After a small dinner I wash today’s loot. After that I move photos from my phone to computer, and then it’s time for my money making plan:

Beg on the internet!

Hah! In actuality I set up a Patreon account. Which is kinda the same thing. I keep it private for now. I do have the decency to make something before I ask for money.

Next up is more video planning. Specifically making what will hopefully be the first of many vlogs on the new world - that is, monsters, monster hunting, the [System], post-Upheaval creatures/plants and so forth. As opposed to the two videos I made yesterday

The video will be about what I’ve done until today, and I’ll start planning a video for everything that happened with the [Basilisk] today. Maybe merge the two, but that might be too long.

I’m definitely not merging these. Just going through the draft without the camera on takes a good couple minutes. And then there’s the editing to include the photos (in slideshow format).

Oh well.

I quickly prepare the few things I need for the video, and set myself up at one of the walls with the most space.

Oh, it’s past midnight. I stretch. That’s fine. The first vlog, ‘My first days of the Upheaval’, and the replacement video for the channel vid are both uploaded. The Patreon has been launched(with two of it’s own videos).

In addition I have finished drafts for the remake of ‘5 minutes about the [System]’, the open letter about monster hunter organization, open letter on the need to reform militaries and police and on the second vlog, about the [Basilisk].

Before I go to bed, how does the views look on the current ‘5 minutes about the [System]’?

…

…

One point two million, are you kidding me? Shit, I should annotate that I’m gonna make a better version. And link to my money-maker page.

Almost seven million views, about a million views shared between the other videos, and just above a thousand USD per month from patrons. Damn, I don’t want to spend time on management and such, but I foresee that I will need to in order to keep these guys happy.

On the bright side, assuming it will continue growing and even out at maybe double that, I might be able to live off the money. Assuming I live frugally. Most likely I’ll get more patrons than that, though, and if I sell things I craft and/or tutoring and such, I should be able to indulge a little. And then there’s the military...

All right! Let’s experiment a little with my newer aspects to get my mind off things.

Water, electricity and earth… Earth sounds the safest, so let’s try to at least get it to weak affinity.

I sit down with crossed legs, sensing for the earth aspect in the soil beneath me. When I think I sense it good enough, I turn my attention further down, and indeed the aspect changes properties. That would be bedrock, I suppose.

I stand up and jog over to the street, and then to the brick building. The aspect is in the road, pavement and bricks in the wall. Clearly different from the ‘natural’ earth aspects, but there nonetheless.

I go back to the area I dumped my tools and take a position for meditation. Breathing slowly with closed eyes, I guide aspect to my outer arm. When I feel a difference, I open my eyes.

“Wow.”

I tap the affected skin. It’s rock hard. Upon pinching it I find it about as malleable as rock as well. Spend a minute or so trying to make it softer, and the end result it quite leathery, but chips break off. Let’s not do that…

I revert it, and then repeatedly form and unform the stone armor. When I feel confident in forming it, I grab a small [Basilisk Scale] from my ‘might be useful for [Aspectian]’ bag. It’s one of those that fell off under our attacks. Mimicking it, I form stone scales from my hand to elbow, with smaller scales near joints, particularly on the hand.

Emboldened by success, I stand up and, after slipping off my sandals, slowly covering most of my body in scales or varying sizes. I clearly feel the weight of the scales, and they limit my movements, even when I leave joints largely uncovered. Hmm…

To test it out I start jogging around the small grassy area. It’s not too bad, attuning to [Aspect of Earth] gives me a STRength bonus, but it’s still worse than my chitin armor with the backpack. At least it’s not as stuffy and warm.

I revert and attune to [Aspect of Water]. This time I sense for the utility pipes that should run along the street and branch out here and there. Actually finding them takes me a little while since the water in the soil is distracting.

But when I walk over to a manhole cover, away from the grass and trees, it becomes apparent: flowing veins of the aspect going in dead straight lines down the street, only to branch out and split into dozens of smaller and smaller lines, like lightning, by each building.

Since soil has absorptive properties, I elect to try taking on a water form in the part of the street that always forms a big puddle when it rains due to poor drainage.

It is quite similar to taking on my mist form, and soon my entire body semi-transparent, while my legs have straight up turned into water. I raise my T-shirt and look at the crisscrossing of muscles, blood vessel and the organs beneath them. Fascinating!

Now to try out mobility.

Where the mist-form gives me freedom by way of amazing acceleration and limited flight, but with limited speed, this water form(now with opaque upper body, because not freaking out people) is more like a flowing river, or perhaps large wave:

I pick a direction and move that way, building up great momentum and flowing past all but the biggest obstacles(for the record, I totally didn’t crash right into a wall). The negative, of course, is that it is hard to stop and/or turn unless I use the terrain.

Next up: [Aspect of Electricity]. Following the electric wires and lines that are everywhere isn’t exactly hard, but seeing what happens in transformers and other devices is interesting. Now, I brushed up on physics, specifically on electromagnetism.

Electromagnetism? Despite the aspect only mentioning electricity, magnetism is physically the same. Whether the ability will agree remains to see, but for now I sit cross legged with the copper rod planted in the ground between my legs, and fridge magnet in hand.

I can definitely sense the aspect in the magnet if I focus on it, so that should open up more options. For now, though, I put my hands around the base of my lightning rod and try to gather the aspect.

