For the first time since I arrived, I have no idea what time it was when I woke, but it was still dark, and no one was moving. Both Dakota and Shamhila were in their cots asleep. I lay quietly and considered what to do, ‘status’ still beckoned, but two other aspects were also important. I need to improve my power pool. I suspected that Steven is going to ensure that my Stamina pool would be forced to grow. With that, I remembered that I had some updates last night before I fell asleep.

I blurred my eyes and looked for any traces of a HUD or the notifications that I had received earlier. This out-of-focus viewing surprisingly worked better than I expected. To the bottom right was a pale blue blinking exclamation mark. At the top of my vision were two sets of HUD elements. At the top left, there were three small bars with tiny symbols to the right. On the other side of my view of my field of vision was a pale red icon that was slowly cycling.

I focused my attention on the exclamation mark and the blue boxes that I had missed appeared filling my field of vision.

Basic Strike

1/10

Causes a critical wound to the head of your opponent.

Active - Uses a Moderate amount of stamina.

Upgrade path

Common Strike

Synergies

???

Skill improvement - Understanding I - 4/10

New Title - Utterly Exhausted 1 - Improves the maximum levels of power and stamina.

The new title might just be why I was now awake. Status still felt important and with the hints that I have picked up from the ‘Understanding’ skill and the HUD, it seemed that achieving this was within reach. But the problem is what I learned from Steven the day before yesterday, each skill passive or active used power, I had thought that there were no constraints but clearly, I was mistaken. I gained a health regeneration ability during the transfer between Universes. So this suggested that it was possible to achieve this for Power.

Being asleep had helped me regenerate but while I could not read any of the values in the HUD I did not feel that I had regenerated either Stamina or Power back to 100%.

The various games I had played had different ways to recover resources or minimize the use of resources, from potions, gems, and artifacts. Skills such as meditation, mana circulation, and mana finesse, from the RPG style and in the eastern style of games ideas such as Dao, Meridians, and internal pathways.

How it worked in this Universe was a mystery. The more I dwelt on the issue I was becoming aware that my Stamina was rebuilding faster than my Power.

Concentrating on the feelings within my body, it appeared that Stamina was being generated internally and the power was flowing into me from the environment. The problem was that these feelings were so nebulous that I could not even be sure, of which one was internal and which external. There was a beat in my chest that appeared to relate to my health, but because I was fully healthy I could not sense anything about how that regenerated. There seemed to be three aspects to my attributes: Body, which I knew about, and Mind, which appeared to be centered in my spine. And something else which was centered in my core. Soul, Daitan if I could just identify a useful concept I suspected life would be easier.

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I decided that nearly any action would likely help. I consider what was coming in from the external source. I considered two different mental processes that I had used during my life: The rainbow, and self-directed dreaming. If those patterns of thinking had worked in my previous life maybe I could extend them here.

The issue is though I cannot by the look of it risk gaining any more skills until I gain either a large pool of power or am able to regenerate it much more quickly. My Stamina has already built back up to what felt like a reasonable level. I carefully ignored the HUD. I suspected that this was the start of a new skill, which I definitely did not want to gain right now. I had previously been able to get a list of my skills and titles, but it had not triggered the new skill, which was lucky looking back. But it did not list my attributes. I suspected that if I managed to list those then I was pretty sure I would gain the current unwanted skill.

What I wanted to do was improve my attributes, and having that status skill that I suspected existed would be excellent. Thinking back about when my attributes improved during the first few minutes in this universe. It did not seem like they were the traditional gaming attributes. It seemed that maybe there were multiple attributes that related to a base attribute. Stamina would be a body attribute. Did power come from the mind or soul skills, not understanding how things worked was a drawback, but my understanding of the scientific method gave me hope.

Since Regeneration was a skill, it did not make sense to empty my power pool and hope that repeatedly emptying it would expand the pool. It was by this logic more likely to give me a power regeneration skill. No more skills for the time being !!!!!

So how do I improve my mind? Because improving my soul, or Daitan or whatever the third aspect I just did not know where to start.

……..

The first model that I want to try is to imagine a balloon and fill it with the power that is entering my body from the outside. I started to work. I have the image in my mind. This seems to occur so much easier than a few days back on earth.

Excellent. I can control the intake but damn it. It just leaks out all over the place and does not inflate the balloon. It is not as if there were just little pin holes, there were great gaps in the fabric of the balloon, I just could not patch them, I strengthened one area another would weaken. The size of the space was fixed, I just was unable to enclose the entire space with any sort of membrane that I could think of.

I had to give up on that idea. My next idea is to imagine the power as a liquid. That seems a lot easier than viewing it as air. But how do I contain it? I could sense the power flowing in and out. Moving about. But where and in what was it moving that kept escaping me.

There were pools where it gathered. But it disappeared as a gas. It flowed into something and appeared to be consumed. When I focused down on a pool and tried to push it towards one of the other pools all that happened was that it disappeared faster. Some aspects of me felt weaker yet at the same time, other aspects seem to strengthen. When I stopped pushing the original pool would fill back up and the aspects that had changed reverted. In one case it felt that as I pushed a pool that was very near another, a tension that I recognized as a precursor of gaining a skill started to form. Since that was very much a No No I stopped instantly. It was in the circumstances a scary feeling.

I could hear movement in the hall, so it was likely that we were going to be called soon. I determined that today I would have to fail at learning new skills. Attributes seemed safe but I felt that I was skating on thin ice at the moment with how much power I had available.

Holding on to the image of the power as a fluid seemed right. If increasing the size of the pools was not a winner what else could I learn. It flowed in and seemed to strengthen the environment in some way and then it flowed out. I looked at the inflow and compared that to the outflow I could tell that there was more entering the system than making it out. What looked like pools were more like eddies that spun around.

I was struck by the similarity to Tesla’s valve. It relied on fluid dynamics to prevent liquids from moving in one direction. In this case, there were multiple incoming flows and a smaller number of outward flows. However, the flow through the system was slowed or blocked by the eddies. Look at some of the eddies that were moving slowly but the odd few seemed to spin the wrong way, Some seemed to spin correctly but were inhibited by a flow from a different eddy.

Looking at a flow that was near an outflow that spun rather slowly, I pushed and tried to increase the rate of the spin. This did not have the same tension that I experienced earlier. The pool that contained the eddy grew a little larger. This caused the flows that feed this pool to speed up, the little change that I made had significant change across the system. Some eddies slowed, some sped up. But overall there was a real increase in the amount of power that moved through the system.