Skill: Acquire [Basic] mastery of Ocean’s Duality magic

Achievement +500

Getting 500 Achievement was nice, since it brought my total from 10,518 to 11,018. However, that wasn’t the most important System notification. Much more interesting was the second notification I saw.

Since you have trained the concept of Ocean’s Duality magic to [Basic] Grade for the first time, upon your death you will have the option to purchase [The Cycle of the Ocean] as an ability, for the cost of 2,000 Achievement. This Ability has the following effects:

Keywords: N/A (This Ability does not have any keywords).

All life and death related abilities, especially those formed in relation to the Ocean, will be slightly enhanced.

Training the Ocean’s Duality Skill to basic grade in the future will become significantly easier and faster.

Upon reaching Basic grade in Ocean’s Duality for the first time in each life, you will receive the following benefits:

The sunlight that glitters off the surface of the ocean is one of the fundamental components of your magic. This allows you to regenerate from most serious or even disfiguring injuries while exposed to sunlight, albeit at a very slow pace. In addition, while exposed to sunlight, you will slowly generate small quantities of all four types of Essence. Finally, your mind will be better equipped to manage multiple things at once, making it significantly easier to use illusions or mental attacks in battle while still controlling your body effectively. (Multitasking ability will scale based on your Intelligence Stat).

Your connection with the crushing depths of the ocean will also become one of the fundamental components of your magic. While utilizing any magic related to fear, death, or madness, so long as you inflict any amount of mental or physical damage upon an enemy, you will also apply a small amount of ‘crushing pressure’ to that enemy, weakening both their physical and mental abilities by squeezing both their mind and their body with traces of the deeps of the ocean. (this is applied as a percentage of the damage you deal. This may be turned off at will).

Glut Penalty: 7

Note: This Ability can also be purchased in the Market from an Ability Cube as well, as it is an Ability with no keywords. However, it will be more expensive than purchasing it after earning it yourself during a Reincarnation. You will need to purchase any Abilities you wish to keep within three days of returning to the Market. Please keep this in mind when considering purchases, and plan your purchases in advance.

I blinked in surprise, seeing a System notification I had never seen before pop up.

To be honest, I had started to assume that there were no Skill levels for magic at all. After all, I hadn’t gotten a single skill grade in anything like ‘healing’ or ‘illusions,’ no matter how much I trained my illusions back on the islands. As of yet, none of the three of us had seen a notification about a grade for skills related to magical concepts. I had started to assume that magic just didn’t have skills the way weapons and crafting did.

Clearly, this assumption was incorrect.

The fact that it took us so long to see our first mention of magic grades, however, made me wonder just how much more difficult it was to form a magic-related skill than a physical one.

When it came to the ocean, I had two lifetimes worth of experience messing with it, my {Lake-Gazer’s Dress} to put me in contact with a ‘mini-ocean’ at all times of the day, and I was currently using my extreme affinity to directly interact with the concept of ocean magic.

Despite all of the things working in my favor to help me learn how to use ocean magic, it took me over a decade and a half of work in this life just to get to [Basic] grade.

Just how difficult was it to reach this point normally? I knew that the three of us didn’t really benefit from the increased mana concentration of this world the way the native residents did, but even so, I doubted people hitting [Basic] Grade in any magic related skill was common. The idea that [Basic] grade skills might be restricted to incredibly competent, powerful existences in this world made me feel very strange.

I sighed, and shook my head. I dismissed my System notification. I had a hard time figuring out if I wanted to purchase this new ability. Assuming I wanted to buy the spatial evolution for {Endless Hunger of the Ocean} and then buy {Echoes of the Deep}, I needed 14,000 Achievement and 45 Glut penalty available. Currently, I had a little under 11,000 Achievement, and 27 Glut available, meaning that just purchasing those two things would be rather difficult for me. I needed to earn a fair bit more Achievement before we returned to the Market, and then buy more stats before I could own the two Abilities.

I decided that {Ocean’s Duality Magic} probably wasn’t a very big priority compared to my other two purchases, and decisively ignored it for now. I would think about it if I had a bunch of Achievement left over when we got back to the Market.

Then, I stopped worrying about the future, and headed towards Sallia and Felix. Even though I probably wasn’t going to be buying my new ability, I wanted to start healing Felix, and I wanted to let them know what I had seen, at least.

I grabbed a fresh tub of water, before I found Sallia and brought her with me. We arrived at Felix’s door a moment later, and after I knocked a few times he opened the door and let us in.

“I got a new healing ability. I need you to dunk your head into a tub of water for a bit, and then I can get started on permanently healing your eye,” I said, as I walked into his room and set down the tub of water.

“Got it,” said Felix, and immediately dunked his entire head and most of his shoulders into the tub of water before I could say another word.

“Ah…. I don’t need you to dunk your ENTIRE head into water, Felix,” I said. “Just up to the damaged eye and a little extra. Keep your mouth above water so you can breathe.”

