“Godamint boy, couldn’t you have taken a couple of people with you?” Richard spouts out as soon as Alex comes into view in the tri speeder.

“Leave him be, Richard. He has been through enough already without your negging.” I say in a normal tone, but with a desire to strangle the idiot. Couldn’t he have given warmer welcome while Alex was injured and chastised him later?

“I know, I know, it was stupid,” Alex says at the admonishment, though in a low volume taking care not to shift his chest and aggravate his injuries. My Life resource is a miracle, but it only ‘cauterizes’ the wounds, it didn’t actually heal much of the tissue. That second part is Ludmar’s domain.

Though I don’t need the Perception to notice that he is not ok, not yet.

Each jostle of the speeder in the full central yard and close corridors to the Ludmars’ new office seem to drive a spike deeper and deeper, even if he doesn't wince and my perception field detects no actual pain spams from him. I continue watching him being taken before walking past the town hall to my second home, the little root hut in the village.

Well in range of the entire proceeding with all my senses, including mana sense extending my range through the network, I just sit to observe it all closely.

Last time I knew a few runes and the way man was shaped, but I simply had no context, nor any equivalent resource to the healing aspected mana that he is wielding.

Life likely won’t work the same, but if I learn even one thing from observing the process that I might have missed otherwise, I’m calling it a success. Maybe next time I could have healed Alex myself.

The operation starts out tense, and I wince even when he doesn't do that himself, but the next two hours see slow and steady improvement in his tissue.

The boy really was too reckless for his own good. Alex seems to injure himself more than most doesn’t he? He needs something to mitigate that besides growing a head on his shoulders.

I ignore anything else for the moment and go back to watching the thousands of mana points heading into him slowly cycling under the system's myriad of runes to make it more effective. Similar to my own Life, healing aspected mana by itself is not very ‘healing’. Not that it doesn't help the body, but the few leaks of mana from Ludmar’s lack of experience allow the healing aspected mana to work unaided. And I’m shocked to realize that it works very similarly to life, supercharging the cell's natural healing.

I pull a few paper sheets and make sure to note down anything interesting to gather with my last set of notes and the ones that Merlin and a few others had added together by watching Ludmar’s work. I simply don’t understand his reluctance to simply try and teach a few other people his skill. The system tented to put people with similar personalities in the same village, even if sometimes that personality manifested in different ways, but once in a while someone like Brad and Ludmar completely broke that mold.

He was mistrustful and tended to assume you were stealing his pen if you so much as borrowed it to jot down a quick note without asking and that just engendered a certain distance in all our dealings, only reinforcing his status as an outsider.

I may be something of an outsider to the village by choice, but that was just because I needed a little physical and mental space to develop, and the fact that being too entangled with the politics of running a village is not my cup of tea. Nobody in the village even cared that I said I wasn’t part of the village and that I kinda founded my one person village. They treated me as one of their own more than even most new additions. He had no physical space separating him from the others, but nobody would miss him if he went away, except for his healing.

That we would miss dearly.

With the wounds more than halfway to recovery and much more superficial as the muscle and tendons were completely taken care of, Alex gets up and walks out on his own feet.

Even as Ludmar cracks his knees against the floor and heaves after the long and arduous use of Mana, I move my perception field away. My thoughts, however, are firmly back on him. He is not all that bad. He is just brusque. But you can’t force someone out of their shell by force. The best you can do is to be there if they ever come to you.

I add a little note on another piece of paper, to remember to tell Charlie and the others about what I know of him and make sure if the time ever comes, we don’t drive him away, even if only for what he can do for the village.

With a clean conscience and proud of my stupendously magnificent conclusion, I get up and head to meet Alex, something made extremely easy by accompanying him with the perception field.

“Hi,” I call out as he heads roughly in my direction on the central square.

“Ohh. Nash, thanks. I forgot about thanking you for the help before. I’m not sure I would have made it without you… again.”

