I feel weird.

Not bad…but weird. Like my balance is suddenly off.

I breathe as normally as I can and slowly pat my chest with my hands as I try to feel out my lungs underneath.

Why is it so hard to see what’s happening inside of me?

Pain from pushing too hard has stopped – reminder everyone. I’m not actually feeling “pain” pain. My skill is giving me pain as a sort of feedback and pain is bad and means stop. Sure there was a tiny bit of feedback that made me think it was like working out…but once again pain is bad and means stop. I’m not going to push myself that hard again. It’s not worth it. It’s not healthy.

Once I catch my breath I realize pretty quickly it's actually easier to breathe. A single suck and woosh my lungs are full.

An exhale and woosh I’m sinking down into my skill.

It being easier to breathe is making it hard for me to prevent phantom breath from activating more aggressively.

The world fades away as I hide from time.

Count to ten Mr Time. Let’s play hide and seek.

I breathe in.

Peekaboo Mr time!

I breathe out.

Oh no! Where did I go!

…

This is actually a problem.

I sit in a world of smoke and mist – the distant world shifting and churning in my peripherals. It looks like someone turned the world into ink and dumped water on it. Colours bleed and blend into purple grey smoke instead of brown. The world is smoke and my breath is mist – heavy with damp mana from my wet mouth and lungs. The world around me is mist, damp with time; and my breath is dry smoke – clashing with the surroundings and drying out ‘time’ as it approaches.

Yes. They are both ‘both’ – but not at the same time. The truth is probably just that the way my skill is feeding information into my mind is strange and not necessarily correct. It's easy to see and yet the more I focus on it the weirder it gets. The harder it is to explain. I’m not even seeing any of this – I just think I am. Closing my eyes removes a lot of the trippy parts but I can still see the mist and smoke clearly that way.

Closing my eyes actually helps me focus even if it removes the world even further.

I’m not stuck here. Every time I actively work to take small short breaths I fade to normal.

The problem is my default is now something like 2-3x speed instead of 1.0001x speed. Becoming “Normal” takes work.

Or in other words. Becoming “Normal” means manual breathing. Woof.

This skill has so much potential but it comes with so many problems and I haven’t yet reached any of its benefits. I sit here in smoky nothing for a while and seriously consider my current problem.

I seriously consider asking Mr Wizard to remove this skill. I shudder to think what that might feel like to have a higher tier skill removed…but so far it feels like the skill has brought more challenges than it's brought solutions.

I’m leaning towards keeping it, but I want to consider this problem thoroughly. I’m in a supposedly unique situation where I can remove any of my skills at any time and try again from scratch.

Would removing this skill even remove it from my lungs? If my lungs are now magic lungs, will they continue to generate phantom breaths even without the skill on them?

Would removing the skill end up worse for me? Or would it safely fix my problem?

Let’s see. Pros and cons for removing it. Pros first because they are nicer.

Why do I want this skill? Well…I have a hard time being patient for things that don’t matter. It should let me skip over all the boring bits of life to focus on all the highlights. Waiting for food to cook? Time skip a bit. Check. Time skip a bit. Check. Waiting for cement to dry? Time skip a bit. Done!

It should also extend my lifespan and at a high tier should even make me almost immortal…and what kind of gal doesn’t want to be immortal? I’m not necessarily afraid of death and if life becomes boring and monotonous…well I wouldn’t want to drag that out forever. If on the other hand! If it stays fun! Well then I wouldn’t mind sticking around forever. Heh. Stick. Cause gluuue. Life is rubber I’m glue and I’ll adhere myself to you!

Cons. I haven’t gotten it under control. Because I haven’t gotten it under control I’ve lost time several times.

Seems to be more of a pro than a con to keeping it so far. What if removing the skill keeps the effect of time skipping but removes the skill feedback? I start accidentally losing time without being able to see the mist or interact with it?

That’s terrifying.

I would probably be able to get the goddess to heal me as a worse case scenario but hey! That’s no reason to put myself in that position.

Well. The only real solution I see is to force myself into fixing this. As scary as the idea of being stuck in this mist forever is…its not dangerous just now. I have time. I have time to try and fix it.

To start I relax. I calm down and breathe as steadily as I can.

The world fades even further.