“Oh,” said Felix as he moved part of his face back above the water. “Sorry, I should have waited for you to finish talking.”

I grinned, and felt a bit warm inside.

It was hard to find friends who trusted me so much that they immediately shoved their head into a tub of water without questions when I asked them to. Even if it had been a little silly, it also showed me just how much Felix trusted me, and that made me feel good.

“I’ll probably need several days to finish treating everything,” I said. “Sorry, my alteration reserves just aren’t that fast at recovering yet, and right now my healing ability is a seriously unoptimized mess. It’ll get better, but for now it’s still pretty weirdly specific and expensive.”

Felix shrugged. “I don’t care. We have over a century left before we start really encountering old age in this world, and we won’t even be adults for another ten or twenty years. I can lose a month or two working on my crafting. Even if it isn’t ideal, it’s not a real issue.”

I nodded, and got to work.

Just like when I had been testing my new ability, a blob of silvery light appeared near the bottom of the bucket of water. Then, it began to very slowly float towards Felix.

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I stared at the lackadaisical blob of silvery light, and wondered if there was a way I could speed it up. I concentrated, and instead of just imagining the currents of the ocean of souls bringing a new soul into a body, I also pictured Felix’s body actively drawing in the ‘soul,’ or in this case, the ‘life’ that existed inside of the water.

I felt my alteration essence drain away more quickly, but the blob of silvery light also sped up considerably. In less than a second, it sank into Felix’s eye. Felix’s damaged flesh started to suck in water. Then, his ruined eye started to change: little threads of flesh and muscle around his eye cavity started to flesh themselves out, reverting some of the damage his body had suffered over the past few weeks.

And then I ran out of alteration essence.

Felix eyed me for a moment longer, before he seemed to realize I couldn’t do anything else right now. He pulled his head back out of the tub of water, touched his eye, and let out a breath of relief. “That feels good.” Then, he gently touched the ruined side of his face, and grinned. “I can see out of both eyes again. My bad eye is still incredibly blurry, as if I’m trying to look through a really foggy window pane. However, I can at least see a little bit out of it.”

I grinned as well.

Felix’s words confirmed that my ability would be useful. It would take several days worth of my alteration essence, but it was a feasible way to treat everyone’s injuries. I would probably need to spend a month or two finishing up the healing process, but spending a month healing everyone was far better than everyone being permanently crippled. I was incredibly happy that I had worked out how to use my new spell, and that it seemed to have so much more potential than before.

“I’ll heal everyone a little bit per day, until I finish treating everyone’s injuries,” I said. Then, I paused, and glanced at Felix. “Actually, do you think it might be better to focus on one person at a time?”

Felix glanced at my legs. Even though they weren’t gray anymore, they still looked clearly withered and shrunken. “I think you should heal yourself first, honestly. Don’t you want your legs to not hurt anymore?”

“I mean, I do, but I also have a pretty high Fortitude. I took the least damage out of everyone here, so I don’t mind waiting a little longer to get my legs treated.”

“In that case, why not focus on Anise first?” said Sallia. “Ella, Felix, and you are all adults, even if you and Felix have rather young bodies. You can handle pain a lot better than Anise. Since everyone will get healed within a month or two, why not let Anise get healed first?”

Felix nodded, and I nodded too. Sallia’s words made sense. I also felt that Anise was the most vulnerable of us, so healing her first made sense.

“So anyway, what about your ability evolution, Miria? You mentioned it, but we were mostly focused on healing.”

“So, I ended up getting access to an ability evolution. I have three potential paths that I can take…” I started detailing what I had seen for my ability evolution paths, while Sallia and Felix nodded along.

After hearing my description, though, Sallia also frowned.

“That actually reminds me… I also got an Ability evolution during the battle against the Orukthyri. I meant to discuss it with the two of you, but with everything happening, I got distracted and forgot to mention it.”

“Really? So both of us ended up getting ability evolutions,” I said. “What were your options?”

Sallia nodded. “Let’s see… so for my own ability evolutions, I got three paths as well. One of them doubles down on the physical enhancements from my runes, and also gives me +20 Perception per rune for my first three runes. But it doesn’t change anything else. The second makes me significantly faster at regenerating absorption essence while holding a sword in my hand and lets me ‘save’ several sword slashes as a sort of… energy attack, meaning I would finally have some ranged options from my swordsmanship, and I would also have a way to attack several times at once if I needed a trump card. The final one allows me to compress the first nine runes together, much like how Miria’s weakness correction lets her combine the first three and seventh through ninth runes together. I’m leaning towards compressing the first nine runes together myself: I think it’s just the best and most balanced growth path. If I go in that direction, and Miria pairs goes for spatial manipulation, we would have a fairly balanced group,” said Sallia. “Miria could handle long ranged attacks and magic, as well as weirder things like spatial magic. She can also handle our healing, meaning I wouldn’t need to think about that in the future and could focus on stabbing things..” Sallia suddenly seemed very happy. “I personally really like the idea of Miria focusing on Spatial manipulation so that our group is more balanced in the future. I imagine we’re going to be fighting together a lot. Getting abilities that synergize with each other and cover the weaknesses of the others is going to be very useful moving forward.” Sallia shrugged.

