5.04

“Fools, I made something none of you could’ve ever conceived of achieving. I made a choice, I cheated the systems you built, kill me if you will. For no matter how suited you imbeciles are to janitorial work, I have left a stain you can’t clean off.” - Last words of Magus Smar Da Ten Yu, only a few days after she created costless resurrection magic.

My vision splanched.

Staggering slightly, my hand fell onto the table, trying to grab onto it for leverage, but they were slower. My fingers couldn’t close fast enough to actually grab onto the edge, instead sliding onto my staff for support.

I fell onto the ground, my vision, it was screwed. I saw the floor beneath me, the ceiling on top of me, I felt places even if they were obscured. The tiny cracks in the ground, the dirt behind the table leg, I saw outside the walls as human activity died with the night. Everything nearby I felt, an alien sense going outward before the energy that made it seemed to dissipate and all was darkness.

But I opened my eye and I saw. Embedded in my left eye socket, a gem like pure lapis lazuli, sculpted to a perfect sphere and with intricately carved lines like the endlessly caressing waves. Glowing within was a constellation of stars forever aimed north. I closed my other vision, the one that allowed me to perceive all nearby and I calmed. The eye of Analyze.

Standing back up, I realized my body was not slow because I was slower, but because I was thinking the wrong thoughts to move. Inefficient ones, still human. When I shed those like an ill-fitting sock, embracing this body’s instincts I moved with the same speed as expected. Slowly, I opened the other vision again, seeing everything nearby but not further.

Utoqa was watching me silently, “All good,” I said, reassuring not him but my own still wobbly legs.

There were some changes. My racials, Darkvision, Fungal Body and Innate Magic were all changed. I lost the first to the new vision.

Manavision [Passive]: Your race’s innate mastery of mana allows you to perceive everything within a radius equal to your Myconid Level x 5 metres. You see in dim light as if it were bright light, and in darkness as if it were dim light. You can't discern colours in darkness, only shades of grey. A dispel or null magic effect will negate this sight. If you have no mana, this sight is automatically deactivated.

Undeniably a negative, if I didn’t have spare eyes I would’ve been locked as a short-range mage. But an upgrade in terms of my current build.

Fungal Body [Passive]: You have resistance to poison and bludgeoning damage. You are vulnerable to desiccation damage.

Resistance to a more common form of damage in return for vulnerability to a rare one? You took this nine times out of ten.

Strong Innate Magic [Passive]: You gain 2 Tier 0 Spells from the Magic Cap Myconid Spell List, as well as,

Choose and gain 1 of the following options per Myconid level:

* You create 1 Tier 0 Spells and gain them on your Spell List.

* You gain proficiency and knowledge in Arcana.

* You gain a passive Detect Magic within the range of your Manavision.

Along with the addition of Age-Type Heteromorph, these were all the changes done to my racial skills. My passive stat-growth still remained the same… This was almost entirely beneficial, the multiple downsides of manavision were overcome, leaving nothing but benefits. Desiccation damage I can avoid. Yes, I just need to avoid deserts, dry places and that damned sun. I just needed to stay hydrated, getting bludgeoning resistance was always worth it in these scenarios…

“Does heat do desiccation damage? I.e. Fire?”

I hissed slightly before I caught myself. My instincts had been altered.

“What were you reacting to? Heat or fire?”

“Heat,” I answered. “Fire likely has no more effect than on a normal person. Perhaps less so if I am so filled with fluids.”

Which left heat, I needed temperature controlling magics, or perhaps a way to quickly rehydrate myself. Fire damage remained an issue but it was not fire that I would be vulnerable to. I’m gaining weaknesses but they remained manageable enough that I could make countermeasures.

“So you really are changed huh?”

I paused at that statement, “What do you mean?”

“Don’t forget that your current body has been altered to be accurate to the myconid form, theoretically your brain isn’t human anymore.”

“That is true in theory, in practice I seem to have all my faculties cept for a few new weird habits,” I returned.

“You immediately jumped onto thinking of what countermeasures you could take against desiccation damage.”

I raised an eyebrow, “What do you mean? I always do that.”

There was a dry laugh, “And both of us thought my desire to unravel what Discovery is was due to me being a curious idiot.”

My hand stiffened, tightening on my staff, “You don’t mean…”

“I mean at first it is completely unnoticeable,” he said, “it seems like you until you spend too long and suddenly have a thought completely contrary.”

“We are constantly changing as well, even without this,” I gestured around, “our fourteen-year-old self would not at all recognise either of us.”

“True, but to be fair he was an asshole by all accounts.”

“That we can agree with,” I thought with a chuckle.

