The Way Ahead

Edwin’s back was sore. While that might not have been all that noteworthy on its own, especially considering his sleeping conditions, it was the first time he had woken up any less than perfectly rested since he got the Sleeping skill. It probably wasn’t helped by the fact his ‘door’ had fallen on him in the middle of the night, jolting him awake and making him lie sleepless for a while, even using his skill not enough to pull him back into slumber.

Guess it’s not high enough of a level yet, he mused, rubbing his lower back and stretching.

Edwin surveyed his domain. A small waterfall, two giant rocks with mud caked into the gaps between them, a pile of stones, and a bunch of branches and leaves. It certainly wasn’t much, but it was all he had at the moment. Today’s tasks were relatively simple. Get a fire going, gather some more food, and maybe build up his shelter a bit. All of that would be really hard without any tools to speak of, but he believed in himself. There was a chunk of stone that was already somewhat knife-shaped to begin with, maybe he could knap it into a more usable form? Build himself up from the stone age.

Level Up! Visualization

His chosen rock in one hand and a complementary stone in his other, he sat down on a conveniently sized rock he mentally dubbed as his sitting stone and started hitting the rocks together. While knapping was a new experience for him, he felt a slight tug to ensure he hit them at a specific angle instead of head-on or just barely scraping them together. It was a bit odd, as it felt like muscle memory for something he had never learned, but he guessed that was a result of-

Level Up! Improvisation

-Improvisation. Yep. So did the skill lead him towards doing actions correctly or did it just magically improve the results? Both? Something else entirely? Where was this knowledge coming from?

Level Up! Research

Level Up! Survival

His skills seemed happy, anyway. Was Research just ‘Learning’? It seemed like it, and if that were the case, it was absolutely amazing. Magically-enhanced learning capabilities! Would it help him level his other skills, or figure out what they did?

Level Up! Improvisation

About an hour later, Edwin had something which would... probably pass as a knife. It was pointy, and had a sharp edge, at least. It would probably break really quickly, but it was better than nothing. With a tool finally in hand, he could try to start his fire. There was lots of dry wood and leaves around to serve as kindling, and a bit of hunting turned up a sturdy, dry stick and some rough wood that would serve as excellent material for getting a spark. He tried cutting a few shavings of wood with his new blade, but while it looked like a knife, it didn’t act like one, and it snapped in half the moment he put too much pressure on it. He threw the pieces off to the side in frustration, burying his head in his hands. Then, he took a deep breath, composed himself, and settled for using what tinder he already had, grabbing his chosen stick and spinning it.

Half an hour later, Edwin was bored and his hands were sore. He knew this wouldn’t be easy, that it would take a while, and that it would be boring. But having not actually done it before personally he wasn’t prepared for just how tedious making the point of a stick spin on a single spot would be. It was starting to heat up, at least, so he knew he was doing something right, but it was still just so boring.

An hour after that, there was no improvement and he figured he was doing something wrong. In frustration, he snapped the stick he was spinning and tossed it to the ground. It clearly wasn’t working and if he went too much longer, he could feel blisters forming on his palms.

He sat with his head in his hands for a few minutes before just starting to look around. It was a bit of a long shot, but maybe he could find some flint around here?

It took him a while, but eventually Edwin’s gaze fell on his broken knife. He wasn’t sure if it really was flint, but he didn’t have any better options. It did look vaguely flint-like from what he remembered of the mineral, and a bit of striking its two halves together yielded a few sparks, so it probably was flint? He gathered up a few wood shavings and some dry needles and grass, piled them on some dead leaves, and started sparking the pieces together.

It still took a few minutes, but Edwin nearly jumped as a set of notifications broke him out of his distracted, aimless musings.

Level Up! Survival

Level Up! Improvisation

You have unlocked the Firestarting skill!

Accept Skill? Y/N

The thought of getting something, anything really, to help him not have to go through that entire process again (notwithstanding how much easier using flint made things) brought him to instinctively accept the skill, before rushing to grab the dry kindling he had nearby and feeding it to the tiny spark before him.

About a minute later, he had enough of a steady fire going, fed by twigs and dried leaves, to take a moment to glance at his notifications.

Level Up! Firestarting

Firestarting

Light that fire inside of you! Er, outside of you

Make fire

Increased ease per level.

