The next several days flew by in a blur. The New Reader quest kept repeating itself, though the number of books doubled each time, as did the experience points I gained. The problem was the other reward. Skills, it turned out, were yet another progression system locked behind a level requirement. This one was level twenty-five, and each successive quest only provided another rank to the reading skill that I had to. At least the good news was that the quest line had forced me to finally learn some of the more basic concepts of the system. Without being forced into the very specific direction the System had in mind for my education, I was free to start pouring through introductory guides to any topic I could get my hands on.

Attributes were more or less what I had expected them to be. They were a numerical value abstraction of someone's core components. The range and granularity were much greater than I had expected, though. I had been imagining something similar to a tabletop RPG system, and while that wasn’t an incorrect assumption exactly, as the attributes were organized into several basic categories: Senses, Actions, Reactions, Interactions, Soul, Core, and Luck. Everything got much more complicated once you went below those top-level designations. It seemed that when it was designed, it had been done so to take into account that some attributes were not a universal constant and tried to boil it down to labels that were universal. Senses was a broad category that covered all ways a person perceived the world. For example, it was something that covered anything from how far a human eye could see, to the pain tolerance certain parts of your body could handle. Those were sub-attributes that were applicable to someone with my body, but there were also things that covered the detection of underwater scents or electromagnetism readings with antennas. Actions governed anything someone consciously did. Things like strength and memory fell into this category. Reactions were things that happened on a subconscious level caused by external phenomena. This included willpower and fighting off most diseases. Interactions was where charismatic influencing fell. Physical beauty seemed to be the main aspect of it. Soul and Core were pretty straightforward and governed all aspects of those components. Luck was apparently mostly a mystery and was used as a catch-all for attributes that didn’t seem to fit anywhere else. Either an exhaustive list of all known sub-attributes hadn’t been written, or I just couldn’t find it. Given the infinite complexity of life, I assumed it was the former.

Skills were exactly what they sounded like, but even the lowest rank of them granted a benefit above what would normally be possible for someone without a core. That meant that reading was likely to improve either my speed or my retention. Both skills existed, but I wouldn’t learn just which one I had until I was able to get into the menu, which I also had learned was impossible to do until I created my core.

For virtually everyone, there was no purpose in delaying the formation of their core, and it was usually done before any leveling had even occurred. It was impossible, though, to progress past level twenty without a core. At that point, the soul was no longer able to contain the energies a person had gained alone. This was the reason cores had been developed at all, as a way to break through the soul-level barrier. And while that meant I was locked out of the skill system until I could form my core, it did not mean I was locked out of the attribute system.

Thanks to the less restrictive reading quests I was gaining experience at a much quicker pace. It took me only four days to hit level five and unlock the attribute system, and I had plenty of points ready to assign. After the usual dinner with the brothers, I laid down comfortably on my bed and pulled up the menu, eager to see what my options were. I dismissed the popup about unlocking the menu and selected it. Core was missing, but that came as no surprise to me.

Senses Actions Generalized Auditory 4 Generalized Mental Use 6 Generalized Gustatory 4 Generalized Physical Use 1 Generalized Nociception 1 Reactions Generalized Olfactory 3 Generalized Body Toughness 1 Generalized Proprioception 2 Generalized Disease Resistance 1 Generalized Mechanosensory 3 Generalized Mental Resistance 3 Generalized Vestibular 2 Interactions Generalized Visual 2 Generalized Beauty 1 Generalized Presence 2

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Soul Luck Soul Energy Detection 2 Cheat Death 4 Soul Energy Projection 1 Soul Energy Regeneration 1 Soul Energy Strength 1

I had been wondering how my attributes would be organized. I knew it was possible and entirely likely that I would have higher-level generalized attributes for the senses. I was surprised to see the same in the other three that had it, though. I had expected those to be a bit more straightforward in their lists, but apparently not. Part of the reason why there was no exhaustive list is you didn’t get to see all the skills you could potentially learn, just those that you had some rank in already, knowingly or not, and it was possible to gain more from later experiences. While I may have felt the tiniest bit insulted at some of the skills, I also wasn’t totally surprised by any except for cheat death. Every author had agreed that starting with a luck skill would give someone a leg up, but as they were incredibly unpredictable, no one should ever count on it. I selected cheat death and read the description.

