Chương 29: The Panel

Joe spent his first week in Dynamic Foundation discovering how many ways a body could ruin something that had been simple while standing still. Static Foundation remained part of every training day. Hall had been clear about that. Reaching Minor Success did not mean abandoning the method, and Joe had even less reason than most students to neglect it. Publicly, his Static Foundation had only recently crossed Minor Success. In reality, it had reached Major. The stronger foundation helped immediately.

When Joe stood still, Blood Energy answered almost as soon as posture and breathing settled. Dynamic Foundation took that stable resonance and attacked it with movement. A step changed the pressure through his feet. A turn changed his hips. A shift of the shoulders affected his breathing. Trying to preserve awareness through all of it felt completely different from recognizing Blood Energy inside a fixed stance. Joe failed often. He enjoyed that more than he expected.

Static training during the previous year had become a search for increasingly small imperfections. Dynamic Foundation gave him obvious problems again. The resonance disappeared during a turn. His breath arrived too late. His weight moved before his center was ready. Each failure gave him something clear to correct. Every Hard Work Pays Off responded well to that kind of practice. By the seventh day, Joe could preserve the resonance through several portions of the first sequence before losing it.

He was nowhere near Minor Success. He was improving. That was enough. It also gave him a reason to revisit something he had deliberately left alone. The pale rectangle. Joe had first managed to call it months earlier, shortly before his first Starlight anniversary in the Hall. At that time it had appeared for less than a heartbeat. He had seen only a faint rectangular shape before it disappeared. More importantly, summoning it had consumed Blood Energy. Joe had stopped immediately. His control was better now.

His Blood Energy reserve was better too. Static Major Success had made his internal awareness much clearer. He could sense changes in that reserve well enough to stop before curiosity became stupidity. So on the next Hall rest day, Joe went behind the house. The old tree still stood there. Its trunk had thickened since Joe first used the bark to count birthdays. Several shallow scars remained from those early marks, though Joseph had eventually forbidden him from continuing once the cuts became too numerous.

Joe had moved to another tree afterward. Mostly. The original remained one of the quieter places near the house. The fields beyond it were bare after harvest. Dry grass bent beneath the autumn wind. A few bundles of straw remained stacked near distant field boundaries, and smoke rose from several houses where families had already begun preparing for colder nights. Joe checked his surroundings before sitting. Nobody nearby. Simon was at the Hall. Mike and Joseph were working farther south. Lily and Pam were inside.

Mary had gone with another group of children to gather fallen branches, under strict instructions not to cross the western footpath. That last part made Joe less certain how long privacy would last. He settled against the tree. First, Blood Energy. Joe entered a light meditative posture rather than a full Static stance. He slowed his breathing and let his awareness spread through the body. There. Clear. Stable. Then he remembered the sensation from the previous attempt. Not the rectangle itself.

The intention behind it. The pale birthday words had always appeared without invitation. When Joe tried to summon them deliberately, something had responded only after he supplied Blood Energy. He focused. Show me my progress. Nothing happened. Joe waited. He tried again without repeating the words mentally. He concentrated on the same internal pressure that had preceded the earlier flicker. Blood Energy shifted. Joe noticed it immediately. A small portion moved in a direction he could not physically identify.

Not toward the arms. Not the chest. Not the head. It simply left his usable awareness. Something pale formed in front of him. Joe did not move. The rectangle stabilized. This time, it stayed. Words appeared. [Skills] Fishing — Lv. 4 50/100 Farming — Lv. 3 48/100 Medicine — Lv. 2 98/100 Static Foundation — Lv. 3 2/100 Dynamic Foundation — Lv. 1 5/100 Joe stared. For several breaths, he did nothing except keep the display present. No strength. No intelligence. No health number.

No convenient list explaining the secrets of the universe. Only skills. That was already far more than he had expected. Blood Energy continued draining. Slowly. Joe noted the rate and returned his attention to the panel. Static Foundation was the obvious place to begin. Lv. 3 2/100. Joe knew one fact with reasonable certainty. His Static Foundation had reached Major Success less than two weeks earlier. The panel called it Lv. 3. That made Lv. 3 his first reliable calibration point.

If the numbering followed the recognized mastery stages, then Lv. 2 would probably correspond to Minor Success. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. Lv. 1 would then represent the period before Minor, when someone had begun learning the skill but had not reached the first recognized threshold. That fit Dynamic Foundation. Lv. 1 5/100. Joe had practiced Dynamic for approximately one week.

He understood the first sequence better than he had on day one. He could occasionally preserve Blood Energy through several movements. He was nowhere near Minor Success. Lv. 1 therefore made sense. Still, Joe did not promote the interpretation into fact. Two martial skills were not enough evidence to prove an entire universal level structure. Static gave him one confirmed point. Dynamic gave him one plausible comparison. That was all. He looked at the numbers after the level. 2/100. 5/100.

