“So it’s really just a matter of paying close attention to something, and then trying to recall it later once it's out of sight, as accurately as you can,” Brennan explained, bending his knees a little more for the correct form.
“That's how I got it anyway. I'm sure there are other forms of regimented training to unlock it more efficiently. I've been working on creating my own research for skill acquisition, but it’s slow-going with so few data points. I have my parents, my sister, and a few other people. Not the best sample size in the world. My reach for academic material is just limited. There must be books cataloguing these concepts in greater detail, and they’re all far outside of Craswidge.”
Skill unlocked!
[Teaching (Common) Lv. 1]
Would you like to equip this skill?
I think I’ll pass.
He chuckled ruefully. “At least I have one attentive listener.”
To his left, Agnes was mimicking his pose, arms stretched out and legs bent in a picture-perfect squat. It was something they had started doing in the recent months, now that Brennan was being permitted a bit more freedom by his family on account of ‘good behavior.’ He no longer needed to be with his sister while playing around with other kids, so he had found a more secluded area in the village where he could just train his stats.
For some reason, Agnes here had started following him around instead of sticking with the rest of the group, and while at first he’d been reluctant to keep her in his space when he was grinding, she turned out to be the least obtrusive workout partner he could’ve asked for.
Granted, it wasn’t just limited to physical workouts. He did plenty of mental skill training too—just outside rather than inside. Given that a little over a year had passed since they met that group of seekers in the tavern, he’d had a solid amount of time to make progress.
Name: Brennan Kerrick
Race: Human (Lv. 0)
Class: N/A
Attributes:
STR - 4 -> 7
AGI - 5 -> 10
CON - 2 -> 5
PER - 3 -> 6
INT - 7 -> 12
WIS - 5 -> 8
SPI - 5 -> 7
Skills:
- [Analyze (Common) Lv. 91] -> Lv. 99
- [Focus (Common) Lv. 84] -> Lv. 97
- [Sense Magic (Uncommon) Lv. 51] -> 65 Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
- [Memorization (Common) Lv. 77] -> Lv. 90
- [Reading (Common) Lv. 72] -> Lv. 92
- [Writing (Common) Lv. 66] -> Lv. 95
- [Sprinting (Common) Lv. 16] -> Lv. 54
Almost there.
He was getting close to upgrades in most of his skills, at this point. He deemed it likely that a lot of them would be evolving at the same time, but simultaneously, the last levels were the slowest and hardest. It felt unfair, like the system was mocking him by dragging its feet with the final milestones, and there was nothing he could do about it other than practice harder.
In truth, Brennan could’ve had a fuller list than this. The reason it wasn’t was because of his promise to himself. Until he upgraded Sense Magic, he would give himself room to keep his build open. There were plenty of skills in his archive at this point, just from the sheer number of unlocks he had declined to equip. Just nothing that appealed to him so much he was going to invest time into it over other skills.
Case in point, he had already been given the option of taking a balance skill, but he’d declined it in favor of hunting for other unlocks. And the skills he wanted were decidedly not physical. In fact, they were among the list of skills he had passed over back during the time of his Skill Seed selection: Meditation and Divide Attention.
Divide Attention was the one he was after the most, and the one he had dedicated the most training to, simply because of its sheer usefulness in any field, but it was extremely difficult to feel like he was ever making progress and not just making a mess of both the tasks he was executing. He supposed more people would have it if it were one of the low-hanging fruits.
On that note, there had been a few surprises when it came to other people’s skills. Not in a productive sense. No, rather it was the opposite. Brennan discovered that a lot of people around the village simply had skills that would improve their quality of life even if it didn’t necessarily make them better at what their Class allowed them to do overall. Stuff like Glare Resistance, Flavor Harmonization, or Spoilage Detection. He couldn’t help but find it mind-bogglingly wasteful.
