Chương 4: It's time to grind

Now, instead of absorbing the energy randomly across all attributes upon tier up, we designed a way to store it in the body such that there is enough to increase attributes by a total of four points - which can be directed through training. Train strength while the energy is stored, the point goes to strength. Train all four equally and they each receive one. The body does the accounting; the person decides the category.

- From the memoirs of Neeli, Second Principal of the Progenitor's Faction Kara woke up confused, which was at least consistent with how he had fallen asleep. There was an enormous trunk wrapped around him. For the two seconds before memory returned, this was simply an inexplicable fact about his morning. Then the previous day arrived in order - the island, the jackals, the violet man, the treehouse, three years - and he understood exactly how he had ended up sleeping against something the size of a small building.

The trunk lifted off him with great delicacy, careful not to wake him, approximately five seconds after he was already awake. He sat up. Through the canopy gaps, the light was high and warm. He had slept through the evening, the night, and a good portion of the morning, which given the quality of the previous day seemed like a fair trade.

"Wash up, boy. You stink." Pranky was in his rocking chair. He had the settled look of someone who had not moved from it and had no plans to change that. In the corner near the far wall, there was a small pond that Kara was fairly certain had not been there the night before. He looked at Pranky and decided not to ask.

"Are you going to sit there watching me bathe?" Pranky rolled his eyes, stood, and walked outside like a man who had all the time in the world, which, given what Kara was beginning to understand about him, might have been literally true. Bodo lumbered after him. Tremble didn't move, eyes closed, giving every indication of not having registered the question and every indication of having registered it completely and not considering it worth her time. Kara took his clothes off and got into the pond.

The water was cold and clear and exactly what he needed. He stayed in it longer than strictly necessary. The thoughts about his family found the edges of his mind, patient and persistent, and he boxed them away in the corner he had been putting them since yesterday. Later, when he had fewer immediate problems. He was aware this was a delay rather than a solution, and delay was the resource he had available. A snort from Tremble informed him that he had been in the pond long enough.

He climbed out to find his sports suit replaced by a tunic in some brownish material he didn't recognise and trousers in the same fabric, both surprisingly soft in a way that took him a moment to appreciate. His suit was gone. He had worked hard to convince his father to up his stipend so he could buy it, and the cost still sat somewhere in his chest, and now it had been replaced by something that looked assembled from the forest. He noted it in his growing file and put on the tunic.

Outside, the forest was going about its business. High above him, on his usual branch, Kite regarded him with an expression of cheerful evaluation.

"Good morning, youngling." The voice arrived directly in his head, bright and enthusiastic, full of the energy of someone who had already decided the day held potential.

"Good morning," Kara called up. Below, Pranky and Bodo were looking at him from the ground. Fifty feet below.

"Come on down, boy." Kara looked at the drop, then at Kite. Kite shook his enormous head, amused.

"Just climb down. That is your trait, isn't it?" Right. He had said climbing. He had better do something that resembled climbing. The main trunk had no useful holds he could identify. The branch he stood on ran outward until it met a smaller tree about two hundred feet along, and that one had branches he could work with. He made his way across, transferred over, and climbed down through the lower boughs methodically, the way he had climbed since he was old enough to find things to climb. He dropped to the ground.

Pranky looked him over.

"Hmm. Not how I expected that, given your trait. But fine." Before Pranky could say anything further, Kara asked the question that had been sitting at the front of his mind since yesterday afternoon.

"Why can't I see the leaves? I know they're there. I can feel them underfoot right now. But they're invisible." Pranky looked at him like a man who had just had a hypothesis confirmed and found the confirmation extremely funny. He did not suppress it.

"That explains why you were walking into every shrub like a blind mole rat." He adopted, without warning, the posture and tone of a university lecturer who considered their subject the most important thing anyone had ever been asked to understand.

"Sit." Kara sat.

"Most leaves appear green because they reflect green light and absorb red. These leaves are made of metamaterials. They redirect all incoming light around themselves rather than reflecting any of it. Invisible to most things below a certain grade threshold." Kara processed this calmly. He was, apparently, at the absolute bottom of the perceptual hierarchy on this island. He asked, just to confirm.

