Name:

_______ Alana Skyisle

Age:

12 weeks

Species & Subtype:

female - human - foetus

Level:

4

Experience:

267/1250

Health:

4/4

Stamina:

4/4

Mana:

4/4

Mana regen:

4 m/hr

Strength:

0

Agility:

0

Dexterity:

0

Vitality:

1

Charisma:

0

Magic:

1

Luck:

0

Intelligence:

30 [+89]

Wisdom:

0

Soul:

1

Skills:

[Transient Soul LV 4]

[Universal Comprehension LV 1]

[Infoscope LV 41]

[Modify-Chromosomes LV 15]

Investiture points:

20

Nice, but where are the skill slots? Why haven’t you blessed me with a new skill slot, Systemmy?

Everything into Intelligence!

50 [+89]!

What did I learn from all of this evolving? The formula for experience was [level + 1]^2 x [50]. The formula for Investiture points was [level] x [5]. With every evolution it would be harder to reach the next level, unless the formula changed. Going from something like Level 999 to Level 1000 would require 50 million experience points!

I spent a week memorizing more levels of the info-fractals for Identify and Modify. It shot my [Infoscope] to Level 55 and [Modify-Chromosome] to Level 29. I was pretty sure now that I had found a way to cheat the system. Nearly frying my soul-brain to memorize two spell formulas was definitely worth it.

I pointed the Infoscope at itself once again, identifying it visually. It appeared in my mind as a ghostly construct akin to a fractal with many tentacles. Each of the tentacles broke into smaller lines that shimmered with even smaller lines of Omnicode and those lines broke down into even smaller lines of data. It was truly beautiful! I spun it about, feeling proud of what I had created.

I pondered how I could improve the design of the Infoscope. Could I point it at my own thoughts? What were my thoughts? Did they already echo inside Blankie’s organic brain as actual neural patterns?

I started to mess with Omnicode to make the Infoscope perceive my brain activity.

It took me quite a long time to arrive at the necessary code fractal, but after weeks of trial and error I was able to point the Infoscope at specific parts of my own brain. I saw that it was indeed expressing, echoing my thoughts as neural patterns. Using this data, I attempted to point the Infoscope at concepts, words and ideas, learning how various Omnicode patterns represented them. Months flew by as I tried to understand my own brain and studied the language of the System concept by concept.

The relentless mental labor showered me with XP and pushed me towards the next level. I initiated the level up.

Tu du! Level up to LV: 5! 1 new skill slot gained!

When I came back to awareness, something major had changed in the chart.

Name:

_______ Alan Skyisle

Age:

26 weeks

Species & Subtype:

male - human - foetus

Level:

5

Experience:

512/1800

Health:

5/5

Stamina:

5/5

Mana:

5/5

Mana regen:

5 m/hr

Strength:

0

Agility:

0

Dexterity:

0

Vitality:

1

Charisma:

0

Magic:

1

Luck:

0

Intelligence:

50 [+89]

Wisdom:

0

Soul:

1

Skills:

[Transient Soul LV 5]

[Universal Comprehension LV 1]

[Infoscope LV 56]

[Modify-Chromosomes LV 30]

[____________________]

Investiture points:

25

[Tu du! Quest completed! Congratulations! You have managed to change yourself from within!]

[+500 experience bonus!]

Yes! I did it! In your face, um...

I wasn't sure who I was supposed to impress. I didn't really have friends or enemies yet. I was alone. I thought that I liked being alone. Being alone was starting to suck.

"Systemmy, we're friends, right?" I asked into the void.

"Yes we are," I answered.

As per usual, I invested the 25 points that it granted me into Intelligence.

I kept up my study of the language of Magic, delving deeper into Omnicode fractals.

At 75 [+89] Intelligence my memory was becoming crystal clear, almost photographic. As my knowledge of Omnicode grew by leaps and bounds, so did the complexity of my Infoscope. I was no longer a blind man randomly groping in the dark for control knobs, but it was still too early to call myself the master of Omnicode. The language of magic was far too maddeningly complex for me to grasp in its entirety and for nearly six months of hard work, I had barely managed to scratch the surface and truly mastered only one word in it - Identify.

