Earth magic: control dirt mastery changes from "advanced" to "master"
You have obtained 1/10 requirements for a trait upgrade
Due to improving one spell's mastery to Master from Novice without formal instruction
Woah what, the last time that was mentioned was for upgrading the genius trait, meaning there was another upgrade if I mastered ten things without being told how! Even harder though was that the trait itself mentioned how the skills were in different categories, so it was a fair bet that nothing else under the header of earth magic would count. I already had one more obvious one to use, 'power coat', but after that if I am unable to find a way to unlock the skill limiters it would take me at least until class level twenty, if there wasn't overlap in category in any skills by then. Chances are high something would overlap, like I'd get another earth magic which would add two more levels needed to have enough skill diversification.
As for 'control dirt' itself, master level gave me much greater range and the previous two bonuses were enhanced further. Mud was down to only about twice the energy to handle than regular dirt, when I first tried lifting mud without the bonus it was probably near ten times. Force was up even higher, I could slam dirt balls into things harder than I could punch if I didn't coat my fists, it also meant I could lift stuff with a dirt platform more easily. Speaking of platforms, I jammed six tendrils into the ground and wove the seventh around them, then with a little burst of energy the disk I outlined popped free and I was once more flying. With all my new bonuses and magic gear I managed to reach near thirty meters off the ground, six times as high as last time.
This let me breach the forest canopy since it was mostly composed of birch like trees, looking around I could see signs of the various features nearby, like the divot marking the bush grove, the crease where the river winds through it, the black monolith of stone partway up the mountain... hold up. I turned back to look, and there was indeed a big black chunk of rock partway up the mountain that clearly didn't belong there. I say that because the mountain was of the generic grey rock variety, now how didn't I see it before? I slowly lowered myself down and I had my answer, it was nestled in some kind of valley and was obscured from view just slightly below my max height.
Nothing crazy came from that direction so it probably wasn't a threat, but it was super interesting, and it wasn't too far away. The soldiers never found it because the limit of the hunting zone was only a half day's walk so they could kill a thing and get it back home before it started rotting. It was a thing to check out once Valerie was an adult and didn't need my support anymore, get an escort of Christina and some soldiers to see if was anything interesting. Course I first had to ask Victoria if she knew what it was, if it was something that was passive until you touched it and then it tried to kill you I would stay away from it. I settled back down to the ground and after making sure nothing else up here needed my attention I headed back inside for the night.
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Today I headed out with Valerie and an attached celestial, with them I could really go at it with Christina, who was waiting for me since I told her what the plan was yesterday. Before we got started on that though, I asked Valerie if she needed any new information to level effectively, she asked if I had anything that could give a magic sense headache without needing a lot of range. Apparently she had reached maximum range that was too low to grind MFR effectively, I asked if she tried using 'move dirt' at the same time, turned out she didn't realize both of those could be used together. With her set to go I turned to Christina and turned on 'power hit', she responded with the defense version, and we proceeded to beat the snot out of eachother.
Trading attack and defense position every few hits and being sure to press on the energy flow as hard as possible we quickly leveled both of those base melee skills. In just a few hours we hit the power leveling limit, as a bonus we both got a level in 'self blunt damage resistance'. I technically guessed what it was before I could see it, but it was only applied to self damage, as in it made it harder for me to break something from hitting something that was harder than bone. It was really helpful in Christina's five on one fight since it let her break her sister's arms with a bash without her own breaking from two equally strong objects hitting eachother. With us at the limit for the low tier skills we moved on to the higher tier version.
That was a lot more intense of a trade since even with my mastery advantage 'power coat' was inherently weaker than 'power strike' since that was a specialist attacking skill vs my general purpose skill. A few more hours passed before we finally hit the leveling limit for them as well so Christina left to go hunt while I sat with Valerie for a bit and helped her smooth out some things she didn't realize she didn't get quite right and compared our 'move dirt' to the other's. After that I decided to try a new method of fire training with the celestial, once my furnace was up to temperature I circulated physical energy into one hand in the raw defense form and circulated mana into my other hand, then I jammed them in.
