Tsar hurriedly collected the totems and talismans throughout the room, dropping them into his Soul Vault before heading back towards the training room. There were notification beginning him to pay attention to them at the moment, but he would look at them when he got back and could concentrate.

Arriving back at the training room only took Tsar a few minutes. He went over to his cot and sat on the edge of it for a few moments before he brought up the Notifications that the system had decided he needed to see. His guess was that his Shaman Class had leveled up, or maybe he’d gained a new skill. Drinking a half dozen potions in the course of about twenty minutes was never a good Idea. But at least he hadn’t mixed them. just mana potions alone wouldn’t do much except leave him feeling drained.

Congratulations

You have reached Shaman lvl. 10

Stat points have been allocated.

Gain 900 skill points.

Congratulations

Create Totem has reached lvl.5

New types: [Rest] [Purification] [Defense] [Prosperity]

Congratulations

Create Talisman has reached lvl. 3

New types: [Purification] [Rest]

Congratulations

Bind Spirit has reached lvl. MAX

Cost = Target Spirits Resource pool

Effects: Binds target Spirit to Shaman, Totem or Talisman. If bound to the Shaman, Spirit takes up 1 attunement slot.

MAX Level Bonus Effect: Enhances the bond created between Totem or Talisman and Spirit. Spirit type will now add effects to Totem or Talisman based on Spirit Type.

“Hah! Predictable System.” Tsar muttered to himself as he read the first notification. But it was still impressive that his class had gone up by nine levels. That was an extra 45 stat points to int, wis, and will. The new effect of bind spirit was interesting and meant that not only did he have a whole lot more options in creation now, he also would need to experiment with different Spirit Types to see what their effects were on totems and talismans. He still needed one more level to be able to spend the skill points though. The next notifications were anything but what he would have called predictable though.

Congratulations

You have pulled of a Feat that not only should be impossible. But you repeated and replicated that Feat five times in one day.

Reward: Gain the Title: [Legend]

Effects: Base values of Vit, Con, and MP Capacity are changed from 5 to 10 of their respective resources.

Congratulations

You have unknowingly, and without asking for a reward, saved the life of a Legendary life form. Potentially changing the destinies and fates of thousands of beings for millennia to come.

Reward: Gain the Title: [Hero]

Effect: +100 to all Stats.

That was astonishing to say the least. Not only had he just gotten two titles, he had no idea what the second one was for. The effects of the Titles were amazing though, his resource pools had just doubled in size, not to mention that the Hero title had added +100 to all stats. It didn’t even specify unlocked stats. Meaning that if someone got the Title they’d get a whole bunch of benefits that leveling didn’t give them. Then there was one more notification that caught Tsar completely off guard… and pissed him off.

Congratulations

You have reached or surpassed the first mortal threshold (500), in all primary stats.

Reward (Choose one): [Lifespan modifier increased by 2x], [Regen stat modifier increased from 0.1 to 0.15], [Base value of Vit, Con, and MP Capacity increased from 10 to 15]

You have one minute to decide, or the system will randomly assign the reward.

Reward not chosen within the specified time frame.

Reward selected by system [Lifespan modifier increased by 2X]

Note: This choice will carry over between deaths.

“God Damnit!” Tsar practically screamed. “Of those three choices only the other two are actually worth something! Damnit! And I can’t even get a redo.”

Tsar wasn’t sure which of the other two he would have chosen. But he was leaning towards the capacity modifiers. He would eventually have so many souls in his Soul Well that regen wouldn’t really matter. Thinking long-term increasing his pools values was the most beneficial. He really wasn’t going to be ignoring notifications anymore. It had cost him dearly today.

He was going to have to ask Radgar tomorrow about the thresholds so he could be on guard about them when the time came to select the rewards. Highly irritated Tsar didn’t feel like he could fall asleep at the moment, so he popped open the Lightning Grimoire and started reading.

The funny thing about reading a book is you need to know the language it is written in. When he opened the book and started looking at the words written down Tsar was confused at first then it was like it clicked in his mind and suddenly the text was legible. He blinked a few times not understanding what had happened before he remembered his Auto Translate skill.