“Keep it in mind though. After all, if you don’t understand how the system works…”

“Then you don’t know how to cheat it,” I answered as I stood.

And with the options given to me, it was finally time to start cheating.

----------------------------------------

I met back up with Noam later that night.

Utoqa pushed open the doors of the tavern and we quickly found the table where he sat. He sighted us first, waving at us with his free hand before he looked at the group seated around him with a smirk.

“Read em and weep,” he splayed his cards onto the table. Four of a kind, Knights of wands, cups, swords and coins.

The heavyset man who sat before him smirked as well, “A good hand, but you need better.” He threw down his own hand, a straight flush, three to eight of cups. Unfortunately for both of them, I already knew the winner.

“Is this good?” Greenie asked as it raised an arm, just as Yellow dropped the cards. A royal flush of swords.

“Shit.”

“Damn. A royal succession.”

Coins changed hands as the wisps now sat on a pile of silver.

“Looks like business calls Weten,” Noam said as he shuffled the deck, before handing it back to the heavy-set man, “good game!”

He took it, grasping Noam’s own hand in a handshake, “You too, and bring along the cute mushroom thing as well, unless their parent disagrees?” he asked, glancing at me.

I shrugged, “Just do it responsibly.”

Both the wisps nodded before the man chuckled and ruffled their caps a bit, “Well looks like me mates are calling me as well, see ya later Noam!”

“See ya!” Noam yelled as he waved back.

I gestured at Utoqa to take the freed seat as I sat behind the wisps. “So you’ve been gambling all day?”

He rolled his eyes, before shrugging, “Of course!”

Hmm, not the most solid alibi, but it’ll do. I glanced towards the bar and Noam hollered a waiter. “Anything ya’ll like to eat?” he asked.

“I’m partial.”

“Something with meat.”

“The crabs please!” Noam hollered at the waiter, before adding in a lower voice, “Did you know that shellfish is cheap as fuck here?”

I raised an eyebrow, “Really?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he replied, taking a swig from a tankard, “I mean it makes sense, lobsters and shit were originally peasant food, super cheap everywhere until rich people ruined it for the rest of us by making it gourmet.”

“And with oceans ruined it just raised the cost even higher.”

“Yep,” Noam replied.

Interesting, our family always eschewed seafood because, well, just look at the cost, and I’ve never really cared to try it. VR taste programs don’t offer anything exemplary. If anything it felt like they were emphasizing the thick seawater taste which was just repulsive. I ate some yesterday at another restaurant but all I could recall was how hard getting the shell off was.

“Now that we’re here, let’s get down to business,” I started, directing to Utoqa. He turned to me, in a way not really human, the action was too sudden, like a creature swiftly jerking to catch sight of a predator, only with none of the panic.

I took it as a gesture to continue, “If we’re going to work together it’s best to figure out payment distribution as soon as possible-”

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

Noam snorted, “Bah, you have to make everything seem boring! Basically, he’s asking how much of a cut you want on each quest.”

I raised an eyebrow, “Pretty much. We should get that out of the way and temper expectations. I suggest we each get an equal share of money, with quantitative items like weapons on a need priority basis.”

It was a similar system for most pick up groups. I could see some conflict if we wanted the same loot, however our classes were distinct enough that it would rarely happen.

Scavenge was a truly useful ability, one-use, but the thing with trinkets was about how much you could stock up. Something I didn’t have because my sporages inevitably expired after a few hours, my maximum output was always limited by my mana regen.

“Mine and his agreement is that he handles all the money we get together,” Noam added, thumbing towards me, “but he’s the accountant.”

Utoqa considered it for a moment, “I am fine with this bond.”

“How does your Scavenging trick work by the way?” Noam asked, “Like, do you need to kill it yourself?”

“I do not,” he answered, just as the waiter came with our food.

“Like, can you make something out of this lobster…” Noam continued asking in between mouthfuls and Utoqa answered. As I idly crunched my own portion, I was thinking.

Utoqa was someone we really needed, as well as something that could prove a theory of mine. A theory that answered a question.

What could possibly balance a Traveler against a normal person of this world?

Travelers couldn’t die, if we decided to do something, then we had infinite tries. Other powerful creatures existed, but they were slow, and had their own conditions and weaknesses. Travelers at a glance did not seem to have obvious weaknesses to balance them out.

That was until you looked at the stats.

