After some time and being maneuvered through alleyways and back streets, that seemed to have been cleared of all occupants. More than small traces were identifiable but no details could be determined. We arrived.

James announced “This will be your new home for you and the other groups. As one of the smaller groups of heroes, I have arranged that you will have this barrack. To balance the numbers it has been decided that you will share this space with the fifth.

This will be the best you get until you have reached the point of learning your craft.”

He then brought us into a hall with tables and a servery. The troopers stopped but James, their commander, continued. Waving us forward into a hallway he indicated the 2 rooms on either side,

“At the end, there are the washrooms and the facilities. There will be a total of eleven of you. You must come to your own arrangements on how to share the rooms. Over time, It is likely that you will find new groupings.

I will leave you now.”

Even as he left the other group that he called the fifth entered the hallway with their guide. He gave the same instructions word for word. With exactly the same emphasis and intonation. It was quite odd. Looking into the rooms there were 3 cots and small chests at the foot of each. Looking around

I said, “Let’s take the room next to the hall on this side.”

Shamhila replied, “Sounds good to me”.

Dakota just grunted.

Noticeably there were no doors, just curtains that provided an illusion of privacy.

Before the new trooper leader left, he told us all that we should rest. At the first bell, to go to the mess hall, clean and ready to eat. It was strange as if he was instructing young children. Yet all of us that had been summonsed quickly shuffled around and lay on a cot. Almost caught me out, it looked like certain commands did not need to be uttered in the command voice to be effective.

I quickly followed and lay on the cot, with my eyes closed pretending to be asleep. I focused on what had happened over what only seemed like the last few hours. I did suspect that I had experienced time dilation while traveling in the disembodied state. So it felt much longer to me. In my life, the most important skill that I felt that I had was the ability to analyze complex systems, and identify how they worked internally from the external aspects. So the rules I had determined so far seemed to be.

* Having a purpose related to the skill that you want to learn or improve is required.

* There is something about repeating three times that is important.

* It looks like there is something like aura effects.

* Curses are real.

* Spells. Skills, still not sure what to call them, require effort.

* Once a ‘skill’ reaches its maximum the next step is an upgrade.

My heuristic had been to form a question that describes the problem that summed up the problem under consideration. And then experiment, with those ideas. Magic was going to be an important part of my future. I had played enough MMOs and RPGs to be aware that like physics there would be rules, even to something that twists the fabric of the universe. So the first questions I formed were how I could apply it rather than what it was, or how it worked. That was for later.

Question 1

Why is repeating the word 3 times important?

Question 2

How often can I use a skill or spell?

Question 3

How do I improve?

Since I was pretending to be asleep, I was very limited in what experiments I could run. Thinking about the skills that I had, suddenly one of those damned blue boxes appeared in my mind's eye. The interesting thing was that it listed my skills/spells.

Skills

Basic Regeneration

6

Basic Resistance

2

Basic Perception

1

Common Pain resistance

1

Basic Curse resistance

2

Taal Language

Chaos Affinity I

1

Hidden

Identify I

3

Hidden

Racial purity 1%

1%

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Hidden

Title

Hidden

Ultimate

Hidden

Outworlder

Rare

Hero

Considering my little mental list, I focused on the process that I recalled that resulted in gaining a number of the skills. The reason for the skill was clear, immediate, and necessary. How important learning the skill seemed to be very important. It was the reason. The why. That also seemed to drive the direction that the skill developed. The chanting of resist allowed the learning of two skills, a general skill which in turn resulted in learning the resist pain. The ambiguity and the simplicity of the vision that I had, resulted in having to first learn the general skill, and then the specific. That seemed possible, but confirmation was required

But why did nothing happen until I completed a set of three chanted words. Each of the repetitions of the word had differing emphasis, The first had the sense of definition. The second empowerment. And the last triggered the effect. So how could I test this?

I thought about skills or abilities that I had experienced in the games that I had played, after all the skills that I had learned had distinct gaming feel about them. Given that I did not want to give away that I had not been affected by the curse, any skill needed to be something that I could do when pretending to be asleep.

Meditation, Mana Sense, Perception, Improved senses. I had no sense that Mana even existed, so the first two were out. Perception felt that it had something to do with Sight. Improved senses, well maybe I could improve my sense of hearing or smell. If I could manage either of those two, it could lead in time to being more aware of my surroundings. The great thing was that I could do either while in bed and seemingly not doing anything. The other sense that I thought of was taste, but I could hardly go around and lick things in my sleep. But longer-term, that could be an important, taste could lead to all sorts of things around sensing poison, also I know that smell and taste are quite strongly coupled.