The next thing that Tsar noticed was that certain areas of the text in front of him seemed glow slightly golden, whereas other areas of the text had a dark, miasma, looking glow around them. He really didn’t understand this very much until he read over those different sections and experienced opposite feelings when he read the different colored text. The dark text gave Tsar a feeling of rejection, of wrongness, like there nothing of value to be had from reading them. The golden text gave him a feeling of rightness, of correctness, of value and acceptance. He had no idea what skill he had that might be making this a thing but as he looked at the very first page of the book, he got the feeling that he needed to correct the dark spots. Make them glow golden. In fact, the desire was so intense that Tsar started doing exactly that.

As soon as Tsar thought about making alterations to the Grimoire a ballpoint pen with an eraser appeared in his hand. It was such an odd thing to happen that he dropped it, but before it hit the floor, he suddenly found it in his hand again. Deciding to ignore the blatant magical weirdness of what was happening Tsar read over the entire first page. Finding it to be a very rough explanation of electricity and how it worked. Now, Tsar was no electrician, but he had been a programmer and had been known to dabble in DIY PCB building and couple of other things that had required that he have at least a rudimentary grasp of electricity and how it worked.

With the assistance of Zen Meditations perfect recall combined with the fact that he could see what areas were wrong made it so it didn’t take Tsar long to correct the first page. The eraser on the pen somehow perfectly erased even the ink and allowed Tsar to erase and rewrite as much as he wanted very easily.

He plowed his way through over a dozen pages correcting everything that was wrong with them, and the entirety of the pages were glowing a soft golden color. All the pages that he corrected were mostly about electricity and its basic functions, how it was generated, resistances through materials, stuff like that. There honestly wasn’t anything related to magic in the grimoire yet.

Something interesting happened when he got to a section that actually needed more written in it. somehow the available space to write in grew right there as he was writing. Shifting the rest of the information forward like a word document. It was fascinating. But soon he got to the interactions of mana and electricity. And that is where pages started getting really strange. Almost like a checkers board of gold and darkness. Some sentences had just a single word that was dark while the rest of them were golden, or even a single punctuation mark that was dark giving the rest of the sentence a grey pallor.

After a few hours of correcting his Grimoire of Lightning, Tsar finally felt like he was ready for sleep to take him. He laid down and fell asleep quite quickly. His mind full of electrical diagrams and charts of Ohms and all that stuff that he’d just reviewed out of both his memories from Earth and the information contained in the grimoire.

The next day came too soon, and after a breakfast of monster corpses from his Soul Vault Tsar was back to fixing his Grimoire of lightning. He figured when Radgar wanted to train he’d come find him or Iggy would inform him. So, Tsar continued to fix stuff as he read deeper into the Grimoire.

But then Tsar got to a certain point where no matter what he changed the words would not gain that golden glow. After going back and forth over the information Tsar was unsure why things were wrong. Then it hit him. There was nothing in the earlier areas about electromagnetism or fields or anything regarding the more advanced things about electricity.

Going back to where it seemed like the Grimoire should have those things Tsar spent a while pouring over his memories with Zen Meditation. Thanking his lucky stars that he had been a huge nerd growing up as a human and had spent countless hours watching the science channel, discovery channel, and surfing random Wiki articles on various things. You know, instead of going out and making friends and goofing around like teens should do.

Soon Tsar had looked over all of his memories that related to electricity, electromagnetism, and everything applicable to it that he had ever seen or even heard of. It was an astonishingly large amount of information. But he began to copy it all down into the Grimoire from his memories with a gusto.

Tsar wasn’t sure how long he’d been at it. He was fairly certain that he’d added at least a hundred pages worth of information, diagrams, schematics of circuits, and calculations by the time he started moving on to the areas he couldn’t fix before. Now however, Tsar was finding it easy to use the information to correct things. His progress was slow but steady as he looked over the information and actually began learning a lot about how mana and the forces of electricity interacted with each other. After what had to have been eighteen hours of nonstop erasing and rewriting things in the Grimoire Tsar was beat. He curled up and fell asleep.

