When morning came, I felt less exhausted, so I finally started going over the Achievement rewards we had gotten while rescuing Felix. There were quite a few of them, and a few of them made me scratch my head in puzzlement, because they had some rather interesting implications.

The first System messages were fairly normal.

Slaughter: Kill a Human who has consumed and absorbed an Ability potion

Achievement +300

Sadly, since I had been too busy teleporting around bullets and lightning bolts, I hadn’t killed the ability user with water. So I didn’t get an ability from it. But ultimately, it wasn’t that big of a deal. My raw combat ability in this world was already quite high, and losing a skill wasn’t the end of the world. If another ability user attacked us in the future, I would just need to remember to use extinguish next time. And if no other ability users attacked us in the future, I would just accept that I wasn’t getting a Skill from an ability-user and move on.

Slaughter: Kill a human with no ability for the fifth time

Achievement +100

The fact that I had killed five people didn’t surprise me. I had been teleporting around a lot of bullets, and I had at least tried to aim for lethal attacks when I had the option. Sallia and I had probably both gotten the most kills last night.

I was a bit surprised to see that I hadn’t reached the next breakpoint for killing humans. The next Achievement reward was one I had already eyeballed during the fight, to confirm my kill.

Slaughter: Kill ‘Aplos.’

Achievement +450

Unlike my earlier kills, this kill had been done entirely using my alteration essence, thrown into the biggest extinguish I could muster up. Sallia and Anise had also contributed heavily to killing the creature, but I had done the most damage overall. I did suddenly realize that all of us had been focusing on other stuff, and hadn’t had time to go over our System notifications. If Anise was lucky, she might have gotten a keyword ability out of fighting Aplos. I would ask her later, once she was more likely to be awake.

But I had gotten a ability from Aplos, which was nice.

Endless Hunger of the Ocean has devoured Aplos for the first time. New Skill created.

Mirror of the Mind’s Eye:

Your body begins to take on characteristics based on other people’s understanding of you. (This may be somewhat controlled).

This Ability allows you to detect what other people think about you, so long as they are within a certain distance, and then choose up to one enhancement or new ability based on that impression. This understanding of you will also potentially influence your personality somewhat, although the higher your [Willpower], the weaker this interference will be.

This ability or enhancement cannot exceed the equivalent of a [Basic] Grade enhancement or Ability from the Market. (Up to 15 points in Stats or one basic-grade new ability).

The ability to take on new characteristics, depending on what other people thought of me, was… odd. I thought back to the fight with Aplos.

HAD the creature gained new abilities based on my understanding of it?

Now that I thought about it, Aplos had used illusions to attack us, and before then, I had suspected that the creature was a master of illusions. After all, the soldiers who had seen me use illusion magic had immediately assumed Aplos had escaped. Perhaps my belief had directly granted Aplos the dangerous attack it had used against us. Which made me feel a little bad. Even if it hadn’t been intentional, one of my thoughts might have gotten my friends hurt. Luckily, nobody had died last night, or I would have felt incredibly guilty.

Aplos had also had a weakness to manifestation essence, at least when we tried using manifestation essence attacks against it. Which made me wonder if Aplos also copied weaknesses when using people’s expectations to get new abilities. If so, my version of the ability didn’t have that glaring weakness, which was nice. Normally, {Endless Hunger of the Ocean} only created weaker copies of abilities I encountered, but it might also try to remove harmful components as well. It was something to think about.

Since the ability could be deleted if I felt it was influencing my personality too much, I added the ability into {Endless Hunger of the Ocean}’s second skill slot, and felt a wave of new, bizarre sensations. I could feel several strings of ideas about me, primarily coming from five different sources.

The first three sources of ‘belief’ about me were from my friends, and before I could respond to the sensation of my new skill activating, they pressed firmly into my mind, like a weight settling on to my thoughts. It was almost like it was a weight that had always been close to me, and I had simply been unaware of it until now.

The closest and strongest impression was from Felix, and his image of me was pretty close to how I thought of myself. But some parts of my personality were magnified in his eyes. Felix seemed to have an especially strong impression of my drive to improve, possibly because I was the strongest advocate of ‘do interesting things, even if it might get us killed’ within the group. Due to my own reflections on myself and my emotions over the past few months, I was pretty sure that my actions were driven by fear instead of confidence and drive to improve, but Felix wasn’t intimately aware with every single one of my thoughts and emotions, even though I did talk with my friends about my feelings from time to time.

Anise, had a slightly different impression of me. I could feel her impression of me as if it were a warm, fuzzy blanket, or a hug. Anise’s strongest impression of me seemed to be from the stories I had told her in our previous world, about our time in the ocean world. And she also seemed to pay a lot of attention to my attempts to take care of the group. Her strongest impression of me was of a warm-hearted healer.

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I had a strong feeling that tapping into Anise’s understanding of me would give me some sort of passive skill that boosted my healing abilities, and it might also change my personality a bit to make me more empathetic and warm-hearted.

Sallia’s impression of me was closest to my own impression of myself. She felt that I was a someone who focused on my friends and ‘found family’ a lot, and had a very strong desire to ‘protect’ my friends and keep them safe whenever I felt they were threatened. This created a slightly odd split in Sallia’s impression of me, since she felt that I could be extremely dangerous when I felt that my friends were threatened. This impression would likely give me some sort of boost to extinguish, since Sallia had a particularly strong impression of that ability and how it tied into my fighting style.

