**Skill Up** Focused Senses Level 5

As Jack withdrew from focusing on his sense of touch, he was greeted with a skill level up.

Focused Senses had been stuck at level four for so long that he was beginning to doubt it would ever level up. Wasting no time, he went into its evolution screen.

**Alert** New Skill Evolution Available Choose one Narrowed Focus Awakening Filtering

Before he started breaking down the evolutions, he went to Kai to ask him if he knew anything about the skill. Kai told him that there were many skills that enhanced senses, but most of them only applied to one sense, and rarely two.

A feature of Beastform gave someone access to skills that their bonded animal had. Because of that, much of the herd had some sort of perception ability.

The most common skills were for sight and hearing. Kai and Ava had a skill called Keen Eye. It did all the normal things Jack had assumed a vision skill would do; increased range, details, and ability to see in the dark.

Apparently, there were plenty of bonded with Echolocation, basically letting them scan their surroundings through their hearing. Most of them were bats.

Most wolves had some skill that improved their sense of smell.

An alchemist who was bonded with a boar had a skill that gave both enhanced smell and taste. That was when Kai revealed that there were combinations of skills out there that have the ability to fuse together.

For example, the alchemist had fused their perception skill with Identify. The end result gave him a new skill called Master Gourmet. Kai wasn’t quite sure what all the skill did besides the normal enhanced senses, but fusing the skills did erase the two original skills.

More information for him to file away for later.

What Kai stressed was that he wasn’t aware of a skill that boosted all senses.

Together they came up with ideas of what the evolution options did.

Narrowed Focus gave them the impression that instead of enhancing all senses equally, it would let you choose one to focus on.

That was already how Jack used the skill, but it did require his full concentration. So maybe the evolution would make it require less active attention to use.

Kai had an interesting theory for Awakening. He believed it would ‘awaken’ a new sense. Jack’s mind immediately went to some sort of spidey-sense, but Kai listed off a few other possibilities.

A type of magic sense, empathy, or even something like the ability to feel the weather.

Thinking about it, Jack realized there were endless ‘senses’ options. He couldn’t feel gravity but he knew it was there, same with time. That evolution could either be amazing or completely useless.

They were both in complete agreement for the function of the last evolution. A way to ‘filter’ out information that he was receiving. Maybe it would let him turn off the pain of a stab wound or ignore all sounds besides the one he wants to listen to.

Although it did seem like their ideas for Filtering and Narrowed Focus were really similar. One zoomed in on a subject, while the other could take away everything but the subject. It seemed like Narrowed Focus would be the better of the two.

So Awakening or Narrowed Focus. The first was a wild card of usefulness. While the second might make the skill easier to use, it might even make the skill viable to use during combat.

Ultimately, his decision came down to one main thing. While he might not be great at it yet, he could already ‘narrow his focus,’ but he had no way to unlock a new type of sense.

**Alert** Focused Senses has gained the evolution Awakening

He stood very still, waiting for some sort of foreign sensation. When nothing was immediately apparent, he summoned his inventory and stared at the body of the spell seeker trying to see the magic he knew was around it.

Well, it didn’t give him a way to sense magic. That would be too easy, though. With the multitude of potential senses, he didn’t even know where to start in his search.

As usual, the system wasn’t giving him anything to go off of.

The Basic Instinct evolution of Mimicry wasn’t any help either. Normally it would instill some sort of muscle-memory-like instinct to use a copied skill, but not this time.

Hopefully, the function of the evolution will reveal itself in time.

The sheer amount of questions Jack had about the system and the world would have probably kept both of them stuck in the camp for a few days. Since neither of them wanted to sit idle for that long, they came to an agreement that they would meet up once a day for a few hours to go over things.

This made it so Jack could train his skills and level, while also letting Kai go out and hunt with Ava.

After the first round of questions, Kai announced he would be back at the same time tomorrow.

Since he was using the pistol's recharge time as a magical stopwatch, Jack was surprised to find that Kai didn’t return for almost twenty-eight hours.

While Jack really didn’t care about a rigid schedule, he had assumed Kai would. So when he asked the birdman if something held him up from returning, he was surprised when Kai insisted that he was not late and that he was in fact a couple of hours early.

A dozen very confused questions later, Jack had an answer to his continual time discrepancies.

“What do you mean there are thirty hours in a day?” Jack exclaimed.

Kai looked equally confused and answered, “A day is made up of thirty hours. I do not know how to say it differently”

“Thirty hours? Like sixty minute long hours? Each minute with sixty seconds.

Kai gave out a frustrated click, “Yes.”

