Tsaimath
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Chapter 1075
🕑 Added 2024-10-28 17:00:13 +0000 UTCLooking back at the work I had managed in the last two months, I could only feel pride. Sure, I hadn’t done all that much when it came to levels, only gaining six thanks to teaching various people magic and managing to make a few breakthroughs when it came to enchanting, but the levels hadn’t been what I had focused on. However, I received a pleasant surprise at level one-hundred-five when I didn’t just gain a single point in each attribute from my Dragon-Touched Trait but two of each. That, together with the attributes I received from my recently elevated class gave me utterly insane increases of twenty-seven attribute points every five levels, two of which were unassigned. Compared to the six pitiful points I had gained at the same level while on Mundus, the difference was between night and day.
When I quietly asked about the attributes of other people, I had to carefully hide my smug sense of self-satisfaction or jealousy would have been the inevitable outcome. Jonas, one of Daniel’s companions, acted as a mixture between frontline fighter and scout and was all too happy to explain how he had decided to work on a fairly balanced distribution of attributes. In reality, that meant he had a whopping thirty Strength and Agility, alongside a slightly less impressive twenty-five in Vitality and Endurance, alongside a few other, slightly elevated attributes, mostly thanks to crossing the first divide. Realising that, unless somebody was purely focused on a single attribute or had some fairly impressive traits, I could compete with essentially everyone in their strongest attribute was just a little sobering. Also, incredibly awesome, but it drove home just how incredible the Dragon-Touched Trait was, with the sheer breadth of attributes it bestowed upon me.
The attribute points I gained, in turn, resulted in traits further improving my magical and sensory abilities, as both Intelligence and Intuition were pushed beyond the thresholds they both required, something I realised would continue every five levels, as long as I occasionally put a point into Intuition. However given that I realised I was starting to reach a point where my lacking perception was holding me back in my magical studies, I decided to start putting my free points into Intuition in an effort to have it catch up with my Intelligence a little. It would take an almost comically long time to close the thirty-six-point gap between the two attributes but if I didn’t start somewhere, I’d never get it done. And it wasn’t as if the two attributes would stop growing, it was just that I’d get to almost three hundred Intelligence before Intuition would catch up, using the assumption I wouldn’t get some other traits as I continued to work my way up the levels. This would take a while…
For Intelligence, the trait was fairly unspectacular. Sure, increasing the amount of Astral Power I was passively drawing from the Astral River once more was neat and I certainly could use it but it was far from the sheer breadth of utility I received from the Mind over Matter ability. Alas, not every Trait could give me more reality-shattering tricks or I would manage to get myself into even more trouble than I already did.
The Intuition-Trait further improved my senses, allowing me to narrow the scope of my senses but increasing their sensibility in turn. Using that within the Astral allowed me to, for lack of a better word, zoom in on specific parts, similar to the way I had managed to locate the kids and use the information discovered that way to travel to that location, at least if there was some sort of beacon I could focus on or something that stood out to my senses in the first place. My tower, for example, and the eye atop of it, was an excellent marker, something I could find swiftly and, so far, from any distance I had tried it out. That alone made for an interesting discovery, though its utility was somewhat limited, as I could only travel through the shadows on my own.
But the attributes and the levels were only a minor part of my recent achievements, the primary part came from the time I had spent experimenting with my magic and the results of that. Such as the testing for the aforementioned Shadow Stepping, it was the primary contributor to my Astral Meditation skill going up by two points and reaching level fifty-eight, but that was only a minor part of my testing.
Mind and Soul, on the other hand, were one topic I focused on, initially using the prisoners I had taken until they expired and had to be disposed of. Afterwards, I could do some experimentation on consenting volunteers, but only using Mind Magic, with some limited and very careful tests. As of yet, I was not trying to manipulate, instead, I was primarily trying to read and understand, with the occasional test to see if I might be able to transfer memories from me to others. That part was largely limited to people I trusted, in other words to Luna and Lia, and using only minor and brief memories, giving us mixed results. The limited results might be because we were using minor memories, memories like one of a shared breakfast the day before, or they might stem from a lacking methodology, we just didn’t know. because the methodology was lacking. Either way, any manipulation of the Mind was something I remained very careful with, at least when the mind in question was one I cared about. Sadly, the progress had stalled a little when it came to skill points, the experiments only granted me two of them, bringing the skill to seventy-six.
Soul Magic remained difficult to control and even harder to implement practically, mostly because it was difficult to visualise the Soul and conceptualise its manipulation. Affinities were, at the end of the day, only a very minor part of a soul, with far more complex and complicated layers hidden beyond my current perception To make matters worse, the entire process was incredibly tricky and delicate, with even small mistakes causing major, and often fatal, problems. Again, not something I could test on people I cared about, or anything I actually cared about. But the creation of different magical plants and animals worked fairly well for now, which, in turn, had resulted in a few extra points in the Soul Magic skill. It only reached twenty-six but it was better than nothing.
Another element I had dabbled in, with some success, was Enchanting, especially now that I had access to cloth spun under the auspices of the system. Cloth and thread, allowing the creation of simple bags and even a backpack, all recognised as such under the system, not the usual grey notifications marking them as things made before the change. The difference was quite extreme, allowing me to imbue the cloth with actual enchantments and even weave magic directly into them in a stable fashion, especially using the Darkness Runes of Space I had learned not that long ago. By now, the bags I was creating were actual, magical bags, recognised by the system as such and allowing for some marvellous storage capacity. The creation of those bags and the enchanting of a fairly wide variety of clothes to improve attributes or the comfort of the wearer turned out to be excellent training and my Enchanting skill rose accordingly, as did a few of my Rune Magic skills, though those only went up by one each.
Last of the things I had focused on, but certainly not least, was what started as an attempt to create a draconic form, an idea soon discarded as too ambitious and downgraded into what the notification after levelling up suggested, finding my Wings and Breath.
The Wings followed the idea I had to create the entire draconic form, using Ice and Snow to carve them, Darkness to bind them together and give the usually hard and inflexible Ice the needed malleability to let the wings move and, lastly, Wind to let me soar, regardless of aerodynamics.
It was a great idea, at least in my opinion, and I was slowly getting better at creating the wings, though I was fairly certain I was missing something. My current brute force approach was working, though I doubted it was the intended process if there even was such a thing. Maybe it was the opposite, the process I took decided what sort of dragon I would eventually be, meaning while there was no way to fail the implied test of the system, I was fairly certain this wasn’t the way I wanted to succeed, not by bashing my head against the proverbial wall until it broke. So, even if I had managed to get two points in Ice Magic for my troubles, one in Darkness Magic and a neat three points in Wind Magic, I might want to examine different paths to achieve my goal, or I might become some caricature of a stupid dragon.
Regardless, my work had only begun and I still had a good deal of time this winter, more than enough to test around and find some other avenue to pursue. Maybe I should start working on my breath, just to see if that was enough to give me an idea or five.