The obvious interpretation was progress toward the next level. Obvious interpretations had a bad habit of becoming assumptions people forgot they had made. Joe treated it as a working hypothesis. Static being only two points into Lv. 3 seemed reasonable. His Major breakthrough was recent. Dynamic being five points into Lv. 1 also felt plausible after a week of meaningful practice. If the values changed after training, that would provide stronger evidence. Joe moved upward. Medicine — Lv. 2 98/100.

That line held his attention longer. He had worked under Merek for well over a year. Joe could identify most common materials the shop handled. He understood cleaning, drying, storage and basic processing. He could prepare several harmless external mixtures under supervision. He knew the difference between nourishing medicine and medicine intended to treat injury or illness. He was far better than when he first entered the shop carrying fish. He was not remotely equal to Merek. Merek had decades of patients.

Decades of unusual cases. Recipes Joe had never seen. Failures Joe had never experienced. Judgment built from situations Joe had not encountered. Joe's knowledge was broad for his age and narrow compared with a real healer. Lv. 2 therefore did not feel unreasonable. The 98/100 was stranger. If his interpretation was correct, medicine was extremely close to another threshold. Joe thought about his recent work. Merek corrected him less often during routine processing. Joe rarely confused common herbs anymore.

He could judge several materials by smell, texture and moisture without asking. Yet his tasks had also become repetitive. Sort. Dry. Grind. Clean. Prepare known materials according to instructions. Joe was getting better at doing those things. He was not often being forced to understand medicine independently. Maybe the remaining two points were not something another thousand perfectly sliced roots would provide. Joe stored the thought. He did not yet know enough to call it a bottleneck. It looked like one.

Fishing produced another surprise. Lv. 4 50/100. Joe had fished for years. Long before martial training. Long before Merek. He had experimented with lines, hooks, bait, traps, river levels, current patterns and placement. Every Hard Work Pays Off had accelerated those improvements after age eight. Still, Lv. 4 looked high. If his martial interpretation extended across other skills, Lv. 4 might be analogous to Complete Success. Joe almost rejected the idea. Then he reconsidered.

A level did not necessarily compare difficulty between skills. Fishing Lv. 4 could not mean fishing was somehow more advanced than Static Foundation Lv. 3 in an absolute sense. That would be meaningless. They required different knowledge. Different physical ability. Different time. A village child might become highly competent at gathering eggs while remaining incapable of martial cultivation. The levels probably described mastery within the individual skill. Not universal value.

That explanation also helped with Farming. Lv. 3 48/100. Joe had never considered himself a farmer. Mike was a farmer. Joseph was a farmer. Joe was a child who helped. But he had helped for years. Weeding. Harvesting. Clearing irrigation channels. Sorting grain. Repairing boundaries. Carrying bundles. Watching adults judge weather, soil and crop condition. Every Hard Work Pays Off did not care whether Joe formally declared an activity to be training. Meaningful work still produced learning.

No Regression kept legitimate improvement. Apparently years of household labor had accumulated into substantial competence. Joe found that amusing. In his previous life, he had spent years trying to avoid yard work. Now a supernatural panel was informing him that farming was one of his better skills. The display itself interested him nearly as much as the values. Lv. /100. Neither looked like terminology Hall used. Alex had never described Major Success as Level Three.

Merek certainly did not tell apprentices their medicine was ninety-eight percent complete. The format felt familiar for a different reason. Games. Progress bars. Numerical levels. Concepts from Joe's previous life. That suggested another possibility. The panel might not be showing information in some universal language built into the world. It might be translating information into a form Joe understood. His birthday messages had done something similar.

"Perfect Health."

"No Regression."

"Every Hard Work Pays Off." Those names were understandable to him immediately even though nobody else in this world had ever used the terms. Joe could not prove the panel came from the same source. He would have been surprised if it did not. That still left too many questions. Why had it become accessible only after he learned to control Blood Energy? Why did opening it consume Blood Energy? Why did it show skills but not his talents? Was the information objective?

Or was it an interpretation generated from Joe's own understanding? Could it be wrong? Joe refused to let a supernatural-looking number replace judgment. If Medicine displayed 98/100 and Merek told him a preparation was unsafe, Joe would listen to Merek. If Static Foundation showed progress while Hall identified a real flaw, Joe would correct the flaw. The panel was information. Information could be useful without becoming religion. The Blood Energy drain increased. Joe dismissed the display.

It vanished immediately. The loss stopped. Joe remained beneath the tree and assessed himself. The cost was noticeable. Not dangerous. Still meaningful. Opening the panel repeatedly during a training day would reduce the energy available for actual training. That created a natural limit. Good. Joe did not particularly want another habit demanding attention every few minutes. He waited until his Blood Energy had recovered before doing anything else. Then he returned home. He told nobody.