The next day passed by in much the same manner. The insights he was gaining about mana and electricity kept growing as he went. Fixing and editing until all the information on page after page was glowing a nice shade of gold. He was slightly concerned that Radgar may have forgotten about him as he went to sleep yet again. But his fears were assuaged the next morning when he awoke to find Radgar sitting on a chair nearby.

“Good morning, Tsar, I hope you slept well. And I would like to apologize for not coming to start our training when I said I would. Me and Iggy have been experimenting with the effects of the totems and have discovered their limitations, and strengths.” Radgar spoke as Tsar joined him.

“Oh? What did you discover?” Tsar asked

“Well, we’ve discovered the effects of the totem are divided across the number of plants it is effecting. Meaning that if two plants are in the radius of effect each one gets half of the total benefit. That also means that extending the range of its influence can be detrimental depending on what you really want out of the totem. Still an incredibly powerful artifact.”

“That makes sense, if it didn’t have that limitation, I feel like it would be insanely broken. Can you imagine having several fields worth of crops that were growing 200 times faster than normal? Depending on the growing seasons in the area that could mean the difference between starving during the winter or having so much extra that its going to go bad before it can all be eaten.” Tsar said.

“Indeed. But for a powerful nation it could mean getting a hold of incredibly powerful resources once a year instead of every two hundred years. Certain trees, Flowers, Herbs, and roots have very powerful properties. Like giving permanent boosts to hard to unlock stats or altering the base values for resources to stats by certain amounts. Even increasing regeneration stats values. There are many different kinds, and they represent strategic resources for the nations of the world. The thing about those resources is that they are incredibly slow to grow. Some of them only reaching maturity after a thousand or more years. Your totems would make those resources more prevalent and therefore increase the power of a nation with those resources by a significant margin. I would caution you from revealing any of this type of Totem at all as even if it only provided a 10% boost you would have nations hunting you in order to force a slave contract on you to make more totems for them.”

Tsar paled at the thought. It was true, even a 10% reduction in the time it took to grow resources like that would be a tremendous boon for any nation. If they found out about something that could make them grow 200 times faster? He could potentially start a world war over something like that. Yep, no more Totems of nurture for the foreseeable future. Although it would be interesting to perhaps bury a stack of four in the middle of a desert and see what happened.

“Yeah, not gonna be showing off any of my totems to anyone I don’t trust. Even then I’ll probably keep them as secret as possible. I’m pretty sure the Shaman Class is supposed to help nations develop from primitive tribes. It’s a support class… but a support class that isn’t dedicated to single target healing and buffing. Its all mass buffs and the like.”

“Your hypothesis is definitely reasonable. But you are forgetting that it has incredible potential for being a magical attack powerhouse. You’ve only seen Wisps. But there are spirits out there that can raze entire cities to the ground overnight.” Radgar reasoned.

“That may be true, but my spirits can only go a certain distance away from me. Last I checked my Wisp can only get about 30 feet away from me before it won’t go any farther. And that distance hasn’t changed since I first got it.” Tsar countered.

“So that would make you more of a defense-oriented support. One that could be practically unassailable with the correct spirits bound to you. In a dungeon that would make you incredibly valuable. Especially if you could get some healing and buffing spells under your belt.” Radgar lapsed into silence after that.

Then Tsar remembered he needed to ask about the thresholds. So, he did.

“Ah! I should have told you about those sooner. There are four Mortal Thresholds for the Primary stats which are, Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Vitality, Intelligence, Wisdom, Perception, and Charisma. at each one you are offered a different choice. I don’t really remember what they are. But the first one is at 500 stat points, the next one is at 1000, then 1500, then 2000. The next thresholds are called the Core Thresholds. They start at 4000 then 8000 then 12000 then 16000. Again, they offer choices, but they vary from person to person. Then there are the Nascent Thresholds, and they start at 32000 points. Most people reach the first Threshold in the A- Tier but grinders tend to have the first three if not all of the mortal thresholds crossed depending on their classes by the time they even evolve into an A- Tier. It is one of the many reasons why Grinders are both feared and highly respected. Especially grinders with rare classes.” Radgar explained

