Lord Cosgrave sat in her office going over the never-ending paperwork. She was looking at reports on essence crystal shipments that were of critical import. None of their local sources produced enough for their needs, as such her city relied too much on trade. Scowling, she cross-referenced the yearly yield numbers.
Hearing her door open, she glanced up to see her aide walking in. Setting her papers down, she moved the holograms floating above the desk to clear her eye line.
“Yes, Jessica. What is it?” She asked.
“M’lord, this afternoon the intake report was filed concerning the survivor of the Islangur raid. You wanted to know if anything of importance was included. I’m sorry to say that there wasn’t,” said Ms. Chandler.
“Any further reports of Islangur activity?” Lord Cosgrave asked.
Shaking her head, Ms. Chandler replied, “No m’lord. The mages say that there is nothing out there, while Army Command remains skeptical. Could this not be an isolated incident?”
Pausing in thought, Lord Heleema Cosgrave leaned back in her chair. There was nothing to indicate a larger plan was afoot. It was possible that the raid was just an unfortunate meeting in the woods.
“Alright, stand down preparations for ‘Silent Vigil’ and return our threat status to ‘All is Well’. Let’s put this behind us and move on. There is nothing to be gained by giving this more attention than it deserves. Let the army continue their investigation if they want, but let’s try not to waste resources.” She said definitively, then continued, “Is there anything else?”
“No m’lord,” Ms. Chandler said as she gave a slight bow and left the room to return to her duties.
Lord Cosgrave gave a huff of annoyance, and returned to her examination of the regional essence crystal trade.
------
As he walked through the halls, the intake hall, and courtyard, Nero planned his evening. First food, then class scheduling, then hitting the books in his room. He decided to check his identity to see how much center he had. It was pretty low before he decided to call Nick.
Name
Nero Walker
Level
4
Race
Human
Growth
71%
Tier
1
Condition
100%
Age
14
Center
11%
Body
1
Mind
1
Soul
1
Confluence
10
Stars
0
Pillars
0/0
‘Shouldn’t I be on my ass right now?’ he wondered. Nero remembered that Mrs. Salvatore said people normally didn’t drop below 40% without having some serious symptoms. Pausing in a hallway, he leaned his back against the wall, out of the flow of traffic. Closing his eyes, he took stock of himself.
‘I’m a little hungry. Definitely thirsty. A bathroom might be a good idea. No sore joints or headaches. I guess I do feel a little tingly. It’s like I’ve been up all night and then had to work through the day. This feels exactly like I’m staying awake on nothing but 5-hour energies and my vape. Wait? Did death cure my addiction. Well, that makes sense. I wonder if these crystal-worshipers smoke weed? Eh, I’m sure someone is smoking something somewhere,’ he thought.
Nero resumed his walk to the cafeteria. On the way he looked out for a bathroom to hit.
Eventually, he was walking into the lobby of the Dorms. As Nero started toward the dining hall, a sense of his impending DOOM came out of nowhere. He stopped and started looking around.
His attention was pulled toward the front desk about 30 ft away. Ms. Averett’s steely gaze met his, piercing the room like a spear of divine wrath. The crowd seemed to split open as if no one dared to cross her eyeline. She said nothing, and stood still as a cat waiting for an opportunity to pounce. Nero gulped, then reevaluated his plans for the evening. ‘I should sign up for classes while I’m here. It’d be silly to go to dinner first. After all, it only makes sense,’ he thought to himself.
Without breaking stride, he pivoted to the classes-hub, the sense of Doom evaporated and everyone continued on with their day.
Nero looked up the beginning classes for combat, specifically magic combat. The classes all had a basic essence theory class as a prerequisite, along with a note that you need to have been tested in combat casting proficiency before applying. Not dissuaded, he looked up the basic essence theory class. It’s a six week class that meets every other day, that’s five 3-hour classes a week. No prerequisites needed. He signed up for a class that begins in 5 days and meets in the afternoons. Nero applauded himself for beginning his journey in reality bending. He closed his connection to the board and started to turn away.
Pausing with a foot in the air, Nero realized that what he just signed up for wasn’t a combat class.
