Earned Skill:

Body: Sleep

Right after waking up the next morning, Victoria gets a message that she learned another skill. At first, she didn't quite understand what a sleeping skill would do for her, but this was one of the few situations where the description became helpful. Supposedly, it would make her sleep more efficient, allowing her to sleep shorter without it causing any problems.

As always, it was still dark outside when she woke up. If she had to guess, she had slept for exactly six hours.

Actually, sleep had shown to be a problem for her for a long time, after all the longer she slept, the less time she had to learn new things. The problem was, while there was a lot of information, on how to save time by sleeping less, on the internet very little of it was backed up by professional opinion.

Sure, for some people, it was possible to subsist on two hours of sleep a day. But the sleep pattern was inconvenient and despite having a lot more time every day, Victoria found herself a lot less efficient and it just didn't feel healthy. It was possible, but that was all. In the end, it had taken quite a bit of experimenting until she finally found the best pattern.

Now, the problem was, she had made an oversight. In modern civilization, electrical light was everywhere, always only a single switch away. But right now? She couldn't see shit.

She had to carefully feel around until she finally managed to open the window shutters, trading warmth and darkness for moonlight and cold.

Only then did she realize that she had gone to sleep still with her clothes on. Considering that she had worked out in them even before that, she would definitely have to wash them already. The problem was doing that without damaging them. Together with the infrastructure, all modern soaps and detergents had been lost as well, leaving them with nothing but hard soap. It wasn't like she could just magi...

No, she could just use magic to clean them! Sure, she wouldn't do so without any training and a bit of trial and error, but few things screamed "Household magic" as much as a cleaning spell would. If Daniel could make a magical, black, and heatless fire that consumes literally everything, then making magical water that cleans your clothes shouldn't be impossible. It would probably be even better than any modern soap or detergent.

Finally stopping daydreaming over all the possibilities of magic, Victoria slipped into her High-heels and sneaked into the kitchen. Taking the two buckets waiting there for her, she leaves the house through the backdoor and makes her way to the well.

With one bucket of water for the drinks and food of the day and another for cleaning, her day could finally begin. A quick wash and a new set of linen clothes later, she was back in her room, the god already waiting on her.

"Well then, let's continue where we last were interrupted! This one is gonna take a while, so take a seat.", the boy said, acting like it was his room and not hers.

With the chair already taken, Victoria had not much of a choice but to take the bed.

"Right, just so you know, yesterday, and even now, I'm still making sure that the old woman doesn't wake up, so no need to worry about her. Anyways! I explained to you the rough situation yesterday, but I think I should explain to you a bit more before you make a decision. I'm not like Creation and his cronies after all.

So, I created humanity and made you guys powerful enough to rival, possibly even kill gods, and most importantly, highly resistant to their meddling. Well, as resistant as a non-godly entity can be. For example, they have to ask for permission for a lot of things before they can do them to you, and even with it, their powers over you are limited.

The only reason Creation was able to seal away so much of your power, was because he interfered almost instantly while you were still created, which is the moment something is the most vulnerable to interference. And even then, just the fact that you could still train your bodies and minds, meant that the seals on Aura and Psy developed small cracks if a human pushed against them enough."

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"So, if the seals had been perfect, we... our bodies wouldn't have grown? Would we have stayed as babies or what are you trying to say?"

"Well, not exactly, your bodies would have grown as they did already. But do you remember how strong you were before yesterday evening? Before you broke out you Aura? That would have been it. It would have been impossible to get stronger."

"But what about muscle training?"

"Well, you wouldn't have gained any. Increased muscle mass is a result of uncontrolled Aura. If you can control your Aura well enough, you can have any kind of muscles you want. In case you were worrying that increasing your physical stats would turn you into a muscle-monster."

That had honestly been exactly what she had been thinking about. She had put too much work into her body to let something like that happen.

"Let's get back on track. Vulnerable during creation, and Humans, and the System are largely resistant to godly interference. You should remember those two because they made the system and the world the way it is right now.

