Four days later, Josh leveled again.

CONGRATULATIONS! You are now a level 48 Metalcrafter! You have 1 free attribute point and 1 class attribute point to allocate. Your class attributes are Perception and Sensitivity.

NEW SKILL LEARNED: Analyze Structure. Automatically learn blueprints for any object that you study, deconstruct, or repair. This includes items deconstructed by the Salvage technique or repaired with the Repair spell. Multiple analyses will be required for more complex objects.

Josh blinked bleary eyes. The System notification was the only clear thing in his vision. It took him a moment to even realize what he was looking at, and longer to go through his stats and figure out if this was an option he could exploit.

He shook his head to clear it and focused on his surroundings again. He was in Abraham's shop. He'd been spending a lot of time here the past few days, ever since they got the cars out of the pit. Abraham and his girlfriend were accommodating enough, and they had the tools and space he needed. As it turned out, he needed a lot.

The cars, while interesting, were probably the least important bit of his little operation. They had attracted a lot of attention, which was good in its own way, because he'd been repairing literally everything he could get his hands on.

It was easy to forget, outside of the City, how many little devices people had that they almost never had a chance to replace. They just had to keep using them, fixing them up when they ran down, until eventually they couldn't be fixed. Most houses had whole piles of old toasters or guns or radios, all just waiting to be stripped for spare parts whenever someone got the time.

Now, with his Repair spell, he could fix them all. It was far from perfect, and in particular anything with a circuit board was very likely to turn out to be outside his Metalcrafter skill. Any computer or smartphone was almost impossible for him to do anything useful with. But people didn't have a lot of those out here anyway. When no one outside the City could repair a smartphone, no one outside the City wanted to bother with one of the damn things.

The point being that for the past four days, he had been working nonstop. He'd barely slept. He'd barely even paused for rest. He'd just worked on the object in front of him, repairing it piece by piece, and when he was done with it someone would swap it out for something else.

Some objects were easy. Simple items like the electronic torch he had practiced on, or even complex objects with simple damage like a cracked engine block. Those usually only took a single cast of the Repair spell, and not even his entire mana. Others took multiple castings to fix every individual crack and bend. Cleaning up rust on some bearings, smoothing out an axle.

It was rare to find something that he couldn't fix. At least after the first day, when people realized he couldn't fix silicon or plastic, and they stopped bringing him smartphones. Someone tried to have him fix a Tower-made piece of armor, but he didn't have a tenth of the mana capacity he needed. Someone else brought a pocket nuclear reactor, made before the end of the world by the Mechanist himself, and he had the same problem. Although the device had been designed to need no maintenance, it seemed that also meant that no one but the Mechanist himself could have fixed it.

Josh asked where they had found something like that. The old woman who brought it to him admitted it had been broken for decades, but no one in the family had ever had the heart to throw it out. Josh suggested donating it to a City museum, and she almost brained him with it.

For the most part, though, it was all a blur. He'd always been good at operating without sleep when he needed to, and some blessed soul had found him a decent invigorating tea. Coffee had its place, but it couldn't replace a good cuppa. He had slept sometime, though. He wasn't sure if he had gone home, or if he had crashed on Abraham's guest bed. He distinctly remembered waking up one morning to find that someone had put a blanket on him overnight. That probably meant Abraham's place. Mary would have rather dumped him out on the floor.

He'd taken as many mana potions as he could get his hands on. For the smaller fixes, where he only needed to fix a small break that cost a point or two of mana each, he just made up the difference with his [Meditation] skill. It had even ranked up, when most skills like that were usually annoying to rank up. But too often, he found himself having to empty his mana multiple times in a row, and he didn't have time for meditation. So, he popped one of the glowing blue vials, downed it in one go, and burned off more of his mana.

Sarah had sold him mana potions by the crate. Turned out that they were relatively easy to source the ingredients for, and she wasn't trying to make anything fancy right now. She was just making as many low-level potions as possible to grind out experience while she experimented with bigger things on the side.

