Clover groaned as he pried himself off the ground. As much as he wanted to lay there forever and bask in the moment, he knew he had to move. It wasn't safe out here.

Despite feeling like he had been hit by a car, which wasn’t too far from the truth, Clover was in a good mood, unable to stop himself from breaking out in a wide grin. It felt like he had a new lease on life. For the first time in a long time, he had hope for a better future.

Clover retrieved his wheelchair. It was a bit beat up, but fortunately, it was still in working condition. With nowhere else to go, Clover turned toward the electronics shop.

To his surprise, the door was unlocked. Cautiously, he entered the building. Rows of shelves stacked with used electronic equipment stretched to the back of the store, dimly illuminated by an assortment of trendy battery-powered lights.

“Is anyone here?” he asked while scanning the building for any sign of danger. No one responded.

Clover strained his ears; in the distance, he could make out the soft sound of TV static. Figuring it was safe, or at least safer than outside, he closed the door and delved further into the building. Wheeling slowly, he passed a row of clocks with hands that spun and jittered wildly, following no rhyme or reason. The clock face closest to him completed a full revolution in a matter of seconds.

He hurried past that section, soon reaching the end of the building, where he found an extensive array of old televisions. All but one were dead.

On the screen, a man walked through a park with an ice cream cone, surrounded by people who were entirely too happy. It was one of those cheesy medical advertisements that he used to hate. He chuckled. Maybe one day, he wouldn't have to watch. Maybe one day, he could walk through a park with an ice cream cone of his own.

Clover paused as he caught his reflection in a piece of glass - he looked like he had just walked off the set of a horror movie. In the interest of not looking like a total psycho, he cleaned up his appearance, using a rag he had found on one of the shelves to wipe off the monster's blood before it could dry. He shook leaves and twigs out of his hair.

He quirked an eyebrow as he finished. He wouldn't be winning any awards - he hadn't even managed to wipe all the blood off. It was harder to do than he thought, but at least he didn't look like a zombie anymore.

Clover fantasized about the future for a few more minutes before refocusing. If he ever wanted to reach that future, he’d have to be smart. Stumbling around without a plan wasn’t going to get him very far. He opened his [Status Screen].

Name: Clover Hills

Race: Human

Class: Blank Lvl 1 - 50/200

Shard:

HP: 63/150 (10)

SP: 100/100 (10)

MP: 100/100 (10)

Affinity:

Strength: 0

Endurance: 0

Vitality: 5

Dexterity: 0

Agility: 0

Perception: 0

Intelligence: 0

Magic: 0

Stat Points: 0

Skill Points: 0

For each Point he had put in Vitality, his maximum HP had increased by 10. He assumed that the increase had also counted toward his current HP. He didn't have any facts to back that up, but it made an intuitive sense to him. If his math was correct, his HP had fallen to 13 in the last moments of his fight with the Bone Rat.

He hadn’t realized he had come that close to death.

To his left, the TV feed suddenly cut out. The hair on his arms stood on end. There was something off about the interior of the building. He had almost died once because of his inaction; he had no intention of making the same mistake again.

Clover closed his [Status Screen] and scurried out of the store to find a safer location to hide out the night.

He paused as he rolled past the dead rat monster. Nestled in the grass by the monster's side, an unnaturally round white rock glowed softly. The air around it seemed to distort, carrying whispers of shifting stone and metal over the wind.

Clover briefly wondered if the distortion was a side effect of getting hit in the head too many times. Or blood loss. Really, it could have been a combination of both. He bent down and carefully poked the stone. In movies, touching mysterious magical artifacts usually ended in disaster.

He jerked his finger away as if the stone was a thousand degrees. It wasn't. Poking the stone hadn't caused an adverse reaction, and now that he had a moment to think, he remembered the System mentioning that Skill Stones were possible rewards for killing monsters. This could be one.

Slightly paranoid of approaching monsters, he scanned his surroundings again, then bent down and picked up the Skill Stone. To his partial surprise, the stone did not turn out to be a bomb or explode into an otherwise negative experience. Instead, a new [System Announcement] appeared when his fingers grasped it.

Sculpting - Lvl 0 (Common)

Accept Y/N

The [System Announcement] gave him little information to work with, but he didn't see any reason not to take it. Of course, if he had his choice of things, [Sculpting] wouldn't have been his first Skill. He'd have much-preferred something like [Super Mega Death Fire Explosion Barrage], if that was a thing, or [Cure Cancer].

Either one would have worked for him.

He clicked accept.