That decision required less thought than anything else he had learned that day. Simon did not need to know. Merek did not need to know. Hall did not need to know. Theodere certainly did not need to know. Joe had no idea what the panel was. Until he understood considerably more, revealing it would produce questions he could not answer and attention he did not want. The talents were already the deepest secret of his life. The panel belonged beside them. Four days passed before Joe summoned it again.

He deliberately waited. That was partly caution. Partly an experiment. Those four days included three Dynamic training sessions, two Static sessions, time in Merek's shop and ordinary household work. Joe returned to the same tree near dusk. He opened the panel. Blood Energy drained. The familiar lines appeared. He checked Dynamic first. The number had increased. Not by much. Enough. Joe smiled slightly. That supported the progress interpretation. Then he looked at Medicine. Still 98/100. Interesting.

Joe dismissed the panel. The result told him more than a change might have. He had spent meaningful time in Merek's shop. Every Hard Work Pays Off ensured that meaningful effort gave him something useful. Yet the visible number had not moved. Several explanations were possible. The gain could have been too small to change the displayed whole number. The panel might not track progress the way Joe assumed.

Or his recent medicine work might have improved aspects of existing competence without meaningfully approaching whatever separated Lv. 2 from Lv. 3. Joe liked the third possibility. It matched ordinary learning. A person could perform familiar work faster without becoming capable of harder work. His previous life had contained people who repeated the same year of experience ten times and called it ten years of growth. Medicine might work the same way.

If Joe wanted to cross the next threshold, he might need different problems. Independent preparation. Diagnosis. Understanding why ingredients were used instead of merely recognizing the process. He would need to investigate. Not immediately. He already had Dynamic Foundation to learn. The panel created another temptation too. Joe could estimate. Dynamic had started at 5/100 after roughly one week. If it gained five points every week, Minor Success might take about— Joe stopped the calculation. No.

Static Foundation had already taught him better. Early progress was fast. Later progress slowed. One week of beginner improvement could not be extended into a twenty-week prediction as though cultivation were a salary schedule. Every Hard Work Pays Off guaranteed useful return from meaningful effort. It did not guarantee equal return. The difference had become obvious while moving from Static Minor to Major. Some weeks had produced noticeable changes.

Other weeks had produced refinements too small for Joe to recognize until months of them accumulated. The panel might now let him see those smaller gains. That was valuable. It did not make the gains equal. Joe could already imagine the danger. A number moved. Then he wanted to make it move again. His previous world had been very good at exploiting that instinct. Games gave people bars to fill. Applications gave streaks. Jobs gave targets.

Humans tolerated absurd amounts of repetition when someone placed a number beside it. Joe was not immune simply because he recognized the trick. So he made a rule. He would not open the panel simply because he was curious. Once a week was enough unless he had a specific question. The cost helped enforce the rule. Blood Energy spent staring at numbers was Blood Energy unavailable for training. Information had value. Progress had more. Over the following week, Joe continued Dynamic Foundation.

The resonance survived farther into the first pattern. Then farther again. He started the second sequence and discovered a new collection of mistakes. Simon corrected one. Hall corrected three. Joe corrected several more through repeated practice. Static Foundation remained part of the schedule. Its improvement was slower. Still present. Merek's shop continued as well. Joe paid more attention now. Not to the panel. To the work. Why did Merek choose one drying method for a root and another for a leaf?

Why did two preparations using similar ingredients require different processing? Why did one mixture tolerate rough measurement while another required much tighter control? Joe had always asked questions. Now he watched for questions his routine had stopped forcing him to ask. Merek noticed after several days.

"You're staring again." Joe looked up from a tray.

"At what?"

"That is usually what I ask you." Joe smiled.

"I was thinking about why these are sliced before drying, but yellow-thread is usually dried in longer pieces." Merek looked at the tray.

"Good." Joe waited. Merek continued working.

"That's all?"

"You asked why you were staring. I agreed it was a better reason than usual." Joe almost laughed.

"Can you answer it?"

"Yes." Merek did not. Joe waited. Eventually the old healer looked toward him.

"What?"

"You said you can answer."

"I can." Joe understood. Merek wanted him to try first. That was useful too. The stubborn 98/100 remained in the back of Joe's mind. He did not mention it. He never would. The panel had changed something important, but not in the way Joe first expected. It had not given him strength. It had not taught him Dynamic Foundation. It had not solved medicine. It had not even explained itself. What it gave him was measurement. A way to see that slow progress still existed. A way to notice when progress appeared to stall.

A way to compare himself against himself without needing anyone else to know what he was truly capable of. For someone with No Regression and Every Hard Work Pays Off, that was almost unfairly useful. Joe intended to take full advantage of it. Quietly.