The temptation was there to just turn around and cower in a corner. But he promised, so Kyle pressed on. He crept slowly back to the cave entrance. He would need to take out the birds first before he could descend from the cave. They were in the way, and anything in the way had to go.

Taking a new look at the idyllic valley offered Kyle a fresh prospective. The valley wasn’t some mystical place where fairies played. It was an obstacle, and one he needed to overcome.

Think Kyle. What would your dad do? The first step would be to observe the scenario. Small mountain cave, check. Large cliff face, check. Flying enemies, check. Not flying Kyle, check.

He closed his eyes and calmed down his breathing. He could do this. He had to.

The macaws were large enough to fit into the opening of the cave, but not large enough to pursue him further inside. The obvious solution was to lure the macaws into the cave and then retreat further inside before bombarding them with skills.

That plan worked well in that Kyle didn’t get killed, but he also wasn’t able to kill any of the birds. When Kyle attacked one of the birds from the cave entrance he succeeded in drawing its aggro. He also succeeded in retreating back into the cave where it narrowed and the bird could not reach with its wingspan. Unwilling to fold in its wings to give chase, it ended up retreating.

This was an unexpected result. In the dungeons on earth the monsters had basically never retreated, even the intelligent ones. Either these birds were more intelligent than any of the monsters in the explored dungeons on earth, or something had changed. Hoping for a different result, Kyle tried the same tactic once more. He drew in a different bird, but was met with the same result. His DPS was just not high enough to kill them before they ran away.

Okay, gotta think Kyle. Plan, you need a plan. A good plan. What other options do I have? Tie it up with rope? Trap it in a tent? Think, Kyle. I don’t have any skills other than damaging ones, except…

Kyle retreated back to the chamber he first appeared in. He then double checked his skill list. Something was strange. He had somehow used his Water Purification skill to clear up his snot and tears. His mind was kind of hazy, but he remembered crying, and crying produces two things. If he had in fact bawled his eyes out, there should be some evidence of that.

He suddenly had an idea to test his theory out. He went to the edge of the chamber, dropped his drawers, and took a leak.

Once he was finished with his business and had a pool of pee on the floor in front of him Kyle activated his skill. At first it didn’t work. Kyle knew it could, so he kept trying. It took a while, but he seemed to eventually will his skill to see the pee in front of him as merely dirty water. Once he was able to have that mental shift, the pee quickly lost it yellow color and turned into regular water. Kyle nervously dipped his finger in the water and brought it to his mouth. It tasted exactly like water.

Kyle had an epiphany. Perhaps everyone had been thinking about skills all wrong. People generally treated them like they were the same as in a game, but this wasn’t a game. It was real life. An example was his skill Rapid Air Bullet. There was no real reason for him to be able to shoot twice as many bullets if he used both his hands to fire them. It was more of a mental block.

This, this is it! The answer was right here all along. Of course the world wouldn’t be turned into a game. That’s just dumb. Real life isn’t fair or balanced, so why would skills be fair or balanced? That means that skills are not nearly as limited as was previously thought. I always treated them as if they did exactly what they said, but what if they only showed you how to manipulate mana in a certain way? Wait! Maybe that has to do with the soft skill cap of level thirty?

Quickly checking his skill list, Kyle had to consciously stop his mouth from catching flies. His Water Purification skill, which was previously at level thirty, was now thirty-seven. He had gained seven levels of the skill with almost no effort on his part. It made his grind to get the skill to level thirty seem meaningless.

A wave of relief washed through Kyle. He could do this. He had promised, and dying was not part of that promise. So what if there were giant man eating macaws in his way? Sarah was waiting for him. He could do this.

Kyle meditated for a few minutes to focus his mind and then moved on to the real test, Basic Earth Shaping. If he could purify liquid that wasn’t actually water than he should be able to shape rock even though it wasn’t technically earth. Kyle focused on activating his skill with the cave floor as his target. The first ten minutes saw no success. Neither did the next ten. It was only what must have been over an hour later of him constantly visualizing rock as earth that his skill finally worked.

A wide grin split his face as he checked as saw his skill level had risen by four. His earlier panic was gone. He would find Sarah. Nothing would get in his way. He would find her and never leave. He had promised. She would never lose anyone ever again.

Kyle went back to the cave entrance. It was time to implement a new plan. The plan was simple, while the macaws could get into the opening of the cave entrance, they could not and would not follow him deeper inside. To get around this Kyle only had to modify the cave entrance so he could bombard the birds with skills while they were unable to reach him.