Tsar’s mind was spinning with numbers if he was right, it would mean that Radgar himself had stats at over 32000 points. Which just seemed outright ridiculous. But when you think about just the stats gained by race leveling, then classes, then skills, then Titles, and potential other sources of stats like the herbs he’d mentioned earlier… Well, it wasn’t unreasonable to believe that there would be S+ tier individuals with stats in the hundreds of thousands. Especially Grinders. If Tsar only took into account, his Self-named title and only evolved vertically then by the S+ tier with just that he’d be close to the fourth threshold of the Core thresholds in his willpower stat alone. That wasn’t considering class levels, race levels, evolution bonuses, skills, or anything else that could occur between then and now.

“Well, that’s good to know.” Tsar said scratching the back of his head, “I got two new titles for making those Totems and the Talisman though, so my stats have changed. I didn’t know about the thresholds, so I pissed away the opportunity to actually pick my first threshold bonus. Got the crappy lifespan modifier and I am stuck with it forever.”

Radgar chuckled at that shaking his head, “Only someone like you would think that enhancing the lifespan modifier is ‘crappy’. But I will admit that it is slightly useless to you who has infinite retries. Normally the Lifespan stat is equal to five years of life per point by the way. For elves its 20 years per point and they normally start out with 200 points in that stat. By the way, which Titles did you get, I’m curious.”

Tsar felt his mouth drop at that statement. That meant that as his current race he had a life expectancy of over five thousand years! He could take all the time in the world to level up and he’d be just fine. Shaking his head Tsar answered without really thinking about it.

“[Legend] and [Hero]”

“Hmmm… You may want to hide those two with your talisman when you head out for your adventures. Both are well known in their effects and will make you stand out a lot before you are ready for that sort of attention… You really are a Hero though. At least to me and Iggy” Radgar said with a slight sigh.

“How in the world could I be a Hero to you two? Isn’t Iggy an L Tier tree? And you are S+ almost L Tier yourself. No way I could be anything more than a slight annoyance to you two. Maybe a pet? Or a child?”

Radgar laughed a deep belly laugh and actually fell off his seat onto the floor.

“My dear boy…” he managed between gasps, “You have no idea what you’ve done for both me and especially Iggy… You see, World Tree Saplings and indeed trees in general have certain conditions necessary for their leveling. They don’t gain EXP the same way we do. They gain EXP through two factors growth and age. World Tree Saplings in particular have a… well a sort of curse associated with their race. If they do not reach their evolution threshold to become an Adolescent World Tree before they reach a certain age, they will wither and eventually die.” Radgar looked sad and his voice was heavy as he continued, “When Iggy chose me to be her druid, unknown to both of us at the time, the previous Druid King was furious. He had been waiting for her seed to mature for over five hundred years at the time. But like I said we were unaware of this. In his fury Dramius went to a curse mage and had him place a very weak curse on Iggy’s seed that would sap away her energy and slow down her growth. It was so minimal that we didn’t even realize it was there for close to 5000 years. Of course, we broke the curse as soon as we found out about it. But… it was too late. The damage had been done. Our best calculations put her growth at over five hundred years behind schedule for her to be able to evolve… That is when I gained my Berserker Class.”

Radgar had returned to his seat and his eyes held a far off look about them. as if he were seeing the past.

“But my dear boy, you have all but guaranteed that Iggy will not only meet the deadline. But will surpass it with a great deal of time to spare… So yes. Even at your low tier and level, you are indeed a Hero to us both.”

“I second the motion and it passes by majority rule.” Iggy giggled, “But seriously… Thank you Tsar. You saved my life, even if it would have been another ten thousand years from now.”

“Well, I would do it again in a heartbeat. You two are my friends. I’m glad I could prevent you from dying 10,000 years from now. As weird as it feels to me, I’ll probably still be around by then, I look forward to seeing what you become.” Tsar said trying to sound nonchalant about it.

“Well, now that we’ve got the mushy feely bit out of the way for today, how about some hand-to-hand combat training?” Radgar said with mock excitement in his voice.

