The darkness inside of the shelter was oppressive and absolute. After only a few minutes had passed, Mike realized he hadn’t thought up a way to get air into the shelter. His first solution was to create small holes for air, but that failed miserably–the sand storm outside was so fierce that sand immediately began pelting the structures inhabitants, despite him angling the holes in multiple directions. The next solution was to create a couple of tubes to breathe from, but those became clogged. Finally, in a stroke of inspiration, he simply added another four feet of space to one side of the room on the outside wall. It required all of his concentration to form the Quicksilver without being able to see it, but after months of working with the substance, it was doable. Once the addition had been completed, he opened up the wall and greedily drank in the fresh air. After catching his breath, he guided the pups to wiggle over to the new area before following after them on his hands and knees–a necessity in the short metal tent. When they were situated, he closed off the new portion of the tent, dissolved the metal not being used, and began the process again.
For the next 8 hours, the process continued, his ability to manipulate the unseen metal growing with each iteration so that he was slowly able to open up more space and thus rest for longer periods of time. By 16 hours, his eyes throbbed, an interesting reaction to the total darkness that he was experiencing. Despite this, he couldn’t help but feel grateful that he wasn’t alone. The young pups took to the new situation without complaint, nipping his hands occasionally whenever they were hungry.
At 24 hours, his eyes began to see motes of yellow in the darkness, which moved in and out of his field of vision.
At 26 hours he realized that the motes of yellow light were tied to where the cubs were… something he probably should have realized sooner, but nonetheless he was proud of himself for realizing.
At 28 hours he was sick of watching the lights, but found that he saw them faintly even when his eyes were closed.
At 30 hours the whelps asked for more food. A dozen minutes later, he began to notice a faint gas that seemed to form around the yellow dots he had come to associate with his charges. It glowed faintly, albeit much less than even the dim glow of the main sphere. The gas seemed to trickle in from all sides, the cloud growing bigger and thicker, and he soon began to be concerned. All at once, it was absorbed into the dot, like a vacuum sucking up spilled flour. While minute, he was certain that the dots were now fractionally larger than they were before. Curious, he Analyzed the foxes. Both had gained two levels and were now 22.
The implications were staggering. Somehow, without killing anything, the two cubs had gotten stronger. And based on everything he had seen, he could only surmise that the foxes were pulling energy from the meat of the wurm. With nothing better to do, he ate a piece of meat and closed his eyes, looking inward. For thirty minutes, he sat there unmoving, willing the gas to form, but then the air got heavy and he was forced to move the shelter again.
It wasn’t until another 12 hours had passed that his next breakthrough came. He wished that he could say it was perseverance and insight that had led to it, but that would be lying. The truth was that he had gotten curious with his seemingly new ability to see energy and had begun to search his body for his favorite organ: the stomach. He had first found his core, a process made easier by having found it previously. It still leaked trace amounts of energy into his body, which slowly circulated before coming back. Had it not been for the pitch darkness, this would have been impossible for him.
The next major organ had been his heart, which seemed to be more saturated with energy than anything other than his core. After that, he found his stomach, well actually, he found the piece of wurm jerky that was sitting in his stomach. The energy was faint, but it was there. Rather than circulating, the energy given off by the meat seemed to simply disappear downwards almost as fast as it was given off, and he could only theorize that it was going into his digestive track where it would be excreted at the time of his next bowel movement. The sudden thought made him realize that he had been stuck in the shelter for almost two days and it was really time to do some business.
At the 50 hour mark, and after consuming way more meat than was healthy, he figured out how to not let the energy be wasted. His issue had been trying to will the energy from his stomach into his body, when he actually needed to do it as it began to leave his stomach, it was a slight change in perspective, but it made all the difference. Focusing in on one small pocket of gas, he followed it from his abdomen, up through his arm, down his leg, and finally back to his core, where it built up just like he had seen in the cubs.
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After being in the shelter for 72 hours, three entire days, he finally had enough gas built up around his core that he felt he could try to Level Up. He had gotten much more efficient at extracting the energy, even if he was still much worse than the foxes. He still had to focus to get each bit of energy, a process that fatigued his mind more than any test had in school, but it was getting faster. He could push the energy through his channels and to his center, rather than just absorbing it and watching it circulate. He did find that he needed to focus on it the whole time or else it would just get mixed in with the rest of his circulating energy and seemingly disappear.
After a short break, he gathered himself, then tried to gather the energy and willed it to merge with his core. After ten minutes of intense concentration, the only reward he had to show was a splitting headache. Deciding he had put off sleep for far too long, he expanded the shelter as much as he could before drifting off to sleep.
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Sleep didn’t help. After another 30 attempts at forcefully increasing his level, he was left feeling completely defeated. A sentiment which was only made stronger when he saw that the cubs were now Level 26. The only thing he could be grateful for was that the energy stayed around his core once he put it there.
Still, he was trapped in a tiny shelter in a storm that was still going after three and a half days, so he pushed onward. He could sense that he was onto something big, even if information still eluded him. On a whim, he broke off some of the gas and willed it to become more dense, shrinking it down from around the size of a quarter to only a pin drop. From there, he allowed it to follow the stream of outgoing energy from his core, watching as it circulated throughout his body.
Most of the time, the stream seemed to follow long, straight, paths, which looped throughout his body much like the veins and arteries he had learned about in his anatomy classes in college. Every once in a while, the pathways became much more stiff, like something carved into stone rather than the natural pathways his body possessed. It wasn’t until the energy reached the back of his hand where he had watched the glyph for his Burrowing skill take shape that he realized the unnatural areas were his various skills.
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For the next three days, he only stopped watching the circulating energy for a few activities: 1) Moving the shelter so they wouldn’t suffocate. 2) Sleeping. Something that had only happened one time so far. 3) Playing with the fox cubs. While they had at first been very willing to hide from the storm, their fear had slowly turned to boredom and he was forced to spend a few minutes playing with them in the darkness each time he moved the shilter. 4) Gathering energy after eating a meal. He had long since stopped overeating when he found that he couldn’t gain levels, but he saw no reason to not increase the size and density of his energy cloud. On the contrary, it felt wasteful not to gather it now that he knew it had a purpose. If there was one thing ingrained in him from his Great Depression Era mother, it was to never waste.
So strenuous had been the exertion on his mind, that he actually received a point to Intelligence on two separate occasions, bringing his total up to 40. That was a welcome bonus, even if it felt small. 6 and half days of nearly nonstop work, for two points in Intelligence. Definitely the worst training sessions he had had so far.
He had slowly made a mental map of all of his pathways during his hundreds of circulations through them, and as he adjusted it slightly from his most recent iteration, his body pulled in energy from the air around him, gathering an amount almost equal to his own stored cloud, before it sent it shooting through his pathways and up into the glyph in his head, where it seemed to cling to every surface of the glyph at once before the pathways became slightly larger.
[Congratulations! Energy Sense reaches Level 2!
+2 to Intelligence
Your ability to sense cosmic energy has increased.]
A grin split his face, followed by a scowl, and a cough of frustration. From watching the energy reinforce Level Up Energy Sense, he was pretty confident he could increase the levels of his other skills, something that would allow him to continue growing even if he hadn’t figured out how to level up yet. That was helpful even if he was unhappy that his Intelligence was so much higher than his physical stats.
What wasn’t helpful were the instructions for reaching the next stage of Energy Sense: Cultivate from the cosmic energy around you.
“At least I know the name of this substance is Cosmic Energy now…. AAArgh!” the scream interrupted his sentence as he looked inward, “The System used up my energy for that Level Up too?! Why on earth would I waste it on such a dumb Skill?”