---Richard---
Richard stared at the surroundings slightly dazed. For days upon days of sleepless intensity, his projects had taken over every spare thought and action he’d had.
His body defense dropped all the negative aspects of sleep deprivation down to minor annoyances. Toxin buildup in the brain and metabolic imbalances were dropped so far as to be unimportant. Physically Richard was confident he could go indefinitely without sleep at this point – pushing past the first few days of habit-breaking was the hard part. His subconsciousness and muscle memory thought he needed sleep and took a while to teach themselves it wasn’t important anymore.
Of course ignoring the physical aspect, mentally going weeks without sleep takes a toll as well. It should have at least – In this case, Mental defense helped reduce the stress and after reaching nine days without sleep, Richard had gotten a rare achievement gifting nine “unconsciousness defense” for his body and nine “mental fatigue defense” for his mind.
That achievement alone had dropped the slow build of tension to near zero – the stats specialized enough to give noticeable changes.
Well…anyways. What now? Should he start sleeping again just for the sake of it?
Sleep aside…what now?
There were a dozen different things Richard wanted to study and probably close to a hundred questions or experiments he wanted to do.
The specific combination of mental stats Richard had, just seemed to give him even more questions. "What kind of autism do you have? Mine gives me experiments to do with the frequency and attention span of a coked-up squirrel."
Could he now focus on making drones that survived being phase shifted into different dimensions? Fiddle with different kinds of sensors and frames till he was finally able to start taking pictures of the places he could round trip? Explore the unknown?
Should he try and finally put some focus on himself? Purge the last of the non defense corruption from his body and use those stats to build weapons? Finally take achievements seriously and start grinding up some personal power?
Maybe what Richard should focus on instead was his nest. Richard really did want to see what he could make with his nest instead of trying to use his nest to make things – just focus on randomly trying stuff out to see if anything useful appeared instead of specifically engineering it to make him types of materials he might need…First on the list of random ideas he wanted to test was if mobile nests were possible.
What would making a giant truck or train or 'something' and sticking his nest seed in the middle do? Was that even possible? Could be fun. Could be fun.
Goals aside…what about this true unique achievement? Which of these three choices should he pick?
Something custom. Stats. Something he didn’t understand.
The custom reward…might be the easiest way to solve some problem he had. The simplest method to gain something unique – or gain something earlier than others…
But Richard no longer had a burning goal he was willing to sacrifice everything for. Picking it just for the sake of picking it would probably result in the weakest reward. It was like stats. If he were willing to let the system hand him whatever it wanted, he would get 3x as much.
Speaking of stats, did he want to choose them? It was essentially the strongest reward from a pure profit standpoint. If Richard picked the random version, it would almost double his total stats in one go. Him having more stats would keep him ahead of the majority of humanity and make it easier for him to get some of those final “unique because I did it first/boomer” style achievements that had slowed down…
Free stats he could allocate into his body’s defense would…be incredibly satisfying. Body defense synergized so well with itself and what he wanted…even if it wasn’t an insane doubling of his stats. Well, picking free and tossing them all into defense would explode his body’s potential with the way stats self synergized.
But eh.
If he were to go the stat route, Richard leaned more towards the random option and cleaning out ones he didn’t want. Even if the system tossed a bunch of inferior body stats at him, Richard could pull them out and put them in more permanent equipment. Body speed stats would boost any vehicle Richard made to insane mobility speeds. Body power would boost his stone cannon setup into remaining relevant.
Stat wise…if Richard were to go on a purely research basis, he could also try the custom request. If stats were each single atoms of super dense elements in the “unable to form outside of black hole” category of the period table…what if Richard were to ask for as many unique elements as he could?
Body power, speed, defense all being elements x01, x02, x03. What if he just asked for one of every element it could get him? Everything from elements 300-1000 on the periodic table!
But based on the pattern it would probably be even worse than the free stats. Something like a third…instead of 243 stats he could place wherever it might be 81 unique stats he could study…
…
And then of course there was the first option. The mantel. A reward that only did something if he helped push the world into making it do something.
