“I think I am a superhuman already”
“You only noticed it now?”
Indeed, it was silly of me not to notice how much outside the standard I was. The ability to use magic aside, I had characteristics that would be impossible for an ordinary human from the previous world to possess. I could go on without food and water for days on end without getting tired and weak, my concentration could hold for hours – if not days – depending if the subject was magic, I could heal from wounds that would require a lengthy (and expensive) visit to the hospital, just by sleeping and waiting. My mental fortitude could overpower 99.99% of humans from my previous world too. I guess dying does change a man.
When you factored in my magical abilities, those being a slew of new senses that allowed me to perceive the world from magical angles, the ability to control magical powers in my body and outside my body, the ability to think not just at superhuman – but supernatural speeds when encountering things of magical nature, the ability to literally partially turn undead at will and the potential for telekinesis and telepathy, to name a few, I could undeniably be judged a superhero back in my previous world.
“Or a supervillain”
“Or a supervillain, right. The Menacing Supersleep – a terrifying nightmare for good parents who set their children a bad example of how one could sleep through their entire life”
“You wouldn’t do anything with your powers back on Earth?”
“What could I do in that boring world? There was nothing for me there. I could only eat, sleep and wait for death. Wait, cross the last part, I didn’t wait for death, it came for me unexpectedly”
“You could change the world, even as you are now”
“Then let me change this one. For better or worse”
“Let it be so”
…
When it came to the new world of psychic abilities the undead tiger so generously invited me to, I could not be more interested.
Psychic abilities seemed so much simpler and more practical than magical. When you needed to go through a billion of calculations each time you cast a spell, and a billion more when you tried to modify it slightly, it only took but a thought to use psychic abilities.
There were other benefits to using them too. For one, I noticed that the more I practiced them, the easier it was for me to take control of myself, on all levels.
I could easier control my mood – recently, falling asleep was not a problem at all; I could control my body better – it was a subtle difference, but a welcome one; and even the vortexes in my body were slightly easier to manipulate.
The downside to psychic abilities was one, but it was glaring – they were very weak, as I was now. To use them not only drained my MP, it also used my ST more than even hard physical labor that wasn’t that big of an issue after my body began using mana. All the while the effects were minimal. I couldn’t even make a small rock float using telekinesis. At most, I could make a few sand grains fly for a while – and that drained me to death. All the while, progress seemed slow, terribly slow. It was already a week after I came from the dungeon, but there wasn’t even a step forward form when I first started.
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Mind you, I have been going at it for at least 12 hours a day, without a break. My entire day consisted of sleeping, eating a bit and practicing these abilities.
Not to mention getting better, I haven’t even become more familiar with the new abilities. Though it did make sense. Before, I could enjoy such a great growth when studying magic because I had the luck to acquire several skills and my attributes were literally considered a cheat by the demon who sent me into this world.
Ralph did say that two of my attributes, Aura and Psychic, were not believed to be magical by the people of this world and even the System called them simply “attributes” and separated them from the rest. While 8 out of 10 attributes I have are “magical”, the other two are kind of on their own, so I should not expect my road in learning how to handle them to be nearly as easy, especially considering that, individually, my affinity for each attribute is only above average.
What pains me the most is that my trusty skill, Mana Insight, is of no help at all in analyzing the nature of psychic abilities. Arcane Collector worked, but it was nothing more than a skill of extreme induction – it only helped me based on my already existing experience. When I had a sizable amount for “magical” spells, when it came to psychic ones – I had nothing. Zero plus zero was still zero, by the laws of algebra.
What could help me improve my condition?
….
I killed the undead tiger 10 more times in the past three days. At this point it’s become so simple that I don’t even know what to say? Lately the tiger has been running from me the moment I stepped into the arena. It’s honestly a bit sad. Is it considered animal abuse? Can undead even be considered animals? They aren’t exactly alive.
Whatever. What’s important is that I rose by a level and I also might have exhausted the usefulness of my long time undead adversary.
I have thoroughly studied its psychic ways and I can find no more clues at all. I can now lift a stone the size of my fingernail for several seconds and I feel much more in control of my own mind than before, but I don’t think it’s going anywhere.
…
Two weeks, 24 tigers and about 190 hours of practice and I have to admit that this will be tough. I can now have a firm grasp of the fingernail-sized stone in the midair for about 10 seconds, if I push for it; and I am showing feeble signs of developing yet another sense (or it might just be my self-control reaching a level where my instincts analyze my surrounding environment and give me a feeling of a new sense) and I feel control of every small muscle of my body, but that’s it.
I don’t feel flustered, partially because my control over my own emotions is too tight for such a feeling to appear, partially because of the mental skills I have, partially because I understand that it won’t be easy to walk this road, but I have to admit that I will not be able to achieve any useful results anytime soon.
If you think about it, the speed of my growth in learning the arcane is proportional to the amount of things I already know and can do, thanks to Arcane Collector, meaning that I should be growing exponentially fast. The only reason why I am not, therefore, is probably not in my affinity, nor is it in psychic abilities themselves, but in something that I am missing in my understanding of them. There must be a crucial piece of information that I am not aware of that is hindering my growth, some kind of wall, so to speak.
Which makes sense, considering that the only exposure I have had to psychic abilities was a creature that was very much distant to me. How much could I, a living human, could learn from a creature that was not only not living, but also not humanoid?
I suppose it would be logical to shelve the project of learning more about the avenue of psychic abilities and focus on continuing to plunder the dungeon. I wonder what the second floor has in store for me?