I move away from the small ceremony that would start soon outside the village after delivering the little works of art. As it turns out making flowers is much, much harder than I expected. Not in changing the colors or the texture to something flower-like, but in achieving the natural look, shape, transparency and a dozen more ethereal concepts I never paid any attention to back on Earth.

To get it looking better than the cheapest of plastic flowers, I got help from dozens of people, but the work was definitely worth it.

I may have paid attention to nature, but flowers had never been a particular interest of mine and I was much more used to other aspects of mother nature.

As I walk back mana flows from my feet and I try to hold in place all the runes needed for the levitation formation. So far I had only succeeded in doing this in minor ways and even then it was a pain, but for a minute I sustain it to float an inch of the ground and allow my momentum to carry me forward. Balancing awkwardly, I look like a noob after their first success skateboarding.

Some 150 meters later, as the light climb to the village’s gate starts my slowly fading momentum is quickly sucked away and just as I’m about to slide backward, I turn off the mana flow and my feet touch the ground.

I search in my head for the light headache that might be forming after the impressive feat of magic, at least for anyone who wasn’t Merlin or was making use of carved runes and I’m glad to report that there is nothing.

If I wanted to keep going for a long period I would undoubtedly start feeling the effects but be it practice or the hammer blows the HLZ beasts were delivering to my will as I fought the strange powers they exhibited in being able to disrupt any mana constructs, I was improving by leads and bounds.

Relentlessly I train hoping to one day achieve the level of control I wished.

As I’m getting close to the village I see Greg walking out the gate.

“So, are you ready?” He asks me.

“Yep, just contact me in half an hour when the sun goes down.”

“Sure, I will just put a couple of things in order first, but I will be finished before sunset.”

Over the night, in preparation for the next day, I guide him searching for the wolves he needed until he finally reaches the vaunted level 100 but all our hopes are dashed when he returns and we have a proper talk.

“Dammn. It's all crap.” He says swiping through the invisible stats screen in from of him. “I was hoping for something else, but all of the options are for shitty ‘upgrades’ to my class. Every single one of them is of common rarity. There is not even any uncommon ones. And I didn’t even unlock another subclass.”

“Ohh well. It was worth a try.” I say.

“Yeah, it was, but it is disappointing. I was hoping for more.”

“Is there anything that you can salvage?”

“No, these ‘upgrades’ are all common rarity. All variations on my Spearman class, but it would actually lower the rarity. I was prepared to accept pretty much anything, even if didn’t have large bonuses, but a downgrade? Nahh, no way.”

“And while you don’t choose the next class, you won’t get any more skills or the multiplication bonuses from passing the level threshold. Hell, by lowering the rarity of your class you can even lose stats.”

“Eh, kinda. That is one protection the system has in place, or so the rumors go.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you pick a lower rarity class apparently you have to option to keep the previous levels bonuses, and only tacking on the smaller bonuses from the new class every time you hit a transition level.”

“You are talking about level 10/50/100?”

“Yeap, we are still trying to figure out if the next transition level is 150 or 200, but unless someone like Merlin with loads of EXP chooses a class soon, we won’t know for a good while. Seeing these shitty options available, I don’t even blame him for waiting to get a better class.”

“You were arguing for him to wait instead of the other way around.”

“We can’t afford to waste our talent.”

“At least you got a couple more stat points. So it wasn’t a total waste of time.”

We say our goodbyes and he walks off a downcast heading for the training ground to eke out every smidge of improvement that he can in his skills with the slight improvement in stats and the practice.

Without anything immediately needing my attention I head to the MRI to take a look at the latest prototype of the data storage that doesn’t require any runes to work, are at least not after the initial setup.

The moon is high in the sky in the almost unnatural movement that we all come to expect from it.

After all, it’s always a full moon and the amount of light is enough for anywhere but a few rare buildings with the window turned to the wrong side, especially considering most people in the village had their perception stat nearing the twenties and few choose locked stats before arriving here. We also had gotten much more used to working with this amount of light.

I arrive at the MRI to see the beautiful machine that is being tested. A rack with a tall stack of copper plates. The thinnest we could produce reliably and uniformly. About as thick as a soda can. The MRI had worked in conjunction with Stuart for days before finally getting it right.

I approach the well-crafted wooden box looking at its internals with more ease than if I had x-ray vision. Standing four foot tall by three foot wide and over a foot deep, the box sits on top of a workbench against the wall, instead of the runic table with the roots in the middle of the room as most projects do while they are being worked on. Just as I’m about to turn a pulse of mana arrives in the box through the mana network.

One of the copper plates stacked to the left moves seemingly by itself, though I can sense the runes responsible for that. Pulling the blank coper sheet a little larger than common a4 printer to the middle column and the only one of the three columns that is free.

The page floats downward being precisely moved not even getting close to any of the sides until it touches the lower metal plate on the floor of the machine. Another thick steel plate slides over from the side and covers it before firmly clamping in place.

Hundred of tiny pins are driven upward with incredible force poking holes into the copper sheet. After clearing the small copper circles the entire page floats to the top to a similar device as on the bottom, except this time it is much less sturdily built, and thousands of pins are arrayed and pushed downward with much less force. About half of the pins are stopped by the copper, while the other half poke through the small holes.

Data pulses are sent back to somewhere else, I assume to check that the punching process went correctly, though I stop gawking at the successful creation.

“Hey. Impressed with what we managed?” Asks Lewis, the researcher heading the development of all the data-oriented projects.