At this point, Edwin felt fairly confident in the skill’s ambiguity to figure it would only make setting fires easier. His hope, however, was that it only made things he wanted to burn more flammable. With even just a bit of luck, he didn’t make everything nearby ready to burst into flames with so much as a spark. Well, at least he had made a bit of a firepit, lining a small area with the rocks he had removed from his cave, so it shouldn’t burn down the forest or anything.

He did have to wonder, though, if it made him more fireproof. Probably not, but was there a fire resistance skill? Fire Resistance was a common enough fantasy and game-type effect that it probably had a corresponding skill here. Maybe he could unlock it?

Firestarting did not, it seemed, improve his resistance to fire. Even just a second with his hand in the flames hurt, and his brain refused to let him keep bare skin exposed in his tiny campfire any longer than that. And with no corresponding skill, it was probably safe to assume he wouldn’t unlock Fire Resistance in this manner.

…though assumptions were always dangerous.

…and he was hardly safe at the moment, he needed to take risks if he wanted to survive.

….

Twenty minutes later, Edwin felt somewhat more certain this wasn’t the way to unlock Fire Resistance. His hand, currently soaking in the frigid mountain stream, agreed that he should probably stop sticking his extremities into flames. With a sigh, he stood up and inspected his fingers. The skin was still a little red, and what little hair had once been on his wrist had burned off, but it seemed otherwise relatively unscathed. It was almost noon now, and Edwin was getting hungry. He fed the fire in front of his cave some more sticks, then piled on a few larger branches which should keep it going until he got back.

Level Up! Walking

Level Up! Survival

Level Up! Nutrition

Level Up! Improvisation

Walking was absolutely getting easier, as this trek to and from his chear grove showed, and while it was still hard to tell if that was just a result of Edwin getting in shape or his Walking skill leveling up, given his lack of adequate nutrition and missing the sore muscles which usually accompanied him becoming more active, he was fairly certain it was the latter. It was a bit of a surprising realization. Sure, there were magical floating text boxes and bears the size of a truck, but it was another thing to realize that he, personally, legitimately had magical advancement powers that were invisibly helping him survive. It made him wonder what other aspects of this System he was missing out on.

He didn’t really regret prioritizing figuring out mundane survival needs over ‘grinding out’ skills. The former was a known quantity, whereas the latter was much more mysterious and newer. Really, he didn’t know enough about the System to know how to take advantage of it, all told. For all he knew, he could be totally screwing himself over in some unknown manner. Why couldn’t it have come with a tutorial or better descriptions or at least better numbers? He mentally resolved he was going to beat that ‘improved accuracy’ in his Status until it gave him actual, wonderfully concrete numbers. The vague impressions he got about the level of his skills relative to his other skills, while useful, weren’t raw mathematical digits.

He might also be able to figure out what was up with Paths! He still got a similar feeling when looking at them as when he was looking at his lower-leveled skills, and maybe if he got numbers, he would be able to figure out what exactly they needed to advance. He had a sneaking suspicion it was related to his (lack of) class and was rather keen on filling out his missing knowledge on that aspect of this world. Would it unlock new skills? Let him use magic? Do something with the conspicuously empty Attributes? So many possibilities!

Edwin was rudely jolted out of his daydreaming when he hit his head on a low branch he had missed, and as part of his flinch, bit down hard on the chear he was in the process of eating, catching his finger in the process.

“Gah!”

Edwin winced with the pain, and going to rub his head managed to scrape his recently-injured finger on the same branch his head had just smacked into. He sighed, And I had managed to go so long without walking into anything, too. I suppose it would have been too much to hope for that Seeing and Walking both would somehow prevent me from not noticing stuff like that.

Carefully ducking under the offending branch, Edwin continued rubbing the sore spot on his head with what he realized too late was a juice-covered hand. I was on such a roll, too. Getting a fire going, finding water and food and killing that bear… he bemoaned to himself, Note to self: magically improved senses still don’t protect against general obliviousness. Now, snap out of it before something actually dangerous comes around.

