Navigating home, Dyani noticed even more city guards and companion beasts patrolling than earlier. The beasts had their noses to the ground, searching for an elusive scent. A muscled feline that looked like a cross between a house cat and a bicep sneezed as she passed and gave her a dirty look, but a dismissive glance from the woman that accompanied her made it clear that whatever or whoever they were looking for, they weren’t Dyani or someone like her.
Perhaps someone had stolen one of the Squirrel Lord’s beloved beast companions. It didn’t sound likely, but the city lord was the only one that could elicit such a dramatic response from his guard. It was possible that a wealthy family had called in a favor to search for a runaway child or mistress, but Dyani didn’t know enough about high end politics to speculate beyond that.
Whoever it was, Dyani hoped they were better at hiding then they were at attracting powerful eyes. She doubted there was anywhere in the city to hide from the enhanced perception of so many high level beasts.
Dyani arrived home before her mother, and turned her room over looking for a notebook before hurrying to the bathroom. She stripped off her clothes and sat naked in the bathtub, book in hand. She couldn’t stop a giggle, but swiftly masked her excitement with the stoic satisfaction of a great warrior gazing at a defeated army.
Searching through her class notes, she found the page dedicated to basic experience allocation and advancement. The lesson had been interesting, so she’d actually paid attention and taken notes, unlike in lessons on spellcraft, runes, or other esoteric subjects.
Scanning through her notes, Dyani confirmed her basic understanding of the process and cycled her mana through her channels to prepare them and reviewed the various areas where she could allocate her gathered experience.
Attribute:
Location:
Description:
Mana Capacity
Core
Maximum Mana
Mana Regeneration
Inner Core?
Mana Recovery
Magic Power
Mana Channels
Strength of mana and skill power.
Strength
Muscles
Bodily power
Speed
Nerves
Does what it says.
Endurance
Heart and Lungs
Stamina Recovery/Maximum
Vitality
Guts (intestines, stomach, kidneys, etc.)
Health Recovery/Maximum
Mind
Brain
Memory, speed of thought, mental resistance (not intelligence?)
Toughness
Bones
Physical endurance
Perception
Sensory Organs
Senses and ability to endure those senses.
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For the first time in her life, Dyani wished she’d taken better notes. The general ideas were there, but she remembered there being some more complicated interactions between attributes as they reached higher levels. The only interaction she remembered was how increasing your Speed without increasing your Mind and Toughness was likely to get you splattered against a wall, since your brain wouldn’t be able to keep up with your physical speed, and your body wouldn’t be able to endure the resulting impact.
Her teacher had made Nodin write that down several times and read it back to her to ensure he understood after he shouted that he would just put every bit of experience into the best attribute, Speed. Dyani smiled at the memory and considered allocating the experience she’d gathered into Speed.
The mental lag and toughness issue shouldn’t be a problem at such a low level, but she decided that the attribute wouldn’t be as useful as some others.
Perception was completely out. Even if her note claimed that the attribute included the ability to endure the increases in her senses, she had no desire to smell any more of the sewer than she had already. In fact, if she had a way to temporarily shut off her sense of smell entirely, she’d use it everyday.
None of the Magic attributes would be any help, without any skills to use mana on. That fact still hurt, but less than it had a few weeks ago.
Between Kemo’s hints about her father’s death and Dyani’s success in gathering experience so far, she was certain that regardless of what her future talents turned out to be, she would discover them soon enough. According to a couple of long conversations with her mother, they would eventually grant her some kind of benefit. Whether that benefit would be something she actually wanted was up in the air.
Nymin knew a great deal about how talents functioned, knowledge she’d gained from desperate research after the devastation of gaining her own talent. While talents were unique, they did follow a couple of general patterns.
Talents gave abilities based on a central theme or archetype, though the exact theme wasn’t always clear at lower levels. Her mother’s talent’s were clearly based on the power’s of a wraith, an intangible monster that sustained itself by draining the health of the living, though her mother drained mana instead of health.
One of the examples Dyani had heard was a mage with talents based on the stars. The level 1 talent transformed their ordinary mana into stellar mana, while later talents granted abilities based around various constellations.
Dyani didn’t know what the theme of her talents was, the effect was just too general, but the fact that her talent had the clear downside of not being able to absorb skills was interesting considering the other thing she’d learned about talents.
Talents that had downsides tended to have larger benefits, with the increase in power being proportional to the downside. On the other hand, talents that were generally beneficial for everything, like a talent based on reducing the cost of every type of skill, were less powerful overall.
It made her all the more excited to level up and get another talent. If her new talent followed that pattern, it would be amazing.
But, since she had no idea what direction it would go in, she couldn’t use it as a guide for allocating her experience.
With the Perception and Magic attributes eliminated, that left Strength, Speed, Endurance, Toughness, Mind, and Vitality.
Strength and Speed were both tempting, but none of the monsters she’d fought were physically stronger or faster than her. The only significant issue she’d faced was the Plover Moss and its spores.
She considered which attribute would best help her resist a similar attack. She remembered that Toughness was largely responsible for resisting physical attacks, while Mind could provide some defense from mental or emotional magic, but the only attribute that would significantly assist in resisting and purging infection was Vitality.
Dyani ran over her lines of reasoning, confirmed her decision, and started pouring the loose cloud of vibrating experience into her guts. She didn’t have any way to feel the individual organs, but once her intention was clear and she started pushing on the energy, it naturally flowed where it was needed.
Her shoulders slumped as the experience left her feeling deflated, and her insides burned with pain, like she’d swallowed a cocktail of peppers and pure alcohol. When she came to her senses, she was curled up on her side in the bathtub, cold sweat all over her body. She stood, and marveled at how healthy she felt.
Her body moved easily and eagerly and a thousand tiny aches and pains she hadn’t realized had been afflicting her were erased.
“I need to do that again.” And if her current rate of experience gain held steady, she would. Dyani smiled, but the expression went lopsided as her stomach softly gurgled. She must be hungry. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and advancing surely took a lot of energy.
Dyani managed to exit the bathtub and take two steps before her insides rioted, causing her to double over. She heaved a couple times before vomiting up a fountain of gray ooze.
She was forced to adjust her personal scale of disgusting smells. The city sewer was dethroned as the champion, replaced with whatever was now splattered on the floor. Dyani managed to get back to the bathtub before throwing up again, this mess equally disgusting, but in a different way, more blood and pus than thick, gray ooze.
After waiting in dread for another batch of vomit that didn’t come, Dyani spat out as much of the acrid taste as she could and slid over to the bath’s faucet.
The water was cold, but she barely noticed. It was clean and didn’t taste like a week old corpse. She stayed there, washing out her mouth, then drinking so greedily that she vomited again. That time, what came up was sunshine and rainbows compared to what had come out after allocating her experience.
Someone should’ve warned her, her teacher, her mother, Veraine, since she actually paid attention in class. Suddenly, the thought of advancing again in only a few weeks wasn’t such a pleasant prospect.
No, she would endure this. It was just another foe, another fight, even if it was against her own body, instead of a monster or villain. Dyani planned to add a line to her notes about the unpleasantness, but found there was already something there.
‘Initial Advancement of each attribute may cause discomfort.’
That description entirely failed to convey how bad that had been, but if it were true, then at least she would only have to endure this once per attribute, not every time she advanced.
Dyani wasted an enormous amount of water cleaning herself, the tub, and the floor, but even after over an hour of scrubbing, there was still a dark stain on the wooden floorboards that had somehow bonded to the lacquered finish. Dyani covered it with the small rug that was normally under the sink.
She was just finishing when her mother called out to her as she arrived home.
“Acorn? Are you home?”