“Yep. It’s a large step forward. You managed to fix pretty much everything that was going wrong with it.”

“After Stuart got the copper sheets just the way we wanted, the troubleshooting process became so much easier. Working with temporary materials is much more complicated. ”

“Is there something to work out yet?”

“We are still not happy with the data compression that we can achieve using this design instead of proper data cells. With the information in ‘magical’ storage, any ‘computation’ needed was just ‘magically’ resolved. Now we are having trouble integrating things, we even got 4 more people that studied computer science and knew actual assembly code, really low-level machine code stuff just to help us out. We are condensing in days, stuff that took months, years or even decades to develop the first time around on Earth, so bugs pop up all over the place.”

“What did you guys settle on?”

“We thought about using 5 bits with a modifier for special characters, upper case and stuff, but in the end, we are using a standard 8 bit with a special double-tiered dictionary for the compression. It won’t be able to handle any other languages yet, for now just English, but not many in our instance even speak another language.”

“How efficient it will be?”

“I would call it 50% compression, which is not that much better compared to just using 5 bits, but there is a lot of improvement to be made. Some of those improvements are fine, but I don’t think we should implement most of them. They likely won’t be worth it.”

“Why?”

“Because of the added complexity to the system. Your goal is to reduce our dependence on engravers with this correct?”

“Yeah.”

“So case in point.” He says as if the conclusion is obvious.

“Either way, good work, and keep me informed of how things develop over here,” I say as a farewell and walk to the note stack to take the whole thing and read through it.

I find a large rock in front of a house nearby, probably put there as a bench and take my seat to leaf through everything. I even learn most of the design of the newest storage option, just a couple more days for manufacturing and I will have virtually infinite storage. Then I would see the real benefits from my book.

I get up to walk the 20 meters back to the MRI, but instead, I stop and put the notes in the inner world. After closing the portal, I open another one underneath the notes with its exit right atop the shelf where the notes are stored inside the MRI building.

The binder falls with a faint but satisfying thump on the shelf.

Happy as a mango with my own cleverness, I run back and start work on increasing yet again my perception stat.

I did focus on other stats, but increasing this one at the fastest possible rate is what would help me in improving the perception field which I would need on my class trial. The thirty days ‘cooldown’ on the class trail was over and I could begin right now, but it was not the time.

After taking it I could go all the way to level 100 and unlock more skills, improved stats and maybe even more, but rushing it sounded like a really bad idea. Just thinking about entering it willy nilly send my gut churning. I had failed this trial already, not just keeping at minimal requirements, but outright failed.

Too much was up in the air, so I couldn't draw any conclusions from that, but I would prepare a lot better for next time around and getting my perception field as sharp as possible along with other preparation like storing as much mana as possible on the few root strands on my body and a dozen other small things sounded like the thing to do.

This time after I identify the quickly moving object and the source of sounds and the dozens of others exercises, I meditate to draw out the hidden upgrade.

I head deeper and deeper passing through my soul with almost casual ease compared to my first attempts, though even after getting much more used to it, the closest lights are still dozens of meters away. I was really too lucky that the inner world was so much easier.

Going through my entire body and extracting the single point of perception takes me half an hour but instead of stopping, I keep on and go as deep as I can.

My awareness draws in the roots in the vicinity until they become part of my body and I cannot distinguish where I end and they start.

Looking at the minutes of changes in the biochemistry of my body and trying to extract any improvements that I can make

Everything seems so elusive, even the Perception stat that at first was relatively easy to see as being ‘stressed’ and primed for an improvement, is drawing away from me the closer I look at it even as I imagine my body improving.

The hours pass, the day and night cycle repeats and I meditate unmovinly there like a scarecrow unconsciously repelling everyone away.

Dozens, hundreds of tiny changes occur and I can faintly feel them though out myself, but none of them look to be anything like what I have felt before.

My strength, stamina and perception will all continue to be the same. As far as I know, I only gain a single stat point in the very beginning and nothing afterward, but there is something that I gain from the practice beyond just improving my meditation skill independent of what even level the system attributed to it.

A deep peace as my body is both smaller than a single cell and larger than the village spreading over miles around. Aspen becomes me and I become him for a few instants or an eternity. That scapes me as well.

This duality, this infinite sliding scale is something that gives me perspective as I continue to head deeper in my meditation.

Just like when I hold my breath, as my eyelids open and I take in the world, for a moment there is no one else in the entire universe but me.

The universe abhors this state and sends reality crashing down as my connection to Aspen is returned to the natural state, I feel pain coming from all the roots in the inner world, hundreds of tons of roots spreading over. People begin to walk again and I realize the sharp contrast from the stillness from a moment ago. They somehow seemed to be frozen until a moment ago.

The system takes notice of the changes within me and it all comes crashing down.

If each o these sessions before invited a single construct within me, now a torrent of system’s Aether shoots into me dragging along dozens of constructs looking to find purchase in my soul.

I attempt to use my entire Aether pool to defend, but even as I try to shield myself, I also realize I’m not fighting a stream of a river, but an ocean. No matter how strong I get, I would never wield the ocean, the most I could hope for is to swim in it. And even swimming is so beyond me that it doesn’t bear consideration as I fail to draw even an iota of Aether from the system.

The tide fades and peace returns to my soul.

Curious about what changes happened, I open my stat sheet, and yes, there were changes alright. Really nice changes, even if I didn’t agree with the method.