Chapter 23: Suspiciously peaceful.
Life in the village continued… normally. Well, pleasantly and relatively uneventfully. There hadn’t been enough time to really establish a ‘normal’. It had been a month, but the strange atmosphere of this place made it seem like much less. He could only really tell how long it had been when he focused on the progress his Skills had made. First, there was the further upgrades to Void Beholder.
Skill Name: Void Beholder
Form your will into a sphere. The beholder can fly freely and hide itself from all senses. It is completely controlled by you. You can project all of your senses through the beholder. The beholder acts as an unlimited channel for all your Skills. Enhances the effect of physical Perception used through the beholder. The beholders formed by this Skill function as parallel processing modules, even when not deployed.
He hadn’t focused on this Skill that much despite using it for basically everything nowadays, and the upgrade was what came from an idea for another Skill that worked well with the framework of Void Beholder. The effects of the upgrade was basically a tiny ‘computer’ that he could think through.
It wasn’t anywhere close to as complex as the human brain, but it was more streamlined for certain tasks and gave him incredible ability to multitask—a necessity with how many beholders he had moving around constantly. This also scaled with his Mind stat as just well as his normal brain functions did, so it would continue being useful as he leveled up. If he leveled up.
The next Skill was his old favorite, Voiding. He still didn’t understand exactly how it worked—it seemed more like a Spell sometimes, what with it not being based on runes and being modified by repeated use. But he was sure that it only grew from deliberate action, and it didn’t improve just from naturally being used. He had to lock onto what he was trying to make it do, and sort of push the Skill to do it. It was definitely very different from his other Skills, not in the least because it didn’t seem to count for Titles, at least the Rune ones. It made sense, but by the exact description of the Title it should have.
It had been quite a while since he had last upgraded it, and the new effects were quite useful.
Skill Name: Voiding
Nullify and void the very foundation of existence. Decreases the strength, quantity, and connection of all mana in the target area. The more active the mana, the more it is affected. Can be used in an aura around the caster to decrease the power of all external spells, magical abilities, magical Skills, and opposing concepts that pass through or are cast from the zone. The user may also decrease relative momentum of objects and beings in the zone. Can also be used on contact with a being or object to focus the nullifying power on the target. On an object, this has a greater effect on inactive mana and can weaken or destroy enchantments and can instantly eliminate a chunk of momentum. On a being, this increases the power of the effect and allows it to affect internal spells, magical abilities, and magical Skills as well as hindering the ability to gain momentum at all. The user's body is suffused with the suppressive weight of their will, increasing all physical stats by 10. All mana attempting to directly affect them has reduced effect, especially hostile and mind-affecting mana.
Did you catch the difference? The stat boost, right? Haha, got you! There was one more change. Now, his aura also affected concepts! This might not seem like too much of a boost, but all the abilities and Spell he had encountered had a conceptual portion that now made them even more vulnerable to his trump card.
But yeah, the stat boost was the big thing. It really highlighted how different Voiding was from other Skills. They all relied on stats, fundamentally barred from buffing the base stats without taking from themselves and those same stats, creating a feedback loop in the wrong direction and losing effectiveness. Oof, that was explained horribly. But the point is, Voiding was different. It drew from some weird power inside of him that wasn’t his stats, but still was amplified by higher stats. He wasn’t even close to understanding it, but he was quite happy with such a generic and cost-free boost.
The next two Skills were the ones he had been focusing on for most of his stay.
Skill Name: Void Attack
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Energy is stilled. Power is negated. Concepts find no purchase in the void. This Skill automatically activates when the user’s soul believes an attack would kill them. The attack and all energies within it are nullified and voided. Has Twenty-three charges before it must be refilled with your will. Attacks voided can instead be turned into momentum in any direction.
Skill Name: Condense Will
Changes your willpower into a void energy that can be used in addition to your normal willpower to increase the power of Skills fueled by it. The generated energy is stored inside the Skill. Generates and stores Will of the Body.
The unsaid changes were of course increased efficiency and strength, and in the case of Condense Will, massively increased capacity. Also, the glaringly vague and unhelpful bit about Will of the Body. The short line summarized his efforts with transforming willpower in quite an unsatisfying way. Will of the Body referred to the willpower that had been transformed to allow it to heal him or provide bursts of strength and speed.
That had been his major effort over the past month. The nature of willpower made it really hard to store, and he couldn’t exactly up the generation rate on command. But if he transformed it into another state, the rules could change a bit. But wouldn’t that just be more places to spend willpower? Eventually, his regeneration couldn’t keep up, right? That would be true… if entropy applied here.
The fact of the matter was that runes and concepts could produce more energy than was put into them. The problem was that he hadn’t figured out a way to get willpower as an output, so he couldn’t get infinite regeneration that way. But if he separated his willpower from himself and changed it to something new—like in Condense Will—he could make a sort of ‘core’ that would produce more on its own.
This was why the description of Condense Will specified that it generated Will of the Body instead of transforming normal willpower into it. So basically, he had free regeneration. And an emergency strength boost. This was what made Skills better than Spells, in his opinion. Although that could change in the future…
As much as he had made great progress, he was even more awed by what the Elders had made out of his Skills and runes. They made progress a lot slower than him by the nature of Spells, but that was made up for by the added efforts of almost all the other Elders joining Nivulous in ‘appropriating’ the qualities of Trent’s runes to alter Spell patterns. They had already created a couple of complete Spells that boosted physical stats far more efficiently than any previous Spell.
This was only the start of what they predicted they could do with this new method. Most of it went somewhat over his head, but he understood that it would allow them to make more stable and powerful effects. And also maybe tap into the system’s information through Identify? Comparing the Skill and Ability versions had certainly helped him with deciphering it, but again he wasn’t always following everything they did. As of yet, he had only managed to make the useless Skill give him a ‘lore description’ for some things. No boosts to the range yet, but he was making progress.
He hadn’t made any changes to the percentage boosts provided by his Skills during the time, but it was arguably more important to work on defense, and more useful in the long term to refine Condense Will. Well, that was how he rationalized it. The most efficient way to progress was always whatever felt right at the time, because it was all increasing his power and his mood played a large role in working on it.
The final Skill he had worked on in the Velder village was the old problem child, DESTROY. He still didn’t feel confident in tackling the concepts that kept its chaotic core from dissolving, but he could work around that.
Skill Name: DESTROY
Condenses void power into destructive force. Requires ####### to use. Channels and builds up force inside the body of the user and releases it through an attack. The force heavily damages the body of the user. The user may continuously cycle the force through their body to increase its potency and momentum. This damages the user while cycling and increases the damage of the released impact to the user. This is a Forbidden Skill.
Instead of altering the mass of ‘force’ runes, Trent had added a structure around it to take the energy and amplify it by… spinning it. In an extremely complex way that took a lot of his experience to create. But really, it was just spinning the energy and letting a mishmash of concepts do the heavy lifting. The result looked a lot less appetizing in the description than the effect actually was. Why? Catalyst. Just Catalyst. It was so damn broken.
Honestly, he was half convinced that all he had to do was convince himself that something was the result of his Skills, and he would be immune to it. Like, charging the ground to negate fall damage type of thing. It probably wouldn’t work like that, but the fact that it was a possibility showed how bullshit the immunity was.
…Actually, a fall from terminal velocity wouldn’t kill him. So, he didn’t even need it to do that. But the point was, he could just ignore all of the downsides of Skills like DESTROY with ease. Now, if only he replicate it. Well, one thing at a time. He had plenty enough power, and he was in a near-paradise, with a beautiful and amazing house.
…So why did he feel so dissatisfied?