The days started to go by faster and faster. Getting this new tier of energy under control was harder than expected. While I could still use my abilities and they were a lot more powerful. I didn’t have the fine control or the capability to manipulate it like I used to. This was a serious setback but training it wasn't as hard as the first time as I already knew what I needed to do.

Other than that, I started to test out the new abilities that I have. Haste was one of the easier-to-test abilities. Like I had expected it gave me a huge boost in speed but in exchange when the boost ended, I got a wave of exhaustion.

I could also activate it at different levels so I could manage the consequences. I couldn’t use it back-to-back it wouldn't let me activate it so often, but it seemed to have a few-hour cooldown depending on how hard I pushed it.

But the speed it gave was amazing and even better it boosted my mental side as well so I could keep up with my own movements. It wasn’t at a level of time stop but dropping things will never be a problem again. It was hard to quantify how much it sped me up but using my regular energy and dropping my sword it now took about 4 times as long to hit the ground.

Crushing hands seemed to be extremely useful for multiple cases. Not only did it help me grip my weapons better, but it gave me a damage boost while fighting with fists or open hands. It was an extremely versatile ability that also meant I would no longer need any weapons to do massive damage.

But there were limitations. While it did have some damage mitigation, I could easily overwhelm that if I pumped enough energy into the ability so I could hurt my hands quite badly.

Still, this could be a possible lifesaver when my enemies think that I am harmless or a last-ditch effort attack to save my life. But that did mean I would be sacrificing my arm to save my life.

If I were able to get an ability that would allow me to restore my body it would have great synergy with this ability. Of course, anything that made my body stronger would also help this ability hugely.

Trouble sense was a finicky ability at best. It didn't allow me to divert more energy into it, but I was able to switch the stream that fed it from my normal energy to my core energy which will hopefully make it a lot better. While I haven’t really felt it working, I do get the sense that I needed to train which luckily I was already planning on doing.

Stealth the ability helps me achieve whatever my stealth skill is trying to achieve. If I had to give a name to what the ability could do it would be an all-compassing ability. It helps absolutely every part of trying to be sneaky. But now you didn't have to rely on your physical capabilities as energy would now help achieve what you're trying to do. This ability could be extremely powerful, but it will depend a lot on the person who was using it.

I felt that the interactive map had so much potential, but it needed a few more abilities to truly bring it to the next level. If I had some sort of a scanning ability that could penetrate the earth and give me the data that I could feed into interactive map, I could possibly survey my entire land and beyond for useful resources.

Nothing could escape my notice and I would like that a lot. It would be even more awesome if I could collect data into the ability so I could track animal movements over the years and other stuff like that.

But I’m guessing I would need a lot more abilities to make that work and I don’t know if it would be a good idea to put so many resources into this idea. While it would be useful it wouldn't be necessary.

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I have a good enough memory and it will probably get a lot better as I level up to remember most of those things but I guess I am just used to being able to keep information on my PC so I could always get back to it at the later date.

As I had suspected armour damage absorption was an absolute game-changer. It did even more than I dreamed possible. Not only did it lower any amount of damage done to my armour I could also use that absorb damage to fuel my attacks.

While I couldn’t currently fight for hours and then release a huge attack that would end a dragon it might be possible in the future. This however brought up the biggest problem that I seemed to have. My lacking equipment.

My armour could only keep so much damage before it started to break itself and while my sword was better with energy it still couldn't handle the amount I could push into it.

It's quite disappointing that my equipment will be holding me back. My level gains and training have pushed my body beyond my gear's ability to keep up with it. Not only has my bow been left behind for quite a while my regular armour is also experiencing that problem.

If I bend beyond my amours capabilities without reinforcing it with my abilities, I start to bend the steel. While I made my armour extremely flexible it still isn’t as flexible as my body. And now if I wasn’t careful, I could destroy my armour by stretching.

I let Arthur make some inquiries from some of the merchants in the village and I had to conclude that I was quite poor even with the gold that I got from the goblins. Currently, I could only get a few armour pieces and a weapon that would still be too weak for me to properly use but a lot better than what I currently have.

This needed to be fixed and I saw two ways to go about it. One was to buy the raw materials and make better stuff myself and the other was to make better stuff from the materials I can gather and sell some of those items to get a lot more coin.

My energy cores didn’t disappoint. It took them a long time and the process was still ongoing but they are now making even stronger energy. It seems that whatever base energy strength I will have they will make a small amount of stronger energy. This was amazing and I couldn't wait until they finished upgrading and started to grow bigger again.

An idea did pop into my head that perhaps it would be a good idea to try and make more of them in my body but when I wanted to try a sense of dread came over me that overwhelmed me. It took me a few minutes to calm down, but I guess trouble sense got its first mark for saving my life.

After that, I refocused on training my energy while time passed quickly. The weather started to get colder and colder. My apprentices stopped going to the village and even the dungeon runs by the villagers stopped.

The winter had finally entered its last phase before it started to turn into spring. While before we had what I call a soft winter where the temperatures barely went past minus 15 degrees Celsius. Now starts the crisp winter. Temperatures plummeted in only two weeks to minus 30 to 35 degrees.

In this weather, even my temperature core had difficulty keeping up, especially if the wind was strong, but it still did its job. With the rabbit fur cloak going out was quite pleasant. While my apprentices now also had a similar cloak that only helped them to do their jobs for a short period before they needed to go back inside. I usually stayed with the animals so my body temperature would help keep the room warm.

Everything was quiet during this period because no one wanted to move. Everyone was hunkered down and just waiting for the weather to start to warm up. I actually quite enjoyed it as moving around was a lot easier because I didn’t have to use my weight reduction to walk on the snow as the cold made its surface so hard that it started to support even my armoured weight.

I would assume that a lot of animals would have died if the snow wasn’t so thick. Currently, the rabbits were just living their lives as they had before. Making burrows in the snow to find frozen grass to eat. But if they didn’t have the snow to protect them from the cold their situation would be a lot worse.

But the weather didn't stay like this for long. In only a month the temperature started to rise again. It was tough for everyone here but I’m guessing we got it quite easy. I couldn’t imagine how bad it could be in other places where food and fire fuel was difficult to get.

Soon we were entering the last stretch of the winter. The cold started to disappear day by day and the sun started to stay longer and longer. While the winter will stretch for another month or two spring will be coming soon meaning a lot of farm work will soon start.