Thanks to my ongoing modifications of the Infoscope, I could now see colors!

My window into the world was no longer white & blue.

I wanted to see viruses, but couldn't find any in myself. I was completely virus free at this point because of the placenta. The placenta inside of my mom was extra powerful, likely affected by her high Vitality stats. It nourished and protected me by blocking out all pathogens from crossing the maternal-fetal barrier. It was nice, but also annoying as I wanted to study how to fight local diseases by observing local viruses. For example, if an infection was bacterial I could design a Bacteriophage virus army to defeat it.

The smallest thing my Infoscope could observe was inter-molecular bonding and even then the view started to get pretty blurry no matter how I adjusted it. Thanks to my Soviet education and the study of radiation and its impacts on people at the Semipalatinsk nuclear Test Site, I knew the basics about atoms and nuclear physics. I spent a few weeks identifying the atoms within myself, hoping to someday learn how to modify matter on the atomic scale.

The cost of modifying a single atom theoretically would be quite minute, since it was so tiny. Alas, my Modify was currently designed to modify Chromosomes, not atoms. From the Soviet Journal of Quantum Electronics, I knew that atoms could be manipulated one at a time with an electron beam. Quantum electrodynamics, aka the relativistic quantum field theory of electrodynamics was a fascinating topic for me. I wondered if trying to push the Infoscope to see things that were smaller than atoms was affecting or messing up what I was observing.

As much as I wanted to play with atoms, I also knew that it would be a pretty terrible idea to mess with the atoms inside of myself. I simply didn't know enough about atoms not to screw things up horribly.

What I required was a way to move the Infoscope to some really far away and desolate place for such... tests.

With this in mind, I set out to design a new spell, one called the [Info-Tether]. It would allow me to establish a direct vector-beam of information between my Infoscope and myself. It would allow me to move my all-seeing, all-identifying spell far away from myself.

Regardless of my accomplishments, mild anxiety was beginning to nip at my heels, brought on by months of repetitious mental labor and loneliness.

I badly wanted to know what was outside of the womb. I needed to turn my Infoscope outward to identify what my mom looked like, see where she lived. Peering at my growth for weeks on end was really interesting, but my birth was an inevitability and it was better to be ready for whatever awaited me out there.

In another few weeks of design and testing the Info-Tether was finally done. I added it to my skills.

I added a stretching [Info-Tether LV 0] line to the Infoscope construct, connecting the ghostly jellyfish to my body and tried to pilot it away from myself. It now functioned like an endoscope, allowing me to identify and perceive various things within the amniotic fluid as I moved it about.

The fluid contained a variety of waste, proteins, carbohydrates, lipids and phospholipids, urea and amniotic stem cells. There were a lot of stem cells in the womb, aiding my growth.

I carefully directed the Infoscope construct out of the womb, passing through flesh and organs. I observed the intricate, organic beauty of my mom’s body from within, as if it was unlocked to me in all of its splendor. It was different, bigger, more complex than mine as all of her nerves, muscles, bones and organs were already developed. One didn’t grow up to be a biochemist without great appreciation for anatomy. My mother seemed like a healthy human as far as I could determine from my strange vantage point.

The Infoscope identified her as [Cassandra Alana Skyisle - Agromancer: Lv 20].

I attempted to Identify my mom's other stats, hoping to see more than her level. It didn't work. The Infoscope simply flickered and crashed, draining nearly all of my mana in the process. I guessed that maybe she had some sort of a defense skill against such sneaky information-gathering.

Once my mana had rejuvenated, I created another Infoscope and shot it out of myself, flying it through my mom once again.

For a few moments I hovered at the edge of her skin, a bit worried about going forward. What had awaited me outside? Cavemen? The Renaissance? Magical space communism? How advanced were the people of Novazem? What if they noticed my Infoscope? I pushed my construct ahead, slowly and cautiously passing through layers of my mom’s skin.