You should be dead. The fact you aren’t is one of the most improbable events to have ever occurred in your universe. Every point placed into this attribute will further raise your chances of not dying when the statistics otherwise say you should.

That was it; there was no numerical breakdown of how the points affected the statistics or anything quite so useful. This was why luck attributes were considered their own particular category. The authors I had read claimed that anyone who studied them always ended up with nothing to show for the time spent. However, luck worked. It also seemed to work to keep that a mystery from everyone. I reread the names of the senses, not fully connecting them all to what they did. I knew the ones that represented sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, and I was pretty sure vestibular had something to do with balance.

I was drawing a complete blank on the other two. I knew one had to involve a sense of pain, and one was likely tied to spatial awareness, but I couldn’t say which was which. Selecting any of them for further information didn’t help either, as apparently, I had to allocate a single attribute point before I was provided a description of an attribute. The System seemed to work under the idea that a person with the attribute should already know what it was. While that was frustrating, I did have sixty-three points to spend, and I was unlikely to spend them on the same attribute. There were caps to how high one could, but they also weren’t universal, and I wouldn’t know I was at the cap and how to get past it until I was there.

So, I started by quickly assigning a single point to each of my senses so I could get a better idea of what they did. That wasn’t the best idea, but everything in my body suddenly felt stronger, which in a normal circumstance tends to cause a nasty headache. When one of the senses that you had increased was the one that controlled feeling pain, that headache was multiplied. My head felt like someone had hit it repeatedly with a hammer. The room was instantly both too loud and too bright. The air smelled and tasted wrong. I could feel my insides moving. I rolled onto my side and curled into a ball, hoping that this would end soon.

It took nearly an hour and expelling the contents of my stomach for my body to start to get used to the changes. That had been a colossal mistake. I even knew that one of the senses was pain, so I should have realized the possibility of what would happen, but I had been too much like a kid home after trick-or-treating. I vowed that from now on, I would only raise one attribute at a time, and the smell of my room as I cleaned up what had happened helped to imprint that as a hard rule into my brain.

So it turned out that I was right, vestibular was balance. Nociception was a sense of harm to my body and the cause of the increased pain. I could think of a few reasons why I might want to increase in the future. It was likely a good way to track internal changes in my body before they became a real problem, but I would need to boost my pain tolerance before that was a realistic path. My joints already ached more than they had, and that was going to be a problem.

Proprioception was my sense of position in the space around me and the one I had wanted to identify the most. I could possibly use it to offset some of the knee problems I currently had. Boosting that should, in theory, solve the constant issue I had with running into things. But before I could spend points on that, I needed to find the cap for all of my reactions. These would be important for core creation, and I wanted them as high as I could out of them. I placed ten points into each of them, this time one at a time. The only real change I felt immediately was the pain in my body seemed easier to ignore. I didn’t know at this point if that meant my body was actually stronger or just more capable of shrugging off wounds that would still cause lasting long-term damage.

I moved mental resistance up to twenty-five next, as that was closest, and there I found my first cap. Once I was able to break through this, it should, in turn give me access to some of the specific attributes below it. Essentially the furthest attribute down the chain had the most dramatic effect on the very specific thing it controlled, while anything above also applied, but the boosts they gave were spread out and lesser. On a whim, I decided to put the last thirteen points into mental use. With the pain tolerance increase, I decided to wait on my original idea and see if I could instead increase the speed that I was gaining knowledge. That had the potential to cause a feedback loop to improve my stats even faster. Anything I could to move towards an exponential gain seemed the smart way to go.

All in all, despite the memory of the throbbing headache I had caused myself, today had been the most productive day I’d had had since I arrived in this world. I hoped that was a sign of future things to come, and as I remembered that I still had to save my world, I decided not to dwell on that hope and instead take a well-deserved long rest.