I could feel myself being moved somewhere. Everything hurt but not as bad as I was expecting. I could hear wolves and other dragging sounds. This attracted my interest, so I forced my eyes to open.

I was being dragged on a stretcher over the frozen river. I didn’t want to tilt my head up so much to see who was carrying me but Emma was walking beside me and George was guiding Francis. So, I would assume it would be Arthur who was dragging me. Knowing I was safe and that I had been treated and we were going back home I gave a thumbs up to a worried Emma and let myself pass out.

Everything felt a lot better the next time I opened my eyes. I was in my room and it seemed to be nighttime. I slowly started to test my movement capabilities and found myself surprised. Everything was stiff, and I still needed a lot of healing, but I was surprisingly well off. Need to thank fantasy healing for this and I need to remember to buy more of those healing potions.

I guess my movement woke up Goose as he flapped to me, and I started to pet him to calm him down. His emotions were all over the place and I could understand the pain he went through. Sometimes it’s harder to watch someone get hurt than get hurt yourself. I spent some time just calming him down before I turned my attention to my notifications.

The first thing to surprise me was that I got another achievement. The rewards for it were extremely generous and had interesting implications.

New Achievement: Tier surpasser

20 stat points into three main stats

5 stat points into all sub stats

I have heard about this tier thing before but nothing clear about what it actually is. Apparently, it’s important enough that you might get an achievement for I am guessing killing someone at a higher tier than you.

I wonder what’s the threshold for reaching a higher tier and what it actually will do because there seems to be a clear dividing line that the system has put in place. The ranking system that developed races use is something they have made up and doesn’t actually belong to the system.

In this world information and how it's distributed is the most annoying thing. Why are they so hung up on keeping secrets? I could only hope that it was for a good reason. Perhaps if you know about some achievements you can't actually receive them.

That would be the only excuse I could think of but if this isn't the case this world really needs people that are willing to share information. I feel sorry for any meta players who would end up in this world. How can you play meta if you don't have all the information?

But then again who am I to complain? I have only been here less than a year and perhaps the way they are doing it is actually the correct way that will keep this world from being destroyed by powerful people. I mean if I understand it correctly if a wizard reaches a certain power level, they could be considered a nuke-level threat. So, perhaps it is best to limit how many people can reach that far.

Thinking about that made my head hurt. It was almost circular logic which I hated the most. Checking out my other notifications I got a lot of level-ups for skills and abilities that affect my solo combat. But what's more surprising I got 5 levels in all my classes. This came as a complete surprise, and I could only think it was because of the monster being a higher tier.

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This got my empathy past 80 giving me another trait, pheromone interpretation. This was an unpleasant trait. Now my mind could understand pheromones. Before it was something only my subconscious mind would pick up. It was difficult to adjust to the new stimulus but not impossible. I had to wonder if this was how dogs would understand the world.

I also got intelligence past 80. This trait was standard if I had to guess. Enhanced cognitive capabilities. A general boost but a welcomed one. Hope this will get me past the next stage of improvement.

After I moved a bit and loosened everything up, I went back to bed and kept thinking about every monster fight I have had in this world. I remember clearly the statement that fights usually only take moments before a winner is decided but in my experience, about half the time a fight takes a lot longer. So why the discrepancy?

There was only one variable that was different and that was me. I mean the achievement I got basically proved it. The battles that take a long time to win. I was meant to lose them and quite quickly, especially the last one.

The difference seemed to be my ability to control my energy and that I have access to a higher tier of energy thanks to my core. I don’t know what I did to deserve that much luck to be able to get that trait but it has probably saved my life in every difficult fight.

It might be a good idea to lean further into that aspect. Specializing I believe is the correct thing to do as I think I have made it past the foundation part of my growth. Well, perhaps a little bit more to shore up the foundations correctly but I think I am quite close.

While I could move a bit I will probably need to be in the bed for the next week or more so it would be a good idea to start working on energy control even more. I mean what else have I got to do besides that? This will also help me recover faster.

Thinking back on the fight my energy control was truly the thing that gave me the victory. The monster had so much energy, but it just wasted so much on useless movement and just generally was very inefficient in using it.

While I have been extremely happy with my efficiency perhaps, I have not truly dived enough into it. Every ability that I have I trained to a certain level of efficiency but I have stopped at that. For every single one of them. That efficiency limit that I put on myself is now really old and goes back to when I first started to experiment with energy.

I keep finding things that I miss, and I don’t like this. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to fix that because perspective is something that gives you wisdom and you get that by messing up. You just didn't know better before you mess up. But there must be a way to alleviate this problem.

First is to listen and try to understand the advice given not just from my perspective but theirs as well this might help. Then I need to periodically sit down if needed for multiple days and just think back on everything I am doing and try to see from a different angle what I might need to do differently or understand what I have missed.

Days went by quickly as I slowly got myself back into acceptable form. While I would not be confident in fighting anything close to my level, I could now properly start to do recovery training. It won't take me long now to get back into peak condition. I have missed going to the village and it might hurt my relationships there to not be in contact for this long, but this cannot be helped.

Another week went by, and I felt I was finally back to my peak form even better than before actually. The time it took to reflect on myself also helped me realize how much it actually helped that I have trained myself the normal way.

My theory about having a better body and that helping bring out my power better was completely true. If I hadn’t trained, I would guess I would leave about half of my current strength on the table. This will give me a huge leg up on anyone who believes that all you need to get stronger is the system.

All the proof I need was just to remember what happened in the lake fight. Sometimes I can’t even believe the images in my memories they are like something out of anime. The monster sending me flying remind me of almost every superpower fight I have seen.

But this fight also helped me get a better grip on my powers as I was finally able to go all out. This in turn helped me get a general idea of how I fit into the power structures of the sentient races.

Long story short I need to start keeping my true powers hidden. If it’s needed I will still do it but it would be better if I could at least hide some of it until the nation is revealed. I can already picture people's faces when they realize I am a lot more powerful than they thought and because of that, all their plans are now fucked up. I can’t wait for it to happen.