“Don’t worry about it. Your little companion was worried sick, that is how I found you so fast.”

“Ohh, I thought…”

“They called me after I was already on the way, Metaphysically speaking. Though it only worked because of the root network. If you were outside it, or anyone but me had found you, you would be dead. Even the places within comm range but no roots would be a death sentence as far as my help is concerned.”

He shrugs at the intricacies of the system instead concerned with his new companion:

“Was Spike worried?”

“Spik… don’t… don’t tell me you named your seed Spike?

“Hahh, ok I won't.”

I chuckle, letting the air rush out of my nose as I silently laugh.

“You have Aether. Try and connect with him, even if it doesn’t work at first, just keep trying. He has come from Aspen so he is familiar with Aether. He should also be able to learn your mental patterns. Just be careful, you are a lot stronger than he is. As a matter of fact, I can tell him you are ok.”

“I think we both know he realizes that. He has been spreading himself thin for the last little while. I also think that the exercise of learning each other's languages would be helpful for our relationship. ”

“Look who is trusting their gut,” I say like the cat that ate the canary.

“None of that creepy smile. I always listen to my gut, the last couple of days just… amplified this a bit.”

“Well, what are you going to do now?”

“Get my spear fixed.” He pulls out of his inner world one of the spears hidden inside. A splintered mess with a chip along its cutting edge.

The spear wielder’s spear.

Basically a gift from the smith to him. The very first +7 weapon in tatters. That will not do.

I reach with my fingers and right before I’m about to touch it, they twitch, but I push through and absorb the remains of the magnificent weapon. There is…

Holy moly.

Aether.

A faint but present Aether field fully fixed to an object and nothing like the Aether of coins, but a fully formed Aether field, like the spear is alive.

“What the hell did you do?”

He gives his characteristic boyish smile and breaks all reality with his next words:

“I got to level 101 in my spear wielding skill.”

------------------

Half an hour later I’m still disbelieving even as we make plans for his next weapon along with Blackwood’s input. Except is the same weapon, it is just being reforged and we try to decide what to sprinkle in.

Proper runes, a living piece of wood as its shaft, silver and gold in the very head to connect to the runes behind it.

“I still think that the Buffing runes you were discussing with Merlin can be put in.”

“Likely, but while they sound amazing at first glance, there are severe limitations. Without a lot more mana and larger runes, they would be all but useless.”

“Mana is not that much of a problem for me, I have a battery, you just need to figure out how to miniaturize the runes. Not when I have become a mini you.”

“You can’t really n something external like that to carry you, especially given that you are not storing your mana but relying on other people for that, and even your battery is not enough for a long fight. If you rely on other people’s tools to prop you up, it will come to bite you in the ass. They are bloody useful, even a rune that buffs everyone in the village for a 1% regen rate or speed can be invaluable, but for now, I’m leaving Merlin and Burges to figure out how to use them and I hope you will forget that idea be until they manage to come up with something that is not just a mana sink. For now, I got other projects in mind.” I say pointing out the very notes and pieces of his spear strewn over a workbench that Blackwood rarely uses.

I let the comforting pounding of steel behind me act as a metronome and even my very thoughts get in tune with the working of metal I dive in again trying to make the perfect plans for tomorrow's efforts.

Another hour passes and Alex’s initial enthusiasm is simply gone asI get to the more technical aspects of the build. His will and desire to act, to move, and contribute more than the little he has to offer at this junction make itself manifest. Though I stop soon after with little to do myself. With an already well outlined design, I leave the shop for the second time in the day.

Too bad Mirthil is so outside the realm of possibility that it doesn’t even merit much of a deeper study.

After Alex mentioned the faux Inner World he carries, I start to think about more use for it. With the right modifications, a properly set up suit of armor, integrating both leather, metal, and wood could become a formidable defense and that is a platform that might be able to power the buffing runes he is talking about without wasting 90 percent of the mana.

