For the rest of the night and through the early morning I played around with my new Skills. They were a constant source of wonder and entertainment for me, and with several sources of stress that had been weighing on my mind suddenly gone I was able to simply enjoy them. Saltwater Sense was the primary Skill that I worked with, since both of the other Skills were completely passive. While they were functional and had some sort of effect on my capabilities, it wasn’t nearly as obvious as the entire sphere of information that came along with Saltwater Sense.

Perhaps half-sphere was the better descriptor, because Saltwater Sense merely made me aware of where saltwater was in a moderate radius around me, around twelve to fifteen meters. It didn’t tell me anything more than that, but I was able to tell from where the water was and what the bottom of the bay was shaped like, where the anchoring posts for the dock were located at, and could even make out the rough voids of fish as they pushed their way through their aquatic home. It was difficult to make things out at that level of detail, but it felt like I was getting a better grip on my new sense as the hours rolled by. There was still a vast amount of improvement available to me, however. Even if I was blind above the surface of the water, I could get the faintest impressions of that space from Saltwater Sense, the amount of moisture in the air just barely enough to tease me with future possibilities.

In hopes of improving my Skills with outside aid I had returned to my character sheet, now proudly displaying my new class and four skills.

Name

Robert 'Bob' Rowland

Class

Ocean's Child Lvl 1

Body: 0

Mind: 4

Spirit: 10

Perception: 2

Experience: 413

Power Strike

Water Resistance

Blessing of the Tides

Saltwater Sense

Choosing a class had consumed all the experience points available to me, leaving me with nothing to spend on improvements, but that didn’t stop me from trying and seeing what had changed. Trying to increase the level of my class simply gave me a message about insufficient experience, while attempting to increase my attributes directly with experience led to the same message that had previously shown up.

You do not have the ability to raise your attributes with experience.

While the System still refused to provide me any sort of description for my Skills, and didn’t provide any new options for me to eventually purchase, it did generate a new message when I attempted to add experience to one of my skills.

This Skill is not ready to be improved.

It was an annoyingly vague message, given that it didn’t tell me what it would take for a Skill to be ready, but at least the promise of eventual improvement was there.

As I sat there and mulled it over, I idly listened to the early risers starting their day. Mostly it was a few sailors getting an early start on readying their boats to sail. Low Tide wasn’t all that far away, and it seemed like most of the crews wanted to be out on the open water before the tides turned. That left a large number of chores that needed to be done first involving hauling and cleaning, setting sails and lines, unloading the previous catch and loading new nets and cages, all accompanied by far more invective than even Gordon Ramsey had been able to fit into his job description. I wondered if one particularly inventive captain was actually upset with his asleep-on-their-feet crew, or was simply grumpy about having to be up early himself.

After a few minutes of learning some new colorful turns of phrase I let my attention return to the topic of my skills, hoping that a fresh approach might yield some new insights.

It felt like I had all the pieces I needed to start getting some answers, or at least some working theories. I was now far more familiar with Skills, Classes, and the System itself than I was before. And it was the interaction of the three that gave me my first idea as to what was happening.

When the System had given me my Class, it hadn’t been a simple thing. It had tweaked and tailored a generic class into something that perfectly fit what I wanted and needed. The System didn’t do that for Skills, but that didn’t mean something similar wasn’t happening. The lack of levels was my primary clue. If a skill had levels, that implied that a higher-level skill was better than a lower level one. For example, a level five Power Strike would hit harder, swing faster, and take less energy than a level one Power Strike. But where was that improvement coming from? It had to be from improvements provided by the System, otherwise there would be no point in making a distinction between different levels of the same Skill. Improvements made by my efforts wouldn’t be discrete. There are a thousand ways to tweak the path of a swing, and a thousand ways to add or subtract energy from the Skill, and a thousand ways to tweak the actual point of impact slightly. Moreover, any improvements wouldn’t be permanent. Just because I had put the effort into figuring out a better swing didn’t mean I could Power Strike with the same brutal form I had when I first had the skill.

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No, discrete levels were only possible if the System itself was providing assistance and altering what and how much assistance it was providing. Therefore, the lack of Levels on skills was an indicator of the system being ‘hands-off’, metaphorically. Instead of me telling the System to use Power Strike for me with a set level of power and skill, it had simply handed the Skill over as is, and it was up to me to use it however I wanted. It would take time and effort to test, but I had a hunch that the Skills belonging only to me would let me shape them over time as they responded to my desires and actions What the system had worked to do for me in an instant, I was given the freedom to do in my own time with my own effort.

Little changes, over the course of days, months, and years would eventually add up. Right now Power Strike was all about adding energy to my swing to hit harder, but if every day I focused on making it faster and faster then there would come a point where [Power Strike] would no longer be an accurate description of the Skill. I’d have to put in the effort and the time to reach that point, but my suspicion was that the Skill screen would allow me to alter my skills once they reached that point.

[Power Strike] could become [Blitz Strike]. [Saltwater Sense] could expand to [Water Sense]. [Blessing of the Tides] and [Water Resistance] could change as well, once my individual understanding of the Skills reached a point where it was significant enough to redefine what was possible and what wasn’t. Or I was chasing a theory down a rabbit hole and would just have to make do with my Skills as they were. Only time would tell, but I was okay with that.