The Skill Stone’s exterior cracked like an eggshell, and through the shattered rock, thick marble light that moved like syrup leaked through, following a curving pattern as it flowed toward his grasp.

Clover watched the process, enraptured. A small part of him that wasn't used to things going his way considered the possibility that this was a trap - that if he let the lights touch him, he'd turn to stone or something equally ridiculous.

He took a deep breath, savoring the ease with which it came. If the System wanted to kill him, it wouldn't have to resort to cheap tricks and fake rewards. Logically, that raised the question of what the System wanted in the first place - why did it feel the need to bring about the apocalypse? However, as the first of the marble lines left the Skill Stone and wrapped around his fingers, slowly sinking into the skin, that line of questioning died.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

What felt like an electrical current ran through his bones, then in the next moment, the world faded away, and he fell into a new place - a new moment in time.

Perplexed, Clover soon discovered that he was now a passenger in a body that was not his own. With no control over his movements, he was forced to watch, through a pair of eyes that were not his own, as a young man with only one arm rushed down a cobblestone road.

After a natural spike of panic, Clover relaxed. He was along for the ride; there was nothing he could do about it. He might as well enjoy it.

The one-armed boy entered a medieval workshop. Rough slabs of stone rested on workbenches, and tools hung from the ceiling. More importantly, a crowd had gathered around a stage, where an old man with a long white beard spoke about the basics of sculpting. The boy shuffled to a back corner of the workshop.

With nothing else to do, Clover listened. He figured if the Skill Stone was showing it to him, it had to be important.

As the man spoke, the Skill Stone occasionally activated, etching words and concepts into his memory - aiding him when he failed to understand. Each time it flashed to life, he could feel the effect weaken as the Skill Stone depleted its supply of energy.

As the lecture neared its end, Clover had legitimately learned a lot. Though, he wondered what the point of learning about [Sculpting] was. He doubted he could sculpt a monster to death.

"Now, after hearing all this, tell me, what do you think the first rule of sculpting is." Clover flinched; the old man was staring right at him. The crowd fell silent; no one wanted to risk being wrong.

"They have to look good," the one-handed apprentice said. Clover's lips followed, mouthing the words. It was a disorienting, if novel, experience. In his opinion, being a ghost inhabiting someone else's body wasn't all it was chalked up to be.

“Wrong!” The crowd laughed.

Like a record that had reached its end, the scene froze with a jolt. Then, a force pressed against him in the next moment, carrying his consciousness back to where it had come. However, before he could resurface, a second force, more violent than the first, crashed into him, pulling him back into the Skill Stone. The air around him vibrated wildly, and he could hear the sound of massive amounts of stone shifting in the distance. He closed his eyes out of reflex.

When he opened them, he found himself in a dusty old workshop. The scene had taken on a more dreamlike quality - the details blurred. Through the one-handed apprentice, he watched as he worked by candlelight to create a small sculpture. With only one hand, the boy struggled to manipulate the material. His repeated failures did not seem to discourage him.

Clover set aside his confusion and observed the crafter as he worked, gaining literal firsthand experience.

The scene skipped forward. A force pulled at him, but was once again rebuked. The details grew more hazy, and the distance between him and the one-handed apprentice seemed to increase.

Clover wondered if the Skill Stone was malfunctioning or if this was how it was supposed to work. He doubted it.

The apprentice sculptor was older now. Still working alone in that dusty and dark workshop, he held his hand over a chunk of stone with his palm facing downward. Hundreds of failed sculptures laid scattered across the ground.

He tensed his hand. With a crack, the stone stretched and distorted, moving without being touched. A few seconds later, a completed sculpture in the shape of an intricate star laid on the workbench.

To put it mildly, Clover was shocked. Even though he had watched it happen firsthand, it had gone down too quickly for him to truly comprehend.

The Skill Stone sparked, and suddenly, the answer felt like it was at the tip of his tongue. He just couldn't spit the words out yet.

“Not good enough,” the apprentice grumbled, then tossed the sculpture aside.

The scene skipped forward once more. Older again, the apprentice manipulated a stone cube, forming the bottom half of a vase without using his hands. Somewhat prepared this time, Clover carefully observed the process, attempting to deconstruct it.

Waves of power surged through the sculptor, increasing in intensity whenever a particularly large chunk of stone would move. Clover tracked them to their source. At the sculptor's core was a place that brimmed with static energy. There and not there at the same time, it felt like a separate plane of existence. If he did not pay attention to it, it was completely invisible. And even when he devoted his full attention to it, he still had trouble perceiving it.

Within that core, a structure, most likely a statue from its size and weight, hummed with power, fueling his sculpting abilities. Time passed, but enraptured, Clover did nothing but observe it.

