CHAPTER 144
Mus had asked a question and some of the craziness of his dream jumping had faded, but the world was not functioning in his head how Tom thought it should.
In some fashion, it was like he was separate from time. People seemed to move before they did and the voice echoed as the different syllables of the words blended together.
The trumpets were still going, and he needed to deal with that.
He shut his eyes and stepped sideways into his system room.
Standard, unchanging metal walls greeted him, and then the text appeared.
Congratulations, your skill True Dreaming is available to evolve.
Do you wish to evolve it now?
“Yes.” Tom ground out with the echoes, making him feel nauseous.
What was all that crap he had just lived through?
Those visions.
Were they figments of his imagination? Or the future? Or possible futures? Or…
Tom did not want to think about it. The memory of two of them in particular made him want to shrivel over and die. Those two entities of unfathomable power. He shivered. That was a paygrade he never expected to play on and nor was it one to strive for… Even thinking was dangerous. The GODs Tom imagined would not appreciate threats to their existence.
Tom focused on the plain metal wall to distract his errant thoughts, but the wall text just shifted and altered, so he read what was written. The words blurred, but he could perceive them.
Calculating evolution options…
You can evolve the skill in one of two ways.
* A direct evolution of the existing skill to a higher tier.
* Alter the skill to become Prophetic Sapient Dreaming instead of True Dreaming.
“What’s the difference?”
Prophetic Sapient Dreaming weakens all aspects of the skill but removes the restriction tying the visions it shows exclusively to the past.
The direct evolution option upgrades all existing features of the skill, including the ability to penetrate wards, frequency, duration of vision, availability of information extracted.
Tom considered the brief description of the two possibilities. While there was more data available, he knew he had limited time to decide and reading more would be wasteful. His mind raced to consider the options.
In the context of why he had been gifted the potion, he felt obliged to accept the straight upgrade version. The killer clearly had defensive wards to stop his skill and Prophetic Sapient Dreaming specifically weakened the penetrative ability. Offsetting that downside of the new Skill was a true oracle ability that would allow him to see events in the future versus the current skill that showed him events in the past to arm him against what he would face in the future.
True Dreaming so far had helped him upgrade a component of the golem and got a much better deal out of Mus for humans and himself than they had any right to expect. Tom was sure that a lot of Mus’s largess in paying a million in value for each volunteer was based on those first impressions. If he had been intimidated like the others, then Joline wouldn’t have received the opportunity to negotiate such a rich deal. Then all the rewards dolled out with had been off a far lower base, and he would never have got this potion, another thought chimed in. Even though it showed the past to help his future, it was not a toothless ability however, being able to see the future directly would definitely simply the interpretation.
Tom wanted the future capacity. It sung to him, but tutorial instincts screamed at him to reconsider. That jump to see future events would have to come with draw backs. Possibly only in a ward breaching capability, but possibly in other more important areas. His existing skill was already a powerful oracle. It had proven its worth with Mus and Hao and lived up to its high tier status. It was probably better to enhance his existing skill that take an easier to use a skill that would be weaker in the area that mattered, which was predicting the future and finding opportunities. Because Tom knew the Prophetic Sapient Dreaming would have to be less potent in those key areas to justify its extra reach to bring future visions.
Plus, there was absolutely nothing to suggest that Prophetic Sapient Dreaming would be easier to understanding than the existing skill and lots to indicate it wouldn’t be. Just having to place a vision in more of the timeline would complicate the analysis.
The decision was logical sound, but it felt dirty. What sort of person willingly gave up the chance to see the future?
“One who understood that the future is shaped by the past and not the other way around.” He whispered to himself.
That seemed to prompt his wall to react, and the text changed to present a question.
Which way do you wish to evolve your skill True Dreaming?
The words flashed in front of. Bright and obnoxious in response to his overly long pause while he considered things followed by his cryptic whisper.
“Straight evolution of True Dreaming.”
Congratulations. Skill True Dreaming - Tier 7 has evolved to skill True Dreaming - Tier 8.
Tom sighed in relief. He had done it. He had a tier eight skill and new trumpets were going off to tell him he still had details to attend to.
“What? Show the most pressing message.” He ordered.
Congratulations, your skill True Dreaming - Tier 8 is available for evolution.
For a moment, Tom stared at the words, not understanding what was written. Was this a glitch? Could the system malfunction?
Then he saw the number associated with the upgrade.
Did this mean he was getting a tier nine skill?
Internally, Tom completed some fist pumps.
Would you like to evolve your skill True Dreaming - Tier 8 to True Dreaming Tier 9?
“Yes!” he almost yelled. There were no downsides to selecting this option. “Evolve. Go.”