“So you’re telling me there are thirty hours between sunrises?”

With an almost exasperated click, “Yes. The amount of sun in a day does vary with the time of year, though.”

The possibility that the earth took longer to rotate shocked him more than he would have liked. He knew that the earth grew in size after the system was introduced. If he remembered correctly, it should be twenty percent bigger. So changes to how the planet moved shouldn’t be that surprising.

The issue was that the revelation brought up a thousand more questions. If the length of a day is different, what else could be different.

Trusting in his knowledge of the world and how it functions was what caused him to get stuck in the current dungeon in the first place.

He had already begun questioning how physics was affected by the introduction of magic, such as the square-cube law, or how a bird as big as Ave could even generate enough lift to fly.

In a world of magic and game-like systems, could science even be trusted?

Trying to push past his existential crisis, Jack attempted to get some simple answers out of the way. “How long is a year then?”

“Ten months.”

Great, back to the Roman calendar. “How many days in a year?”

While Kai was much more engaging when talking about uses of skills and evolutions, this mundane line of questioning seemed to almost physically pain him.

In what seemed to be in a more monotone voice than normal Kai replied, “Three hundred days.”

“So thirty days a month? Are they even, or is each month a different length? Why is a year split into ten months?”

“Yes, there are thirty days a month. I do not know why you would vary a month. It follows the cycle of the moon.”

A single month is a full moon cycle? That’s actually pretty convenient.

“And a year is one revolution of the planet around the sun?”

“Yes.”

Doing the math for a pre-system year vs a post-system year, he found that they were about the same length, provided all of Kai’s information was accurate.

It was a slight comfort that his sense of time in relation to a year was fairly accurate.

All his little time discrepancies started to make sense in the light of the new information.

When he was healing from his infected back wound, his original math said it would heal in a little over six days. In actuality, it only took five. At the time he figured it had to do with his level up, but thirty-hour days made the math work.

Same with the breaking of the dungeon. Instead of fourteen pre-system days like he originally thought, it was eleven and a half post-system days.

It also explained why he felt like he was sleeping less. He had assumed with higher attributes he needed less sleep. No, he wasn’t sleeping less there were just more hours in the day than he thought.

With his head swirling from new information, Jack asked if Kai was willing to postpone the rest of the question session. Kai was more than happy to agree to that.

Wanting to occupy his mind with something else, Jack pulled out his pistol and created a barrier.

This wasn’t his first attempt to use Mana Absorption. So far he had had little to no success with the skill. It didn’t help that he could only practice the skill two to three times a day for at most five minutes until the barrier disappeared.

Placing a hand on the barrier, he attempted to suck the mana out. He could feel that the skill functioned much like Blood Drain, but it just didn’t seem to work.

With Blood Drain the target was already bleeding, so using the skill worked with that, pulling more blood out than normal.

If he thought of the barrier as a body and the mana as its blood, he ran into the issue that there was no wound to pull the blood out of. While he couldn’t confirm it with his own eyes, Lucy’s images of the barrier didn’t show it leaking from anywhere.

When trying to learn the skill from the wolf he noticed the steps of the skill; break down the spell, pull in the mana, and lastly, convert that mana to your own.

So looking at it, maybe he was doing it all wrong. He was skipping the first step. But how was he supposed to break down the spell?

If he could ‘cut it open’ somehow, he could theoretically drain the mana from there. It wasn’t like he could just drain the blood out of something without cutting into it first. Could he? Something to try after he was finished with the barrier.

As the minutes ticked by, he felt more and more discouraged as everything he tried failed until he had less than a minute until it dissipated.

Wait. When the spell ends, that would technically be it breaking down. What if he could take advantage of that moment to siphon off a portion of the mana?

As the time limit came to a close, Jack prepared for the moment by leaning into the barrier. As the barrier began to dissolve into the air, Jack fell forward, passing through the translucent wall as if it was thin air.

Taking that as a cue, Jack began to try to pull in as much mana as he could. He tried sucking in from not only his hands but his entire body.

So focused on the task, he didn’t even try to break his fall, landing face-first into the mud. Just before he hit the ground, he felt something freezing cold enter his body.

Laying on the ground, he felt an unnatural chill flowing through him. It was as if someone injected a tiny piece of ice directly into his veins.

Lifting himself up, he was met with an interesting notification.

**Perk Acquired** The Wizard's Origin Requirement Acquire a mana pool through a non-evolutionary means. Unlocks the Convalescence Attribute.

Grants the Mana Battery trait.

“Uh, Kai, I have a few more questions.”