The idea of powerful people calling themselves gods was laughable. As far as power structures went, that felt like peak might makes right abuse.
Ahhh!
Richard looked around his workstation. In the corner on a short workbench there was a bucket of water – actually a bucket of “weak” acid. H2S04 was basically water when compared to most of the more caustic aether unlocked variations. Basically a different concept all together.
Walking over Richard closed his eyes and shoved his head into the water. A short shake and he felt some of the gunk wash off his face. Days of caked-on grime scrubbed by a nice cleansing bath.
That's fucking better.
Richard glared about his room taking it in for the first time. It was a box. A box of stone. No window and no door because both of those interfered with certain kinds of experiments and he hadn’t prioritized that. Depressing as shit.
When he entered and exited this room he spun his arms about a thin section opening up a entrance to the outside…but now that he was just sitting here?
Usually when he came back in he sealed this bitch up. Fans and filters that doubled as fume hoods helped keep the air clean…but that was mostly to prevent it from breaking certain experiments not for his own safety.
Where were the windows?
Walking over to a wall Richard’s stone hands spun a circle and slid out a solid circle of window in a random spot.
Glancing around he grabbed a weak projection device and slapped it on the wall. Moulding the stone to hold it tightly in a second Richard let it project a one way refraction pane giving him a bit of privacy. Keeping one connection hand pressed on the device and pumping aether into it, Richard stomped back to his now contaminated bucket and moved it to the ground.
Keeping the window powered with barely a thought, Richard stepped into the acid and swirled his permanent boots about.
Stone began to slowly flake away as bits of dirt and crud were washed off integrated limbs.
Alright. What's the best option? Richard considered the three options from a looser perspective.
The “correct” answer changed based on how you framed things.
On one hand, mantel was the most variable. Massive FOMO if it appreciated in value but right now it was worthless.
Custom had the most potential to get something small but hard to come by. Richard doubted it could be massive when compared to the other options. Might let R sneak something extra in if the bastard was feeling generous. Custom shit was always marked up in comparison to what they had on the shelves.
It had to be balanced with the other options otherwise Richard could just ask R for 2000 stats and one up the system…but yeah. Fuck that guy.
Final option was stats. Stats were the simplest safest and arguably strongest option.
Math pointed to picking stats. Strongest in the moment boost. That boost could easily chain to more free shit.
On the other hand.
Well, stats were the most boring of the three options – if Richard was focused solely on personal strength he wouldn't have cared about or succeeded with his altruistic system goal. He would have grinded achievements instead of finding them pleasant surprises for things he was already doing.
Richard stepped out of the murky bucket and grabbed a blow torch. One of his connection hands pumped a thin stream of aether in and using the low powered flame, Richard tried drying his face and hair.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Fuck. Burning smell. Why don’t my stats extend to the tips of my hair follicles? Dead skin and shit being unprotected is useful but hair being dead and vulnerable is just inconvenient.
Richard flicked a device across the room and took a picture of himself glancing at the AI popup a second later.
"I look like shit. What kind of toddler burns his hair? Who let that madman near the blowtorch?"
Richard shook the last drops off then crossed the room in a few strides. With a flop he was in his expensive comfortable chair and with a few mental commands the chair was soon reclining and pulsing kinetic massage pulses with the force of a jackhammer.
Richard lowered his bludgeoning defense slightly as his skill started reducing the pumps and got back into his decision making.
So stats.
Most boring option and counter to Richards main goal for life which was to keep being entertained.
It gave the biggest initial benefit…but Richard could probably gain that number of stats in the future using smaller achievements. Even if it took a year or something, that benefit could be gained in other ways. Fuck short term gains. Fuck Boring choices.
If he stopped looking at the options as an optimal benefit…what the fuck even was a mantel? James had gotten some sort of different kind of one and it…regulated his aether into corrupted aether?
Of the options it seemed the hardest to get at a later point. If this was the level of achievement Richard needed to complete to get one just handed to him…well fuck it. Richard probably peaked with that achievement might as well cash it in now. Good chance he’d never make something as goated as that again.
Richard tapped the option finally letting the system message disappear.