“My healing ability in this life is honestly too specific. It can close up wounds and stem bleeding really effectively, and treat some other wounds that happened recently, such as burns and stuff. I was mostly focused on quick treatments in the middle of a fight. But I’m definitely seeing why that’s problematic now.” she sighed. I have a lot to think about when it comes to how I build my rune abilities next life.”

“Hmm… going back to the topic of evolution directions, I feel like both of you are discounting the potential of the Skill evolution path,” said Felix. “I think that Miria’s points about its weaknesses are valid. However, it also has some strengths. Specifically, when we go to fight for lives in the Market eventually, we’re probably not going to have much time to train in the Market first. Our bodies in the Market only last a few months before they start to decay, and it takes a long time to build up lots of runes. This means we’re going to be working with stunted versions of our builds during what might very well be the hardest fight of our existences. The skill evolution path definitely has a lot of weaknesses, and doesn’t fundamentally transform Miria’s abilities, but it also doesn’t need any training to build up. As long as you extinguish something, you immediately get its ability, and that means that you can raise the ability back up immediately upon returning to the Market.”

“But she still needs something to kill,” said Sallia. “So far, we’ve found lots of skeletons and the strange wooden butterflies in the Market, but I have no idea if either of those can be killed with extinguish. After all, Miria basically forces things to have a ‘candle of life’ and then puts it out, but do undead even have a candle of life in the first place? After all, they’re dead.”

Felix fell into thought. “I have no idea.”

I nodded. “I think I can still force the ability to work, but that’s also just an assumption right now. It’s worth testing before making a final decision, but right now, even if I can extinguish skeletons and wooden butterflies, I still lean towards space being the best choice. We still have three lives left, meaning I can focus a bit more on long-term growth than the fight for more lives. The spatial direction seems to be the best for enhancing my abilities in future lives, at least in my opinion.”

The three of us continued debating for several hours, until, to my surprise, someone knocked on the door.

I poked my head out, and I was surprised to see Ella, Anise, and the muscle expert again.

“He came earlier than I thought he would,” said Ella. “Are you free? If so, he could also take a look at your legs and Felix’s eye. Even if the odds aren’t great, it’s worth a shot.” She glanced at her arm, which no longer caused her pain, but still looked as stiff and dead as a branch of dried out wood.

I immediately nodded. “I found a way to make my attunement heal the more permanent injuries, but the muscle expert and I can work out a better treatment plan together.”

“You worked out a way to make your attunement heal permanent injuries?” asked Ella. She sounded very hopeful. I grinned at her.

“Felix can see out of his eye again. He says it’s super blurry, but I ran out of shaping essence before I could heal his eye. I figure it’ll take a month or two to finish healing up everyone’s injuries, but the muscle expert might be able to help cut that time down.”

Ella looked decidedly more enthusiastic than before. The five of us walked into the room where the muscle expert was waiting, along with Anise’s parents and Felix’s mother.

After that, the muscle guy looked over my attempts to heal Felix’s eye, as well as my own legs, before he nodded. “I can help some with Miria’s legs and Ella’s arm, but I really don’t think I can do much for Felix’s eye. Anise… I can probably help somewhat. But since Miria says that she can also deal with permanent injuries…” he grinned. “I can deal with some of the more muscle-related injuries, and you can do the other stuff, right?” He said, turning towards me. I nodded. “Can you demonstrate how your healing ability works?”

“I’m out of shaping essence for the day, but I can at least describe what happened when I tried using it…” I said, before I started explaining how my healing ability worked. Felix and Sallia added to my explanation from time to time, while the muscle expert nodded along.

“Interesting. Based on that description, I think that we can deal with all of the permanent injuries within a few weeks. I think it would be best if we started each treatment session by having me repair what muscles I can interact with, followed by Miria dealing with any minor issues I can’t heal…” the man started launching into a more in-depth plan of what muscles he would start treating in each of our injuries, where I could heal things afterwards, and what his schedule would look like.

After he finished explaining, at my, Sallia, and Felix’s insistence, he started healing Anise’s face. Now that the connection with the fog creature was cut off, his ability didn’t run into any issues as he started healing her desiccated muscles and skin. Ella thanked him, and he promised to return tomorrow.

I smiled.

We still hadn’t located my family or Sallia’s family, and a bad feeling in my stomach told me that maybe we would never hear of them again. Felix’s father was buried in the wastes, and nothing we did would ever bring him back.

But at the very least, we had staved off most of the other impacts of the fall of our home and the journey across the wastes.

All we had to do now was keep growing and getting stronger, so that the next time we went to the wastes, we weren’t caught as unaware as we had been this time.