"The creatures you stumbled into when you arrived were at the bottom," Pranky confirmed.

"Until you showed up." The follow-on question was obvious: how was he supposed to gain any energy if he couldn't defeat anything here? His parents, both G-grade Tier 6, were well above average back home. The Area councils topped out in the low F-grades and were regarded as the peak of what most people would ever meet. Hardly anyone reached the higher tiers of F-grade on Earth; they left for other planets, where there was room to grow. The weakest creature he had met yesterday had been F-grade.

"Enough," Pranky said, which was apparently something he could do with internal monologues.

"Climb back up to the treehouse. Keep going up and down until you gain a point in Dexterity. No breakfast before that." His stomach, on cue, made its position clear. He had no argument that would improve the situation, and he had meant to raise his Dexterity anyway - the most applicable stat to what he did, with a couple of points in IQ alongside to round out the morning. He made his way back up through the smaller tree, along the branch, and down again. Then again.

The rhythm was not unpleasant once he stopped treating it as a task and let it turn automatic. About an hour in, the warmth arrived. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. ATTRIBUTE INCREASED Dexterity: 22 >> 23 He sat and let it settle through him. Attribute increases were different from the tier-up glow - cleaner, more localised, like a muscle finding a version of itself it hadn't known was there.

Bodo appeared from somewhere in the trees with a bowl of soup and an omelette. The soup tasted of mushroom. The omelette was exactly an omelette. After the morning he had been having, it was the best thing he had eaten in recent memory, which admittedly only had to beat three weeks of raft rations. He was still holding the empty bowl when Pranky appeared behind him.

"Now find your sports suit." Kara looked up at the culprit.

"Can I at least have a clue?" Pranky appeared to consider this with great seriousness.

"No." He looked at Bodo. Bodo looked away slowly, like something large trying to be invisible and not succeeding. He changed tactics.

"You know, Bodo, you are the kindest, most considerate mammoth I have ever had the privilege of meeting. No contest. And it strikes me that a mammoth of your obvious moral character would want to help a lost fourteen-year-old who has had an extremely difficult couple of days and only wants to find his suit." He paused.

"I could tell you about the suit. There's a story. It's quite moving." He kept this up for several minutes, varying the approach. Eventually Bodo, with the resigned dignity of someone who knows they are being manipulated and intends to cooperate anyway, extended his trunk toward the ground. Toward a leaf. Kara felt the leaf, looked at Bodo, looked at the leaf again, and then went to the nearest tree and started searching the branches. He searched more trees in more directions. Another hour and a half.

Nothing, except a gibbon settling onto a low branch to keep a clear line of sight on the funniest thing currently happening on the island. He sat down next to Bodo, exhausted, and actually felt the leaf. It was large - larger than the ones underfoot all morning, larger than anything he had brushed past in the branches. He turned it over. Same smooth surface, same invisible quality, but the weight was wrong.

Dense, heavier than a leaf had any right to be, the kind of weight that meant a thing dropped straight and stayed where it landed. Two things came out of that, and he made himself sit still long enough to follow both. The size meant one tree. There was exactly one on this island big enough to grow a leaf like this, and he was sitting under it. He had worked that out an hour ago and then climbed four others, which he decided not to examine too closely. The weight meant the base.

A leaf this heavy did not catch the wind and drift off somewhere scenic. It fell near the trunk and gathered there among the others like it - where you would put something you wanted found, but not found easily. One object hidden in a heap of near-identical invisible ones. He nearly started digging through the pile right there. Then he stopped, because there was a third thing. He had crossed this base a dozen times and never once felt the suit underfoot. So it was not on the open ground where his feet went.

It was off to the side, out of the walked lines, tucked into one of the arching root hollows where the soil sat sheltered and nobody stepped. That took him from a base the size of a house down to five or six pockets of dark earth between the roots. The leaf was still in his hand. He tipped it without thinking, and the moisture from his palm ran across it and pooled at the low edge rather than soaking in. It held water rather than absorbing it. He looked at the leaf, then at the root hollows.

The suit was a sealed surface too. Pour water onto bare soil and the soil took it and went dark. Pour it onto the suit and the suit would shed it, bead it, hold an edge that had no business being there. Water would not let him see the suit. It would let him see the one place that behaved wrong. Getting it there was the next problem. The pool was up in the treehouse, fifty feet over his head, and he was disinclined to make fifty-foot round trips cupping water in his hands. So he climbed up once with a plan.