This skill really likes me being calm. It’s activated with deep breaths but calm deep breaths feel like better quality deep breaths even if it’s the same amount of air entering and exiting my lungs.

Just a bit of feedback I’m not sure about.

This time as I gently sink into the skill without pushing it as hard as I can, the smoky mist “comes to be” stronger. Stronger Faster Smarter!

Sorry.

The longer I sit here breathing calmly the more comes to me. Instead of trying to super charge a breath by compressing it, the skill sinks me deeper all on its own. I breathe in mist and breathe out denser mist. I breathe in denser mist. I breathe out even denser mist. From my perspective it’s taking a lot longer to sink deeper into the skill…but as a plus side there’s no pain!

I wouldn’t say my lungs are suddenly much stronger or anything…but they feel more efficient. It’s easier to breathe as if my nose and throat have been cleared and deep cleaned.

Let’s see. I got a bit of an ability to maintain a connection to the real world when I got to tier 4 on the skill.

That ability should strengthen as I practice it. Strengthen as I grow in tier.

I’m currently Tier 6 and at least one of those last tiers was gained because I snorted concentrated phantom mist.

If I want to follow the guide I got when I gained this skill, the next step is to increase my ability to interact with the world.

That’s what I should aim for in Tier 8. I have two tiers to figure this out.

To start I begin to compress the mist I breathe out. I compress it and stick it to itself by rubbing my hands through the air and squeezing it intermittently.

Soon it's almost cloth in my hands. Cloth I can tear easily if I use my skills to interact with it, but which doesn’t break with normal interaction.

I wrap my body in this cloth cloaking my form. Poking holes in the cloth and then layering it I try to form a labyrinth.

This is the first time I have done these steps without rushing. Patience. Breaths. Breathe in and out. Wrap and fold and tie and squish.

I don’t know if this is necessarily correct. I don’t know if I’m doing any of this correctly – a lot of what I’m doing is feedback from the skill and yet most of what I’m doing would be impossible to do with the skill alone. The only reason I can compress and glue the misty mana is because of Triboadhesion and mana crystal creation working in tandem.

This is probably not how the immortal legion uses the skill – and yet maybe they have supplementary skills as well. Just ignoring this

I…honestly don’t know how long I work. This time I’m trying to make something permanent – not a temporary effect but something I can leave forever.

I work for almost a day my time and then spend a bit strengthening everything I’ve done so it doesn’t break. Happy enough with my partially done construct I head to sleep eating a small simple meal and then resting my skill activating as I fade into unconsciousness.

I wake up. A huge portion of my work is undone – unraveled in the night. Another whole section has…solidified and warped. I start again remaking and remodeling the building.

At some point what I’m creating stops making sense. I’m in a trance – testing random stuff out and poking my skill to see if my tests are useful or not.

My maze becomes a series of rooms and valves. I make cloth out of phantom breath – cloth that can fill with smoke from my skill. With some glue the cloth becomes a bag – a bag that inflates as I exhale, the air passing through the mana with some trouble and the mist getting mostly caught in its folds.

The mist is a lot. It does so many things – the longer I work with it the weirder it feels.

This skill is not what it sounds like. I already sort of discovered that but really. I don’t think I believed it deep down.

It’s not like I’m breathing out mist that speeds up time. Nonono. That would be easy!

I’m breathing out mist that decouples me from time. Mist that hides me from the physical mist of time and pulls my body into itself when blanketed by it. Sure, that has the same result…but it’s a completely different feeling. The skill goes about it in an entirely different way.

It’s like I have a skill to make fireballs but instead of fire mana igniting anything, its portal mana sucking fire out of a plane of fire and spitting it out into a single point.

The more I feel these sideways facts the more I’m able to manipulate the smoke-mist. It's actually recognizing that that lets me start manipulating the smoke without Triboadhesion or mana crystal creation – I have to breathe and exhale in all sorts of weird ways to make my breath swirl or create smoke rings as they leave my mouth…but all of that’s harder to work with than using my other skills. Harder and less effective. I continue working on my time outfit.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

It very very vaguely looks like I’m a marshmallow mascot. I’m hotboxing myself into a blow up bag – the way the time mist interacts with my mana smoke is regulated with vents and little cloth tubes.

