Mike lay down to sleep, but his mind kept returning to the slight variation made to Rock Tunneling when he had last increased its level. Eventually he gave up on the fruitless endeavor of calming his churning brain and turned inwards, examining anew the skills he had memorized over the previous weeks. To his surprise, each of the skills he had upgraded had changed slightly from what he remembered. For the most part, the changes were small enough that had he not seen the skill change, he likely would have chalked up the differences to some error on his part. But taken as a whole, it was clear that the symbols were being changed as he upgraded them. This led him to, what he considered, a very fundamental question: Did the System make the changes to the skill when he leveled it up, or was it the natural progression of the pattern?
The fact that the System imposed levels on earth’s inhabitants and slowly increased them made him lean towards believing that the System simply started with a worse symbol and slowly made it better, which explained the idea of Levels to some degree. That got him wondering if he could optimize his existing skills by simply growing and changing them into their perfect forms, rather than relying on the System to do it for him.
Eventually, the thoughts became too complex and he was worried much of his thought process was originating from sleep deprivation. Falling asleep had rarely been a struggle for ever since SEAL training, and he refused to let it impact him now. So, without further ado, he smashed his hand on the ground as hard as he could, then used Hands of Healing on the small injury, putting him to sleep immediately.
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That night, as he recreated the Rock Tunneling symbol on a long drill and excavated a small narrow hole from his kitchen to the outside world, a near perfect chimney, his thoughts kept returning back to the symbols, their changes, and the many different ways he could apply that knowledge.
Most important to him was being free from the System’s interference as soon as possible, which helped him make a priority list: 1. He needed to keep leveling his skills to monitor how they changed and hopefully understand if the System was to blame. 2. He needed to understand the relationship of the symbols. Were they some form of language? Could he piece apart a few key words by comparing his skills? 3. Once he had a better grasp of the language, he needed to upgrade his skills to their purest forms, and maybe create new skills that he deemed helpful. 4. He needed to steal the rest of the cosmic water, as forming and upgrading skills was energy intensive and he liked having an unlimited supply. 5. He needed more vessels to store the water.
His list formed, he sat at his table and enjoyed a long draught of cosmic water with some wurm jerky, where he was surprised to see a notification he hadn’t noticed during construction:
[Congratulations! Tinkering Skill advanced to Level 5!
+1 stat point by assignment.
Keep testing the limits of your imagination]
Apparently the System saw his drill a method towards advancement, though whether that was because he had made a tool with a skill fractal or because a drill was going to become key to his progression was still undecided. After dismissing the notification, he climbed outside to where his chimney lay, and spent the rest of the night making it blend into the stone around it. He wasn’t sure if the birds would notice it, but it was better to be safe than dead.
The following days blurred together. Each day around noon, he awoke and spent a few hours leveling his skills and memorizing them, and without being distracted by the invading symbol that sucked away all of his excess energy, he was able to focus on how the skills were modified upon leveling up. He devoted a large amount of energy towards Rock Tunneling, both because it sped up his digging speed, and because he thought it was a more easy concept to decipher than Sonic Sounding or Damage Premonition. Hopefully, it was just two simple symbols, one for “separate” and one for “rock”. His original theory was that it was that the symbols actually meant tunnel and rock, but decided that was less likely than merely separating the stone from its surroundings.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
When the skill reached Level 8 he could pretty much scoop the stone away with his bare hands as easily as he could move them through air. This was also the point where the amount of energy he awoke with in the morning from the water wasn’t enough to level the skill further. At that point, he turned his attention to Pottery, which he also advanced to Level 8, gaining him 12 points towards Dexterity. It may have been an odd choice, but he needed to make more vessels to store cosmic water, and his previous attempts at doing so were mediocre at best. Hopefully the upgrades would allow him to be more successful.