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He had drunk so many mana potions in the past few days that his teeth were blue, and his mouth tasted like syrup. He twitched every time he moved, and he was pretty sure that if he wasn't using a magical spell that handled fine detail automatically, he'd find himself unable to even reassemble a pen.

He reached for a power drill. It was in the broken pile, not the tool pile. When he did, however, a hand reached out to stop him.

“That's enough for now,” Abraham said gently. “You stopped for a minute. Another level?”

Josh shook his head. “What? Yeah.”

“You should be level 48 now. Did you get anything interesting?”

Josh looked at him for a long moment. “...I got a passive skill called Analyze Structure.”

Abraham looked surprised. “All right. What's it do?”

Josh told him. He was so out of it that he didn't even consider that he could just send over the screens.

Abraham stared at him. Josh stared back.

“First,” Abraham said at last, “you need sleep.”

Josh frowned. “What? Why?”

“Because your brain is fried by exhaustion and those mana potions, so you haven't realized how incredibly valuable this skill will be.”

“I can learn blueprints,” Josh said. “So what?”

Abraham sighed, then took the next item from the pile. It was a simple wrench with a fracture down the head. “Here. Just... fix this, and we'll see what happens.”

He cast [Repair] without speaking. It cost a single point of mana. Josh was far too tired to check his logs and look into the actual math, but he suspected it might not have cost much more than that even discounting his ridiculous Sensitivity score. A nearby pile of steel shavings and a welding torch both glowed for a moment, and then the wrench had a shiny scar down the middle. It was even cool to the touch.

That was typical. The notification was not.

Blueprint: Wrench (medium, metal) progress gained. Total progress to full blueprint: 12.5%

“Well?” Abraham asked.

Josh sent the notification over.

Abraham read it quickly. “Twelve point five percent. That means if you do this eight times, you'll learn a new blueprint.”

“That seems a bit low,” Josh managed, even though he really just wanted to lay down and sleep. “Wouldn't I learn everything in ten minutes that way?”

Abraham ignored this comment. “It mentioned your Salvage technique.” Abraham handed the wrench back. “Use it now.”

Josh took the wrench, and activated his Salvage technique combined with [Instant Crafting]. The wrench pretty much fell apart in his hands, but he did get some more progress.

Blueprint: Wrench (medium, metal) progress gained. Total progress to full blueprint: 25.0%

Abraham smiled. He looked like he wanted to rub his hands together and cackle, but he was too composed for that. “Excellent. It would be better if it was fully retroactive, of course. However, we can't have everything.”

Josh looked at the pile of things he had already repaired today. There were definitely more than eight wrenches in there. “It feels like such a waste, though.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I think most objects will take longer to learn their blueprints,” Abraham said. “A wrench is about as simple as it gets.”

Josh turned a baleful look in his direction. “No. No, that does not make me feel better.”

Abraham smiled. “Fair enough.” He rose to his feet. “All right, that's enough of that. Come on.”

Josh blinked. “Wot?”

“You need sleep,” Abraham said firmly. “I only let you experiment because I know you never would have been able to sleep with that hanging over your head. But you reached a milestone, that means you can take time to have a real break. With food and everything.”

Josh's protests fell on deaf ears. Miriam, Abraham's girlfriend, forced him to go home and sleep in an actual bed. She even locked the door behind him, as if he might just turn right back around and continue working.

...which he had considered doing. Briefly.

Mary and Anna waited outside, and walked with him back to the mayor's office. Josh wasn't sure if they were his escorts, his honor guard, or if they just happened to be nearby and decided to go with him. He did manage to summon enough energy to tease Mary about spending so much time with Anna, though, which was a plus.

Everything was a bit of a blur. He was sure he spoke to someone at the mayor's office, though he couldn't put enough clues together to remember who it was. All he knew was that he woke up in a soft bed, his mind significantly more clear, to the smell of coffee.