Chương 185: Time’s Worn Tracks

After my failed conversation with my mother, I didn't try to engage with my mother again. I still wanted her to get better, but most of the time she was lost in a drug-induced haze, and I firmly remembered how badly my first attempt to help her get clean had gone. I couldn't communicate with her when she was high, and when she was lucid she adamantly refused to change. Sallia was the one who had the firmest stance against my mother when I talked about what had happened in the group.

<Miria, just because you're born to a certain set of parents doesn't mean that they care about you. I… I know that you care a lot about people. And I'm grateful for that - I really am. But you also need to remember that not everyone is going to have the same reaction to you, or have the same attitude towards their friends and family as you do, > she said. <Some people won't treat you as precious members of their family, even if you're related by blood. You don't have to care about people less. Just…

be more selective about who you invest your time and energy into, and don't let other people prey on your good nature. I don't want to see you get hurt like this every time you're born to a bad family. > I didn't know if I entirely agreed with her, because I still wanted to see my mother get better and healthier.

And my mother had kept me alive while I was young and vulnerable: I felt that counted for something, even if it was hard to see my mother lost in a drug-induced haze every day and it looked like she wanted to rip my throat out anytime I mentioned quitting. But even if I wasn't sure if I agreed with Sallia, I promised her that I would at least think about it. She didn't seem wholly satisfied with that, but she didn't push me. I still wanted my mother to get better and for our life to improve.

But I also couldn't make her better just by waving my hand and throwing magic at her. Renewal could do a lot for someone who was hurt and needed help. It could even regrow lost limbs. But it couldn't help somebody fix their psyche when they didn't want to get better. As much as it hurt me to admit it, right now I just couldn't fix things. That didn't meant that everything remained stagnant, though. Even though my mother continued to be lost in her drug addiction, things with my friends got better as time passed.

For Felix, I continued to slowly modify his face, making him less and less similar to the person we had first rescued from the facility and making him look more and more like himself. We experimented a lot with slightly different facial features and aesthetics until eventually we found something Felix was really happy with, and at the same time, he started to look so completely different from the body we had rescued that nobody would be able to recognize him.

At Felix's very strong suggestion, I also modified my face a little bit. I wasn't willing to change my face much from its original shape, because I was still very happy with my face and body. But Felix pointed out that, while none of the soldiers in the facility had gotten a good look at us due to all of the chaos, magic, Aplos's escape, and the illusion-based magic that had been flying around, the soldiers might have gotten at least a glimpse of my face.

So I tweaked my face just enough to make it hard to recognize me at a casual glance by broadening my forehead a bit, shrinking my nose a bit, and slightly lightening the color of my eyes. It wasn't enough to make me unrecognizable if someone knew what I looked like, but considering how hard it should have been for the soldiers to see us in the first place, I felt it would keep them off our trail.

Sallia and Anise went through similar treatments, although their facial reconstructions were slower, to make sure their parents didn't notice anything off. Anise's hair was slowly restored to a bubblegum pink color over the course of a few months, much to her joy and my bemusement. Anise was as attached to her hair color as I was attached to my facial features.

It definitely made Anise stand out, since pink was NOT a common hair color on this planet, but her parents seemed to find it more hilarious than troubling, so it worked out fine. About a week after we rescued Felix, Anise did say that the hats in her area had stepped up patrols around important buildings and increased security checks. Her father had apparently been complaining about the inconvenience of the increased security measures in the more important districts of town.

I wasn't even sure whether it was a response to the ongoing war, which had settled into a long, drawn out stalemate, or whether it was due to our rescue of Felix. it could have been either, or both. Either way, the giant, prominent hats worn by the guard were now everywhere in Anise's district. Amusingly enough, the slums still had about the same hat presence as before - approximately zero. If the government was looking for us, they were looking in the wrong area.