The rest of the journey back was fortunately uneventful, and he managed to keep enough awareness of his surroundings as to avoid running into or tripping over anything. Once he arrived back at his little shelter, he lay his harvested fruits to the side- he had repurposed his jacket into a makeshift bag and picked as many chears as he could easily reach, which ended up being quite a decent number- and tended to the fire. It hadn’t completely gone out while he was gone, which was nice, though it did take a bit of tending to and a few handfuls of dry nettles before it returned to open flames.

Level Up! Firestarting

His survival-related tasks finally complete, Edwin collapsed onto his sitting stone, reveling in the sensation of allowing his increasingly sore legs some measure of relief. Pity this rock was so uncomfortable. Hmm. Nah, he was going to lay down. That would feel amazing.

His bed did not, in fact, feel amazing, but it was certainly better than a slightly moss-covered boulder, especially after removing a few of the more uncomfortable branches in it.

Status.

Once he had his status up, Edwin started playing around with it. First, he tried re-organizing the categories themselves. Changing what order they appeared in was fairly trivial, and splitting up the notification wasn’t much harder, either, giving him more of a HUD-like display of his status. Granted, he didn’t have any need to do so, and was impractical besides, but it was fun nonetheless. But he was getting distracted. Unsurprisingly, him simply requesting numbers appear on his status didn’t work. So, it was time to get inventive. It was fairly simple for him to organize his Skills into being ordered in order of strength with just a twist of mental will. Where to go from there was a bit trickier, though. He was fairly certain that his Firestarting was only level 3- it had only leveled twice since he had unlocked it, after all- and he was able to ‘tag’ it as that level with only a bit of effort.

Level Up! Status

Oh! Perfect timing. With both the notification up as well as his status, Edwin compared the strength of his Status with Firestarting- the former being… exactly 5 times stronger than his level 3 skill, and with that knowledge in mind, he concentrated on the level-up message until it cooperated.

Level Up! Status Level 16

Level Up! Status Level 15

Excellent! Now he could see exactly what level his skills grew to on level up. Hmm. Maybe some way to combine them?

Level Up! Visualization Level 10→11

Level Up! Status Level 14→17

Apparently this was also good for his Visualization skill. Interesting. It did provide a convenient opportunity for him to try and combine multiple different skill notifications into the same message, though. Hmm.

A bit of tinkering later, he finally had something he was happy with. It was surprisingly hard to keep his previous changes intact while also combining different skill notifications into a single message, but he eventually managed.

Level Up!

Status Level 14→19

Visualization Level 10→12

Excellent. Edwin dismissed the level-ups and with a twist of will he was pretty sure worked, made it so he could call it up as a separate entity from his status, and disable notifications completely if he wanted. Now, to test it…

Notifications

Level Up!

Status Level 19→20

“Yess!” It worked! Edwin raised his hands in triumph, accidentally dismissing the notification in the process. Eh, no matter. He’d accomplished his goal, and now it was time to turn to the rest of his skills. He cracked his knuckles in preparation for another round with the interface.

In the end, it was surprisingly anticlimactic. All it took was him mentally trying to figure out how to apply numbers to the skills on his status page, and it did so automatically. Apparently leveling really did make customizing things easier.

Name

Edwin Maxlin

Age

22

Race

Extraplanar Human

Class

None

Attributes

None

Skills

Status: 20

Athletics: 13

Visualization: 12

Improvisation: 10

Walking: 9

Basic Mana Sense: 8

Flexibility: 8

Seeing: 7

Identify: 6

Breathing: 5

Survival: 5

Nutrition: 3

Firestarting: 3

Sleeping: 4

Throwing Weapons: 3

Research: 2

Paths

Athlete

CharLimitCanttalkmuchNocluewhathappenedDidmybesttohelpyouli

Daredevil

Explorer

Linguist

Lumberjack

Micro-Biomancer

Path Less Traveled

Physical Alchemist

Realm Traveler

Researcher

Stonehide Vanquisher

Survivor

Titan Slayer

Trapper

Way of the Empty Hand

World Traveler

Edwin’s status was looking pretty impressive, if he could say so himself. Well, it was probably impressive. 'Realm Traveler' and 'Stonehide Vanquisher' were almost certainly not common. But okay. Now that he knew how much easier it was to customize, he directed his status- though not his notification settings, he didn’t want to mess with that again at the moment- to reset, and his skills lost their numbers and went back to alphabetical order and his age returned to ‘Very Young.’ Interestingly, his name and race stayed in their altered forms instead of going back to just Edwin and Human?, which implied the System had updated his classification there. It also confirmed his suspicion that his altered age was indeed just cosmetic. Annoying, but manageable.