Analyze told me that Naukoth and Utoqa were both the same level as me, five. And that made sense if you only considered their skills. Both had extremely powerful, but conditional abilities similar to Noam and I. Naukoth could keep an entire raid buffed using a grand piano, Utoqa could create trinkets from corpses. Purely counting my own Traveler levels, I could make an entire area rather costly to pass, while Noam took an… extremely situational ability. He could reasonably fight off a group of up to three people if he was alone but suffer middling results until that number reached like two-hundred or something, at which point he became a walking raid boss. CtH had a whole slew of conditions and wasn’t that good unless you reached a critical mass, but if you did, then the payoff was enormous. In his case, he sacrificed consistency for the sake of a few awesome moments.

If he swapped CtH to something more consistent but weaker, then he would be an extremely difficult opponent to deal with. His own natural skills with multiple weapons and fighting styles would make him a lethal master of all trades with few apparent weaknesses.

Unfortunately, he was an idiot and I just had to deal with that.

‘But back to the point,’ I idly thought as I took a bite of the crunchy food.

Considering both mine and Noam’s stat total to Utoqa’s, an interesting thing comes up.

Currently, my stat total was one-thirty-six, Noam’s was one-thirty-one. Both of us were saving for Feats, but if we included our SP then it would be one-thirty-nine and one-thirty-seven respectively. I was higher because I had more automatically growing stats compared to Noam, but they were still relatively similar.

And while I wasn’t able to get a good handle on Naukoth’s stats, my observations of only his Body stats put him at least at one-hundred. Assuming that his Mind and Soul stats were average, then Naukoth at minimum had one-sixty total stats. Except for his strength, Utoqa was similar in Body stat totals. Implying that his true stat total was around one-hundred fifty.

This was a massive disparity. If Travelers only had the three stat points we get per-level, we would never catch up to a normal person of this world who trained regularly. Our abilities might be of the same level, but their stats would be superior unless we could also train our stats. Which, while nothing has disproven we couldn’t, nothing has proven we could. I had Analyze constantly running on both Noam and I and neither of us have had an unexplained stat increase.

And this was only one of the assumed weaknesses I had. Even if stat theory proved wrong, it said something else. That natives of this world had far longer than we to train their skills and strengthen their stats. They had, in essence, a head start. The leveling guide straight up said a Learned Path was weaker than a normal one. Perhaps with the exception of us unlocking more powerful abilities by accomplishing feats in line with that Path. Me having the wisps for Symbiosis, Noam drawing and fighting off an entire crowd by himself for Spitfire. A Traveler grew quicker initially, we reached similar levels to Utoqa in three days compared to the years he probably needed, but one-to-one, boiling down everything to a simple numerical scale. Utoqa was still stronger than either of us and that was without considering his new Path.

Including Survive, then I could barely match him at the current time and that was with a deific buff. Noam might have an easier time, but that was because the person himself was skilled, not because his stats and abilities he had were in any way equal to Utoqa’s.

Which was overall a fair exchange. And that seemed to be the whole point of the system. Keep taking positives and negatives until something starts to work.

“-Earth to Dusts!?” Noam yelled at the side of my head.

“Hmm?” I asked as I bit off the lobster-like creature’s head.

“Jesus you’re eating the shell and all,” he muttered, “I was asking you what your immediate plans were.”

“Ah,” I tossed the rest of the lobster into my mouth, swallowing it. “I was planning on traveling around. We got paid sixty gold each for that quest which is enough to last a while. Most Wayshards are located in major cities so I figured it was best we got them all logged.”

I turned to Utoqa, “Which Wayshards can you go to?”

He thought for a moment, “The one here and a few past the channel.”

“In Branika?”

“That is what the soft-skins call it.”

To Noam’s confusion, I explained, “The world is separated into two mega continents, likely connected as one supercontinent once but that’s not the point.”

“We’re currently in the bottom right of Braunad, past the channel towards the east you can get to Branika, the other continent.”

“Got it, and you have a specific direction to go?”

“Westward, Manatheres and the Mage’s Academy are there, I wanted to drop by there first and check if I could learn magic.”

Noam scrunched his face slightly, “If you spent the first few years-”

“No, I’m not,” I shook my head, “all accounts point to effective magic being years in the learning. I just need to confirm if I am capable of basic and simple low-level spell casting to prove a few theories before we move on to log other parts of the world. Ideally we also gather more party members as we travel.”

Purely recruiting from Travelers would allow for a static and unchanging force, but if my theories were right then Travelers were on average weaker than their NPC counterparts. Just with Utoqa, it would take at least three average Travelers of the same level to have any consistent success in taking him down. Not recruiting from the resident population would be a severe mistake.

Noam glanced at Utoqa, “Then we’re all in agreement?”

“I have no problem.”

“Then that’s our plan.”

----------------------------------------

After dinner, I retired back to the inn. Making sure all my stuff was still there. Now that I had ways around the storage problem, keeping stuff in other places wasn’t all that useful.