The next several months were rather stable monetarily, if a bit lean for Felix and I. Felix continued to experiment with the gunpowder and metal of this world, in hopes of creating some sort of knockoff product we could sell to local gangs. The profit from selling guns would probably be several dozen times what I got from helping Old Mo, and so I was at least kind of looking forward to Felix succeeding. I did manage to convince Old Mo to help me sell my swiped potions as well.

He didn't even ask me where they had come from when I asked him to help me. He directly bought them the moment I produced them. Apparently, most of the potions were cleaning related, with a few that were meant to heal broken bones or disinfect wounds, as well as one potion that treated an illness called 'Ebellia-' a sort of deep lung illness that caused chronic coughing and lung pain. In total, he gave me 40 Sterlings for the whole batch.

It wasn't a very big payout, but even though I didn't even get one arling, 40 Sterlings was enough money to keep for a bad day or an emergency. Sallia and Anise also helped me feed Felix. It wasn't much, but they sometimes managed to sneak out a meal here, a few sterlings there, and sometimes, a few second-hand clothes. It wasn't anything fancy, and the clothes were often slightly too big or too small for me, but they still helped. Sadly.

Felix didn't get any new clothes - after all, he wasn't willing to put on a dress, and while Sallia did have some clothing that leaned a little bit more towards male dress, there were still some distinct differences between men's pants and women's pants in this country. Felix wasn't discovered by my mother, likely because she was in a blissed-out haze most of the time, and nobody else ever came into our house. We were too poor for anyone to bother trying to rob - which was lucky for the would-be robbers.

The idea of a robber breaking into our house only to get met with two superpowered children did amuse me, but luckily it never actually happened. Finally, everyone's skills and magic continued progressing as time passed.

Anise grew more proficient in using her Shadow-Dryad's eyes and magic missiles to grow stronger, Felix managed to push his metal attunement to 'advanced' state, Sallia managed to push her way to her fifth rune and get all of her spellcasting abilities from the manifestation system online and tailored to this dimension. She also managed to push her swordsmanship up to advanced grade.

I managed to push my attunement to [Expert] grade, where I had gotten stuck last life, and I also managed to form my fourth absorption rune. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. Power: Form a [Expert] Grade attunement (Note: this dimension does not have the laws to support alteration spellcasting. Significant Achievement penalty).

Achievement +200 Power: Form your fourth rune (Note: this dimension does not have the laws to support runes, although it does somewhat support absorption spellcasting. moderate Achievement penalty). Achievement +280 With the 4, 922 Achievement I had previously had, the new 480 Achievement pushed me to 5, 402 Achievement. Sallia was the first one of us to ever push our runes past the ninth rune.

Due to Sallia's rune upgrade, her first three runes were essentially the first nine runes for a normal user of the magic system - meaning that her fourth rune was equivalent to the tenth rune, a threshold none of us had ever crossed before. On the day that Sallia's fourth rune was formed, she was incredibly excited. <My rune abilities are combining! > She yelled into the friendship bracelet.

Even though the friendship bracelets used telepathy instead of real sound to let us talk to each other, I could practically feel my ears vibrating from her excitement. <Combining? > asked Anise. <Yes! You know how I formed my third rune ability to track 'similar items' to whatever I'm concentrating on, right? > said Sallia. <Right? > I said. <Well, once my rune abilities blended together, something interesting happened.

First of all, the range for my metal manipulation has gotten much larger and more precise - I can probably 'catch bullets' with more precision than before, and I wouldn't need as high of a perception stat to keep myself alive, > said Sallia. <More interestingly though, if I hold a bullet in my hands, I can use my metal manipulation ability to look at other bullets with the same shape from a ridiculous range.

I don't think I can do cross-city bullet manipulation yet - but I can pretty easily divert a bullet from a few city blocks away and no direct line of sight. And I can also 'see' everything around the bullets, almost as if they were an extra set of eyes. So I'm surprisingly good at scouting now, > said Sallia. It took a few more months before I created my fourth rune, but when I did. I also got a rather interesting upgrade. It almost felt like my ability was asking me to make a choice.

