Chương 17: Chapter 16 - Confusing Observation

After a minute of debating with herself, she eventually landed on this: Unspent Points: +0 Strength: 74 => 124 (+50) Mind: 100 => 100 (MAX) Endurance: 40 => 60 (+20) Healing: 15 => 30 (+15) Sleep Fatigue Resistance: 20 => 20 Food / nourishment requirement: 20 => 20 Durability: 20 => 70 (+50) Life Expectancy: 61 => 61 Before she plugged the numbers in for real, she wanted to do some experiments. First, she smacked the back of her hand on the edge of the desk. Ow! Maybe she had hit it harder than necessary.

Shooting pain made her eyes water. She counted the seconds until the pain subsided. Next, she increased her Healing from 15 to 30, then smacked her other hand on the desk, just as hard. It hurt just as bad, but only took half as long for the pain to go away. She wasn't a masochist, but she wanted to understand how these stats worked, and that was the first test she'd thought of. She wanted to understand what it meant for her Healing stat to double.

It appeared to correlate to the time it took for her body to heal itself from an injury. Saying it like that sounded stupid, but at least now she knew that the number she saw was a linear correlation to her body's healing potential. Next, she increased her Durability from 20 to 40, then smacked her hand on the desk one more time. She used the same amount of strength, but it didn't hurt nearly as bad.

Measuring pain was difficult, but it seemed like this might be another linear correlation to how difficult it was to injure her body. She realized she needed more data. She needed a test that was easier to measure. She unsheathed her sword, and wedged it between her legs while she sat on the chair. Then, she pushed her hand down onto the blade, keeping track mentally of how hard she had to push in order to draw a bit of blood. Then, she increased her Durability from 40 to 80.

It was more than she had initially planned to do, but she wanted a clean double on the value again for the test. Pushing her other hand onto the sword just as hard, it didn't draw any blood now. She increased the force until it was about twice as much as the first time, at which point the sword sliced into her hand again. She smacked the back of her hand on the desk one more time, and it barely hurt at all. Unfortunately, her hands were both bleeding, and smacking her hand on the desk flicked blood everywhere.

Ew, gross! She hurriedly pulled one of her spare shirts from her soul storage and ripped it into strips, then used the strips to bandage her hands. She cleaned her sword and wiped up the blood splatters as best she could from the desk, then disposed of the shirt in the trash bin. Satisfied with her test results so far, she spent the rest of her stats upgrade points on Strength and Endurance.

Unspent Points: +0 Strength: 74 => 120 (+46) Mind: 100 => 100 (MAX) Endurance: 40 => 54 (+14) Healing: 15 => 30 (+15) Sleep Fatigue Resistance: 20 => 20 Food / nourishment requirement: 20 => 20 Durability: 20 => 80 (+60) Life Expectancy: 61 => 61 With one unspent reward point, she checked the available rewards: Reward Points: 1 [Upgrade Stats (tier-based)] cost: 1 point. Gain +135 points to spend on stats [Guaranteed Advancement] cost: 1 point.

The normal advancement times for each tier of your class will be capped at 1 year. Advancements that happen before that are unaffected. [Stat Checker] cost: 1 point. Gain the ability to view other people's stats. [Limit Breaker] cost: 1 point. Gain the ability to upgrade your stats up to double their original MAX value. [Soul Space 2] cost: 1 point. Your soul can function as a spatial storage device, accessible only by you. The space itself will be spherical, with a diameter of 10 feet.

Anything placed in the soul space will enter a time stasis. As a bonus, this space can serve as a coin denomination exchanger for a 5% fee. [Early Personal Aura Negation] cost: 3 points. Others' magical auras will have no effect on you. [Invisibility 2] cost: 1 point. Renders you undetectable by magical sense, aura, domain, or any other type of ability. You will be truly invisible and undetectable. Any items in direct contact with your skin while you are invisible will also turn invisible.

Releasing skin contact will remove invisibility from the item. Touching or directly interacting with another person will remove the invisibility. She noticed that the [Early Personal Aura Negation] cost had dropped by one, and wondered if it would drop again when she advanced to tier 2. This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

With how much her increased Mind stat had been helping her, she was tempted to buy the [Limit Breaker] reward, just so she could keep increasing it. [Invisibility 2] was also looking quite juicy, as that description fit what she thought she had purchased originally. Having been burned by that purchase once before, she decided to save her reward point for now. She might need it for something specific in the future, and was also curious to see if other reward options became available down the line.