Time wasn’t standing still, after all, and even as I postulated and pondered the other ships nearby could be heard heading out for the day. Given how drunk and tired Lirillin had sounded last night I didn’t really have any expectation of him making an appearance till later in the day, but he surprised me by showing up just before low tide.

“That’s the boat right there. Let me go ahead and get seated and then you can hand everything down to me. Start with the potatoes and boxes first, and then the lighter items.”

“Can do!” Was the cheerful feminine response that followed. It took a little bit of time for Lirillin to get himself situated properly, but he then had his companion hand him an entire grocery list of products, filling up most of the extra space in the boat with enough grains, meats and vegetables to keep the enchanter fed for a month. He was completely lacking any sign of the hangover that I had been expecting, and it wasn’t until he was ready to leave that I found out why.

“Oh! Mr. Lirillin! I forgot to get your money. I got too busy talking, and then I had to help you load the hand cart, and then there was everyone who I hadn’t seen for the day yet, and…”

“That’s quite alright, Cindy.” Lirillin responded with a tolerant tone. “How much did my total come to?”

There was the sound of rustling as Cindy searched around in her pockets before pulling out and unfolding what sounded like a piece of paper.

“Two silver for the beef and sausage, seven copper for the fruit, another two for the potatoes, one silver for the flour, bread, and covers to keep that dry, and three silvers for the hangover cure.”

A jingle of coins followed as Lirillin handed the money over. “There you are, Cindy. Give your father my thanks for arranging this for me.”

“Can do, Mr. Lirillin! Have a good trip!”

His business complete, Lirillin grabbed hold of the oars and began to row away from the dock and any other obstacles that would have previously been an issue for me to steer around.

“Take me to Lirillin’s Lighthouse.” He commanded, before settling in to enjoy the voyage. With [Saltwater Sense] active I didn’t feel the need to take an active role in controlling the oars, and let myself relax as well as we made a right turn and headed back towards home. It didn’t take long for Lirillin to decide to rummage through his new purchases, and soon he was kept busy nibbling away at some fruit that required him to spit out seeds every so often. Being able to see some of my surroundings made the trip far more interesting to me as well. The coast we were travelling along was mostly barren and rocky, but here and there were sections of the beach where sand had accumulated over time. I could feel the sharp profile of the rocky seabed being smothered by the smoother sand as it sloped upwards to my right, and was grateful that my current path kept me far enough from shore to not risk hitting anything, even if a part of me wanted to explore every little cove that we passed.

As we travelled, I had the niggling sensation that something was out of place, some fact of my current situation that wasn’t quite right. At first that feeling was easily ignored, but when it refused to dissipate it began to eat away at me.

It wasn’t that I was hearing something out of place, nor hearing something that should be there. My boat felt fine as well, if still a bit banged up from the roughhousing last night. Even Saltwater Sense seemed normal enough. This might be my first time sensing my surroundings, but from what I could tell they seemed normal enough. No sea monsters slowly creeping up within my range, nor were there cracks in reality that were slowly letting madness from the outer realms slip through. It took me slowly going over every memory I had, moment by moment before I spotted the problem.

The directions didn’t line up.

When I travelled from Lirillin’s Lighthouse to Shellpin Bay, the Coastline had been to my right. I hadn’t been able to see anything at the time, but I remember hearing the waves crash against the shore in that direction. To get home I should be doing the same journey in reverse, which meant the shoreline should now be on my left-hand side, only it wasn’t. It was still on my right, meaning I was heading away from the lighthouse. If I had been the one navigating I probably would have come to a stop right then and there as I tried to figure out what was going on, but the Navigation enchantment worked with my automated oars to keep me moving steadily forwards.

Whatever magic figured out my path was confident I was still going the right direction, and it had successfully gotten me home last time. In fact, if I recall correctly, I had taken this exact same path last time, continuing up the coast instead of turning around to get home. There was some piece of information that I was missing that would make things make sense again, now that I knew what was supposedly wrong.

It was possible that Shellpin Bay and Lirillin’s Lighthouse were set on an island and were positioned so that it took the same amount of time to go either left or right to travel from one location to the other by sea. Me taking a circular route was then either due to the underlying logic of the navigation system, or some minor variance in travel times that was introduced by tide levels and local currents.

The theory was technically possible, but felt too coincidental for me to immediately assume it was accurate. The island needed to be small enough that sailing around it in three to four hours was possible based on the lengths of my trips, while being either large enough or inhospitable enough that travelling by boat was preferable to simply walking from the lighthouse to town. The lighthouse needed to be perfectly positioned so that the travel time to town was roughly the same in either direction. And the island needed to be large enough to support all the industries necessary to sell the food that Lirillin had purchased. Beef in particular should have been a rarity in any place where space was at a premium, but the price Lirillin had paid for it hadn’t seemed that high in comparison to the other products he had purchased. Things just didn’t line up correctly.

More than any of those issues, if I was rowing all the way around the Island I would, at some point, need to make turns. A full circle's worth of turns, but as far as I could tell I was moving in almost a straight line along the coast. I swayed back and forth a bit with the tide, but I continued to travel straight towards my destination, just as I had when heading to town.

It was an infuriating relief when Lirillin once again took hold of the oars and rowed me up to the lighthouse dock. Even as he tied me in place and began moving his supplies inside I barely noticed. I was already planning exactly how I wanted to spend the next week. There was an answer to how I had ended up in the same location despite travelling in a straight line. I might not have that answer at the moment, but I was sure that the Navigation enchantment would have the clues I needed.