Chương 33: Chapter Thirty-Three: A Matter of Priorities

Alice locked her door. It was a habit that had never been needed nearly as much in her previous life, and now more than ever. She sat on the floor with her back against the bed, candle burning low, and opened the Skill Management interface properly for the first time since the night she'd gained it. It did not look the way she'd expected. She'd half-imagined a list, orderly and alphabetical, the way her main Status screen presented everything else.

Instead it opened as something closer to a diagram, in the shape of a tree, root-down, her Tier 1 skills scattered wide across the bottom like branches spreading from soil, each one a small labelled node with their level beneath it. Above them, the shape narrowed. Clusters of related nodes drew together toward single, larger, greyed-out shapes higher up the tree, unlit, and currently unreachable, but visibly there and waiting.

She traced one with a fingertip that touched nothing at all; it was no real screen, after all. Still the habits of her past life had yet to break. [Observe] sat at the bottom of one such cluster. It shared a tree with [Notice Detail]. They were the only two skills marked as MAX below, and both glowed faintly brighter than every other skill surrounding them.

Some other skill, unlabeled and locked, waited above them, and above that, thinner still, something else again, all the way up to a handful of distant points at the very top of the whole structure that she suspected, with a slightly uncomfortable lurch, represented the ceiling of a person's entire abilities in this system. Since there are fewer branches up there, she wondered, you don't get to keep all the skills that you build.

But do they integrate into a new, and stronger skill, or do they simply become parts of a broader, more complex one? She wouldn't know the answer until she reached the next tier, so she set those thoughts aside for now. Alice let her eyes drift wider across the whole shape of the diagram, and a pattern emerged that she hadn't noticed at first glance: the nodes weren't scattered at random.

They clustered, with one broad grouping that read, unmistakably, as physical ([Strike], [Dodge], [Sprint], [Vault], among others), another as mental ([Observe], [Notice Detail], [Recall], [Map Building]), a third as social ([Bluff], [Convince], [Feign Ignorance], [Maintain Alias]). Loose categories, not perfectly aligned, but real enough that she could see the use of this organization once she had more skills.

On the far side of the mental skill section stood her four languages, [Britannian Language], [Latin Language], [Francian Language], [Prusijan Language], with every one of them threading upward together toward the exact same waiting node above. She looked back at her perception skills and frowned in concentration. Observe and Notice Detail were two skills, and they converged together for the next tier. But the language node needed all four. Which raised a question that she didn't much like.

Did more skills in a cluster simply mean more work for the same destination? The next node reached more slowly, because there were more skills to bring up to the maximum level first? Or did it mean something else, that what waited above wasn't fixed at all, but built from whatever she fed into it. Two skills converged into something serviceable. Four converged into a considerably better skill, simply because of the effort involved.

If that's true, she thought, then converging Observe and Notice Detail right now, with only the two of them, might get me a worse result than waiting and finding a third skill to bring up alongside them first. Alice looked at the notification she had received recently and frowned. Convergence available. Two or more synergic skills have reached maximum level at current tier. It was offered to her the moment [Notice Detail] had joined [Observe] at MAX, but she had not yet acted on it.

She could trigger it tonight, if she wanted. Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. However [Observe] was, without question, the single skill with the most potential that she currently owned. Which was exactly why it wasn't going to be the one she tested this theory on. Too important to risk on a guess, she decided. I'll test this on something smaller first. Something I can afford to get a mediocre result from.

Once she understood properly how the tree rewarded breadth against speed, she could decide, through actual data instead of a hunch, whether Observe deserved to wait for a third skill or not. Off to one side, entirely alone, sat [Mental Skill Resistance]. It had no cluster, and no 'sibling' skills with which it shared any real similarity. She lingered on it a moment, uneasy, but aware that this skill was going to be vital in the future.

She didn't remember gaining it and that had terrible implications for power levels and the ethics of those who used them in this world. Everything else on this tree had grown from doing something, again and again, until she became competent at it. This one had grown from something being done to her. As such, she was quite unsure how to upgrade it any further. In fact, if she ever saw this skill level up, she would probably go into a panic about what had happened to her that she had missed again.

She closed the interface before that thought could take her somewhere unproductive for the evening, and reached for her notebook instead. This deserved to be planned properly, not fumbled at one evening at a time. Current Plan, she wrote, underlining it once. It was somewhat nostalgic, as it reminded her of the way she'd plan her research proposals before putting them into proper academic format. Priority: bring every current skill to Lv 10 before chasing anything new.

It was the obvious choice to her, once she'd let herself actually think it through. She had too little knowledge of what the future held, no way of knowing what waited at the narrowing point above [Strike] or [Dodge] or any of the others until she'd actually tested this, but she knew with certainty, that convergence at some point was going to become inevitable, and nothing could converge if it didn't reach the maximum level. The trouble was that not all of her skills grew the same way, or in the same place.

Combat and physical skills: marsh. There was no proper city-equivalent substitute for it, not yet, not with her killer out on the loose. The marsh could be just as dangerous if someone followed her there, but… she needed to learn at least some combat skills with the way her life was going. However, she'd learned her lesson, and she wasn't about to let herself get pulled back into the old pattern of levelling for levelling's sake. Limit: three general level-ups from marsh work. No more.

She underlined that one too, hard enough that the pen nearly tore the page. If she was sitting at Level 11 now, that meant Level 14 was her hard ceiling for marsh levelling, full stop, regardless of what waited past it or how tempting it looked in the moment. Past that point, whatever pushed her further would need to come from the city, from people, from skills that had nothing to do with wildlife or foraging.

As such, if she started gaining general levels too quickly in the marsh, while practicing physical skills, she'd need to stop that practice and focus more in the following… City and social skills: everything else. [Bluff], [Convince], [Feign Ignorance], [Maintain Alias]... all of it grew from exactly the kind of daily interactions she already experienced aplenty, and none of it needed a single trip past the tree line to keep growing.

If that growth started slowing down, she would need to put herself into riskier social situations to upgrade further. These were also the skills that were going to be vital in dealing with police, especially since the investigation seemed prone to public leaks every other week at this point. Afterwards, she sat back and did the maths for how long she could survive while on this schedule. Less marsh trips meant less strange flowers to sell, which meant less income.

She counted what remained in the small tin box under her floorboard, alongside the journal it now shared space with, and found the number better than she'd feared and worse than she'd hoped. Enough, if she was careful, to last a full month without any real income at all, but it would eat through nearly everything she'd built, leaving her in dire straits if the 'month' ran long or the plan ran late. She thought, briefly, of asking Hyde for a loan against future work, and dismissed it just as quickly.

Some debts weren't worth the questions that came attached to them. Acceptable, she decided, after going over the numbers twice, just in case. It won't be comfortable, but this is an investment I have to make now. Any later, might be too late. She blew out the candle before her worries could grow any larger. She counted the money once more in the dark, from memory, and let it lull her to sleep.