Regardless, the point was that people in Craswidge had in large part settled and accepted their lot in life. There was no drive to improve at all costs like there was with him. The children were a bit different sometimes, what with them not having their dreams crushed yet, but the majority of them lacked the knowledge and wisdom they would require in order to truly surpass their predecessors.
And he wasn’t that much better than they were, despite what his ego wanted him to believe. He didn’t want to fall into the trap of believing his own hype before he produced anything substantial to make him unique, or at least very good. That was the height of arrogance.
That’s what they say, isn’t it? Confidence is just arrogance with the competence to back it up?
Therefore, more than half his training was dedicated to achieving something he could call his own, something to reassure him that it wasn’t all just in his head and he’d end up being a farmer or some stupid nonsense like that.
To that end, Divide Attention could prove to be the key because it would undoubtedly accelerate his progress to a noticeable degree. Focus was already helping him, and he had some ideas for how he wanted to upgrade it assuming he received multiple options, but he wasn’t satisfied. He wasn’t blowing the other kids out of the water yet, he wasn’t even blowing five-year-old Agnes out of the water. She was only one year older than him!
He soothed his bruised pride with the excuse that she had been making bigger strides because of his expert tutelage and held none of the same reservations about taking skills she wanted. Lack of magic aside, he thought her build was fairly impressive for someone that young. Among other things, she had gained a balance skill in order to help with the exercises he was showing her.
That wasn’t what caught his attention though. Even more notable was that she, unlike him, had the Meditation skill. At quite a high level, too. Close to upgrading to the uncommon rarity. Whenever he saw her practicing it, his mind immediately pointed out how she seemed particularly well-suited for the skill. The natural stillness she had paid dividends there, and it looked like she was able to create a similar stillness in her head. An extraordinary feat for a person young enough to have just been born half a decade ago. She’d also somehow gotten a better version of his Memorization skill, and those were just the ones she admitted to.
As far as adapting her insights for himself went, he didn’t have a lot of hope. On top of her not being the most verbal and preferring for him to just ‘get’ whatever she was trying to convey through action and long silences, meditation as a discipline just didn’t gel with him. It didn’t come easily to him in the same way.
Admittedly, his efforts to train it hadn’t been as diligent over the years compared to his multitasking attempts. But still, anyone could see that some skills just had a way of staying out of certain people’s reach due to a lack of talent or clashing with their normal thinking patterns or habits.
Why was he trying to unlock the skill if it was an uphill battle with potentially no reward at the end of it? There was only one answer, really, which was magic. During his time in this world, Brennan had spent many hours hunting down training methods mages regularly employed in order to better their control over mana. And Meditation had been one of the top results he found from the scarce bits of information he had managed to get his hands on.
The concept wasn’t that complex in his head. He could imagine the reason Meditation was a favored skill in the art of manipulating the forces of nature. Intellectually, he presumed that it was supposed to eliminate outside influence and highlight the environmental mana in one’s senses more than would be feasible under the strain of external noise. That, in turn, would allow more knowledge to be gleaned about the mysterious magical motes floating everywhere.
It was a shame that theoretical understanding wasn’t sufficient for the system to say he had met the prerequisites for the relevant skills. He needed to put it into practice first, there was no way around it. The problem was that the gap between expectation was a vast chasm that Brennan was not only struggling to cross, but also was reluctant to try his hand at very often in the first place.
Was there some super obvious step he was missing, or was the problem not one he would’ve been able to easily solve in retrospect? He didn’t know, but he was beginning to get desperate when it came to this magic thing. His fifth birthday was in a few months, and the dream of controlling the elements by then seemed less likely every day he tried to envision it.
That was one of his reasons for getting extra training done in locations like this one. Pairing ways to condition the body with mental puzzles and similar exercises to sharpen his mind. If they were doing a lighter session, he would talk about things he had been thinking about. Obviously not all of them, he censored the parts that had to do with mana or other worlds. Just enough to articulate his thoughts better in this kingdom’s language, even if it was one-sided. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping.com.