A string of congratulated through messages run across his screen and the final score evolution was displayed in front of him.
Skill: True Dreaming - Tier 9
This skill allows you to dream from the perspective of a sapiant creature that has observed a past event that has relevance to the dreamers’ aims or the potential to enrich him or her. Additional senses may be overlaid to highlight key features. This ability will evade most forms of warding.
The undirected skill can activate up to three times during the night if the information meets the core criteria.
A directed dreaming skill can be used proactively on a topic of the user’s choice.
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Effectiveness is driven by relevance, proximity, level of opposing fate and the dreamer’s static fate pool minus class levels.
Restrictions. No other oracle skills can be utilised by someone with the True Dreaming Skill.
Tom assessed what was written.
Right there on the wall was the evidence. He possessed a tier nine skill. There was no way he would tell Mus that, because it might be enough to be kidnapped over. If Mus did that and linked Tom’s continual life to his people’s prosperity Tom had no doubt that this skill would work on Mus’s behalf if the right incentives were implied.
“How much experience would it cost to buy this skill?”
The words shivered and changed.
13,100,000
He gulped at the size of that number. He definitely wasn’t mentioning the secondary upgrade to Mus. Though he had been discussing giving the trade deals with thirty million, so it was possible a tier nine skill was not that incredible, but Tom did not believe it.
Skills and Spells to natives were more than their nominal value it was why that tier four spell had been so expensive. It was imaginable that to the natives a tier nine oracle skill was worth a hundred million.
Tom was not about to ask.
Trumpets were still going off that was telling him he had more to review.
“Do I have new titles?”
“Yes, you do.”
“Please show them.”
Title: Evolution Master: Requirements to evolve an existing ability is reduced by 50%.
* Awarded for: Evolving abilities for sixteen power ranks. (The evolution of a tier eight spell to tier 9 is worth 9 power ranks)
* Uncommon Title. Competition Rank: 3rd, 20 Ranking points, 300 experience.
Title: Oracle Master (1): Other oracle skill users will find it significantly harder to locate you and you’ll be able to Pierce their machinations 50% easier when they are acting against you or your interests.
* Awarded for: Possessing a tier 8 Oracle skill.
* Uncommon Title. Competition Rank: 29th, 5 Ranking points, 100 experience.
Title: Oracle Master (2): Oracle skill users with abilities below tier 5 will be unable to use their skills against you or your direct companions. Higher tiers will find it significantly harder to locate you and you’ll be able to pierce their machinations 75% easier when they are acting or attempting to act against you or your interests.
* Awarded for: Possessing a tier 9 Oracle skill.
* Rare Title. Competition Rank: 10th, 20 Ranking points, 500 experience.
Tom absorbed the information and then re-read the third title and nodded to himself. None of the titles in of themselves were extraordinary, with the oracle one’s being rated as uncommon and rare, respectively. That suggested that getting oracle skills to tier eight and nine was not that rare at least on a population scale.
Yet the reality for a low-rank competitor like him was quite different. For him, it was near immunity from divination capacities because there was almost no chance that natives with higher tier oracle abilities would be sent to locate someone as weak as him.
The only people looking for him would be those low in their hierarchy and unless they had Oracle skills above tier five, they would be unable to find him or those in his immediate group.
The more he studied the title the more amazed he was. Immunity from anything at tier five or below was huge and while it would not benefit him immediately at some stage, he knew he would be in conflict with other sapients. When that happened, some of them would have Oracle skills or premonition abilities, and these titles would let him completely negate that skill set. If a team hunting them relied on it, then they would be helpless, especially when his own oracle ability would give him access to all their planning.
As for that first tile Evolution Master?
Well, that went into a basket of its own. It too was only an uncommon title which told Tom that most high-level people would get this at some point, which based on his understanding of evolutions and lifespans in the hundreds of years that made sense.
There was however a difference in receiving this title as a level eighteen versus when you were in the hundreds. A boost to evolutions when he had a few low tiered spells and skills that he used extensively would have a far greater impact than to someone who had already exhausted most of those easily gained evolutions. The key to evolving abilities was to use them broadly and gain an in-depth understanding of their capacities. Once you had levels in a hundred and a similar number of abilities, you used regularly then your chance of evolving any of them decreased. It was just mathematics, as you no longer had the time to focus on any one ability and learn it to a comparable level of depth that you achieved with key abilities early in your development.