I was alone, Utoqa had his own inn, Noam logged off and Declan was silent, drifting in and out of some much-needed sleep. Something I seemed to not need all that much of.

Now I had to settle my racials. I needed to pick my choice for my final racial skill, Strong Innate Magic.

The Arcana proficiency, while extremely tempting, was something I could afford to put off and learn later, which left the spell or the passive detect magic.

Detect Magic within five meters would be extremely useful, but there was something else I had to try out. Something that was worth using this choice that only came every two-hundred years.

I took the spell creation and the one tier zero spell.

As the choice was made, reality bled away and I was alone, looking at a small bundle of power. Formless, weak, but moldable.

Think of what Spell you wish to create. If it is within the confines of T0 Spell, it will be created, if it is not, you may try again.

I took it and thought of a spell that created an eye.

The bundle responded and formed the framework for another spell, Arcane Eye. A spell that created an invisible, magical eye up to ten meters away that relayed information to you.

But it was a tier four spell. I couldn’t finish on this, it wouldn’t let me.

So instead, I added a condition. ‘The eye can only be created by touch, it is a melee spell.’

The tier went down by one.

‘And only on surfaces.’

The tier went down by an additional one.

‘It would be visible, like a rune.’

Another one, tier one, and now came the moment of truth.

‘It cannot be moved unless the surface it was on is moved.’

The tier did not lower to zero, instead, something else became better. The duration went from lasting an hour up to eight.

So this was it. One of the things that can’t be tier zero. Information gathering spells.

I was already aware of things like this, effects that cannot exist in tier zero spells, simply because tier zero spells were spammable, it was why Healing Spores and all other healing spell variants were at minimum tier one. Tier zero spells cost so little that they are completely negligible. They effectively cost zero mana.

But Balm Spores was a tier zero spell because even if its effect felt like healing, it wasn’t healing. It was a bandage. If its effect was put into game terms then all it did was remove the bleeding status effect as well as mend skin. The healing still came from the body itself.

Which meant there was a way to overcome this as well.

‘The eye doesn’t relay information to the caster.’

There was a moment of confusion, where it changed so that it recorded the information for the caster or anyone else to later see upon touching the rune, but I was rather insistent. ‘The eye doesn’t relay information to the caster by itself, in any means.’

‘All it does is see.’

The tier dropped to zero.

I smiled.

‘The cast is silent.’

No change in tier and my smile widened.

‘It is instant.’

No change again.

I looked it over a few more times, testing a few more changes, trying to make it not rely on touch but that removed the silent aspect of it. I couldn’t have everything it seemed, but it was in the best state I wanted so I took it.

Please name the spell.

“Watching Eye.”

Creation Successful

Spell: Watching Eye

Tier 0 Transmutation Spell

Casting Time: Instant

Components: Somatic

Duration: 8 hours or until canceled

Description: Draws a glowing rune of seeing unto a surface, size varies from 5-15 centimeters in diameter. The rune is capable of seeing things but does not transmit it in any way.

The spell was created and I gently touched the ground, casting it, a dimly glowing blue rune that reminded one of an eye appeared.

“Speak the word Declan,” I said aloud, rousing him from his drowsiness.

“Observe.”

And I saw through it, looking back at myself, and seeing the Magician card beside me.

The problem with a system that relied on cost and benefits, was this.

This spell was utterly worthless in a vacuum, all it effectively did was create an aesthetic effect. No one would take this spell, because it was literally useless, if all you wanted was to color a surface, then Prestidigitation was better. This spell was more negative than benefit.

But it counted as a seeing eye, so it worked with Observe. A spell worthless in a vacuum was made infinitely valuable because of this. Because it was a tier zero spell, it was something I can spam, something with only two steps could set up a massive information-gathering network.

And it proved something else.

At the very lowest denomination, the system can be cheated, because the thing you aimed to create in a system like this was not a build with exploitable weaknesses. It was creating weaknesses and conditions that can’t be exploited. If you were weak one way then you got another ability to cover it up. Being vulnerable to desiccation damage didn’t matter shit if you had an item that gave you immunity to it.

What a min/max build aimed to achieve wasn’t to become good at one thing at the cost of everything else but to become so good at one thing that you became good at everything else.

And also importantly, it showed that at the very least the system did not rely on my own values to calculate Spell Tier Level, but on a base valuation system. It proved even if I was blatantly trying to metagame the system, so long as I played by its own rules it could be done. Something I wasn’t sure of since the system was so based on belief, but it seems my own were superseded.

Proving this definitively was worth a once in two-hundred-year chance.

More tests were needed, but this.

This was a good first step.