Waking up it felt like a layer of sand had blown over my skin, with everything feeling a bit raw and rough, along with some very deep muscle pains and aches going bone deep. Slowly making my way into the living space I touched my substance cube, and got enough orange juice to drown a determined woman and enough bacon with eggs to feed a small family.

After making my way through all of that, plus some black coffee and a bit of toast, I felt a lot better, though still very tired and rough around the edges. A shower, fresh clothes, and some stretches took care of the rest except some general discomfort remaining and being worn down, but it would do to at least get through a short day.

Ignut found me doing light stretches in the training room, and seemed pleased he wasn’t dragging me out of bed at least. “Glad to see you moving, come over next to the door here and I will put up a board for us to go over the training plan.”

Walking over to the spot he pointed out, Ignut put a hand onto a wall until a blue holographic looking board that reminded me of a whiteboard.

“So first off, expanded system access. The Gambit system is light, it doesn’t like to give you too much, however there are ways to expand it. One of those is with a class, another is a profession. You have to meet prerequisites and they have to be created by a reasonably high rank god, don’t ask me how they do it I wish I knew, so they are very expensive. Eterna will buy you a class if you complete three challenges, so that should be the first goal to focus on.” As he spoke, writing appeared across the board, displaying a goals column and a requirements column so far.

“Now class and profession requirements are a bit wonky. Professions are the more simple one so lets start there. Effectively you have to have a related profession skill, usually something crafting related, to the profession, however if you have more then one skill that can synergise frequently they will be merged into a singular profession skill by the profession shard. Most common profession related skills are well recorded and known, so if you find one we can plan a path easily enough. I will have some books on basic profession skills you might find or want to try to earn added to your library in the living space.” Now the board had slightly expanded to fit everything in, which was helpful because I had wondered how a smaller end whiteboard was going to contain a whole training schedule plus this conversation topics.

“For classes things get a bit stranger. So they don’t have requirements, actually no. Let me explain how both types of shards work on a simpler level first, or this won’t make the most sense.” Sketching two shards on the board with his finger, one labelled P and the other C but otherwise looking the same, Ignut went into lecturer mode.

“Shards take the essence of themselves to create the class or profession by merging that essence with a skill or aspect of your own soul. Like taking a branch from one fruit tree and grafting it onto another to grow the new fruit, the branch you use determines what it will grow but how well this grows depends on its compatibility with the tree. Not the perfect analogy but it gets the key process across I think.”

“So Profession shards are geared towards a type of profession when they are created. There are Physical, which creates items like armour or a sword, Soul whose crafters create thinks related to your Morph or other more esoteric items, and Consumable which as the name implies lends itself towards professions that create healing, buff, or other more unusual consumable items. So if you have a skill or group of skills that lend themselves to one of those three you can use a shard to gain this profession. This acts like a small sub-soul and grows over usage to grant new advancements to its crafting skill and allows you to make things otherwise not possible until you are a much higher tier yourself without the profession.”

While speaking the essence of this started writing itself under the shard drawing labelled P, which would be helpful if this board was left up because I felt like eventually this was going to get annoying to keep track of.

“Classes are different. No class shard is special, or different, or does anything unique really at all. Instead they simply take your skills, souls latent talents, memories, and goals to forge a class. This gives you a few skills, stat increases, often a class unique skill whose specific function is unique to your exact copy of the class as no souls are perfect copies of each other. Though sometimes it takes a few tier increases to see the variation of your copy of the skill. They also cost a lot. That challenge you did was rated with a high difficulty to complete all additional challenges as it required a particular mental subset that isn’t that common for the bottom tier of soul, so it paid well above what your usual challenge would pay out. This won’t mean a lot yet but it paid out fifteen Divine units, a normal challenge pays out an average of eight to eleven, and a class shard depending on demand at the time normally costs around four hundred units.”

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Realising just how much ‘money’ this shard would cost, and the already existing offer to earn effectively at best five to ten percent of the cost before being given one, I was a bit taken back and it must have shown on my face.

“Fenris, no one expects souls to break even quickly. Now you have passed that first challenge and so it won’t cause you additional anxiety, let me share some numbers with you. That will explain why we give rewards early that cost a lot more than the requirements seem to justify. Each lesser soul at base costs around ten thousand units to summon, for yourself we added in another five thousand to nudge things to bring a soul compatible with Eterna’s blessing and compatible with a biological shell I would be familiar enough with to train. With those costs roughly three to four souls out of ten that are brought here pass their first challenge and are able to continue.”

Numbers started scrawling across the top right of the board showing the estimated costs of this to get a soul that was profitable already.

“Now, of those three to four, however , almost all of them double or triple their cost at least. From there though those with a class average out at the B tier for those that don’t reach demigod advancement. Meaning they are incredibly profitable, once they get going. So this isn’t charity, its again simple economics at play. You are a nice person, but also remember any goals we set are clear indicators that the additional investment is worthwhile. Now class shards.”

Getting ready to move on I at least felt a bit better. It might sound harsh to be called an investment but honestly it was better than doubting people's motivations or trying to work out what they wanted. It was clean and tidy, which I appreciated.

“Class shards work off your potential. So casualty develops when you prune certain potential pathways, so if you grow a skill or complete a divine gambit, there are no longer linked paths where you didn’t achieve those things. A class shard is like a converter that consumes these pruned paths to grow your soul. It only has the ability to consume those pathways based on your impact on the pruning, so if you team up with someone and you both pass a challenge you would each gain half the casualty not a full amount each.”

“So, why grow your class? Simply you get a skill at the first level, then at each level you get stat dice depending on your class, and every fifth level you get to either advance a skill or gain a subskill. Then every tenth level instead offers a new skill or a major skill upgrade. You are limited by your class as to how many skills you can get, and each skill can only have two sub-skills barring a few special skills.”

“I will leave this on the board, but the goal for now is to get familiar with your weapon and we will try to help you learn another skill. I think we will focus on a sensing skill for now, as that would have stopped that slime dropping on you in that challenge. Check over the board for your new training plan, any questions you can run by me tomorrow morning, but for today finish recovering and there will be a couple more books to read through in your living space.” With that Ignut made his way over to the pink cube and left me to look over my foreseeable future plans.

Training plan:

7:00 ~ Sense skill training.

10:00 ~ Weapon practice

12:00 ~ Meal break

13:00 ~ Puzzle practice

16:00 ~ Study (Challenge types, Monsters, Classes, Skills, Weapons, Professions)

19:00 ~ Meal, followed by personal time

Goals Requirements Gain a class shard Pass three challenges (One completed, two remaining Gain a profession shard Earn a profession related skill Earn a profession related skill Decide on a group of skills to aim for via actions in challenges, and reward offerings