But even as those thoughts try to encroach and consume my existence, I stop them from going wild and get on two more urgent things and maybe even more meaningful in the grand scheme of things.

My inner world size and new subclasses skills which is where I start.

There might even be a skill to help me in my inner world expansion or something else.

Having taken care of everything of immediate concern I fly on my very first speeder, a tiny thing only meant for a single person laying down almost like an F1 cockpit by itself abut with a much more aerodynamic design. Coming to think of it, I think even F1 drivers sit more upright than me.

The nearly 20 minute flyover back to my cabin is over in giff where I find a nice place to center myself and make very important decisions like which skills to choose.

As I open the prompt I head straight for my last subclass. The one I was so excited to acquire.

Spatial Architect: Epic Rarity (33 % effectiveness - 0/1 Skills)

Upgrade skill: Space/Time Interaction - Lv10

Create Inner Space - Lv 25

Spatial Maze Sense - Lv 50

Upgrade skill: Space/Time Manipulation - Lv75

Damn, I had forgotten about that. Still, even as I take a second look, the rough math begins to work out in my head.

Considering how the current progress has been, I will only be able to choose another skill for this class when I get to level 126 or 151 depending on when I unlock the 6th skill.

Two are very similar, interaction and manipulation. But as I pass my Aether, I feel that they aren’t different branches from a base skill or even different skills altogether, but manipulation is simply a rung up a ladder compared to interaction, which is the same word I have currently have on my skill. So somehow I bypassed some of the restrictions even under the eyes of the system and can take two steps in a simple choice.

It seems clear to me what I should choose, but this is in many ways like the perception field of my main class, just an inferior version to what I already have, except that is not certain, and the very fact of acquiring and playing with a system gifted skill has its own benefits.

Still undecided, I go over the other skills:

Creating inner space sounds a lot like my inner world. Though it might eventually grow into something beyond that or just a different sort of space, even poking and prodding at the system screen with Aether doesn’t reveal anymore and is too uncertain for my taste.

Moving to the next, the maze Skill is even vaguer if that is possible. It is too open ended, in its capabilities and any benefits are nebulous at best, so I end up taping the last skill without further hesitation.

Upgrade skill: Space/Time Manipulation - Lv75

Your skill Space/Time Interaction has been upgraded to Space/Time Manipulation.

That is interesting. I run my fingers over the last message. Something nobody else had gotten, a quirk of the system being ever so slightly different from all humans. The last time Upgraded the Perception field I didn’t receive this message.

I just shrug it off, but instead of dismissing it, I take a minute to explore the screen. I run my fingers over it, exploring it as I try to Spin a little Aether around me and through the screen.

Most of the time the faint impressions were no better than my best guess, but this time I take my time with it. My gut is telling me this is significant and I mentally bounce ideas off myself and absorb the implications of this message.

Ok.

I get the skill has changed on a fundamental level. But that change didn’t just occur along a single avenue like with my ‘tier’ 1 perception field that got upgraded, to tier 2 along with my main class.

There was a fundamental limit removal that happened this time.

Even as the very thought crosses my mind, something that Alex told me about his experience breaking through level 101 in a skill comes to the forefront of my mind.

Class skills are easier to push through the boundary?

Nobody else felt anything, but now that I think on it, both of the others go to 100 with class skills. Even Alex broke through with a skill directly linked to his class if that makes any difference. I grab a strip of space and try ripping it apart. I pull and tugs, like always, barely budging it, but it does budge. Not even a full millimeter but I sense the warping. Manipulating it is not suddenly easy, just a little more familiar and most important of all, possible at all.

My natural skill approaches the system and class skills.

Perhaps, this change in the nature of the skill just made it easier, not guaranteed that I would manage to break level 101, but it is a step in the right direction.

Alex may just be cheating in his own way by breaking through a skill cap without even it being a part of his actual class skill and if that is the case, perhaps I can break that same limit soon enough.