Breath in

Hold

Breath out

Repeat

...

This... wasn't working.

It was extremely boring to sit and do nothing for an extended period of time, especially after I had been so active in these last few weeks. If this was before, it wouldn't be so bad. Lying around and watching a tv show or reading something was a great way to pass the time.

It felt like torture to bring me out of a sedentary life, hand me cool magical skills, make me fight for my life almost daily, and then ask me to sit still and think about some unknown magical law. I had to admit that I didn't know what I was doing either.

In books, the main character just sits down for a few minutes and magically understands, that wasn't how it worked in real life. Sitting and thinking really hard about it didn't make me understand it any better.

I wasn't going to just magically understand a law by sitting and pondering about it, that was absurd. That was like having no introduction to calculus and trying to learn it through meditation. It was crazy, crazy people would do that.

I admit, I had zero experience with anything regarding a law, but how hard could it be? I knew how ice formed, the freezing temperature of water, hell, I even knew the density. Which is lower than water if you were curious, which is why it floats.

Ice that's most commonly found in nature is not the ice that I was envisioning while I was meditating. Any ice that wasn't clear had air bubbles in it that would compromise the structure.

I remembered taking a fluids class in college where this came up, something about water holding too much air in it and having to expel it while it froze. The exact details were a little fuzzy since the class was a couple of semesters ago. It was the clear ice that I was trying to picture.

Sitting and thinking about everything I knew about ice yielded no results.

I had better things to do than to sit here and accomplish nothing.

Huh, now that I thought about it, maybe not.

My armor was made, my axe reforged in steel, and everyone had new weapons to use. There was nothing actively pressing that I had to get done before tomorrow's wave.

The previous three waves went down easily enough and I didn't have a feeling of imminent dread. I needed to get this law thing figured out soon if I wanted to get it before I evolved. If I continued receiving a level a wave then I would evolve in three waves.

That gave me 7 days to figure it out. Not a lot of time when you thought about it. Wave 15 came tomorrow with wave 16 in 4 days and the 17th in a week.

That was also relying on no changes to the waves as well. Wave 10 introduced a new variable and with a milestone wave coming up, something else could change, ruining my time clock.

If there was a change in tomorrow's wave I didn't think that it would be anything huge or I would feel it. I wasn't positive how my Spidey senses worked but they were spot on for the 10th wave.

I could be in the forge trying to level my profession as soon as possible or training [Ice Manipulation] but I needed a break from that. I had been doing those exact two things for the past few days and I was tired of it.

It was inevitable that I would have to go back and work on them again but I needed a break right now, something to freshen me up and give my mind a break.

My eyes drifted north toward the mountains. The Forbidden Mountains.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

That title sounded cliche, but it was the truth. Ever since we saw how high of a level the monsters there were, venturing there was forbidden. No one had to say anything about not going there but it was implied. Everyone had enough common sense not to venture too far in that direction.

The beasts were too powerful back then, but maybe not anymore. The beasts were past the evolution threshold and were in the F rank, but I had gotten a lot more powerful since then.

I faced boss monsters that were almost that high and they were more powerful than normal monsters. The last wave, wave 14, had a boss at level 24, one level shy of the threshold.

Oh, I didn't think about that. Tomorrow's wave would have a boss past that threshold. How could that have slipped my mind?

The level 24 boss from the last wave was difficult to put down even while working together with Austin. Jonathan even got involved at one point but he couldn't handle the fight for long.

Being a [Shield Warrior] made him a really good tank, doubly so with his earth affinity. The only problem was his low level. He had been gaining on me after every wave and was only a few levels behind me now at level 20, but it was still a 4-level gap behind the boss.

It was annoying that I was doing everything I could to level up and get stronger and he was gaining on me. He didn't even have an uncommon class like me. Maybe that was the reason... who knows?

Now that we had enough personal points to buy whatever profession starter that we wanted, Austin and Jonathan finally obtained their professions. No one else wanted to be an explorer so Austin had to buy his outright. That left him one skill behind me in total since I had more points to spend than him.

He was happy with his choice and I wasn't going to say anything about it. It didn't seem like it would be very easy to level while we were here in the tutorial but it wasn't my decision.

Jonathan on the other hand went a bit more practical with his profession and chose Merchant. He had been a salesman before the tutorial and it translated well into Merchant.

A few others in the family wanted to be merchants so he didn't have to foot the bill for the entire book by himself. There weren't a lot of opportunities to level up that profession, like Explorer, but there were things he could do.

If I had him purchase everything I needed for the forge he got experience for that. He got a discount in the store based on his level so it was beneficial for me as well.

Trading with the few messengers we had received was another thing that he could do to level up. I didn't know if giving the refugees aid counted as experience as a Merchant or not, I didn't ask him.

Anything revolving around trading or purchasing resources was in his wheelhouse though, and he seemed to know what he was doing.

With their new professions, they had more stats to fight with and Jonathan wasn't as far behind. It showed in his help with the boss. He could only tank a few hits but it was better than nothing.

It let me have free reign to attack however I wanted for a few moments and that led to some deep wounds to start the fight.

I didn't know how well that would translate to an F-ranked beast though. When we were fighting the evolved boar when we were below level 10 it was a slog and F rank was supposed to be worse.

Every time you evolved the gap got steeper and steeper. H to G rank wasn't that bad of a jump, G to F was bigger. Something like A to S rank was near insurmountable for most people.

Only someone with a high rarity class at A tier could make the jump and the S tier would have to have a low rarity class to make it possible. There were always outliers, but those were the exceptions to the rule.

Having the boss split its attention 3 ways was a lot easier than when it was just the two of us. We had ranged support from Hal, Carrie, and Rachel but it wasn't the same.

They were up on the wall shooting from safety, we were down with the beast trying not to get eaten.

After thinking about it, we should be fine. I had a host of new skills and I knew the other two did as well. [Ice Manipulation] helped strengthen [Ice Wall] into a defensive ability strong enough that could hold off a boss's attack or two. [Rage] was a nice boost and with my strength stat still climbing, the boost got better at every level.

With a strength stat of 140, the boosting skill brought it up to 154. It added over 4 levels worth of strength in a single skill. It added more stats than what I initially started with.

I was looking forward to seeing what my new magic attack would do. I wasn't expecting [Ice Bolt] to be insanely powerful but it should be able to do some damage.

Throw the boss out of rhythm unexpectedly, or use it to target a vulnerable part while it was distracted. I had a lot more options in combat now that I had a decent number of skills to back me up.

Depending on how the boss went maybe we could start going up into the mountains for our hunting trips. It was getting harder to find worthy prey in the forest and we usually had to settle for level 20 or so beasts.

The forest just didn't have that many high-level monsters in it for us to hunt. We wiped out most of the more powerful ones already. The level 15 bear that scared us so much in the beginning was long dead and its hide used for armor. I think Scott has that set if I'm not mistaken.

The mountains might hold the key to gaining a law before my evolution. It was the only place that had snow near here and maybe being in the environment might spark something.

Gah, I wish this wasn't so hard. It felt like I was guessing at what might work when I knew for a fact people already had the answer I was looking for. If only the system wasn't so stingy.

Laws didn't come into play until the evolution to E rank but maybe the environment was different. I'd read cultivation stories where people gain enlightenment from watching a waterfall of some shit so maybe that was the answer.

It didn't matter if it wasn't helpful, anything was better than sitting here and thinking about it. Some hiking might do me good.