He jerked back to attention as the apprentice finished the vase. Standing up, he retrieved a large bucket of water and poured it into the sculpture. The water level barely rose. Somehow, the vase was larger on the inside than on the outside.

Sensing a pattern emerge, Clover skipped forward through time. This scene, more so than the others, was short, lasting barely a minute.

The apprentice squinted his eyes as he finished drawing a glowing line of energy in the air, forming some sort of symbol. There were more of them, maybe a hundred. He flexed his hand, and they wrapped around a stone tusk, transforming it.

The scene skipped forward once more, taking on an unstable, dreamlike quality. It felt as if the Skill Stone had run low on energy, nearing its capacity.

Perhaps a decade later, the one-handed apprentice nervously stood in a lush green park, shifting in place. A crowd had gathered around a large structure covered by a piece of cloth.

"Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for gathering here today." The man who spoke wore odd clothing. It wasn't like anything he had ever seen before. On further inspection, even the words he spoke sounded wrong; the movements of his mouth didn't match up with what he was saying.

A force tugged at him, pulling his attention away from the discrepancies. "Now, for the moment you have all been waiting for, it is time to reveal the work of our city's newest rising star —." The name cut off in a garble of nonsense, but the crowd seemed to understand what he said just fine.

The cloth was pulled away, revealing a giant marble statue that looked like it was modeled after an elephant. Clover wasn't an expert, but even he could tell it was beautiful. And its appearance wasn't even the most impressive part. Its tusk shimmered in the sunlight, reflecting back a broad rainbow of colors that, by magic, seemed to dance around the sculpture.

The crowd erupted into applause. The apprentice smiled and looked into the crowd, searching for someone. His eyes landed on the wisened old master, who had given him his first lesson. The older man shook his head in disappointment and disappeared into the crowd.

The scene cracked at the edges, then shifted one last time. The details were hazier than before, and the memory felt unstable - at the edge of breaking.

Now, the one-handed sculptor stood alone atop a mountain so tall that it almost touched the stars. Boulders floated through the sky, drawn upward by an invisible gravity, and a frigid wind howled against the stone. The apprentice looked up, tracing the path of the boulders. A dark green dot in the sky rapidly grew - something was approaching.

He whispered something in a foreign language beneath his breath.

He raised his hand, and the stone beneath him rumbled. The mountain took a lumbering step forward, and as it did so, the green dot in the sky, now more prominent, flashed. The sky exploded.

The Skill Stone activated, spending its last sparks of energy.

With a racing heart, Clover awoke to the real world, the sound of glass shattering and terrified screams fading from his memory.

"Coooool," Clover couldn't help but mutter to himself as the Skill Stone crumbled to dust and fell through his fingers - the power within it spent.

From the best he could tell, only a few seconds had passed in the outside world.

He took a moment to collect himself. Other than a headache, he had escaped from the experience unscathed.

Though, when he had used the Skill Stone, he hadn't expected to have been sucked into… Well, Clover wasn't entirely sure what had happened. Had the things he saw actually happened? Was the one-handed apprentice a real person? Was he an alien? He focused back, trying to remember the sculptor's face, but couldn't. What he had learned about [Sculpting] had stayed in his memory with pristine clarity, but past that, he struggled to remember exactly what any of the faces or buildings he had seen looked like.

In the end, Clover was left with the feeling that he had forgotten more than he learned, that he should know so much more - that he once did.

Two new blue screens appeared.

Sculpting Lvl 0 (Common)

Stone endures where paper and ink fade. With each monument made, a reminder of your existence will be carved into the bones of the earth. Passively increases Sculpting ability with each Level.

Congratulations on unlocking your first Skill! Part of your [Beginner Bonus] has been removed in light of your achievement. Going forward, it will now be slightly more difficult to obtain new Skills. However, by practicing your Skills, you will accrue Skill Points. Which, then, can be spent on [Skill Paths].

Clover felt like he had been scammed; no one had told him he would lose his [Beginner Bonus] by using the Skill Stone. He hadn't even known he had a [Beginner Bonus] in the first place!

But he couldn't bring himself to get too worked up. The abilities the one-handed man had displayed with the later Levels of [Sculpting] more than made up for anything he had lost in the short term. If he could one day do the same, it would be a more than even trade.

He dusted the remains of the Skill Stone off his hands, then scanned the horizon for danger. Hearing and seeing nothing of pressing urgency, Clover partially hid himself from view behind a tree, then opened the [Skill Paths] screen. What he saw brought a smile to his face…