His mind felt out the reward and discovered it was better than he had initially thought. The text was a fifty percent reduction in requirements, not elapsed time. Everyone knew that the last ten percent of the progress was the hardest often taking longer than the first fifty percent all together. Tom guessed that the time required to understand a skill before evolution had probably been decreased by sixty percent and potentially as much as seventy percent. That was as much as three times faster but it was also more evolutions because how many people out there developed their understanding of a skill to ninety-five percent of what was required to get an evolution before a new shiny option presented there and they never gained those final few percent?
He was willing to bet there were far more skills stuck, having only met ninety percent of the requirements to evolve than the same ones having only reached forty-five percent of them.
With his limited number of Skills and Spells combined with his expertise from the tutorial, his work ethic and now this title his rate of evolutions was going to progress at an extraordinary pace.
No more trumpets were going off, so he returned to the real world.
“You got an evolution?”
“I did. It was a straight upgrade of the existing skill. Hopefully, I now have the ward penetration to reveal the name of the culprit.”
“I’m sure it will. And your fate investment. Your racial trait did it work?”
“I assume this is confidential?”
Mus hesitated. “I think I already know that the answer is yes. I won’t extend you full confidentiality because if it works, my people the Lookuns will collectively need to use it for these three. The value of an ability to ignore range is immense and we’ll be buying up all the potions we can to get access to more highly evolved skills at a vastly reduced cost.”
“But you’ll be discrete with the knowledge. And only for them?”
Mus’s whiskers twitched. “Well, we might also use it to trade with hu-mans. I imagine that can be profitable for both of us.”
“The fate definitely worked. It altered the probabilities.”
“Did you get a double evolution?”
“No,” Tom answered flatly. “I just evolved the singular skill, but that was my aim. I didn’t try to force it to give the option of a double evolution. I thought that would be greedy.”
Mus’s face was completely unreadable, and Tom was unsure whether he caught the lie.
“Thank you for confirming its effectiveness. Now I owe you for the statue. Remind me of a moment of your skills. Earth magic, lightning magic, Spear anything else? Falling, dodge, alternative weapons you want to develop?”
“I have a fate based falling skill that was earned.”
Everlyn and the others gave him a curious look, but he would not risk stunting their development by telling them what that meant.
“A class-based movement skill and emergency teleport. A number of skills to support my rock throwing, and I intend to buy a full gambit of balance and dodge skills.”
Mus nodded thoughtfully and produced five boxes from his knapsack. “These two are for you”. He tapped the most ornamental box. “This is the highest tier potion and the least valuable on the open market. It enhances fate based skills. I doubt it has the oomph to effect your tier eight oracle skill, but should supercharge your earned skill. It’s a non-linear evolution.”
“What does non-linear mean?”
“It’s unlikely to advance anything up a tier, but non-linear evolutions add an extra aspect to whatever it evolves. The most common non-linear evolution is that which occurs for a tier two fire sword ability. Which after it evolves, it generates the same sword effect as previously but also produces a free fire shield. It remains as officially a tier two spell, but in terms of combat potentially it is considered tier four. The upgrade path is so well known that ninety percent of potions go to that explicit combination.” He paused. “How that will work with a fate based earned skill I have no ideas.”
Tom accepted the boxes and pushed them into his inventory.
“The second one is similarly interesting and is perfect for a newly arrived competitor or someone who has just Earned a dodge skill. The evolution energy tests are related to the difference between the skill level and your technical skill.” Mus winked at him. “Given your abilities. I imagine you’ll get something decent.”
“Those two sounds amazing.”
Mus nodded.
“I would be interested in finding out at some point how it went. My race is not one for extravagant goodbyes.”
“Wait.” Tom blurted. “Could you sense a Radunoc Mark?”
Mus hesitated. “I’m not aware of what that is.”
“It’s a trait or tattoo that allows you to influence trials. The killer possesses one.”
“Hmm… I have seen such abilities before. I sensed nothing when I chatted with anyone, but you hu-mans had lots of exotic things associated with them. Let’s see.”
Tom could feel some sort of power radiating from Mus, as it used some type of ability. Then Mus shook his head.
“That gave me nothing. If someone has the ability, they have hidden it from me.”
Tom sagged slightly. “Well, it was worth asking.”
“It very much was.” Mus agreed. “Your upgraded skill will hopefully let you gain more information. Now, if we leave now, we can cross the wasp plains before nightfall.”
With a thud birdbrain hopped forward and then lowered itself so it laid on the ground.
“Up, up.” Mus instructed and the otter along with his three new companions mounted the enormous animal. Once they were attached, the griffin pushed itself to a stand position. Tom could feel the tremors through the rock from those movements.
Then it exploded into the air and Tom stumbled under the earth shift and the blast of wind.
With vast sweeps of its wings, it vanished into the distance.
Everlyn linked arms with him. “Wow. That was certainly something.”