Sometime around the third day, he began trying to decipher how his internal world was changed by increased stats. Gaining Strength from Rock Tunneling and Dexterity from Pottery allowed him to see how the energy seemed to seep out of his channels, reinforcing his body. It happened so quickly that he was positive he would be able to replicate it, but as best as he could tell, the energy improved the entirety of his being. His organs, ligaments, muscles, and even the very cells that made up his body seemed to be changed as his stats increased. Which caused him to begin to wonder if that was the secret to Leveling Up. He had been so focused on upgrading his central energy deposit, because he had watched the cubs’ grow as they gain levels, that maybe he had missed something different. Maybe increasing his body would lead to the growth of his core. It was another unknown that he tried to make time for in his busy schedule.
After leveling his skills, he spent a few hours updating his memory of his pathways. This started with him simply tracing the pathways, and ended with him going towards the entrance of the tunnel, where some light bled through, and carving them into Quicksilver. Understanding that the symbols were three dimensional made it feel like he was learning them for the first time, and it was a slow, arduous process to truly commit them to memory.
When it was finally dark, he turned his attention to digging. While he had gotten faster at the actual digging part, to the point where he felt he could dig faster through rock than any pre-System machinery, he still had to carry all of his debris to the tunnel’s entrance, something that got more and more difficult with each passing day.
During his time tracing his skills, he began to notice that more and more birds were taking note of the large pile of rubble outside of his home, and he was worried that they would soon be onto him. So now, in addition to carrying his large buckets of rocks out from his tunnel, he had to go outside, climb horizontally for a while, and then dump them. He had made the process easier by carving some narrow pathways, but it still was a frustrating decrease to the amount of progress he made.
After around 10 days, the first major change occurred, he was digging forward, when all of a sudden, his hand broke through the rock in front of him, hitting nothing but air. Had it not been for the ease with which he dug through the rock, the motion would have caused his body to fall forward, but as it was, the only reason why he realized it was that his hand was empty when he went to drop the expected dirt into his debris bucket. Widening the hole and looking upwards through a narrow gap at distant stars, he realized where he was: he had dug to the crevice he had found on the plateau’s top.
Fearing what lurked inside, he did his best to cork the hole, deciding it was best to wait until morning to check and see
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Usually Mike hunkered down as the sun reached its peak, but instead, he found himself peering into a dark crevice bellow. The sun was overhead enough that it blistered the skin of his bald head, even with the tiny amount of exposure he was getting.
“Guess living in a cave is bad for one’s tan.” he muttered, as he shimmied around the edge of his tunnel's entrance to a wall that was mostly shaded and beginning his descent. He didn’t have to worry about the birds hearing his words or his movement, as their own cacophony of voices echoed loudly on the walls around him.
Deeper and deeper he went, reaching the solid rock floor only when he was twice as far below ground as the plateau stood above it. By then, the sun had vanished from overhead, and the entirety of the crevice was only gently lit from the reflected light outside.
In total, the crevice’s floor was about the size of three football fields, as it had slowly gotten narrower the further he crawled down. This made the overall shape somewhat of a diamond standing on end, as the top was so narrow that his body could barely fit through, growing much wider where his tunnel emerged from, before narrowing again towards its floor.
He remained vigilant as he explored the floor, ready to activate Unflinching Meteor the second anything changed. He was glad no one saw him activate it when a pebble had been kicked down from above, landing only a few feet away from him and causing him to startle.
As he made his way around the area, he found a disgusting amount of bird feces, which made him wonder if they took enjoyment from defecating from the cliffs above. More interestingly, he found many areas where the rock had been charred. Other than these two discoveries, the cavern seemed completely devoid of anything.
It wasn’t until the sun was far enough past noon that the crevice was actually somewhat dark, that he found anything of import. As he scaled the walls back towards his tunnel, a glowing purple stone caught his eye, and a smile split his face. Blasting Stone. Its presence explained both the charred stone and the reason why nothing was living in the crevice, as he had proven that the explosive was strong enough to destroy a large wurm.
Mining the stone and placing it in his spatial storage bag, he promised himself he would find time in his busy schedule to collect more of it, before he made his way back to his cave. His final act in the near complete darkness was to smash some rock into a fine powder, put it in an empty storage pot, and place his sweet potatoes into it. Usually he would be concerned that they wouldn’t grow in the rough soil and lacking sunlight, but as he added some cosmic water to his new garden, he felt very confident he would be cooking hashbrowns in his kitchen before the week was out.