I’ve actually managed to use my mist-cloth to hold bags of time-smoke. No way of using smoke-cloth to hold time-mist however.

And yet both of those sentences are the same thing.

You get why I’m confused right?

A few hours later I realize I have smoke-cloth bags of time-mist and can’t make them the way I initially set them up. The bags seem to have aged – the cloth looking almost wet with time-dew and ragged as if it had been lost at sea.

I’m a blind girl fumbling about in the darkness. Send help. I’m lost! Give me a manual or something. The feedback my skill gives me isn’t good enough.

…

I really want to make organs. I want to use my new skill to try and smooth over what I’m doing here. I already have the shapes of organs – a shell. An input, an output, a bunch of mana dense stuff…

Expect there’s not really a mana dense material. Not really. There's mana but its not physical. The skill has nothing to attach to.

I try pricking my finger and gluing my blood to the mana – and nothing happens because my hands just pass through empty space.

…

I have successfully made organs! Instead of just touching the inside of the organ with blood I have to glue the mana of the organ to the blood. Rub the inside of the cloth bag. Make it sticky. Glue that to the blood on my finger.

Wew.

My organs are not good enough yet – I can’t just toss a bunch of stuff in the pot and have it do what I want. At least not with the level of skill I have.

I head to sleep once again a faint rise of panic as I realize days have probably passed.

Wew.

It's not like those days mattered. Don’t worry. Don’t panic yet.

…

But what if those days mattered?

…

No no it's fine. Don’t worry about them.

I proceed to worry about those lost days even harder.

…

Have you ever done something where you’re not fully sure how you did it? Maybe you’re a programmer who wrote some clever code that worked well then came back and saw it all looked like black magic?

That’s how my current time outfit works. I worked on it for ages – my skill feeding moments of inspiration into me in the depth of my trance. I did some wobbly stuff with the pipes over here and some woobly stuff with the pipes over there. Wishy wooshy variable valves and bits of glued blood.

Saying “the skill did it” feels like it invalidates my work. Just wave my hands all “woooo magic” like and bippity boppity your effort is now my property. I’m the one who put in all that effort! I’m the genius that glued those tricky bits together! I didn’t press a button and get it all to work! I put days into it! Days!

And yet I don’t think I can explain how it works anymore. If you asked me to make one of these bad boys I’d start sweating and making excuses.

The longer I spend leaving it working, the more it fades from my perception. I’m pretty sure some of those organs are passing through each other overlapping and doing weird resonance mumbo jumbo where they land on each other. Mana passing through mana except when it doesn’t. Heck it hurts my brain to think about.

Listen. I can’t explain how any of it works but I can definitely describe what it does.

First. It can take my breath and capture it without my breath touching my body. It can vent my breath far away from my body – or in other words, disable my phantom breath from speeding up my time when I don’t want it to.

Disable switch. Check.

Because the outfit is made of mana and because the mana is tied to my skill and…reasons. Well because of all that I can work pretty normally like this without the outfit interfering with me trying to make a mana pearl or do anything normal.

Next. With a weird breath, I can flip a sort of switch and suddenly the condensed breath fills the outfit coating my skin. It’s sort of like a wetsuit – the breath-tight outfit fills and completely cuts me off from my surroundings.

Enable switch. Check.

This default mode leaves me blind – and when I’m this blind my perception of time passing fades. I can sit with the enable switch on for days without noticing – it’s even more insulating than my breath used to be.

Next. With another more involved series of shifts I can drag each of my sense through connecting me to the world by each senses. This is a much more complicated setup. I refract and pass light through mist that almost feels like a lens. I think I glued bits of some sort of light mana or something into it? No I forgot how I managed to get it to work. No guesswork! I think that might just confuse me more.

I press the inside of my wetsuit against my skin where the outside gets pressed…simulating touch. I pull bits of stuff I put into my mouth through an almost airlock when I open and close my mouth letting food and taste through.

Every single sense is reconnected to the world passing through the magical construct, having its time stripped from it or dried off it or whatever…and then it's finally being given to me once again slightly scuffed but mostly correct.

Connection to the world. Established.

Finally. There's the most complicated bit. It does the least. It's still the most complicated. Why I put so much work into a convenience item is beyond me but there we go. This last piece is a sort of thermometer. It’s made with alternating time-mist and breath-mist vials and it presses against my…mist-sense?

