Popping out my speeder in the night, I fly over to my cabin in the middle of the forest.

The familiar gentle climb of the clearing atop which my abode has a slightly darker color that is easily noticeable even in the moonlight. I had a lot to do in the next week or so before I start my class trial, so I had to spend a couple more hours in the village setting things up and getting other people involved in the dozen projects that I wanted to complete before heading over.

Right here and now, I had another goal in mind.

I had to get access to the information in the bookshop. We might be getting closer than ever to the first couple of Mithrill priced books, but investing so much capital in acquiring the information and having to abide by the limitations in them is a hassle.

Those very limitations are the reason why I had only read a few of the books the village bought preferring the results of practical experiments and results from what the others learned from them. Information should be free and I didn’t want even more limitations in place, especially from an entity which most of the time seemed near omnipresent, even if not omniscient.

In the mechanical sense, it observed all. But it had trouble understanding what some things meant and if there had been a small chance that it could have learned enough to overcome that eventually, the council’s manipulations had put a death sentence in the system’s ‘cognitive’ or ‘algorithmic’ growth.

Sitting in the middle of my clay hut, likely many miles away from the closest people, I sit down and connect to the roots letting my entire conscious fully link myself and Aspen for just a moment. The simple exercise slows my mental state and switches my perspective to something akin to a meditative state in moments that might have taken minutes to do on my own. Withdrawing my will back and leaving only a centering sliver behind, I put will in a small spot inside the inner world.

Mentally paging and reading the entire book, I reacquaint myself with it before taking it out.

Placing it in my lap, the letters in the booklet becomes blurry and unfocussed to my perception field, but I can almost read it.

I simply continue to work on it for the next couple of hours until the small but meaningful improvements I have been making make themselves manifest.

Leveraging my near 140 perception points to the limit the task slowly comes from the possible realm to the achieved box and I can quickly, if not effortlessly read the entire thing once again.

No doubt this is the book I most read in my entire life. This is what… the seventh read-through?

Digging deep within myself, I put my fears to the side and step out into the slight wind chill of the night feeling refreshed, more than in a long time.

I just didn’t realize before how the stale air bothered me, but after a rain like this, all is right with the world. So much of an artificial outlook on the world. There are no birds, no insects or worms in the soil, it is possible there are a few more microorganisms, but without a microscope or a lot more in the Perception stat, we don’t know that just yet.

Cycling the perception field, as I take out of the inner world a few of the stat training aids focused on the perception stat that Richard continued to improve upon, I train focusing on a singular avenue of improvement. Multiple ones might be my normal modus operandi, but sometimes a little focus went a long way.

I absorb the sensation of the still humid grass and dirt clinging to my foot. Felling the vibrations of my hair through my body in the slow wind, the sound of settling Earth after the rain, and even the rushing river a couple of miles away. It all soaks in and fades in the background like the song of peacefulness.

Playing with the spinning and quickly moving colored flags and knickknacks pushes my perception stat to the limit.

The moonlight is faint compared to the sun and even the typical house illumination back on Earth, but it is also more than enough for me after so long getting used to it. The added difficulty the lack of light adds to the challenge barely slowing me down, possibly even taking it to the next level.

Less than an hour later, after the quick exercise and another short meditation session I get up with a new Aether construct lodged in the space below my soul near my modest Aether poll, curtesy of the system.

Ohh, so very gracious. Why the system doesn’t let me try to finish the process on my own is a mystery, but maybe I will find out one day.

The next couple of days continues in a similar pace. Most of the time I continue training my perception in various forms, looking at the environment at the greatest range I can through the roots network, then inside my body. Looking through the various ‘realms’. The physical and the metaphysical with the strange Mana, Aether, and probably other things I couldn't perceive.

I learn and get used to things in my very body that even if the perception field could permeate them, I had never simply felt them. Not by simple proprioception. I was slowly learning to feel and place every single protuberance in my bones from my toes to my skull, even the ones hidden inside it or ones normally too small for me to feel with my fingers.

My senses and the environment become a playground as I explore all there is to learn, all there is to ABSORB.

I play with a few grape sized portals, in various states of stabilizations, even going as far as purposefully inducing even more noise in a few and letting myself not only get used to the pain but learn to ignore the attention-grabbing happenings of the very portals to look past them, to look at what is beyond the surface.

Changing mental channels to see other instances became as easy as breathing. A natural action. Though I still needed a small portal to even get started, I felt it is possible to overcome that hurdle eventually.

Not unexpectedly in the middle of the forest and far from anything interesting but a slight rise in the terrain. Not a single person was in range.

Over just six days, a lot changed in my preparations and habits.

My sleep lengthened slightly to around 2 and a half hours and was firmly placed at around midnight. I worked every day remotely with the Blacksmith, occasionally even sticking around with a root avatar for a few minutes after finishing to provide the mana for the best possible quality weapons he could make.

