The Way Ahead

Chapter 74b: The Wheel Turns Ever Onward

“Huh.”

“What’s up?”

“I passed a year on Joriah at some point recently.”

“You can tell?”

“The age on my Status by default thinks I was born when I fell to Joriah. I was getting suspicious and wanted to check it. Turns out, my meddling didn’t do what I thought it would, it just kept me frozen at 22. I took down my programming, which was also really wrong, wow. Maybe that was why it didn’t work? Anyway, I took it down and Status now says I’m 1 year old.”

Name

Edwin Maxlin

Age

Race

Extraplanar Human

Class

Sapper

Attributes

Mana 5

Health 7

Skills

Magical

Basic Mana Sense: 71, Mana Infusion: 74 (Basic Mana Manipulation 9)

Physical

Athletics: 70, Breathing: 68, Flexibility: 65, Nutrition: 59, Packing 76, Seeing: 59, Sleeping: 64, Survival: 66, Walking: 62

Mental

Polyglot: 56 (Language 36), Mathematics: 65, Memory: 49 (Research 50), Visualization: 69

Combat

Bomb Throwing: 39 (Throwing Weapons 48)

Utility

Firestarting: 79, Alchemy: 79 (Improvisation 14), Outsider's Almanac: 111 (Status 22), Identify: 63, First Aid: 75

“Happy anniversary?” Inion probed.

“Thanks, I guess? Not sure what the right terminology for the day commemorating being dropped into a new world would be.”

She shrugged, “Whatever you wanna call it. I don’t think there’d be a name for it, and none that’d be in all languages.”

“Hmm. Well, I’ll think about it.”

“Now, you didn’t think that would get you out of training today, now did you?”

“…I mean, I was kind of hoping that…”

“Ha! Get moving!”

Edwin sighed. No rest for the weary, it seemed.

Edwin groaned as he lifted a full-grown tree overhead. It had to have weighed something close to two tons, but Packing made it possible for him to support the whole thing. He winced as an ice crystal tore into the skin on his leg as he didn’t move it quickly enough. He wasn’t blindfolded in this variation of Inion’s training, but that didn’t make it any easier. Really, he wasn’t sure how he wasn’t sinking into the ground with the sheer amount of weight which had to be concentrated into the space right below his feet.

…Why wasn’t he sinking into the ground?

Hypothesis: All weight carried by a Packer is concentrated in the space below their feet.

Testing: If all weight is so concentrated, spikes mounted at the bottom of feet ought to sink deep into soil once a moderate amount of weight is applied. The ground itself ought to give way under the pressure of a pinpoint application of massive force.

Test 35: Strapped knifes to feet and stood on the soil. They did not immediately sink into the ground. However, it proved possible to ‘disable’ this and sink into the soil. Which happened seems to depend on what is… expected to happen.

Conclusion: There is some additional support provided that prevents a Packer from sinking into the ground, but only when they think they ought not to. Possible use in water- or airwalking.

Despite Edwin’s best efforts, he wasn’t able to walk on water by ‘expecting’ not to, though that may well have been a limitation of imagination. He honestly couldn’t be sure. However, further testing showed that he could walk on mud with more ease if he expected he shouldn’t sink in. However, he would still sink in somewhat, just not as much as normal.

It was… frustrating, and the first true evidence Edwin had that his thoughts could genuinely influence the way his Skills impacted the world around him.

Stupid magic, not following the proper laws of the universe. How dare it open an entirely new branch for comprehending and exploiting everything!

It did mean that he needed to redo a lot of his old experiments which had confirmed his hypotheses, on the off chance that they had been influenced into performing as they were “supposed” to. Fortunately, there weren’t any major discrepancies with the later check. Or was that just because his expectations hadn’t changed? Gah!

Despite himself, he was still having a blast. He was doing actual, really cool research into his own little slice of the universe! He was sloawly learning how to fly! He had magic! He had glowing potions in bowls and bottle (only a single surviving glass vial, sadly) on his shelf!

It had taken some time to rebuild his alchemy supplies, especially as his magical plants stopped bearing so much fruit, but he’d managed it in the end. (Edwin had been quite relieved to find that his knockout potion hadn’t broken after it fell off the roof, and that he was able to safely retrieve it) Inion’s training was painful as always, but it still proved to be a fruitful way to pass the time as winter rolled in.