System messages were so limited. If RIchard had a chance to improve the system, he’d dump half his custom AI bindings into the fucker. How much could status on demand, achievement history, reward deferral etc, all cost? If Richard wanted to save a choice for later, he had to move the box to the side and ignore it. Couldn’t even shrink that little bitch to save on valuable real estate. Systems just like, Vision? It's free real estate! UX work needs a overhall.
Store that shit in a database and quarry it whenever someone asked. Not to be a dick but Richard was confident he could improve the default interface if he had a chance. A blind orphan could improve the base system – how a lack of parents would prevent you from designing a better interface was a bit up in the air. Don’t think about it too hard.
While Richard imagined modernizing the ailing system and tried to relax a force seemed to approach him in the skill plane.
A curved circlet seemed to be offered and slowly placed on Richard’s...sort of head? Where his head might be in the skill plane? – the circlet was some sort of smooth crown? Either way as soon as Richard noticed something interacting with him in this plane, he reached out with his ethereal hands and tried to grab them.
He imagined he was doing the equivalent of grabbing someones wrist as they tried to put a hat on him – in the moment it felt like it should be funny. Maybe shock them a bit. Say hi, yes I can feel you.
For a single moment he seemed to grasp some sort of invisible slippery squishy bugger before with a sharp ach his arms were…bit?...stabbed?
The pain was shockingly deep and Richard flinched.
Fucking rude. What was that for? An overreaction and a half.
His ethereal arms stung. They throbbed. Nothing had ever attacked them before and they didn’t seem to share the defense the rest of Richard's body had.
Cradling his damaged connection limbs, Richard wheezed slightly feeling nauseous. He felt out of breath even though that should be impossible. The pain wasn’t disappearing. What the fuck? Why wasn’t his defense helping?
🛡️ Achievement get: Survived Soul Damage. (Uncommon)
Description: Through circumstances outside of your control, a vulnerable part of you has been damaged.
----------------------------------------
Stat: +3 soul (ethereal arms) defence
🙌 Achievement get: Inquisitive Esper. (Rare)
Description: With bumbling hands you attempted to grasp something that did not wish to be grasped.
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Stat: +3 soul (ethereal arms) power.
Stat: +1 soul (presence) power.
Oh so now we are confirming the existence of a soul? Is that what the systems calling my skill body? Fuckkk. why does it still hurt?
Richard lay trying to deal with the pain. As soon as he had gotten the soul stats the ache had started to fade slowly. The portion of defensive stats that corresponded to regeneration was relatively low – for body defense maybe 1-5% was “void defense” but Richard didn’t know the split for soul void defense.
3 stats…also weren’t a lot. Still it was enough to start healing him and after a half hour of massage his ethereal connection arm were a dull ache when he moved instead of a throbbing one.
Richard sat up and turned off his massage. He’d dropped his bludgeoning defense to zero and yet his adaptive skill had still managed to make it stop feeling like much of anything.
With faint curiosity Richard reached up carefully and prodded the device on his skill head. His…soul head?
The circlet was solid. It was solid and dense and placed so tightly on him it might as well be fused.
If stats were single esoteric atoms and skills were complex almost organic compounds centered around at least one esoteric atom…well this circlet felt like a solid bar of esoteric metal.
It felt like it should be dense enough to shove him to the ground…maybe instead of element 800 on the periodic table it was element 400?
As soon as he touched it with his hands his hands felt stuck to it like a magnet. He could pull them away but that flared up his injury.
Dripping some aether down one of the connected hands Richard felt a two way interface sort of flare up. The closest feeling Richard had experienced was the sort of weird connection he’d gained when collaborating and sharing his skill with others.
Attempting to pull that strange connection towards his AI – physically right beside the circlet in the skill plane – Richard dragged the connection close enough to feel it suddenly jump over.
Ping: -|-|/-||/||/-|/-|-/-/|--|/-||/----|//-|/-/--|--/||-|--/-|-//-|/-||
Ping: |||--|||//-/||--|/---/||-|//--|---/-|---|/-||
Ping: |/-/|/||/-|//------|-|/-||/-/-|--/--|||-|/-||
Ping: |/-/|/||/-|//-----/--|---|--//--|/---||
Richard hooked up the connection to a quick trinary to text converter and started displaying the feedback properly
Mantel designation: Mantel of the anti corruption systems founder.
