mass-Identifying everything in the direction the bolt had come from, suddenly thankful for Inion’s tutelage in that matter. Amidst the flood of meaningless Almanac popups, a single notification caught his eye.

Darkshadow Contract Hunter

Level Up!

Skill Points 1065→1279

Progress to Tier 2: 1362/1770 (Avg level: 66/77)

Alchemy 69→ 78

Athletics 64 → 69

Basic Mana Sense 57 → 68

Bomb Throwing 17→ 31

Breathing 61→ 66

Construction 61→ 68

Firestarting 68→ 77

First Aid 52→ 71