It took longer than he thought. Kyle had no real way of keeping track of time, but he had to take four bathroom breaks before he finished. That was okay though. It only have him something to practice Water Purification on and something to slake his thirst.

By the time he finished Kyle had raised Basic Earth manipulation to level forty-two. If he could keep raising it this easily he might be able to make it reach max level, whatever that was. But right now he needed to focus on hunting. His stomach was not screaming at him yet, but it had been keeping up a low growl since his last bathroom break.

Kyle snuck out to the edge of the cliff and observed the macaws. Their description didn’t say anything about magic, so he was hoping they didn’t have any. Targeting one that was a little bit away from the others Kyle charged up a Compressed Mana Explosion. He fired off a few more Compressed Mana Bolts before retreating to into his murder hole.

The plan worked to perfection. The bird was dumb enough to continue to futilely attack Kyle when he was close to it, ensuring its demise. He was hidden inside an extended portion of the wall that had holes big enough for him to fire spells from, but small enough that the human sized monster was unable to reach him. Kyle’s original plan had involved firing spells through holes from outside the cliff face, but doing that would have made him unable to retrieve the body. Luring it inside the cave entrance meant that when the macaw died Kyle had easy access to its corpse.

It took a few minutes for the bird to finally die, but die it did. After another few skills to ensure it was dead, Kyle crept out of his hidey hole to collect the body and drag it farther into the tunnel. Once he had the body past his unnatural partition, it was time to eat. Changing the way his skills worked had given Kyle an idea. He had no spell to easily make fire and no wood to burn, but he did have a fire spell, and Kyle did not particularly fancy eating raw meat.

It took a few tries. Well, more than a few tries, but Kyle eventually succeeded in keeping a Small Fireball in his hand without firing it. The next problem was actually cutting up the monster corpse, but some Basic Earth Manipulation later and Kyle had a rough stone knife.

The macaw tasted heavenly, but part of that may have had to do with its seasoning of hunger. Once he had eaten his fill and roasted some meat for later, Kyle tried looting the corpse. It didn’t leave anything, but it did get rid of the body which was an acceptable result in Kyle’s mind. Having a dead corpse in his cave would get old fast.

The next birds proved just as easy to hunt as the first one. The first two only dropped mana crystals, the third dropped three enhancement crystals, and the sixth finally dropped a skill crystal. The drop rate seemed rather high to Kyle, and only enforced that these were monsters that he couldn’t fight with regular methods. The quality of the skill crystal was another factor in that analysis.

Name: Weapon Shaping

Effect: The user is able to form weapons created out of pure mana. Higher levels of this skill will allow more diversity and detail in the weapons able to be formed. Any weapons formed deal an additional physical power plus two per skill level in damage. Costs 50 mana to summon a weapon. The weapons last for ten minutes. It takes five seconds to summon a weapon.

The skill was way better than Sarah’s Mana Blade skill. It took Kyle only a few seconds before he decided to absorb it. He could always forget it later, but being able to create weapons would be incredibly useful, if only for cutting up monster meat. And knowing that skills could potentially do more than what they said they could gave him all kinds of ideas of what he could actually use the skill for.

The sun in the sky had not changed position since Kyle had first seen it, but by this point Kyle ignored the dungeons quirks. The only effect it had was to make him unable to determine when it was day and night. Kyle was beginning to suspect the changes to Humanity were bigger than anyone realized, as he thought he hadn’t slept in at least a few days or so but he still felt he could stay awake if necessary. The urge to sleep was still there though, and when he lay down to see if his body needed rest, he went out like a light.

After waking up from an apparently much needed nap Kyle felt refreshed. He had somehow managed to calm down and was now fully focused on his goal. If Sarah couldn’t come to him, he had to go to her. It was time to farm. Kyle could see many of the colorful macaws flying over the jungle in the fairy tale valley below him. It looked like there quite a few of them that he would not be able to lure over into a trap as they were too far away. There were still a few score or so he could kill, so that was what he did. The macaws continued to drop unreasonably powerful skill crystals, but it was not until the fourth one that Kyle found a skill that was truly useful to him.

Name: Supercharged Lightning Bolt

Effect: Fires a supercharged lightning bolt at a single enemy. This bolt deals 1,000 plus ten times magic power plus twenty per skill level in damage. Costs 3,000 mana. Takes three seconds to cast.

It only took four Supercharged Lightning Bolts to kill one of the Macaws which greatly sped up Kyle’s hunting speed. After hunting over fifty more macaws Kyle found a skill which, while not incredibly powerful, was undoubtedly useful.

Name: Meat Harvesting

Effect: When looting an edible monster the user is able to harvest some of the edible meat. More meat can be harvested at higher levels of this skill.