What this complicated fever dream of a sensor does is give me a pretty accurate idea of how much time is passing.

The more I activate my skill the harder it expands.

It's always active and constantly feeding a stream of information into my brain. My brain doesn’t understand it…and yet brains are funky. Given some consistent input that feedback sort of gets translated into a new sense.

I can ignore it of course but still. It lets me say “Oh, time is passing at 2x speed. Time is passing at 10x speed”

No longer will I be a slave to my own skill unable to tell just how much time is passing. The longer it runs and the more my brain has to get use to it, the more accurate my new “time passing sense” gets.

Anyways! Weeks and weeks have passed…but my self inflicted problem has disappeared.

Phantom breath is now 100% under my control. It’s now Tier 11. Nice number with some solid growth. Some point in the middle of my outfit it hit tier 8 and seemed to suck portions of my suit into itself? The skill leveled up incredibly quickly from my personal sense of time…and yet if you compare it to base time…well this could be considered a lull where I barely advanced.

We have something that’s happened now. A side effect. A clear result from this.

You can guess right?

Peas are done!

…

I’m operating in the 3rd mode for my enhanced-skill. This is the mode that theoretically lets you become immortal…I’m letting the skill effect me and then using all the equipment to connect back to reality. I might have achieved that basically immortality step with this outfit. I’m not sure yet.

Basically time is passing at roughly 2.4x-2.6 speed bumping up and down depending on how hard I exert myself. Everything looks ever so slightly wobbly – like I have weak funhouse goggles on or weird warped glasses. Everything I touch feels slightly strange like I’m wearing puffy full body gloves.

Still I’m completely here. Completely and utterly present.

And right now even if it's strange all the altered senses are kind of fun. They are proof I succeeded! I pretend I’m wearing a hazmat suit as I stare down at the peas.

Snow peas are subtler than I thought they would be. There's no little mini blizzard swirling around them. They aren’t pure white – although they are much much lighter than I’ve ever seen a pea before.

What the peas are is cold to the touch. Each pod has a very faint line of frost on them cracking off as I pull the pods off the branches.

When I crack open a pea its insides are frozen. The peas themselves look normal if light but their insides are fully frosted as if someone shoved each pea in a freezer when I wasn’t looking.

I try one – scraping all the tiny spheres out of the pod and letting my phantom breath suit pop around them before they end in my mouth.

Huh. They taste sweet! Much sweeter than I was expecting – and considering cold things are usually less sweet that means they are even sugarier than I think they are!

I’ve had a sweet pea before but this is even sweeter, that’s what I’m saying.

I collect a bunch of buckets from my inventory and start filling them as I work.

It's incredibly simple work and yet because I’m doing everything at 2.5x speed I have to concentrate to make sure I’m doing it properly.

My body takes over a lot of the work – some interaction with my skill lets my body move at normal speed even if my mind thinks everything is happening twice as fast.

Maybe because of this but the entire crop is picked in no time at all.

I think you can plant peas as is right? I look at my second garden bed – completely empty for the most part – and pick one of my two full buckets.

Is pulling peas out of their pods called husking? No that’s a corn thing. I…de-pod or whatever you want to call it and start planting half my produce in the second bed.

Once again because of my sped up speed it goes by in seconds.

I then deactivate my suit the world suddenly feeling very slow.

Let's eat as many of these as I can stomach!

I sit on the ground next to my garden bed and slowly eat peas in noisy satisfaction.

There's something about growing your own food that makes it taste better. I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe it's just because I haven’t eaten many sweet things in this new life but these taste great. I don’t like the outer shell – I think you can eat them but it's kind of stringy and where the inner bits are super sweet the outer shells taste like grass.

I wonder…do you think I could make ice cream out of this? Pea ice cream? Saying that aloud makes it sound kind of gross…

But maybe?

I go to our inventory and pick out a water bottle and a fresh bucket and spoon.

Filling my clean bucket with a bit of water and a handful of peas I try and mash it into the corner.

As I mash the peas the water begins to freeze before my eyes.

I press and stir as hard as I can trying to turn those crystals into slush instead of a solid block of ice. After a few minutes its done. A treat for good work!

Tipping my head back I try some pea slush. It's…interesting. An acquired taste you might say. One I haven’t acquired yet.