Originally, I developed the system to help humanity break free and grow strong as easily and quickly as possible. And believe me, I did all I could to make sure that it would get to you guys with as little changes as possible the moment my seal is released. Well, let's just say that there are a lot of gods beside me, so even if the creation of the system didn't take all that long, they still managed to make the growth process a lot harder for you guys.

The first thing they changed was how you gain levels. Originally, you would have just gotten them if you put in some effort and increased your skill levels, but they made sure to make that process life-threatening, by forcing you to kill demons. And then, they even threw in a staggered progression to make it even harder to get out of the low levels."

"You mean the Tiers and Classes?"

"Yes, the Tiers, not the Classes though, those are a whole other can of worms. Originally, you would have earned stats slowly but constantly, but now, you need to get from level zero to one-hundred only to then upgrade to the next Tier. Rinse and repeat. Problem is, while you get a higher stat growth per level per Tier, you need to kill demons at a similar level to your own to level at any reasonable speed."

"And I guess the demons get stronger a lot faster than someone with a Tier one class?"

"Exactly. If you want to get strong, getting out of Tier one is going to be the first, and hardest step."

"So, that leaves skills.", Victoria states.

"Yep, but they fucked you guys over gloriously there as well. My plan was something like this.

Let's take a guy with fifty points in all stats, and he wants to get better at running. His intent is, running one-hundred meters as fast as possible, ignoring anything else. Obviously, based on his stats and physical build, there would be an absolute limit to his performance that he couldn't surpass barring outside influence.

What skills were supposed to do, was to check his performance, and then help improve it. Let's say he is a newb and only performs at twenty percent of his theoretical limit, then he would get a 'one-hundred-meter-sprint Lv.21' Skill. That Skill would then improve his performance to twenty-one percent, but in a way that he can feel the Skills influence. That way, just by trying to copy the Skill, he would improve, and if he got good enough, the Skill would increase by one level. Repeat that until he becomes level one-hundred.

Once he manages to reach one-hundred percent performance on his own, he would then be able to develop a so-called 'ability' with the system's help. Basically, getting an ability means bending reality to improve beyond what should by all rights be possible. Maybe he would get something that allows him to reduce air resistance, or maybe he learns how to make it so that ANY distance is one-hundred meters long to him. That, baby, is the point where you guys start approaching the divine territory."

It was a bit freaky to hear a child call her 'baby', but now that she had the supposed god talking, she wanted to keep it that way: "But, they changed stuff, right?", she encourages him.

"Precisely. What they did this time, was pretty evil. They totally abused human psychology. What they did was simple, they made it so that the performance correction of the Skill, is added onto your own completely. What that means is simple, the sprinter from the previous example, for example, would reach a performance level of forty-one percent. Twenty percent his own ability, twenty-one from his Skill.

That may sound good, but for one, those aren't optimal conditions for training, and two they made sure that you guys don't notice the improvements the Skill makes. Of course, you can't perform at over a hundred percent without an ability, which in turn you can only get by raising your own performance to the limit."

"That means, once we get our total performance to a hundred percent through Skill and personal ability, we won't see ourselves improving anymore and thus stop trying to improve.", Victoria finished his line of reasoning.

"And with the Classes being a different can of worms, you mean that they are meant to push us into certain roles, right?"

"You get it! I like you more and more! But it's to a greater degree than you might think. Of course, forceful stat-distribution and Skill multipliers make it so that you improve in certain areas easier than in others, but those assholes even went the extra mile. Classes are distributed based on foresight, making sure they correspond with whatever role would make you cause the least trouble without causing you to be unhappy and they even included some subtle probability manipulation to make sure it sticks."

"So it's actually not wrong what they say? That your Class is the crystallization of your destiny? Albeit one that's been forced on us?"

"Well, more like, put people where they are happy and can't cause trouble and they won't. But yeah."

"Phew. Only three things left, right? Waves, Talents, and Heroes?"

"Told you it would take a while."