Kyle considered himself extremely lucky to get such a skill. It would make it much easier to find food and would help even more when he found Sarah and had to feed more people.

I can do it. I promised. At this rate I should be out of here in no time. I just have to focus.

It was easy to hunt the macaws using his current setup, but Kyle had no illusions about what the result would be if he had to face them in an open area. He could maybe deal with one, but two or three would be his downfall. He had cracked the code for leveling up his skills though, so he had an easy way to get some more stat points.

After killing all the macaws that he could reach, Kyle went back down the tunnel to take a break and try and level his skills. Basic Earth Manipulation was steadily leveling up and Kyle wanted to cash in on the stat points gained from it reaching level fifty. It took him at least a few hours, but getting the skill to level fifty payed off in more ways than one.

By this point Kyle had forgotten about the second part of his Exponential Growth title. He was never going to forget again. It turned out that level fifty was the maximum level for a skill so as per Kyle’s title he got a combination point. It was painfully obvious in hindsight what a combination point did. It combined skills. Using one would combine two random skills that Kyle had and would create a new more powerful skill. You could also save up ten combination points to choose which skills were combined.

I don’t know how rare combination points are, but if I can level my skills up to max level isn’t this unfair? I mean, other people would have to worry about not having enough skill slots while I can just combine the skills ad infinitum. Combining skills also seems to make them more powerful. It looks like ideally I should save up the points until all my skills are at max level, but I don’t have that kind of time now. If combining skills can grant me immediate power I should take it. I can plan ahead once I have found Sarah.

Kyle used the combination point and was not disappointed by the result. His Basic Mana Gain and Basic Magic Power Gain had combined to make a new skill.

Name: Mana and Magic Power Gain

Effect: Gain ten mana and one magic power for every level of this skill.

It even started off at level four! It seemed like some of the experience from the combined skills carried over.

It took Kyle a few more times of clearing out any macaws in the area before he felt comfortable leaving the cliff. Water Purification was almost level fifty as well, and getting it there would give him another combination point to boost his power. He was not sure he needed it at this point though. He had picked up some defensive skills from the macaws he killed and his stats had grown a fair amount from the enhancement crystals they dropped and from him leveling up his skills.

Health: 500

Mana: 740

Physical Power: 10

Magic Power: 50

After descending the cliff Kyle was prepared to face fierce opposition from whatever monsters lay in wait in the forest below. There were none. No matter where Kyle went, the macaws appeared to be the only monsters anywhere in the valley. There were still dangerous, so instead of fighting them head-on he used the same strategy of forming small crevices in the walls of the valley to shoot skills from. Once he had killed enough of the birds to feel safe it was time to start searching for the way out.

This took longer than it should have. Kyle ended up killing all of the macaws in his search for the exit from the secret training area. He still had no luck, and he was growing increasingly frustrated. The forest was beautiful, but that was it. No glowing stone. Climbing the cliffs would have been the wet dream of any mountain climber back before the Change. Still no stone. Kyle even dove into the lake, experiencing an underwater landscape like none he had ever seen. But still no stone. It eventually took finding a skill crystal in a treasure chest before Kyle finally found what was under his nose.

He had been exploring the mountains surrounding he valley when he noticed a small hole in the cliff face. It was too small for him to fit in, but some Basic Earth Manipulation later and he was inside. The small cave only had a small treasure chest. That was more than enough for Kyle once he saw the skill inside.

Name: General Item Dowsing

Effect: Activating this skill shows the user the direction of a known item. The user must have knowledge of what the item looks like, as well as its intended usage. Increased precision is possible at higher levels of this skill. Costs 50 mana per second.

Using the skill led Kyle to the lake once more. It only took diving into the lake a single time to realize what he had missed. It was a common theme for things to be hidden behind waterfalls in stories. The waterfall that fell into the lake didn’t have anything behind it though. So instead of something being hidden behind the waterfall, that something was hidden inside the waterfall. The glowing blue stone was floating in the waterfall just at it hit the lake. He had been unable to see it because of the churning waters.

It took some doing, but Kyle finally ended up using Compressed Mana Explosion to briefly interrupt the waterfall and allow him to reach the stone and finally escape and find Sarah. But when he opened his eyes he was not in the cave where he had first started. He opened his eyes to see sand, sand, and more sand. Kyle blankly looked around in confusion as information flowed into his head.

“Congratulations on clearing the first stage of the secret training area. You have received a skill crystal for the skill Calm Mind as a prize. Each stage increases in difficulty, so please take due precautions. Gaia prays for your continued success.”