I still eat it all because it's bad to waste food and by the end its grown on me enough I want a second.

I’m not sure I’d share this – it very much tastes like peas despite how sweet it is…but it's still kind of fun.

Finally done with my meal, I look at my remaining half bucket of peas.

Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to list half on the auction market and auction off the other half in the fairy market.

This way I can figure out which market it sells better on.

Happy with my decision I list both then sit back.

Well than.

Now what?

Have you guys figured out what we should do next?

Plants? Sure! Harvesting my first batch of peas has lit a fire under my butt. I want to expand. Expand!

I should probably wait to see how the peas sell before moving on…and just before I impatiently decide to start anyways I remember what I just created.

With a grin at being able to use my skill so soon I switch on my phantom suit and sink into timeskipping mode.

Without any senses connected to reality I don’t fully notice time passing. The time sensor is still telling me how fast time is passing and my internal clock is able to guess at what happening…but the hour I set the peas to auction for passes in moments.

My 2ish pounds of peas go for just over 400 monies. That’s roughly 20 dolla per pound? Its…not a lot. But also quite a bit? I don’t think I would spend 20 dollars for a single pound of peas back in my old life. They used to be a few dollars max.

Still…effort wise the magic markup doesn’t seem that high? I’m conflicted. I think mana crystal creation might be a tiny bit more efficient in terms of time spent…

But I want a farm! I want a vast sprawl of strange and fantastical plants! You want that too!

Maybe I can figure out how to automate picking these. That would make it free money!

My peas haven’t had any bites on the fae market yet. I think it has some interest but because I’m not there in person I can’t tell you much more than that.

I think…I think if we are going to expand we need to use our favor to help.

Part of me wants to try and buy land that has magical plants on it…but wild plants are probably not the type I can farm easily. Buying a few wild berry bushes is not the same as having some plots of magic wheat and corn or whatever.

I think I do land on wanting the goddess to connect me to a specialized market. The fae market is fun but it’s a mixed bag and hard to find specific things. It does have some magic seeds plants being sold – quite a few actually…but last I checked they were set as a trade for blood.

Goddess shut down my plan to sell my own blood.

The corner store market is full of tons of odds and ends but it too doesn’t help really. I want a new one. One I can buy lots of seeds in.

Drafting up the email I ask for a seed market but also ask if I can get an animal market as well as one that buys produce for lots of money. I get a response a moment later. The goddess doesn’t seem to have noticed it's been weeks since I last reached out. She responds saying my one favor can get any of the things I asked for but not them all.

I nod to myself – not too surprised – then confirm I want a seed store.

Seconds later I get back a response – “done” – and navigating to the market section I see a new entry.

Som’lia’s Seed Emporium.

Heh.

If I sold seeds would it be “Sam’s Seed Emporium?” They match!

A second later the goddesses wisp appears – flowing around in space on my screen.

That’s nice of her!

I move to open Sam’s seed emporium – sorry Soms. How do you even pronounce that – but suddenly a notification appears in the top right of the screen.

Oh, I have an offer for the peas from the fae market…

Someone is offering a jar of pickles or a jar of jam.

That’s…pretty good! I say yes to the jam and pull it out of my inventory.

Wow.

This…this is big.

You know pooh bear? Those giant cartoon honey pots? It’s like that. Giant clay pot the size of my head and full of jam! We have to try this!

Sorry, After I see how this jam tastes we can start looking for plants.

I pull out some of my stockpile of sand bread and slather a good helping on.

What type of seed are you looking for the most?

I move the jam towards my mouth.

I’m hoping for something fantastical. Something I’ve never seen before.

With a massive bite, I place some of the tastiest hecking substance I’ve ever tasted into my mouth.

Everything is good. Everything is amazing. Everything is full of colours and happy!

…

My status suddenly changes.

Self status (click to expand)

Tier 54

Status: Intoxicated, minor ensorcellment, developing cravings...👻(Click to Diagnose?)

Skills 6/6 ->

[Triboadhesion] Tier 20

[Mana Crystal Creation] Tier 6

[The wings of fell] Tier 5

[Phantom Breath] Tier 11

[Eyes are the window into the soul] Tier 9

[Organ Item] Tier 3

...oops?