He turned back, and reopened his connection. ‘Too close,’ he thought while he felt his back sweating at the image of Ms. Averett watching him. He quickly found a free class that anyone can join at the basic level; it met in the mornings, and would pair nicely with his future magic classes. That still left a lot of free time. Nero decided that it didn’t matter, most of his studying would be guided by his reading preferences. Anything they can teach him, he believed he could learn from a book. As a bonus, he wouldn’t have to be in class with people. He looked around at all the polite people, waiting their turn without complaint and with untroubled faces. ‘Yeah… I’m not ready to deal with these people yet,’ he thought to himself.
He cut the connection then turned back to the front desk. Ms. Averett’s attention snapped to him. ‘Damn she has some fine senses,’ he noted to himself.
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Nero gave her a thumbs up and a smile, then walked off to the dining hall. As he moved through the crowd, he could feel her eyes following him. Eventually passing through the door, he gave in to a full body shiver. Shaking it off, he put it in a corner of his mind and promptly forgot about it. It was time for this world’s version of steak and potatoes.
After dinner, Nero returned to his room. He used the link to dim the lights a little, then cut his connection. ‘Won’t be using that for a while,’ he thought.
He pulled of his link and tossed it on his nightstand, along with his notes for the day and whatever else he acquired during his escapades. Throwing his robes in the hamper, his boots at the door, Nero grabbed a set of pajamas that he learned were in the bottom shelf of his cabinet. This knowledge was thanks to his afternoon fiddling with his link.
Taking a shower and getting in his ‘jammies’, Nero curled up in bed with his book on identity. ‘All knowledge is useful, even if it is just learning what to ignore,’ he mentally told himself.
He then spent the rest of the night going through the book until he eventually finished it. Aside from the sections on skills and relative strength ratings of the numbers, it was pretty chalk full of semi-useful information.
He found out that stats points are really just multipliers of inherent potential. Putting it in gaming terms: A body with a zero stat is a normal human body. When a star is used, it injects potential that you have collected and reinforces everything with essence. Healing speed, strength, tensile strength of your skin, organ function, eyesight, even memory is enhanced. Apparently, the brain is part of the body stat. Every use of a star adds about 20% of an increase in performance. The interesting thing is, it stacks. Meaning that at one star it’s x1.2 body performance, 2 stars = x1.44, etc. By the time you have 20 stars in a stat, it’s like the stat actual performs at 38 times the level of a basic human. Even though people vary widely in their basic human potential, that’s some pretty impressive improvement.
This performance applies to all of the stats. Where the body becomes a better body, the mind becomes better at what it does. The mind stat is in reference to your sense of self. Willpower, focus, all of what makes you able to decide to do things. Nero decided to think of it as perspective. How strong is his perspective. A strong mind can break illusion magic, fight back against instinctual drives like fear and panic, and best of all, a strong mind can influence and interact with the world. The more powerful the mind, the more powerful the psyche. So when Nick was tossing dishes around the lab, it wasn’t magic, he was going all telekinetic. ‘I’ll never have to get up to get a beer, or the remote,’ he thought with a grin.
Finally, the soul. The book said that a strong soul gives ‘strength of identity’. The entire chapter was filled with spiritual nonsense about planes of reality, and the endurance of personality. Nero was sure that all of it was scientifically accurate here, but it didn’t mean that he understood it. They also proved, somehow, that the soul is really eternal. When a person dies, they just lose their mind and body. The ‘Who they are’ moves onto a new body via some complicated process that occurs ‘in the higher planes’.
There was even a section on how the mind was sent to it’s chosen afterlife, but the soul gets reincarnated. So, in this world you get an afterlife AND reincarnation. Does that mean that a person could meet another incarnation of themselves in the afterlife? Would they know?
Since all of this was common knowledge, it stands to reason that death isn’t treated like the sad and depressing thing that it actually is. There were parts of the chapter on the soul’s strength and density, with charts showing relative growth and time curves. ‘I don’t understand any of these references, or any of this math,’ he thought with a confused frown.
In fact, all he really took away from the entire section was that he would be an idiot to ignore it.