He mentally directed his entire status to display itself in numbers, and while there were some very interesting things happening down below with his Paths, he figured he should take care of his Age first. That should be pretty quick, and then he’d let himself dive into exploring new information regarding his Paths.

Age

223 days

22, 3 days

22 years, 3 days

22+MOD(3 days,365 days) years

22 years

Eventually, after a few iterations, he managed to get his age to display 22 years, plus his System age divided by 365. Assuming it didn’t change the formatting of his age once he was here for a week or whatever, it should automatically update his age on the anniversary of his arrival on Joriah every year…

The sudden thought about him possibly being in this new world for a year, away from everyone he had ever known, literally worlds away from his friends and family, hit him at once. He had been very carefully not thinking about that, because he needed to survive first and foremost. Once he was actually secure in his safety, he could think about the ramifications of his existence here. People had to be missing him, after all. He might have not had more than a couple friends, but he had vanished with literally no explanation, no warning, nothing. It was…

Edwin interrupted himself before he could break down. No. Pitying himself wouldn’t get himself anywhere. Given the messages he had gotten when he first woke up, he came from a world allegedly utterly unknown by whatever entities ran the System, and who were presumably quite powerful and knowledgeable. Odds were good there was no way back to Earth, and he may as well accept that. This was a whole new world besides! There was magic, too! He could do science here! It was amazing! There were almost certainly other people here as well, he could find them and befriend them as well. All he needed was to survive, and to do that meant he needed to focus and not let his emotions control him. He had practiced this, and with a deep breath he blinked away any lingering wetness around his eyes.

Okay. Where was he? Right. Modulo. The status was pretty similar to a computer program, and once he figured out how to more-or-less hijack the code. It wasn’t quite like what he knew of SQL injection, but it felt like a similar idea. He didn’t have too much experience with programming, but this didn’t seem to be too complicated. It might also be totally broken, who knows? He’d find out in a year.

Checking his notifications, Edwin noticed he had gotten to level 21 in his Status and earned a level in Breathing, of all things. Where had that come from?

Anyway. His Paths were very interesting.

Paths

Skill Points: 122

Athlete 0/60

CharLimitCanttalkmuchNocluewhathappenedDidmybesttohelpyouli 0/120

Daredevil 0/60

Explorer 0/60

Linguist 0/60

Lumberjack 0/60

Micro-Biomancer 0/90

Path Less Traveled 0/90

Physical Alchemist 0/90

Realm Traveler 0/120

Researcher 0/60

Stonehide Vanquisher 0/60

Survivor 0/60

Titan Slayer 0/90

Trapper 0/60

Way of the Empty Hand 0/60

World Traveler 0/60

Skill points… Were those from his Skills? A bit of addition later, he determined that he had exactly 122 total skill levels, which probably correlated to his Skill Points? He felt a bit of a tug, seemingly directing him to advance along a Path. After a moment of consideration, he focused on his ‘CharLimitCanttalkmuchNocluewhathappenedDidmybesttohelpyouli’ Path. Would Survivor perhaps make more sense, if he was trying to sustain himself in the wilderness? Probably. However, he also knew that when it came to surviving in a fantasy wilderness, he’d need all the help he could get, and if there was to be any sort of gift from the creators of the System, it would probably be in the closest thing to a direct message he had gotten from them.

Level Up!

Status level 21 → 22

Oh right, he still had notifications on. He considered toggling them, but figured that for the moment he liked knowing what made him level up. More satisfying that way. Maybe if they got too annoying, he’d fix it, but that was future-Edwin’s problem, not his. Anyway, when he increased his Path, he noticed his skill points had flickered to 121 for a split second before the Status level had registered. So did he increase his progress along a Path by assigning skill points to them? It seemed like it, but there was only one way to really be sure.

Paths

Skill Points: 122

CharLimitCanttalkmuchNocluewhathappenedDidmybesttohelpyouli 1/120

Well, no time like the present. While it may not have been the best decision, he had enough and made up his mind, and dumped the rest of his points into the Path all at once.

His System exploded with notifications.