+++

Many hours later, Tsar felt like he’d laid out on a cutting board while a giant chef went to town on him with a meat tenderizer. Radgar had not gone easy on him at all. At first, they’d ‘sparred’ for nearly five hours straight. During the ‘sparring’ session Tsar had needed to partake of no less than four healing potions before Radgar called it a day and left him with instructions that he was to practice his spells, making sure to use all of his mana. And keep reading his Grimoire. Also strangely enough, he had told Tsar not to open any notifications until he was told to. It was a strange bit of instruction, but Tsar decided to listen to him about it.

So, Tsar practiced using Mana Bullet. Changing its size, shape, and all sorts of things. His favorite was when he used it to replicate the destructo disk. But Tsar quickly ran out of mana and his fun was over for the moment. He would work on fixing the Grimoire of Lightning for an hour then empty his mana again. Rinse and repeat until bedtime.

They continued that cycle for three weeks. The sparring sessions were a mixture of sparring and instruction. Every day the sparring would start out as hand-to-hand combat, then, about halfway through the day, Radgar would have Tsar use the various weapons that Iggy had made out of her wood for him. Tsar couldn’t be entirely sure, but he thought that the swords, Spears, daggers, clubs, staves, and bow and arrows, she had made for him were actually a lot better than ones made out of steel would be. They were supposed to be training weapons, but Tsar was certain that if he had hair he could shave with the wooden weapons. He’d certainly made Radgar bleed a few times when he’d actually managed to land a hit. The only complaint that Tsar had about the weapons themselves was that they were obvious designed for someone much larger than he was. Especially the bow.

Over the course of the past three weeks Tsar became very comfortable with the weapons, and actually felt like he was somewhat competent unarmed now. Another good thing about the training was that he wasn’t clumsy anymore. He’d gotten used to being able to jump nearly fifty feet into the air. His mind was seeing things on a different level of perspective now, one that actually fit with his current capabilities.

On the fourth week Radgar switched up the training to weapons exclusively, and even started coming at Tsar with weapons himself. Which at first terrified him. During all of their sparring Radgar had fought him only using his hands. Now he was bringing swords and spears and everything else just like Tsar. Objectively Tsar knew there wasn’t much to fear. If he died it wasn’t the end of the world. Just a setback. But having a sword swinging at your face or plunging towards your heart is a hard phobia to break. At least that’s technically what it was. Tsar no longer had a rational reason to fear death. But he still did. So, facing off against Radgar who steadily increased his intensity level was a terrifying experience where he truly felt like he was moments from death on a regular basis.

As one month blurred into the next and then the next, Tsar was starting to feel pretty anxious about the notifications that were constantly begging for his attention. But he was a man… Frogglin, of his word. So, he restrained himself from looking. It wasn’t hard most of the time to ignore it. He was making tremendous progress with the Grimoire of Lightning. He’d reached the point where the very first spell was located. The spell had had all sorts of wrong materials or blatant lies mixed in with its diagrams and formulas. Honestly the majority of the formulas were completely irrelevant to Tsar as he didn’t actually need to use them. But for his own piece of mind, he corrected and fixed the information anyways. The first spell was called quite simply ‘spark’ and it fired off a small jolt of lightning into a target no more than ten feet away. When he used the spell, it looked like a beam of light about as thick as a pencil. It didn’t look like a spark or an arc of electricity, it was like a laser pointer beam through thick mist. And contrary to its unassuming looks the spell was actually quite deadly. He’d only hit practice targets with it. but where it hit, it bored a hole through the target and released the electricity to do what it did. His targets were riddled with holes that had massive spiderwebs of burn marks around the holes.

Tsar was pretty sure the Spark spell shouldn’t normally be this potent, but because he had fixed its falsehoods in the spell construct it was much better. The Grimoire had described the spell as setting of a jagged arc of electricity up to ten feet away to stun and disable foes. That description was far from correct. It made Tsar wonder how much he was going to end up changing the Grimoires contents by the time he reached the end. He honestly hadn’t found a single page that he hadn’t had to correct something on.

