The Wanderer's Rebirth: Other Paths

“[Matter Manipulation], huh?” Joram mused, seriously considering it. Given the historical fact that windows, in pretty much any form, were a major security issue, he’d definitely need to find a way to shore up that weakness in his home if he wanted to continue living there.

The problem was that he didn’t’ want to just cover the windows up with bricks or something. Sure, he was practically a recluse and stayed home instead of going out most of the time. But. He still liked, and needed, sunlight.

So, he searched the psionic database in his head and quickly found [Matter Manipulation] and sighed. Even though [Delve] was a 6th level Power, it was just as complex as the 8th level [Matter Manipulation]. Now, the 6th level Power was complicated because it helped him to “see” the molecular, and even atomic, structures of an item, or “just” to get the layout of a larger structure like a building, or a cave system or such.

The 8th level Power was designed to basically… strengthen an item. Looking at the Power, he was pretty sure it did that by reinforcing the atomic bonds of an item. Which he put on par, complication-wise, with the complexity of [Delve]. It was going to be a headache. One that he suspected would last for days, if not weeks.

He maybe had hours do deal with the issue at hand.

“That’s a good idea, but for later, I think,” Joram eventually said, shaking his head. “Though, I think I have a solution for the time being,” he said, recalling, of all things, his elementary school’s solution to idiots.

He made his way to the hallway storage room and began looking around. It didn’t take him long to find several ingots of metal stacked up neatly on the bottom shelf that Altaea had built into the concrete wall. He looked at three separate stacks and smiled. She’d even added stamped-in labels to each ingot, telling him what each one was.

“’Soft iron found inside the concrete’, huh?” he read out loud, amused. That would be rebar, now turned into brick-like ingots. He turned to the next one, simply stamped with “Steel, medium quality”. The third one was, to his eyes, obviously copper, confirmed by its stamp.

Of the three metals, the rebar ingots accounted for the majority of the metal. Next was the steel, followed by the much smaller ingots of copper. Aside from that, there were vials with much smaller quantities of various atomic chemicals. He was pleasantly surprised that Altaea had gone through the effort to separate all of those samples, package, then label them.

Though, given her level of… meticulousness when doing things, he supposed that he shouldn’t have expected anything else.

A few minutes later, Joram was outside, katana tied to his belt, and saber strapped to his back. Also, the whole supply of steel could be seen laying on the ground, though in several piles. The first pile, one of two equally sized stacks, was outside of his bedroom window.

Avi watched from the side while also keeping an eye out for any movement in the moderately dense forest they found themselves in. It was quite a sight, though. The trees were wide and tall, the narrowest one still over a metre wide. The underbrush was relatively sparse given the limited sunlight that made its way through the canopy a good forty metres above their heads.

The trees, which looked somewhat like sequoias, but with a trunk that almost looked black, were intermittently placed, much as you’d expect in a wild forest. Most trees were a good ten metres from each other, while some were at least double that. Given the placement of his once-upon-a-time apartment, he wasn’t sure if he’d lucked out, or if the System had done something.

The now bungalow stood in one of the only “clearings” that he could see. And he used that term rather loosely, as any clearing he’d managed to spot was basically just a slightly wider spacing between trees that allowed some larger fern-like plants to grow.

Getting back to the task at hand, Joram looked at the window, then at the exterior of the “house”. The frame, and window, were inset by about eight or so centimetres, giving him another idea. Which was this: a metal grate.

They’d had them on the basement and first-floor windows in his elementary school. People were jerks, and installing those grates/metal meshes had ultimately saved the school system a lot of money over the years. Now, they’d just bolted them to the outside of the building, it being made of actual quarried stone. Now, given that Earth was about as mundane as you could imagine it, with no magic or anything like that, simply bolting the window protections to the building had been more than enough.

But, going by how quickly and easily those goblins had kicked his door in, well, he figured that that wouldn’t quite work as well in this world. So, he was contemplating adding the metal grated into the brickwork from inside the window frame/well/whatever-it-was-called. Sure, it might not save the actual window if the goblins wailed on the grate hard enough to bend it inwards, but it would 1) stop them from just being able to pull it off the outside of the building, and 2) at least slow them down long enough for Joram to do something about them.

The other problem that Joram thought might be an issue was the grade of steel that he had. He was by no means a metallurgist of any kind. Nor did he know too much about the various grades of steel. He also didn’t know what “medium quality” meant in terms of tensile strength, how ductile it was, and all of that. Would this steel flex slightly, or just shatter when pounded on hard enough?

So, he’d also brought a few ingots of the reshaped rebar. He knew for a fact that rebar was also steel, but it was also nowhere near as “hard” as the “medium grade” steel. But there was a reason why rebar was used in construction; it was tough stuff.