The most surprising reveal was that most people start with a confluence of 0. The confluence being how tightly the three aspects of a person are bound. It is supposed to be VERY important to keep your confluence at least as high as your highest stat. Otherwise your growth can stop, and then you are screwed. Once a person’s growth stops, they are just waiting to die. When Nero read that, he double checked his identity, then promised himself to always give a big buffer with confluence. He didn’t know why his confluence was so high; and for the moment, he didn’t care.
The last thing to note was that there were no benefits to a confluence being more than 5 points higher than a person’s highest stat. There were even references to studies that were done to prove it. Someone had voluntarily raised their confluence alone for 20 levels. There was no discernible improvements to growth. In fact, the subject’s growth seemed to slow in relation to their peers as the study went on. Whether that’s true or not for Nero was unclear, but it was something to consider.
Moving on, Nero found the entire skill section was disappointing. It boiled down to how strong a skill was in comparison to other people. Skill numbers went up without limit. There was a reference to a guy who had raised his skill in Baking to over 500. The guy made a great muffin, but when it came down to it, it was still a muffin. There were no super-human abilities that came from leveling skills crazy high. Granted a person with a 500 level skill in longswords would be a freakin’ AMAZING swordsman, but he couldn’t cut a mountain in half with his skill. Nero was heart-broken.
One piece of information really stood out. Since skills are part of the world, as someone practices and learns a skill, they are absorbing the ‘essence echo’ of all those people who used the skill before them. Therefore, even if the skill itself is average, at least leveling a skill is easier here than back on Earth.
The book had more than 50 pages of graphs and charts plotting growth curves and listing societal averages; those Nero only glanced at. More than half the book Nero considered ‘fluff’. In fact, the entire last chapter boiled down to ‘your path is yours alone’ and ‘you can be anything you want to be’. ‘I swear I’m going to hold a protest or something, these people are way too upbeat,’ he thought with a grimace.
Checking the time (28:24). Nero got up, tossed the book on his desk and went to the bathroom. There is a 30 hour day, with the 30 days in a month, 3 months in a ‘trien’, and 3 triens in a year. ‘Somebody or something definitely is doing some magic-fuckery to mess with the laws of nature here.’ he noted.
Flushing the toilet, He brushed his teeth and then went to bed. Using his link to turn of the lights, Nero closed his eyes. He decided to check his identity before bed. ‘This should be a habit I get into,’ he thought.
Name
Nero Walker
Level
4
Race
Human
Growth
100%
Tier
1
Condition
100%
Age
14
Center
72%
Body
1
Mind
1
Soul
1
Confluence
10
Stars
0
Pillars
0/0
‘How am I leveling so fast? Better question, why didn’t I level when I reached 100% growth?’ he wondered.
Nero went over his identity, finding no answers to his questions. He noticed that his Center seemed to recharge much faster than the books implied as well. It had only been a few hours and he was already recovered, more or less. ‘I’m not telling Nick about this, he’s just going to go all mad scientist and do something that makes me puke again,’ he thought.
Rolling onto his side, Nero tried to banish the situation to the back of his mind. ‘This is bullshit. I was promised a world of dungeons and dragons, with levels and growing power, and all I get is a world of motivational speakers and social studies dorks. I’m not meant for this. I was a cog in the crappy machine back home, I’m not going to be one here too. I’m just going to put up with what I have to. Meanwhile, I’ll learn magic, read some books on monsters, learn how to stab things, and then I can do whatever I want. I’ll find some ‘socially disruptive’ women and introduce this world to what a max level warlock can do!’ He swore to himself as he clenched his fists while he laid in bed and scrunched his brow with his eyes closed as he imagined his future. ‘Ding’ he heard, then felt the essence around him flowing, gently ruffling the sheets.
Nero sat up like a kid who heard the ice cream truck, eyes opening wide. His surprise was quickly followed by a look of fury. ‘GOD DAMN PERSONAL IMPROVEMENT BULLSHIT!’ Nero screamed in his mind.
Nero had read about this. ‘You have to know yourself to realize your growth’. ‘Nope, I’m not dealing with this right now,’ he emphatically decided.
Patting his sheets to get comfortable, Nero ignored everything. While focusing on his imagined epic powers and future conquests, Nero drifted off to sleep.