I was excited by the idea of avoiding poisons because I had a real bad feeling about those nobles that were paying so much attention to us, as we exited the protection of the shielded circle. And some of the projection that I experienced was certainly not friendly. The problem was that I just could not smell much at all, and deep breathing defeated the idea of pretending to be asleep.

So the only choice was hearing. So what was the concept that I could use, I had success with very simple concepts but at the same time they were very concrete. Sound is the movement of waves in the air. What I wanted was an active skill, because the last thing that I really wanted was to deafen myself, or damage my hearing. Thinking about sound, I realized that there were actually a number of different aspects of sound to be considered, and if I narrowed the range of the effects then I might gain some interesting skills. So other than volume, there were frequencies, both higher and lower, also an interesting option would be more perception-based aspects of sound such as echolocation, the ability to determine direction, and the doppler effect to determine the direction of movement independent of volume.

And then there were the sounds that he could generate. I then realized that I needed to attach a word that represented the concept to me. It seemed that it should work better if the strength of the associations and the accuracy of the representation between the word and the concept.

So then thinking about sounds that I could generate again, attracting the attention of an opponent, I was able to clearly link the term “taunt” to that concept via my experience in gaming. Then there was the sound part of a stun grenade, just the simple word “stun” encompassed that concept. Then the word “project” would work for an increase in his volume without the need for yelling.

Obviously, while these were great concepts, there was just no way of testing them when I was pretending to be asleep.

I better focus back on the more passive, yet controllable skills. After all, from what I could tell the resist skills were both constantly active yet only improved if I focused on them and the regeneration skill seemed to be always active. So I need to develop words that represent the hearing concepts but would allow me to control when they are active.

So to increase the ability to hear faint sounds I had two words that came to mind “listen” and “hear”. Hear to me encompassed the overall abilities that I was trying to develop and “listen” was the particular skill of being able to hear things that I would otherwise not be able to.

I was so pleased with myself that I became distracted again and had the concept of “roar” to project a sound that engendered fear. “Damn it “ I subvocalized. I am supposed to be focusing on passive hearing-related skills. So many ideas were flooding my mind. If these ideas worked I could do the same with vision, touch, taste, and smell. How about suppression. Oh, so many ideas.

This would result in abilities that allowed significant awareness of my surroundings and allowed me to control how I was perceived in turn. But even as I became excited by the options, my lifelong expectation was that nothing came for free.

There had to be a cost.

The other realization was that yet again I was falling prey to my lack of commitment. I had always been willing to go so far, but no further. To start but seldom finish. I was a procrastinator! That was a painful conclusion. The result was that if you choose to not finish something you can never be viewed as a failure.

So since I had a new life, I should make some better choices. I needed to start.

The focus was to hear my breath moving through my nose.

“Hear. Hear. Hear.”

“Listen. Listen. Listen.”

I tried to invest each of the second words with a sense of need.

“Hear. Hear. Hear.”

“Listen. Listen. Listen.”

And the third word had an expectation.

“Hear. Hear. Hear.”

“Listen. Listen. Listen.”

When I started I was aware of the movement and the sound that was generated, but it was faint, a sound that was at the threshold of hearing. With the first cycle little changed, after the second I felt that there was an improvement, but it could easily have been wishful thinking, Pushing on, by the third not much changed. But by the tenth cycle, I could hear more, not only the air rushing in my nose but the sounds of the air vibrating as it moved in and out of my throat. Suddenly I could hear the rush of my blood and the thud of my heart. And then across one breath, I was suddenly aware of two more sets of breathing. Within moments I could also detect the rhythmic pulse of their heartbeats as well.

New Skill - Improved senses. 1/10.

New Skill - Amplified hearing. 1/10.

Skill Improvement - Amplified hearing. 2/10.

While listening to my rhythmic sounds and the corresponding sounds coming from the others in the room I suddenly felt a sense of strain in my mind, and between one beat of my heart and the next I faded into a deep sleep. When I woke it was morning and I faced one of those annoying blue boxes.

Status effect - power exhaustion. - unconscious.

There was significant noise coming from the mess hall. Dakota, Shamhila, and I appeared to have woken at the same time. James called out from the hallway.

“Ablutions and then meet in the mess hall in half a candle mark”.

We all looked around as we clambered from the cots. Shamhila called out as he left the room “there is a lit candle on the table that has bands of color”

I glanced at it, there were blue bands at what appeared to be 2cm separations. Since the candle did not seem to be burning down that rapidly it did seem that we had enough time to visit the toilets and have a quick wash. It did seem that a proper clean would need to wait.

I finished up and headed into the Hall. James was on the other side of the room. Slowly we all gathered.