Then, it was an exhausting way to pass the time as winter rolled out.

Edwin was determined to crack open his Skills, and while Packing may have remained stubbornly out of reach, that didn’t mean he let his other abilities fall by the wayside. Well, Inion’s training ensured he wasn’t able to let their levels fall by the wayside, but he still had science to perform on them!

While he had varying degrees of confidence with his assessments, he felt that he had a decent handle on how a fair number of his Skills worked ‘under the hood,’ so to speak.

Athletics increased the density of his cells; giving him more blood, more bone cells, more and tougher skin cells. He’d need a microscope to confirm it, but he felt decent in his conclusion.

Bomb Throwing magnified the speed of combustion reactions, sometimes of his choosing, other times randomly. Breathing had initially helped him absorb more oxygen with every breath and now aided him in using said oxygen more effectively.

Alchemy gave a combination of instincts for how various procedures worked and magnified the results. Construction functioned similarly in that he got hunches as to how something might be best created, but the Skill likewise aided him in said creation. Glues stuck slightly better, saws cut more easily and left smoother surfaces. Firestarting acted as a catalyst, allowing oxidation reactions to happen a lot easier, other than rust (it made him wonder if thermite would be aided by the Skill).

First Aid worked in a similar manner to talsanenris berries, speeding up metabolism in treated areas and magnifying the body’s recovery capabilities. Flexibility made Edwin… bendier. His very bones could deform slightly without pain or harm, or not so slightly in other cases, and his joints were slowly becoming almost omnidirectional.

Mathematics felt like a sort of basic calculator stapled to his mind, that could store numbers he put into it and recall them later, like the System had directly connected a computer cable to his brain. Nutrition, Edwin suspected, aided his body in dismantling whatever he ate on a submolecular level and reconstructing it in a more helpful form. He’d managed to stave off hunger at one point by eating a literal stick, despite it normally being indigestible to humans. That meant he should probably still try to get his minerals, but any organic chemicals he would get just from normal life.

Purify made dissimilar molecules repel one another. He’d separated a small pile of sand and dust just by blowing on it, could wash out even bloodstains with trace amounts of water, and he could clean his hands just by Infusing Purify, making all dust, dirt, and stains just flake off and fall to the ground. He still needed some methodology to purify things, but no matter what it was, it worked great.

Edwin suspected that Seeing worked by messing with the Rayleigh resolution formula. How a Skill managed to mess with a fundamental property of optics was something Edwin deeply wished he had a full lab and research group to investigate, but considering he could distinguish two points less than a millimeter apart from the far side of the clearing, which a bit of math told him should be physically impossible given the size of his eyes, he didn’t see any other possibilities.

The rest of his Skills he just didn’t have anywhere to start with. Be it Basic Mana Sense or Mana Infusion, he simply didn’t know enough about mana to make any educated guesses. Its effects clearly depended on what he used it on, but beyond vague common-sense intuitions as to what should happen with magical rocks or water, there weren’t any apparent physical patterns. He could feel Memory working, sharpening recollections- particularly those from Earth- as he actively tried to remember something, but he didn’t know enough neuroscience to begin to guess how that might work. He ran into similar problems with Harvesting, Visualization, Survival, Sleeping…

Packing still worked when he walked on his hands, interestingly. It didn’t help him support his weight on thin branches, but did when he was in a cluster of vines. It didn’t help him keep his footing on slippery surfaces, but if his feet were coated with something slippery, like soap, then Packing would help him.

He’d finally figured out what it was that Packing did to help him avoid sinking into the ground, as well! It sort of… spread out his weight, under his entire body, but only so long as the ground was at the same level as his feet. Walking with knives for shoes meant the point of the knife was the bottom of his ‘foot’ and the weight was distributed across its normal area. But if he was standing on a knife, then it would be driven into the ground until it was flush with its surroundings or it was somehow able to hold Edwin up.

He was still working on translating that to letting him walk on air, but he felt that he was getting close. And after all-

Level Up!

Skill Points 1235→1473

Progress to Tier 2: 1559/1770 (Avg level: 76/77)

Alchemy 78 → 83

Athletics 70 → 81

Basic Mana Sense 68 → 77

Bomb Throwing 39→ 49

Breathing 68→ 75

Construction 68→ 77

Firestarting 79→ 90

First Aid 73→ 82