My control of it is rather shoddy, but with some concentration I manage to build up enough of the aspect that I can see what I can do with it.

“Ahh, fuck!” I exclaim at the literal shock, perhaps a bit too loud, since there’s a bunch of kids in the area. Haven’t seen any today, but I’d rather not get scolded by someone’s parent. It didn’t really hurt that much… But it was quite shocking! Ba-dum tisch!

My silly humor aside, I really should have expected charging an area with electricity would cause a spark. After all, that’s the 101’s of electricity.

I make a mental note to try doing the same with mana instead of aspects, before repeating the procedure to see if I can lead the charge away from my weak and fleshy body.

Gather the aspect in one area while removing it from another, and you get a discharge. And to not get hurt, direct the electricity around my body, instead of through it. If I make a thin, continuous layer around my body, or maybe multiple lines, like wires. Maybe a grid?

I experiment with a few different methods.

Two -okay, three- dozen tries later I think I get the hang of it, and ramp up the power. I still feel the shocks every now and then, but judging by how the lightning rod and grass around it’s base have been scorched, I’d say this could be dangerous, or even lethal, without the protection.

I keep going at a level I think is reasonable(as in: probably won’t kill me) until I can reliably not get shocked. I think I get it! I stand up and again shock the copper rod. I repeat it a couple times before I feel confident I have a full-body faraday cage.

Next up, ride the lightning! Okay, that’s like three levels too complex and dangerous. What I actually do is to change the aspect covering my body to produce charge as well. Mwahahaha! Fear me, for I am Static Man! All who touches me shall be mildly shocked!

“LarsAAAUGH!” And with that dramatic entrance, Eivind -y’know- touches me. On my shoulder, that is. “What the hell was that?”

“I’m practicing my aspects. Right now, [Aspect of Electromagnetism].” Yeah, I renamed it when realizing it affected both. I can magnetically hover and flip the magnet, by the way. Party tricks!

I check my watch. “You’re here earl-oh shit I should’ve taken off my watch!” It’s fine, luckily, but I put it in my usual travel backpack(one much smaller than the one I’ve used when hunting), next to my phone, which I actually thought to not be wearing when playing with lightning.

Cough. “You’re here early, the meeting time isn’t for another forty minutes.” The meeting spot is at my place, since it is spacious out here and five minutes away from the metro line. The gray clouds tell me we might have to move inside or to the nearby cafe, but that’s fine.

“I had nothing better to do, and you said it would be fine to come here earlier. By the way, I checked your video on the metro, it has like seven and a half million views. It’s as bad as you said, so it’s good you’re making a new one.”

I turn to him in disbelief. “It got half a million more views since I checked it about an hour ago…”

“Anyway, I got the cash we agreed on, now make me a wand that is not a glorified stick!” He holds out an envelope, which I take and check. Four hundred Crowns.

“...less shady with you around...” I mumble.

“What?”

“Ahh, injoke with a friend of mine. A character in a game sometimes says that when you open a conversation. As you might guess he’s a kinda gray-area character.

Anyway, he said that just as I had dumped sixty tons of weaponry into the ocean so my friend could pick it up with his ship to circumvent trading tax. It’s become a catchphrase of sorts when we do things that might be seen as shady, in games or otherwise.”

He chuckles. “I see.”

By the time the next party member -was Hilde her name?- get here, I’ve enchanted my entire chitin armor with an enchant of ‘Lesser Earth’s Toughness’.

As for Eivind’s wand, after discussion(while I was enchanting) we agreed on trying to give it a few properties: We want Flow, like the previous wands, he wants me to add a small [Mana Stone], and he wants it at a specific length.

After greeting Hilde I finish attaching the [Mana Stone] with some copper wire. While I apply the finishing touches, Eivind and Hilde discuss the wand she wants.

“Done.”

Oaken Capacitor Wand of Water’s Flow Conductibility: Fantastic

Capacity: Low

Durability: Medium A finely crafted wand with rather common materials.

It has a small [Mana Stone] capacitor, allowing it to store some mana.

It has fantastic conductibility thanks to synergy between the imbuement and enchants and the [Aspect of Water], and somewhat increases spells and the holder’s Water Affinity.

It is made in such a way to enhance mana bonds.

“Damn, I gotta make myself a new wand, this is far superior.”

“I wanna see!” Hilde shouts and practically throws herself at me, or at least the wand I’m holding. “Wooow! Eivind, you’re lucky. But mine will be better!”

The person in question seems quite impressed, even more so when he experimentally fires a {Firework}, a spell we devised specifically to be safe. It looks pretty though, and can be used as a signal flare.

A dozen meters above our heads, it explodes with a small pop. “In game stats, this thing reduces mana cost by like thirty percent and reduced charge time and cost by a bunch as well. I’m wondering if I shouldn’t give you more money for this…”

“Ehh, consider the price a boon for party members. Besides, as I think I mentioned yesterday, right now I just want to not be the only person who can potentially fight more powerful monsters.”

Hilde tilts her head. “By the way, what’s your levels? I’m level thirty-five now.”

“Nice growth.” Eivind voice my thoughts. “I’m level twenty-four now. Lars, you levelled up your crafting now, right?”

I check my stats. “Ehm… Seventy-three. Fourteen, eighteen and sixteen from classes and twenty-six from the rest. More if I swap out [Aspectian], since it doesn’t count the levels when you also have it in a class.”

…

“Seriously?”