Local Mantel ID Number: 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 002
World Authority: Grade 1.
Authority: World benefit system not found.
Mantel Integration/Integrity: 100%
Note: No perk to manage. World aethersphere is not empowering mantel.
At first, Richard thought the skill crown might be a solid circle of metal but with these kinds of results it was clearly a computer of some sort however rudimentary.
Richard kept querying the device and getting back similar results. Generic pings gave cycling information or full dumps of the mantel’s “status”. Specific requests gave single values or more detailed information. Slowly a picture began to build for him. Stuff R had said suddenly clicked. Theories he had suddenly solidified.
The world system did more than just hand out stats and skills on a merit basis. It also did stuff like place dungeons and spawn monsters. Richard was nearly confident it was involved in sucking away environmental aether and the mechanics of monsters appearing was probably directly related to that sucked away aether…as if dumped aether was pollution and the system pushed the pollution into appearing further away from people and…only at night?
Looking at it like that. The more aether people used in machines the more pollution was made and the more monsters spawned when the system released it…yeah everything seemed to check out!
The system also seemed likely to affect the way skills worked. Certain properties of aether suddenly made more sense as a manufactured result. Certain effects were less the 'default' and more a purposfully designed system. This mantel could interact with a system that wasn't currently set up. Would they unlock it when they ranked up the planet? Would they need to build it themselves? Would R come back once again to offer a ready made system?
Richard had several more theories but he kept coming back to the way aether just vanished in the empty environment and randomly appeared in specific places.
Nests were probably not specifically designed to make monsters but to help manage pollution. So a nest sort of held all the environmental aether in place – maybe the nest seed was dense enough to act like a gravity well that sucked on aether? The type of pollution held related to the types of monster that appeared...was that because the system dumped specific types of aether into specific nests or did the nests themselves work to filter aether… Without the system and nests, maybe monsters would spawn everywhere as soon as enough pollution built? Pop up inside peoples homes or beside operating machines?
There were too many jumps of logic in Richards theory. It felt correct but he had no real proof.
If it worked how he was theorizing it worked…well It seemed like the current system was better than nothing but Richard didn’t know why most of the decisions were made.
If the environmental aether was pollution and directly created monsters why wasn’t it tossed into space? Maybe in the past it used to be dumped onto a moon or something and after years of dumping it created super kaiju able to leap to the planet and destroy everything unchecked. Richard through that might be possible...but at the end of the day it was just a guess you know?
Why did environmental even create monsters if that was true? Life was such a massive jump! Organic creatures and complicated lifeforms were obviously harder to make than…well couldn’t aether just be dumped into batteries and reused? Used to transmute items and mass produce useful materials?
Richard didn’t understand.
Studying why any of this worked the way it did seemed like the best first step towards improving how monsters appeared in the world.
What is the best way of studying this? What are some tests I can run to prove any of these theories?
…
Richard spent just over a day and a half trying to prove his theories. His nest as a collector for environmental aether theory seemed to hold up. Measuring the environmental aether in a random spot gave values roughly around 0.2-2% of a single standard rank 0+ level. Basically zero. Measuring inside his nest gave…well it gave a gradient that got denser the closer to the center it got, but on average it was rank 3 in terms of quality and density. Very center was rank 3++ which definitely had a link to the boss monsters that appeared in nests.
Part way through all of the tests Richard was running he suddenly got a message. Multiple messages when he started checking the cities network.
On one side. A dangerous group was threatening the world. Proven terrorists according to initial scouts.
On the other side…His best friend was being attacked by mooks.
Richard tossed everything. He grabbed his nest. Attached a partly finished buggy to the bottom of his chair. Grabbed everything he could loot from his workshop and then started driving.
It took hours of slightly bumpy traversal and some coordinates from James’s AI but he made it.
Just in time to find his friend besieged by an army.