I go over the work Aspen had done with the seeds basically creating brothers for himself. Though I still had my doubts about this path they should all take. He was right that by experiencing my development and seeing so much more he had grown incredibly fast but Pando’s choice to remain rooted to the ground, pun intended, is not the wrong one just perhaps not right for Aspen and others like him.

Every other day I took the others around to deal with the HLZ beasts. Alex had taken yet another step forward though for now, he was keeping his mouth shut about the nature of his improvements.

He still hadn’t taken another class, but with the pace he has been keeping, it may not even be needed for him to stand on an equal footing with HLZ beasts. Their levels however slowly increased after the village attack, which is concerning. The average level had jumped from about 140 to 145.

Luckily even with the change, the encounters don’t even need a lot of my help with every single one of the fighters using better and better equipment while sitting at a cool level 100.

None of the 3 in the group who could take the next step wanted the basic common rarity class offered and the others didn’t even have that choice. Although their help is a large step forward, this avenue of their growth is capped for now. Even the visitors in the turn of the month who had reached level 100, I heard a lot of hesitation over picking the first class that showed up instead of waiting.

There is still a lot of doubt and second guessing over the information spread in our instance, especially after so many had burned themselves trusting what the ‘kind’ NPC’s told them, but most believed in what I and a few other sources told them about the importance to choose a fitting and strong class. It made sense, and they had seen the disparity even in the initial levels, something that would only amplify if the person chose something random that didn’t suit themselves.

Especially on this next transition. I had a feeling level 100 wouldn’t just be about a large jump in stats or anything like that. If someone simply chose the first random class available, not only would their growth be stunted, they may also lose other avenues to increase their power.

There is more going on than we know, but if the fight against the HLZ beasts, the goblin chief or the lv. 100+ shaman is anything to go by, this next step up is way more profound than I had expected. I got small hints on the book, but I had a feeling it was more profound than I could imagine.

I am willing to rush the next step in the level 50 transition, but maybe it would be best to save the level 100 transition for when I had fully consolidated my foundations and built as much as I could on top. Messing up whatever happened in the level 100 transition could be a gigantic wasted opportunity. The only thing that holds me back from making a hard commitment to wait years is the fact I still didn’t have a good idea of how urgent is the need for more power. It might be that I should have pushed all steam ahead and gone for level 200 and be exploring the instance by now, but I just didn’t know.

In the end, I had to go with my gut, and it told me to be patient in no uncertain terms.

If the beasts suddenly jumped to level 200 no amount of preparations or numerical advantage would help us avoid paying the price, which likely would involve far too many casualties.

I shake my head in the morning light and get on my little speeder. All that preparation with a singular purpose in mind: the bookshop.

A few minutes later I land on the village’s central square and sit in one of the benches surrounding the fountain. Turned to the smithy with my back roughly to the bookshop I start to prepare for the long coming actions. This however seems the wrong way to do it, so I get up and head into my little wooden hut in the village.

Sitting much more comfortably inside I start my work.

Without even coming close to moving my roots inside the small shop or using the perception field version the system gifted me, I just concentrate on the first bookcase. I find and start reading a copy of the book I owned: Introduction to the System.

The familiar text is a breeze to read and I go over it in its entirety over the next couple of minutes.

There are no alarms, no change and not even a single person turns in my direction as far as I know.

Even the inhabitants of the village seem oblivious demonstrated by the tanner who passes in front of my abode on the way out of his shop carrying the smelly curring leather of the latest HLZ beast, a Wolfkin. Tougher defenses than most others, but also a stiffer material to work with.

After finishing I jump to the next book. This is slightly more difficult to read, but still within my capabilities. It was another I had already read in the first weeks, though I didn’t own it.

No reaction.

I keep going, reading everything as I close the door and fully enter a concentration state.

I move through the first bookcase before heading for the one that has a base price measured in gold coins.

Taking out a small typewriter given that this information was sensitive I hook it up to a private copper sheet data storage. A standard rack storage solution courtesy of the MRI. Soon every single letter I type out is stored in the ‘cloud’ I have in the inner world. Not caring too much about small typos and only stopping to check the critical junctions where any misreading could be troublesome, I blaze through the book almost as fast as I can read it.

Each of them is relatively short, and I even shorten useless exoteric references to other works we didn't have access to.

These books could barely be called such, with the longest of them not even getting past 20 thousand words.

I read every single page giddy at the thought of sharing all I’m learning with the entire instance instead of following the convoluted and tyrannical rules for how these overpriced pieces are ‘legally’ allowed to be handled. I’m all for copyright protection, but some of the rules are just stupid.

If you buy a book for the base price under the standard licensing you can’t loan it to a friend. You can’t even read it aloud so he can also listen in. Even just listening to something is usually enough to cause you to be bound by some of the terms of the contract in the book.

Letting go of the frustration and injustice I put my nose to the grindstone. The next couple hours pass in a breeze as I go through the entire bookcase copying books we hadn’t even got our hands-on.

The real gem however is the last Bookcase.

These are books priced in Mithril coins.

With my fingertips trembling, I dive in.