‘You should probably start soon,’ Avi said, startling him out of his musings.

“Yeah, I know,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck with his left hand as he once again looked down at the ingots of metal laying on the grass and moss-covered ground.

‘What’s the issue?’ she asked, raising an eyebrow at him.

“I’m just not sure if this is the right steel for the job, is all,” he said, admitting his lack of knowledge.

‘Then just review the archive that Altaea left you,’ she said, giving him a blank look.

Joram stared at her, mouth open, for a good minute before his jaw snapped closed.

“You mean, it wasn’t just all things psionic that she left me?” he asked slowly, in contrast to his suddenly pounding heart.

‘Yes.’

Once again, Joram waited for her to expound on that statement, but she did not.

“I need to go sit,” he said, shaking his head as it began to throb.

He started to head back to the now front door and stopped, looking down at the ingot laying on the forest floor.

“Man, I wish I had that storage space already,” he said, referring to the way Altaea had been able to store items away in her “stuff space”, a small… dimension that she could mentally access whenever she wanted.

Then he just about crapped himself when a blue screen popped up in front of his face. Joram took a minute to bring his heartrate back down, and to surreptitiously check his pants, before taking a proper look at the blue screen.

It was an inventory screen, complete with a bog-standard grid that he supposed would populate with anything he “stored” in there. Then he noticed the top of the screen and groaned.

There, right in plain sight, were tabs. The first one, on the far left, was marked “Character”, the next “Feats”, then “Skills”, then “Titles”, and finally “Inventory”. That he hadn’t gotten past his Skills before wasn’t terribly surprising, given that he’d mostly just focussed on his Path/Class options. That he hadn’t even noticed the Inventory tab embarrassed and frustrated him to no end.

It took another few minutes for him to calm down enough to really have a good look at the Inventory screen.

Again, it had the standard box/grid that you’d see in a lot of video games. There was also a currency counter at the bottom of the page, which led him to believe that there might be some sort of universal currency on this world. Which, really, was a bonus. Who wanted to deal with currency converters/banks? They always gouged you.

Upon further inspection, he found that he had thirty “slots” that he could load up. He wasn’t sure if that would be a static number like a lot of games had, or if it would increase as he levelled, or increase by gaining an achievement or something. Heck, given just how game-like the System was, he wondered- not without much trepidation- if it was a “pay to win” type System….

He really-really­ hoped that that wasn’t the case. Given just how imbalanced those P2W-type games were, he wouldn’t be surprised if there was a very, very, strict hierarchy that formed because of it. A ruling class that kept a very tight reign on their subjects. Because if you could get more powerful by simply throwing money at the System, then keeping your subjects objectively poor was a no-brainer for any would-be ruler that came along.

Joram shuddered at the thought, then got back to inspecting the page/screen.

There was another section for “Cores”, which reminded him of the trigonal crystal in his pocket. He quickly retrieved it, then wondered just how he stored things into his inventory.

When it vanished from his hand, he blinked.

“That easy, huh?” he chuckled, realizing that the inventory was likely thought-activated. Which, really, was kind of awesome.

To make sure that he wasn’t just making a stupid assumption, he tapped one of the ingots with his toe while thinking about storing it into his inventory. Sure enough, it vanished. He looked back to the inventory screen as saw the equivalent of a pixel art representation of the steel ingot in the first box in his inventory. He then looked at the “Cores” section and smiled to see it there, listed as a “Rank E” Core.

Huh.

Joram shook his head, clearing out the tangential thoughts that started to multiply, and quickly stored away all of the other ingots before heading back inside. Avi watched all this, her head tilted slightly to the side and he could practically feel the questions that she wanted to ask him, but for some reason hadn’t.

He then realized, as he plopped down into his comfy armchair, that he did actually feel… something, when he looked at Avi. When he concentrated on that feeling, he was surprised to get something… clearer, from her. Intense curiosity, if he was reading that right. Which, truthfully, he had not idea if he was. But if felt like that to him, so he went with that.

“What’s up?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at her.

‘I know that Altaea hadn’t activated the demiplane function for you yet, but you still managed to store those ingots, and that crystal, away. How did you do that?’ she asked, curiosity and concern warring in her tone.

“It seems that this System provides an inventory for anyone who’s… integrated with it,” he said, not quite sure about his wording. It was all still so new to him, after all.

‘Ah, that is indeed convenient… and a bit worrying,’ Avi said, nodding.

Again, Joram waited for her to say more about that concerning last bit she’d thrown out there, but it was in vain.

“Why would that be worrying?”