It only took me a few moments to pull up the relevant part of my rune magic ability and figure out what was going on. The fourth through sixth runes will now fundamentally alter one sensory organ, providing +10 Perception per level, and also giving you improved vision when trying to see space. Additionally, each rune will provide you with a significantly increased ability to resist external spatial manipulation targeting you or the area directly around you.

When I formed my fourth rune, the first thing I noticed was that my eyes got much better. I had already had excellent vision, courtesy of my high Perception stat. Combined with the benefits of Sallia's noodle bowl pushing my stats higher, my four runes, and my base stats, my stats in this life had started to reach truly ridiculous levels.

Physical Mental (+61) Essence Strength: (40+128) Grade 8 Intelligence: (20+92) Grade 8 Absorption: (40+82) Grade 6 Agility: (40+94) Grade 6 Willpower: (40+106) Grade 10 Manifestation: (20+77) Grade 4 Fortitude: (40+80) Grade 6 Perception: (30+130+10) Grade 11 Binding: (20+114) Grade 6 Alteration: (40+91) Grade 6 My physical stats, especially my strength, was starting to push the boundaries of what was 'possible' for a normal human in this world.

My youth still worked as a shackle that dragged down my physical abilities, but when I became an adult, my weakest physical stat would already be on par with a trained soldier or athlete, and my strength would probably just barely touch the truly supernatural realm. And with the help of Sallia's noodle bowl, my stats were still improving. I had hopes that by the time I became an adult, people would assume that I had taken a superstrength ability potion. However, my perception was my most prominent stat.

I was starting to notice that my perception stat mildly warped my perception of time, in addition to letting me spot the patterns on an insect's wings from a hundred meters away. I was beginning to see things travel more slowly, especially when I focused.

Combined with the low-speed gunpowder bullets of this world, I was actually starting to reach a point where I could track the slowest-gunpowder based projectiles entirely using my eyes, without even needing to use my spatial perception to track things more accurately. My body was completely incapable of dodging, of course, but I was getting a better handle on just how ridiculous a few extra grades in each stat truly were.

By my estimations, if I had grade 20 Agility and perception, I would probably be able to just dodge guns entirely using my physical body, give or take a grade or two. It would depend some on the type of bullet and gunpowder used, of course - this world's bullets were definitely on the slower side, so I could probably dodge them with a grade 16 or 17 instead. But I suspected that at grade 20 even the fastest bullets from a dimension like this one would be easy to deal with.

I spent a long time considering which organ I wanted to use my fourth rune to improve, before eventually choosing my ears. The ability to hear people sneaking up on me and activate my dimensional perception ability earlier would help me protect myself against my greatest vulnerability right now - sneak attacks. In a head on confrontation, I could protect myself against most problems, so ensuring nobody snuck up on me felt like the best investment of my sensory organ upgrade right now.

The enhancement felt almost like I had directly added another grade to my perception, but only for my ears. But that wasn't all it did. After the upgrade, I could hear space itself. It was quiet and subtle, but when things moved around me, I could hear space distorting ever so slightly accommodate that movement. I wasn't sure if it was quite the same as the echolocation some animals used, but it definitely felt similar.

I could track exactly where almost every object in my surroundings was using only my ears and my Perception stat after my sensory organ upgrade. My eyes also got an upgrade, although it was less pronounced. After the smaller upgrade to my eyes, I could see the way space and reality curved and bent whenever someone messed with space - which was completely useless in this world, since we had yet to meet a single space-magic user besides me. But it would be useful in the future at least.

I found myself increasingly curious about what would happen when I pushed into grade 12 of Perception with my next rune, and then upgraded yet another sensory organ. Finally, the month we turned six, Felix started laughing maniacally.

"Miria! Come take a look! I think I made a working gun!"