Refocusing on her hands, Kiara realized that she had suffered from similar cuts in the past. They weren't too deep, just enough to let blood flow freely from the wound. If she was remembering right, those types of cuts in the past had taken 7-10 days to heal up completely. She would keep a close eye on her hands for the next 3-5 days to see how the healing progressed. A sudden knock at her door drew her out of her reverie.

[Magical Sense 2] showed Dustin's room to be empty, and she was fairly certain that's who was at the door, based on the general sense she got from her ability. She opened it with a pleasant smile on her face. It was indeed Dustin.

"Everything okay in here?" He asked, looking past her into the room.

"Yeah, of course," she responded.

"Why?"

"I heard some banging…" Kiara realized that their desks shared a wall, and he must have heard her smacking her hands against her desk. His eyes narrowed when he saw the bandages on her hands. A little bit of blood had soaked into them. He lowered his voice.

"Should I get Captain Forlick?" His eyes glanced back and forth around her room, looking for a threat. She sighed as she looked at her bandaged hands.

"I'm really okay Dustin, everything's fine. I was just… I don't know, training, I guess, and I cut my hand on my sword." He glanced at both of her hands.

"Twice?" She shrugged.

"And what was with all the banging?"

"Like I said, I was training." He grunted and exhaled slowly.

"If you say so. Wanna grab some dinner?" His eyes were still looking around suspiciously, and he seemed eager to get her out of her room, just in case it was dangerous.

"Yeah, sure, why not," she replied. She quickly grabbed her sword from the floor and re-sheathed it, slinging it across her back. She followed him down to the street to find some food. * Victor spent the night in a nearby inn, then joined back up with the caravan early the following morning. He knew Shian and Dustin were travelling further north, up to Portish, and he wanted to make the trip up there with them. Spending the past few days getting to know them had endeared them to him a bit.

They were both pleasant people, and easy to get along with. Frustratingly, he was no closer to figuring out the mystery surrounding Shian than he had been earlier. He had learned their full names, Shian Yountal and Dustin Savage, but that didn't really help him in any way. Dustin seemed as ordinary as they come, apart from his scary intuition for card games. The only odd thing about Dusin was that he wore a medium-grade storage ring, which was somewhat interesting for a mortal.

It wasn't a ring that Victor had made, and he didn't recognize the craftwork, so it probably hadn't been purchased anywhere near his shop, but the craftsmanship was high quality. Victor had a really good sense for magical artifacts, one of the best in the business. A ring like that was probably worth 150 gold, which was expensive enough to be considered a family heirloom. Some people would kill for that kind of money, and it was hard for a mortal to protect themself from thievery of that scale.

So Dustin was either hiding some kind of ace in the hole, or he was wealthy enough to not worry about losing a 150 gold ring along with whatever it contained. Victor's guess was that Shian was the ace in the hole, and the reason Dustin wasn't scared of being robbed. Victor could tell from the runes on the ring that it had an adjustable pocket dimension size, which was tricky to pull off.

The mana usage was dependent on the size of the pocket dimension, so increasing its size would drain the imbued mana faster, but it also meant that the ring was perfectly efficient. It adjusted to the exact size needed in order to accommodate whatever was placed inside. Victor wasn't even sure how to make something like that, but now that he'd seen it, he would play around with the idea until he figured it out. He was good at figuring things out. Which made the mystery surrounding Shian all the more tantalizing.

It had been a long time since he'd come across a puzzle he couldn't solve. As he thought about things, he relied on his magical sense to keep a pulse on the caravan. He subconsciously recognized a peak tier 1 mage enter the range of his magical sense, but wrote it off as one of the caravan guards. Most of them were tier 1 mages. It wasn't until Shian and Dustin stepped into the wagon that Victor realized what was wrong.

The peak tier 1 signature on his magical sense radar disappeared the moment he focused on it, revealing Shian instead, a complete non-magical user. Everything about her screamed that she wasn't a mage. So why did his subconscious try to interpret her as a peak tier 1 mage. And… Wait, what? Tier 1? Like watching something out of his peripheral vision, Victor could gather a loose sense of everything around him in a 100 foot radius using his magic sense, but was only able to focus on one thing at a time.

When he wasn't focused on Shian, his brain interpreted her as a peak tier 1 mage, but just a day ago it had been interpreting her as a peak tier 0 mage. What was happening?