Chương 29: Chapter Twenty-Nine: Free Skills and Other Small Mercies

Nothing dramatic happened. At least, not at first. Then, with all the fanfare of a kettle coming to boil… Your Class has upgraded! New Class: Intermediate Thief (Common) All skills below maximum level increase by 1. Something moved through her at once, fast and total, not painful exactly but not comfortable either, a tingly sensation that seemed to wake every cell in her body at once. The screen swam and resettled. She looked over her status once the sensation went away. Her body felt… lighter, somehow.

But the status screen did not reflect that. In fact, nothing seemed different, other than the skill level ups, although they were excellent news, unexpected, yet welcome.

Alice paused pensively and looked at her hand. She moved her fingers slowly, first tightening them into a fist and then releasing them, before tightening them again. She couldn't quite pinpoint what was different about it, but something within her seemed to have changed, qualitatively speaking. The fact that this wasn't shown in numbers in the screen as she had expected, with a level up in Vigour or Acuity like in games… There might be more things the system was hiding that she had initially thought.

She closed her hand for a final time and looked back at the awaiting screens. Regardless of the secret features or whatever hidden mechanisms were involved, the only thing she could do now was keep going up the levels and the ranks and learn things one by one. It was of no use worrying about the nefariousness of the whole setup at her current state. This Tier Upgrade offers the following skills. Please choose two out of three available options:"Hmm," she hummed.

From her experience so far in this world, having more skills was never wrong. [Fence's Eye] [Forgery] [Lockpicking] Pretty self-explanatory names from what she saw but she expanded them just in case. [Fence's Eye] – appraise stolen or illicit goods for street value and traceability. [Forgery] – construct false documents, seals, correspondence, and signatures. [Lockpicking] – manipulate pin-and-tumbler mechanisms to open a lock without its key. Just as she had thought. She didn't hesitate long on this one.

[Forgery] first. Alice had wanted the ability to lie convincingly on paper since roughly her second week in this body, ever since she'd understood exactly how much of her survival here depended on documents nobody looked at closely enough. This was a dangerous skill if caught, but it could one day save her life. [Lockpicking] second, without much hesitation at all. Similar reasoning to the first choice.

This could be a skill that would save her life some day, allowing her to escape a situation that she wouldn't have otherwise. [Fence's Eye] was nice but, she didn't have anything worth appraising yet." Forgery and Lock –" she stopped herself and looked at the definition again. [Lockpicking] – manipulate pin-and-tumbler mechanisms to open a lock without its key. Her eyes widened in realization. She could act utterly moronic at times. Skill [Forgery] acquired.

She ignored the notice, tremendously grateful that it wasn't followed by one for [Lockpicking]." Fence's Eye," she corrected herself. Skill [Fence's Eye] acquired. She sighed in relief. [Lockpicking] was the better choice between the two, but it had such a simple definition, that she could easily create the conditions to acquire this skill by sheer practice and experience at home. She would just need to lock the door to her room and practice with a hairpin over and over.

She could not recreate [Forgery] or [Fence's Eye] easily for she would need access to valuable items to forge or fence, but some skills could be created quite easily. Like [Forage], or [Strike]! She had spent so much time training in this marsh, that she had begun to associate it with both physical training and skill creation to her own detriment. Playing devil's advocate, there was a chance she could not recreate [Lockpicking], but that was a chance she was willing to take.

She was quite confident about being able to gain this skill on her own efforts, and if it worked this time, perhaps in future class upgrades, she would be able to choose her skills carefully depending on their difficulty of being acquired in the wild. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Alice, then, carefully looked at a notification that had popped more recently than the rest. Convergence available.

Two or more synergic skills have reached maximum level at current tier.

New interface available: Skill Management. She stared. Which skills had–? The class upgrade level-up, she realized and looked back at her skills. Skills Tier 2 (Uncommon): None. Tier 1 (Common): [Arithmetic] Lv. 6 · [Advertise] Lv. 5 · [Bluff] Lv. 6 · [Britannian Language] Lv. 6 · [Convince] Lv. 7 · [Disguise] Lv. 2 · [Dodge] Lv. 7 · [Drop Safely] Lv. 4 · [Feign Ignorance] Lv. 6 · [Fence's Eye] Lv. 1 · [Forage] Lv. 9 · [Forgery] Lv. 1 · [Francian Language] Lv. 2 · [Garden] Lv. 2 · [Hide] Lv. 7 · [Intimidation] Lv.

3 · [Latin Language] Lv. 5 · [Lie] Lv. 6 · [Local Slang] Lv. 5 · [Maintain Alias] Lv. 6 · [Map Building] Lv. 5 · [Mental Skill Resistance] Lv. 5 · [Mending] Lv. 5 · [Notice Detail] Lv. 10 (MAX) · [Observe] Lv. 10 (MAX) · [Pick Pocket] Lv. 2 · [Prusijan Language] Lv. 2 · [Reading and Writing] Lv. 7 · [Recall] Lv. 5 · [Silent Step] Lv. 7 · [Spot Tail] Lv. 4 · [Sprint] Lv. 6 · [Squeeze Through] Lv. 3 · [Strike] Lv. 7 · [Tailoring] Lv. 2 · [Threat Detection] Lv. 8 · [Track] Lv. 6 · [Vault] Lv. 3 · [Weaving] Lv.