I recoiled as I felt those impressions push into my mind.

I wasn’t sure if I was comfortable seeing the way my friends thought about me. Those thoughts were theirs. I had kind of thought that Aplos’s ability would require a lot more people to ‘believe’ a certain thing about me, and so I had mostly been expecting to tap into the impression the soldiers had of us from last night. The idea of spying on my friend’s thoughts made me uncomfortable, and I was honestly tempted to delete the skill on the spot. I nearly did, but I held myself back right before I scrapped it.

I decided that I would talk with my friends about exactly what my skill did and ask for their thoughts, first, because if I deleted the skill, it would still weaken our group a bit. And I wasn’t entirely sure if deleting the skill was the ‘right’ choice. But my friends absolutely deserved to know that I had accidentally seen a bit more than I meant to, and ask them what they wanted me to do about it. And if they were okay with me keeping the ability, I would consider it. But spying on their thoughts without them knowing felt like a scummy thing to do, so I wanted to at least apologize to them first and ask for their opinion before I proceeded.

Then, I looked into the other two sources of ‘impressions’ floating around.

The fourth source of impressions seemed to come from Old Mo. It was a bit more distant to me, and felt less… ‘real,’ in a strange way. Perhaps it was because Old Mo didn’t know me as well, and so he had a less distinct impression of me than the people I had spent decades with. Now that I knew that my ability spied on people’s thoughts about me, I did my best to shut out his thoughts before I accidentally peeked at them. Old Mo had been nothing but kind to me so far, and he deserved his mental privacy as well.

Then, I focused on the fifth source of ‘impressions.’ This was the only one I had been expecting to see, and also the reason I still thought this skill had some potential. I could feel my mind tapping into the impression the soldiers had of me. This would tell me what the soldiers, and thus the government, thought about us, and would give our group more information to work with in the future. And it could potentially give me new abilities that I might find valuable as well.

The fifth source of impressions felt like a variety of opinions clashing and colliding with each other, but they still at least somewhat similar to each other in nature.

I could make out the impression the soldiers had, of somebody who was cold nearly faceless. It almost felt like, instead of a normal four year old girl, the soldiers we had attacked last night thought of me as a faceless assassin and force of destruction.

They seemed very afraid of me. Their impression of me didn’t really feel like ‘me’ at all. Which was probably fair. My friends and I knew that we had attacked the facility entirely because Felix was imprisoned there, but the soldiers who had survived the battle probably saw us as infiltrators from another nation or something, there to ruin their sketchy research facility. That wasn’t something I had originally thought about, but when I talked with everyone else later, I would also mention how the soldiers thought about us. I didn’t mind reinforcing their belief that we were from another nation, in order to make it harder to track us down.

After that, I did my best to shut off the sensations coming from my new ability. I didn’t want to think too much about my new ability until I had some time to talk with my friends about it. I was still half-tempted to just delete it entirely, honestly.

Then, I continued scanning through my notifications. There were no more kill Achievements, but there were a few interesting Wealth and Influence ones.

Wealth: Own five Ancient Lightning Bolts

Achievement +250

Ancient? I had thought that the people of the facility had been raiding the multiverse or something. If the lightning bolts were ancient… that might imply something very interesting about the history of this world.

Or it could be totally wrong. Yet another thing to bring up with my friends later.

Wealth: Own 1 kilogram of Alkulsteel

Achievement +100

I suspected the ‘Alkulsteel’ was the material the swords had been made of. I had no idea what Alkulsteel was, but apparently, it was a valuable material, if it had triggered wealth Achievement for stealing it.

I would give it to Felix and see what he could make of it. If the swords had no magical properties but were made of some neat alchemical material or something, I wouldn’t really know what to do with it, but Felix might figure out a use for them.

Finally, the most interesting System message of all.

Influence: Cripple the Vernian attempts to study ancient artifacts and rescue project ‘Felix’. (Moderate Impact on this event).

Achievement +2,400

I had gotten a pretty sizeable amount of Achievement for rescuing Felix and stealing a bunch of weird artifacts. Though, if what we had stolen were ancient, hard to replace artifacts, perhaps we had accomplished a lot more than I thought we had by stealing everything we encountered. I didn’t know how hard it was to find more ancient artifacts, but I was pretty sure we had gotten almost the same amount of Achievement for looting the base as we had for contributing to the battle to keep the islands alive in our first life. I recalled getting around 3,600 Achievement from the battle for the survival of the islands, and my contribution had been destroying two boats by luring the sea monster to attack them. For stealing a big chunk of a research base to give me 66% of the rewards felt a little absurd to me. I decided to think more about that later.

All of my Achievement earnings combined totaled up to 3,600 Achievement. With the 1,322 Achievement I had previously had, I now had 4,922 Achievement. Not bad for one night of work, although it had been a bit risky at some points.

A few moments later, as I was reading through my System notifications, I heard Felix stir from my closet.

I quickly ran out the bedroom, and confirmed that my mother had already left the house. I started making a quick breakfast for Felix out of some of the supplies I had squirreled away in my backpack. I still needed to deal with all of the stuff we had swiped last night, and sell the potions I had… borrowed, and do a million other things. But first, I needed to help Felix change up his face a little bit, check if my other friends were awake, and talk about all of the things I had learned and my accidental peeping on their thoughts.