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I actually had a success but not in a way I thought, the majority of both hands were completely burnt, but the tips of my thumbs where I happened to have them touching were less burnt. Did fire resistance actually need the weirdness of duel energy manipulation? I had my hands healed before I tried the new idea, I circulated both physical energy and mana into one hand. Sticking it into the fire was the worst pain yet, being resistant to fire meant it took longer for my nerve endings to burn off and stop sending horrible pain signals. After repeating that several times I actually got two skills that were related but different 'resist heat' and 'resist burning', one was being resistant to high temperatures causing flesh to melt, while the other one was effectively resistance to rapid oxidation.
These were an absolute bitch to train, every level I gained made my hand take longer and longer to burn so it hurt for greater lengths of time. I am sure that eventually the resistance will be stronger than what wood fire can produce, but that was not today, five levels in and the speed dropped like a rock, four was the limit before diminishing returns kicked in but I could usually grind out eight for active skills, but passive skills themselves had been more difficult since there wasn't really anything to just pour more energy into. I am glad I finally figured it out, it was annoying that no matter how much I burned there wasn't any progress. Needing to circulate both mental and physical energy at the same time in the same spot and then burning that spot is one of those things that seemed impossible to do accidentally since I doubted many classes used both.
As me and Valerie headed back down to the royal chamber for the night I saw the awoken celestial walking around and asked her how she was doing. She was doing great, but once she got over the initial excitement of being able to walk around by herself she noticed she felt like something was off. She and her fellow celestials were air purifiers because they couldn't do anything else, but why would something that was only supposed to clean the air have all her other powers? She believed that something happened when the blue boxes appeared that made them sleep, but she didn't think the blue box itself knocked them out, it just happened near the same time. It was an interesting theory but we needed more information, I bid her good night and was surprised that I ended up back home right when Victoria was about to lay the next set of eggs, my subconscious instincts were getting good I guess.
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The third day of training was really annoying, Valerie and I were able to get 'move dirt' to level twenty four but because of the diminishing returns effect getting one last level was effectively impossible. I would be able to get it if I did something ridiculous but I had no idea what new ridiculous thing could be done to speed it along. So we just trained and I showed off how crazy the next tier was with pure volume it could handle compared to the current one. I also showed her the hardened sphere, it was a great lesson on not underestimating spells and was fantastic at giving headaches from looking at it magically. Since we were able to finish up magic training rather early I had her also work on combat skills, probably pointless for a worker but being ready for anything can't hurt.
From all the practice with Christina I was more capable of explaining how to move physical energy around, and she was just clever enough to handle doing it. She took a bit longer than her sister to do it because she occasionally messed up so had to do extra, but in the end she also got the base level power moves. She also confirmed she could not see their stat blocks so workers did not get anything from that tree ever, disappointing but understandable. Another fact was she completely lacked a combat style, soldiers had that hyper aggressive one and Christina had the evolved form, but workers had nothing on combat at all. Other than that it was an uneventful day, which was nice on occasion.
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It was the fourth day of Valerie's training, and it was finally time to see what happens if you got a spell to intermediate before you are supposed to even know about it. I set up several items and had her go first with them for the bonus challenge of giving her the tier one genius trait. Her curious nature soon resulted in a correct guess of using 'move dirt' on the glob of mud I had set out, and several things happened at the same time. She must have gotten a level because apparently I just earned a new trait, 'teacher', because I successfully guided a pupil to intermediate mastery. That probably meant she didn't earn the genius trait, I supposed I was a professional when it came to dirt and making it move with magic.
She got the expected mastery, the same as 'control dirt' it was now cheaper to use on half dirt materials. She also got an upgraded early bird trait, Dawn Bird, upping the bonus exp from ten percent to twenty five percent for any spell she got before she was supposed to unlock it. That was a fairly good boon so long as she stayed under leveled, which is harder than you think since it would mean no digging, even if she was all silvery now she was still a worker and those loved digging. Next up were the two spells that were worker class spells but not "me" spells, we both had no idea what it would take to upgrade them. I supposed trying everything had some effect because a few hours after lunch she got something, meaning it was time to analyze the crap out of it.