2 She skimmed through them quickly until… [Notice Detail] Lv. 10 (MAX) · [Observe] Lv. 10 (MAX) Of course. Synergy. Then, before she could wrap her head around it, her eyes caught onto Tier 2. The RESTRICTED sign was gone. Alice took a deep breath and closed all the screens and notifications. She couldn't stay there all night and think about this clearly in the middle of nowhere. She would need time to understand the implications of this. If skills converged to increase their tier– Alice stopped herself.

She didn't linger. The light was going, and she had a very long walk home with a great deal to consider already. But she noted, with something close to relief, that for the first time in longer than she wanted to admit, the system had given her some explanation. She'd take it. She stood, gathered her basket, and started the walk back.

The city came up around her gradually, marsh giving way to scrub giving way to the first low roofs, and she was three streets into it, basket heavy and her mind still half on the new shape of her skill list, when she passed the little stationer's on Greybell Lane just as the man inside was turning the sign in the window. She stopped before the thought even caught up. Through the glass there was a low shelf of bound notebooks, plain covers, the cheap kind sold to clerks and schoolboys.

There was nothing particularly remarkable about them. But something in her caught on the sight the way a hook catches on cloth, and held. If I can't trust my own memory to hold what I've learned, she thought, standing there with her basket cutting into her palm, then I need something better. Paper didn't forget. Paper couldn't be edited easily, not without leaving a mark, not if you knew what you were doing. Alice really liked this idea, the more she thought about it.

Didn't the people of this time love keeping journals? She would be practicing a popular hobby of the gentry were she to write in one. She pushed the door open before he could lock it, apologised for the lateness of the hour with a smile, and bought two of the plainest notebooks on the shelf and a small bundle of decent steel-nib pens, paying without haggling over the price the way she normally would have. The man seemed pleased enough by that to forgive the intrusion.

Mrs. Hatch's house was quiet by the time she got in, meaning that most everyone had already eaten and gone up, and Alice was glad of it. In her room, she lit her candle stub, sat on the edge of the bed, and unwrapped one of the two notebooks from its paper, setting the second aside for whenever the first filled up. A new pen, a new page, and some ideas of a plan. She didn't write anything for a long while. She sat with the blank page instead and let herself actually think, properly.

She would need a way to make whatever she wrote either illegible or able to hide information in plain sight, were someone to manage to find this journal. Illegible isn't enough, she decided after some time. Illegible may work for most, but… A stranger's eye sliding past nonsense was one kind of safety. A trained eye, Rowe's, say, or worse, whoever had been in her head, recognising nonsense as code was an entirely different problem, and codes invited exactly the kind of attention she couldn't afford.

What she needed was something that looked like something else entirely. Alice, well, Cora really, had enjoyed ciphers as a child. Back then she'd invented whole alphabets for the joy of nobody else being able to read them, and two ideas occurred to her as she thought on those memories. Firstly, a substitution cipher, keyed to something she had constant, unremarkable access to and every reason to own. The Queen Anne's Bible sat on her shelf, as it did on Mrs.

Hatch's shelf downstairs and cheap copies were readily available on any corner for a few pence. Nobody looked twice at a God-fearing flower girl owning one, and a page-and-verse key buried in something that ordinary would take a determined mind to suspect, let alone crack. The second, better idea, followed along the same lines as the first, but two journals, instead of one.

A dull, entirely readable diary, the sort of thing she could leave sitting in plain view, full of the weather and the price of violets and nothing anyone would bother stealing, and a second, hidden text that gave the true meaning of anything in the first to her own trained eye alone. A date that didn't match the weather she'd described. A flower mentioned that wasn't in season. Small, deliberate wrongnesses that meant something only if you had the key, and looked like nothing at all if you didn't.

And the key itself didn't need to be written anywhere a stranger could find and puzzle over. As she had initially thought, it could simply be the Queen Anne's Bible on her table, page and verse standing in for date and number, chapter for category, the whole dictionary of it hiding in plain sight inside a book no one would ever think to question. She liked that one considerably better. A cipher could be broken. A wrong assumption, worn convincingly enough, rarely got checked at all.

She was still working out how she'd manage two journals without either one becoming suspicious when a new notification popped up. Skill created: [Cryptography] The construction and interpretation of coded language, ciphers, and concealed meaning. This should have been good news. Apparently building a working code from scratch, in her own head, and with messy notes on paper, was enough to create such a good skill. She'd take it. She'd take anything that came free. However…

if someone had this skill, if it was of high enough level and they simply used it actively… did that mean that the code would become useless by simply uttering a word?!