Name

Robert 'Bob' Rowland

Class

Ocean's Child : Lvl 1

Body : 0

Mind : 4

Spirit : 10

Perception : 2

Experience : 1079

Skills

Power Strike

Blessing of the Tides

Saltwater Sense

Water Resistance

It had been tempting to level up my new class the moment I had enough experience, but once I decided I was coming back home with Lirillin my priorities changed. While the level up would make me better in some ways yet to be detailed, those same improvements might change me in ways that would be obvious to Lirillin. By simply waiting until I was back at the lighthouse I would have an entire week to adjust to any changes I might experience. I was slightly worried he would notice the changes if they interacted with the enchantments he had placed on me, but I was hopeful I could use Power Strike to increase the demand on my mana so that I would still need recharging occasionally. I was looking forward to finally getting to play around with my first Skill, or I had been, anyways.

I’d been somewhat distracted while rowing home, but once I was actually tied up and didn’t have a constantly changing scenery to take up my attention I noticed something that I probably should have spotted, or at least thought about, sooner.

I was a boat. I was still wrapping my head around what exactly that meant for me, and hadn’t really thought about what that meant for the boat. By accident I had stumbled across a new aversion to being submerged, and it was by accident that I caught my first case of nautical parasites.

I now had a case of the crabs. More specifically, barnacles. At some point during my trip to Shellpin Town a group of the small creatures had decided to latch on to me, sticking themselves in place with their glue-like adhesive and beginning the process of building defensive shells around their location. It fortunately didn’t hurt me, but it was a good reminder that there were other parasites that were more of a danger to unprotected wood.

Mollusks, shipworms, and gribbles were the more common dangers from Earth that I could remember, and who knows what sort of magical or simply alien creatures might exist in this new world I found myself in? Of course, there were likely methods of protecting boats against more common pests, but I had no idea if I had been given those treatments or not. My boat status screen was once again frustratingly vague, but my suspicion was that Lirillin probably hadn’t bothered to pay for anything more than the basics. I was meant to be a prototype after all, and it would be months if not years before any parasites would damage me to the point of destruction.

That didn’t mean I could simply ignore my new companions. Even the few barnacles I had now would alter my profile, making me slower and less maneuverable. They would add weight, not much individually but it would add up as they continued to grow and reproduce. And most importantly, it was a constant irritation now that I was aware of them. Now that I knew what to look for I could help but notice their presence while using Saltwater Sense, and the benefits of that skill meant I wasn’t about to stop using it. I just had to endure knowing that other creatures were taking my body and suborning it for their own purposes. I had a few ideas of how I could turn the tables on the little pests, but for the moment there wasn’t much I could do.

Resigned to my future fate as a mobile ecology, I paged through my Status screens and opened up the option to level up. At a thousand experience it wasn’t cheap, but so far the system had been fair with what it offered. Without waiting any longer, I spent the points, and was slightly disappointed not to experience that transcendental connection to the System again. Instead, all I received was a simple message.

You are now a level 2 Ocean’s Child!

You have five free attribute points to distribute.

Case in point. It wasn’t like I had managed to hear the going rate that other people got for attribute points, but I was happy with the deal that I had made. Even if I hadn’t gotten any new Skills to use, those five points invested into my Spirit Attribute brought me to fifteen Spirit. I pulled up the Status Screen for the boat to confirm my thoughts.

Ash Breeze - Rowboat

Autonomous Intelligence

Component

Weight - 123/750

Durability 9/10

Enchantments 3

Mana Saturation 15/15

Hull - Wood

Navigation

Listening

Oars - Wood

Automation

It was gratifying to see the Mana Saturation numbers balancing out properly. I still had to pin down what exactly Blessing of the Tides did for me, but with Power Strike at hand to burn off any excess mana that might accumulate I felt like I could take my time doing so.

Once I was satisfied with the immediate changes that improving my Spirit had brought, I let myself relax and began to figure out the finer details of the change. A fifty percent increase was quite significant, but it took some time to truly feel out what that actually meant for me. The Spirit attribute did more than simply provide energy to power spells and Skills. It was my spirit, the innate spiritual aspect of my existence, much like Mind covered my mental capabilities and Body covered the physical side of things, or would have if I had a real body, anyways.

My external senses were still the same as always, governed by my unchanged Perception Attribute, but I was far more connected internally to everything around me. It still paled in comparison to the giant web of connections the System was capable of bringing to bear, but already I could feel as if my Class and the rest of the system provided abilities were more familiar. The screens might show the same words, but I was better attuned to them, and it was easier to catch the underlying subtext and implicit values that everything about the System conveyed.

‘[Power Strike]’

I used the skill with a thought and marveled at the immense difference from the only other time I had used it. At the time I had imagined it to be a simple boost in power, but that was only true at the surface level. I had theorized how the Skill might be able to be slowly altered or changed to let it qualify for improvement, but now I was able to see firsthand how that happened.

Power Strike did not exist in a vacuum, and every time I or anyone else invoked the ability we were pulling on the combined history of everyone who had ever swung a blade or a tool. Left to its own devices the Skill would simply grab everything it could, providing an average boost. There were actual techniques for a lumberjack to make sure their axe bit deeply into a tree with every swing, which differed from the knowledge a swordsman needed to concentrate the energy of his attacks as densely as possible, which had almost nothing to do with how a craftsman might swing a hammer to drive a nail, confident in hitting a stationary target he had already positioned himself to strike.

Their commonalities of hitting harder and faster would be present in any Skill that drew on all of those pieces of knowledge together, but it was possible to improve over the default outcome. It would take using the skill hundreds or thousands of times to become familiar with it, to forge a connection with the historical weight buried beneath the surface, and then to either selectively choose what connections to draw from, or to create your own advancements for the Skill to use. To not just settle for mimicking the legends of the past, but to forge a new legend, or at least a tiny piece of one.

That last revelation was especially helpful for me. I already knew that there were far more humans and humanoids in this world than there were artificial boat spirits, so being able to create new skills or tailor System given ones to better suit my unique circumstances was extremely high on my priority list. It wouldn’t be easy, but if I was able to tap into Power Strike after a few hours of work when I didn’t know what I was doing, then it shouldn’t be too difficult to find some other skills that would improve my situation.

After all, how hard could it be?