‘Well, one would assume that this System is there to make sure that people have the strength to survive,’ she began, getting a nod from Joram at that. ‘Given how it empowers people, one would think that that would be enough. But needing to carry what you need with you, and even more than what you might need, in, say, an emergency situation, one wonders if facilitating that need with an extradimensional storage space was done in an effort to increase the survivability of the general population of this planet.’

Joram leaned forward and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to stave off another headache. It made sense to make sure that your… characters, would be able to survive. To take with them what they needed, without it slowing them down.

Was the System a benevolent one, or just a practical one? Or was he really just living in a video game?

Joram shook his head, not wanting to consider living in an actual virtual world, one governed by arbitrary video game logic and “balance” and all that crap. But given that a System existed, he was sure that there were many features that he didn’t know about, could probably never guess at, and had indeed been “balanced” already.

For instance, the goblins. Had he not had the ability to heal himself, he would have already died during that first attack. Bleeding out was a very real possibility here, no matter how many “Hit Points” one had, it seemed. He didn’t know what purpose that damn number served, but watching your “health” steadily tick down after having been stabbed wasn’t fun.

Did it just give you a sort of timer? Or did it maybe give you a bit longer to live after having taken a mortal wound? Getting an artery severed usually resulted in a person dying within a few minutes, tops, if nothing was done to stem the flow of blood. He had no idea how long he’d been “out” after getting stabbed in the hip, so he really couldn’t say….

“Avi?”

‘Yes, Joram?’

“How long was I unconscious that first time? You know, when I got stabbed in the hip and you had to wake me up.”

‘You were out for four minutes, twenty-six seconds,’ she replied simply.

Joram shook his head at that, reasonably sure that he should have been dead at that point. Which meant that his hypothesis might have something to stand on.

Before he could go further down that rabbit hole, Avi spoke again.

‘Metallurgy?’ she prompted, bringing him, once again, back to reality.

He nodded, tucked away the thoughts about health and such for later, and pulled up the information on metallurgy to review.

There… was a lot.

Not only were there listings for every known metal, but also listings for every alloy that Altaea had ever come across and learned about. With how detailed some of the stuff was, he was certain that not only had she started sharing the memories with her other selves, but she had also used [Delve] on most of the things listed.

This… was going to take a very, very, long time to just go through. Not to learn, but to just skim through to find a steel alloy that would be up to the task of keeping out the local wildlife.

“Avi? Are you able to, I don’t know, help me sort through all of this?” he asked, overwhelmed by everything.

‘Forsooth, that is quite possible,’ she replied, a sardonic grin on her face.

Joram just stared at her, blank faced, wondering if she’d spontaneously start to sprout white fur.

It took a while, but he eventually found a good candidate. Well, he’d found dozens, but didn’t have the resources to use any of the others. As it was, he was reasonably sure that the alloy they’d found would do well enough… for a few attacks. Hopefully, and that was riding on a lot of faith that he’d survive, he’d be able to later upgrade the steel to something a bit more durable. Something that would last.

After that, installing the grates/coverings/steel mesh-screen-thingies went reasonably well. Instead of wasting power points, and then needing to wait to regenerate said PP, he just used a hand drill to drill out the spots where the grate would need to be anchored into the brickwork. Knowing that his bit wasn’t as long as he’d like, and thus wouldn’t provide as much strength as anchoring points as he’d like, he drilled about three times as many holes as he thought he’d need.

And given the fact that he would be mentally shaping the metal, he didn’t have to worry about exact measurements, or needing to spotweld additional anchoring points to the covering. He was getting more and more on board with being a [Shaper], or [Metacreationist] as it was technically called. The ability to shape the world around you just… called to him.

Sure, he had access to every other Power and ability known to Psionics. But being a [Shaper] just felt right. Yes, the discipline of [Psychoportation] was also pretty awesome since it not only worked with spatial abilities, but also abilities related to time. Well, there were a few abilities that [Shaper]s had that dealt with space and dimensions, so there was that. Also, there were a few general Powers that also dealt with time stuff.

Aaaaand he had access to it all anyway, so there was that. It would just be a literal pain to lean “cross-discipline” stuff, if Avi was right about that. Either way, he would have plenty of time to learn everything, barring unfortunate incidents, that is.

Joram reached out and knocked on the tree that was growing just a metre away from his bedroom window. No need to jynx things.

Once the drilling was done, the shaping began. Again, it was much harder than he thought it would be. And he was, once again, reminded that this was real life, not a game. Things took incredible amount of effort to accomplish.

Like, not dying.

Once he was done, Joram smiled as the fruits of his labours. For about five seconds. Then his smile started to fade. Then turn into a bit of a frown.

It was kind of ugly.