Not to say the silences were awkward by themselves. They weren’t the kinds of people to make them awkward just by existing in them. Though he did believe it was a bit strange to spend hours on end grunting in exertion and saying literally nothing, something that would absolutely happen if he left it up to this little girl.
“I was thinking,” he said when they were in the middle of a handstand, “we should go to the Village Hall tomorrow. They should have some religious texts near the shrine I can use to advance my reading skill. Even better if one of the council members lets us see some official documents.”
What he was aiming for with the prospective visit to the Village Hall was complexity. He had reached a bottleneck in his personal reading, even if writing was going strong. The issue was that the reading material available in Craswidge was just lackluster, leading him to decide it was time to seek out opportunities to push his level over the edge.
Opposite him, Agnes seemed to be in agreement. Brennan was actually having an easier time reading her than normal, in spite of his upside-down position. Since she was mirroring him, her bangs weren’t covering her eyes like they did most of the time. He could see those amber irises watching him, her expression surprisingly eager.
“What, is your reading skill not that high level?”
She shook her head, a mahogany waterfall of hair rustling through the grass.
He wondered if that was because she spent most of her time outside, or due to some deeper reason. Maybe it was. After all, she didn’t strike him as the type to skip out on education if it were up to her.
Whatever the case, he wasn’t interested in prying. He had other things to worry about at all times. If she wouldn’t offer, he wouldn’t ask. The sun was drawing low already, so they’d have to return soon.
“That’s it for today,” he said, getting back on his feet. “Dinner should be ready in a few, and I don’t want Junia to have to come get me. She always becomes annoying when that happens.”
Agnes, for her part, didn’t offer any protests. Of course she didn’t. She merely broke her handstand and fell into step beside him. These sessions concluded like this on most days, if he didn’t forget the time.
They made their way over to the main road, which was fairly active at this time of day. People making their last meal preparations, some closing out their shops for the day, other kids and adults returning home like them.
There was even a wagon parked on a dirt path to the side, attached to a pair of horses whose reins probably belonged to the nondescript bearded man rummaging around in the tarped rear compartment. Brennan didn’t think much of it at first, just another traveler passing through to pick up or deliver goods. The guy stood straight and strolled back to the driver’s seat, seemingly without a care in the world.
Then they came into range of Sense Magic.
The faint, barely perceptible residue of foreign energy lingered in the air.
That’s not mana.
It was the only thing he could conclude about what was being carried in the back, behind the wooden planks. But his skill was telling him something was there nonetheless. An unidentified source emitting a strange magical signature he had never sensed before. To his horror, the closest thing he could compare it to was the Veil of that one Land Zone his father had taken him to a couple of years ago.
Yet it wasn’t exactly the same as that. It was more… integrated? Merged? Married? He didn’t know the exact word to describe the force or energy he was sensing, and yet he got the idea that it was more emergent than fundamental compared to the other example he had borne witness to. It was gone before he got the chance to study it more.
Just like that, the wagon left, leaving Brennan to stand looking at it over his shoulder, no one the wiser about its contents. Agnes stopped as well, unsure why he was acting strange, but he had to know he wasn’t wrong about this; the weird energy had faded in seconds.
Walking towards an older man who was carrying a red ball of yarn, Brennan did his best child impression. “Mister, mister, sir, uhm. Do you know what’s inside that wagon?” he asked, pointing at the target of his suspicion.
“Hm? That’s one o’ the grain men. Comes around every week,” came the answer, oblivious to what was really inside there.
“Oh, okay. Thanks sir,” he thanked the man before leaving. He wanted to follow the carriage, but that would tip the driver off.
I’m no match for anyone here.
Subtlety was the name of the game, and that would start with a methodical approach. He wanted to get a better look at the probable magic item, but there was a slight chance he had just uncovered something illegal. Not a huge chance, he figured, taking into account that his skill couldn’t have been one of a kind, though still a chance.
…Yeah, they definitely needed to pay the Village Hall a visit. Depending on what he did or didn’t find, he might be inclined to investigate further.