He filled the largest leaf he could find at the pool's edge, ran a vine over the branch above and down the trunk, and lashed the leaf to the end of it. Then he lowered the whole thing from below, paying the vine out hand over hand so it arrived level and mostly full. Refill, repeat. Crude, and it held together, which were the only two qualities he needed. He poured a measured amount into the first hollow. The ground drank it. The soil darkened and the water was gone. Second hollow. The same.

Third hollow, the water went nowhere. It sat. It found an edge it had no reason to find, ran flat across something sealed beneath the leaf litter, and beaded along a line that held a shape - a shoulder, the fold of a sleeve, the suggestion of a collar. Water lying on top of a thing that drank none of it and that he still could not see. He reached in, and his fingers closed on fabric, slick and cool and entirely different from the leaves around it.

The warmth arrived with the point while he was still working it loose from the roots. ATTRIBUTE INCREASED IQ: 22 >> 23 He sat with the suit in his hands. Bodo had been pointing at the leaf the entire time. Literally. The leaf, which came from the tree, under which the suit was hidden. A clue of extraordinary directness, and he had spent the better part of two hours not following it. From somewhere in the upper branches, the gibbon snickered. He put on the jacket. He looked at his arm.

Where the jacket covered him, he wasn't there. He took the jacket off, put it back on, held it at arm's length and turned it over, and confirmed it was a sports suit that had been upgraded - by what mechanism he had no idea - to the point of being functionally invisible. He thought about what it had cost, and what it would cost now, if cost was even a category that applied here, and concluded it was worth more than everything he had ever owned, projected future earnings included.

He gave Bodo a hug around the trunk.

"Thank you."

"Thank Master." Bodo's eyes moved upward. Kara looked up. Pranky was watching from the treehouse branch with an expression that was, for once, straightforwardly approving. This man had layers. Most people you could see the whole of from the outside, and Kara had just seen two of Pranky's - the one that left an invisibility suit out as a discovery exercise, and the one that watched him find it and looked like that. The warmth arrived before the thought finished forming.

ATTRIBUTE INCREASED EQ: 13 >> 14 That had been unplanned. He had a point sitting undirected now, to be spent between the Dexterity increase and the IQ one he had been weighing since yesterday. He was still considering it when Pranky pointed at something behind him.

"While you're down there - could you bring some of that wood up? Gets cold in the evenings sometimes, and Bodo isn't exactly built for climbing." There was a neat pile of logs where Pranky was pointing. It had not been there a moment ago. He looked at the pile, at the treehouse fifty feet up, and at the invisibility suit currently in his hands. He owed him one. Fine. He went to the nearest log, wrapped both hands around it, braced his feet, and pulled. The log did not move. He adjusted his grip.

He tried again, this time with the understanding that he was working with it rather than against it. The log remained entirely indifferent to this understanding. He tried a third approach, lower to the ground and using his legs, and found himself face-first in the dirt with the log not having moved at all. He lay there a moment, taking stock. He could look up and tell Pranky it was impossible. He could almost feel the man's eyes on him from fifty feet up. He did not look up.

He got back to his feet, found a grip that worked, and dragged the log across the ground to the base of the nearest tree. He was not lifting it. He was moving it, which was different and significantly less impressive, but it was progress measured in inches, and he was willing to accept the unit. His Strength attribute increased about halfway through the second log. ATTRIBUTE INCREASED Strength: 11 >> 12 He stood up straight, tested his arms, and picked the log up with both hands.

Heavy but manageable now - the kind of heavy that was a fact rather than a refusal. He still had no way to get it fifty feet up a tree, and was working through his options when Pranky jumped down from the branch. He landed without sound and gathered the entire pile of logs in his arms with the ease of someone picking up a stack of papers. He looked at Kara. He looked at the single log Kara had moved six feet across the ground. He looked back at Kara, and jumped up to the treehouse without a word.

Kara stood at the base of the tree with his empty hands and invented several new choice curses that day. From the upper branches, the gibbon offered its endorsement.