It turned out that the inn had a stable attached to keep horses and other animals in. While I was a bit too wide to just stash in one of the animal stalls, there was a larger area towards one end normally meant for carriages or wagons. Adam grumbled softly as he wrestled me into place, before grabbing the more valuable possessions and heading inside to join his wife and son in a proper bed. Their clothes and household accessories were left behind, but between the relatively low value and bulky size of the objects they weren’t high value targets for theft, and this area didn’t sound like it was a lawless part of town to begin with.

Alone for a while, and confident that I didn’t need to worry about sea monsters on dry land, I took this chance to open up my status screens.

Slappy - Rowboat

Autonomous Intelligence

Component

Weight - 121/750

Durability 8/10

Enchantments 3

Mana Saturation 15/18

Hull - Wood

Navigation

Listening

Oars - Wood

Automation

Name

Robert 'Bob' Rowland

Experience : 3842

Class

Ocean's Child : Lvl 3

Body : 0

Mind : 5

Spirit : 18

Perception : 3

Skills

Power Strike

Meditation

Blessing of the Tides

Saltwater Sense

Water Resistance

Active Sonar

The last few days, despite being more dangerous and riskier than I would have liked, had been great for earning me more experience. Over three thousand experience points from meeting Adam and his family, helping them get to Clentim, and facing down the monster on the way, even if Adam was the one who actually took care of the monster. I could boost myself to level five right away, although the increase in leveling costs would stop me there. Still that would mean that I could spend the rest of the experience on the Skills that I had had my eye on.

You are now a level 4 Ocean’s Child!

You have gained two points of Spirit.

You have three free attribute points to distribute.

While I had more evenly split up the increased attributes when I leveled up from two to three, the majority of them had still ended up increasing my spirit attribute, which meant that I now had another point permanently locked into boosting that stat in the future. The good news was that I now knew exactly what would happen for the next couple of levels, thanks to Adam, and could plan things out appropriately.

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Ideally I would end up with a static distribution of 1-2-1 to my Mind, Spirit, and Perception attributes, but I couldn’t guarantee that I could pull that off. Locking in one of my choices was easily doable, but depending on how the system calculated things I could potentially be looking at a coin flip for that last stat. As such, I spent all three points on improving the attribute that I needed most, Perception. Having a higher Mind value wasn't a bad thing, but information is what I really needed to guarantee my safety in this world.

I didn’t have the weapons or abilities to defend myself from the threats out there, and so I needed to be able to spot them early enough that I could find and follow a course of action to keep me safe. The sea monster had managed to go from outside the range of my Active Sonar to right on top of me before I could do much more than stop moving my oars. A few points wouldn’t do much to change that outcome, but enough points over time, combined with more practice and familiarity with Active Sonar, would hopefully be enough.

It took a single second to improve my Perception by three, and even as I adjusted to the new fidelity of my senses I was already triggering the level up function once more.

You are now a level 5 Ocean’s Child!

You have gained two points of Spirit.

You have gained one point of Perception.

You have two free attribute points to distribute.

I put both free points into Mind, before closing the screen and frowning. I wouldn’t know for sure if I had succeeded until I levelled up to six, something I couldn’t do right away. I also had been expecting the fifth level skill that Adam had talked about, but that didn’t seem to be visible anywhere on my status screen, or in any of the notifications that had piled up as I levelled.

It wasn’t long before I realized that I had simply been counting my levels the wrong way. Adam had said ‘Every fifth level,’ but that didn’t mean five, ten, fifteen and so on. The system first gave me tailored skills at level one, and every fifth level after that would be levels six, eleven, and sixteen.

With that small mystery taken care of, I evaluated my remaining experience. 1842 was so very close to getting me to level six. It was so close, in fact, that I felt comfortable trying to spend some of it with the hopes of still gathering enough Experience tomorrow while travelling to level up after dropping off Jim, Adam, and Gladys. It wasn’t pure hubris that drove me, either. The tailored skill provided by the System would be useful, but I had some skills I could buy by myself that would help me out. It made more sense to buy them now instead of wasting a free skill that overlapped with what they could do.

The following Skills are available to you:

Endure 500 XP

Visualization 1000 XP

Stability 500 XP

Internal Expansion 4000XP

Power Stroke 8000 XP

Power Stroke and Internal Expansion were interesting Skills, in that there wasn’t anything I had done to unlock them. Adam had been the one to use Power Stroke, a single time, but apparently that was enough for it to appear on my screen, even with an exorbitant cost.

Or perhaps not that exorbitant, I amended, as I remembered the sheer power he had brought to bear. Combined with the doubling costs of levels, it probably was a reasonable skill for someone to pick up once they were level twenty or so. I was tempted to try and grab it myself once I gathered enough experience points, but ultimately decided not to make it a priority. Not only did I still have the option of Evolving Power Strike by myself, but I also had no idea what other factors had been involved in the incident with Adam. I knew he used Power Stroke, but I had no idea what his Body Stat was, nor if he had any other Skills that either passively or silently improved his capabilities. Reluctantly I moved my attention elsewhere.

Internal Expansion was likely one of those passive sailor skills that Adam had access to, and that was now available to me through osmosis. Stability was a skill that he either could have given me or that I could have managed to meet the qualifications for myself, but between Stability and Internal Expansion I could see how Adam had managed to load my hull up so fully without worrying about me sinking or flipping. It made me curious to see if there were any other Skills that he could show me that I might want to have for the future.

I was probably in somewhat of an unusual situation when it came to tutoring Skills, what with being both a boat and a person. Adam was able to use his skills directly on me, which probably helped the process along, but if it was always so easy to unlock new skills then I couldn’t understand why Lirillin had basically locked himself away from society to do his work. It was something to figure out in the future, and to take advantage of while I had a high-level individual at hand.

Endure and Visualization were Skills I had unlocked myself, and now that I had a surplus of experience I purchased both Stability and Endure. The monster’s probing of my hull had dropped me down another point of durability, and both Skills were passive that focused on survival, and would hopefully keep me from getting too banged up or capsizing on a rough sea. Neither one came with a healing component though, and I was left with those two missing points on my screen.

It was somewhat strange, being down a fifth of my health while still feeling fully intact and ready to go. I might have a few small leaks that hadn’t been there when I was made, but I was in no danger of sinking or breaking apart as far as I could tell. Was durability some sort of over health that kept me safe until it ran out? Or was this like a video game, where I’d look and function exactly the same, only to break instantly the moment I lost my last hit point?

I wasn’t sure if that was a comforting idea or not. On one oar, being able to ignore damage to some degree would be useful. On the other oar, if I didn’t show any external sign of being damaged, it would likely be far more difficult to get the repairs needed to keep me seaworthy. Out of idle curiosity, I tried to push some of my experience towards my durability stat, only to get a strange buzzing sensation in return. It wasn’t the polite messages from the System saying that I wasn’t allowed to do something, but was more like the acrid taste of a charged battery, or the staticky white noise of a live microphone. These two parts of my existence weren’t made to work together, mostly because no one before me had ever had the chance to bring them into contact before. It was the alien sensation of mystery that I was feeling, and I was interested to see what I could figure out about it once I was by myself in a safe place once again.

For the moment, I simply let my consciousness fade away, and drifted off to dream until morning, wanting to be ready and alert for the short trip to Dirint.