It wasn’t all just training though; Iggy would occasionally take Tsar to see more of her statues. And about once a week Radgar would break out wine and they would sit around drinking and telling stories. Admittedly, Tsar had far fewer stories to share. But he did have something to share that neither Radgar nor Iggy could get enough of. Music. Tsar had described a guitar to Iggy, and she’d made one for him, saying that it was a lot like a lute, only different. In his past life he’d been passable at playing a few songs on the guitar, but he’d never really gotten good at it. Now he was sure that he could have made a living playing the guitar and singing in any genre.

In modern life on Earth, it is almost impossible to go more than a few days without hearing some kind of music. A passing car, going to a bar, sitting at a restaurant, watching TV. Music is intrinsically part of humanities everyday life on Earth even if we hardly ever realize it. Using Zen Meditation, Tsar was able to remember every chord, every lyric, every note, of every song he’d ever heard, perfectly. And the most incredible bit was that he could use Mimic on his memories to replicate the motions of guitarists that he’s seen playing, both on the Tube and in real life concerts. Translating the songs from English to Eldar, which is the language Iggy and Radgar spoke, was the biggest challenge. It only took him a couple of weeks to figure out dozens of songs. And boy Iggy and Radgar loved music.

The sparring took a turn for the more dramatic as Radgar instructed Tsar to use magic as they fought. When Tsar objected because he feared that it would cause too much damage to Radgar if he hit him in a vital area Radgar smiled at Tsar then took his own sword and drove it straight through his own head before yanking it back out twitching like mad as his body healed the damage before Tsar’s very eyes. Tsar was absolutely dumbstruck by the display.

“Listen up kid, as you start to reach certain levels and thresholds in your stats… the term vital sort of becomes a suggestion more than reality. As you can see.” Radgar said as he wiped his own blood off of the freshly healed area of his forehead that hadn’t even left a scar, “Even the brain becomes more of a… thought assistance device. After a certain point the only way to kill something is to literally hack it to pieces and burn the pieces. Otherwise, most at my level can recover from just about anything. Don’t even bother thinking about those monsters who are even higher than I am. Now that that is covered, let’s see if you can actually do anything with that magic of yours.”

Turns out Tsar’s lightning magic could pretty easily hit Radgar. It just didn’t do anything. Mana Bullet was too slow to use fighting against Radgar, but that didn’t mean that Tsar didn’t use it. Making Radgar swat away bullet while he closed distance, or firing it point blank range in his face when he needed to escape and distract. It was fairly useful. The hardest part of using magic while fighting was getting over the need to gesture with his hands to cast the spells. It wasn’t necessary and telegraphed what he was about to do. He could cast spells from anywhere though not just his hands. And breaking the habit of using them exclusively took a while.

After nearly seven months they had just ended their sparring session and Radgar invited Tsar to come have dinner with him and Iggy. They ate a meal of leafy greens and roots like usual, though it was in an uncustomary silence. Once they finished Radgar poured them both a cup of wine and sat back in a recliner that Tsar had given Iggy the idea to build.

“Tsar, I’ll be frank with you son. I didn’t expect you to stick it out with this training for so long. You’ve reached a point in all of your weapon’s skills that normally my students take two years to reach though. And the way that you use your spell’s during combat is shocking, forgive the pun. You have a long way to go yet before you can be considered a master. If you stayed here for the next fifty years training, you would probably reach that point here. But… Iggy if you will.” Radgar spoke

“Of course, Dearest.” Iggy said with a smile in her voice. Tsar always wondered how she did that. It was like you could hear her facial expressions.

Anyway, a moment later a pendant hung on a chain made of Iggy’s wood appeared on Radgar’s lap. He lifted it up and gave it a look. The pendant was a round coin made of wood, with a depiction of a World Tree carved into its face. Across its trunk was a set of crossed spears and in the leaves were three words in a language that Tsar didn’t know until he examined them. “Adventure Always Awaits” it said across the top.

“Tsar Bomba. You have hear-by graduated from the triple A Academy of basic combat readiness for adventurers. And in an unusual turn of events, you have come in as both first and last of your class. Seeing as you were the only member of your class… Anyway, you’ve graduated, you are free to look at your notifications again, and classes have been dismissed. Congratulations!” Radgar said with a smile as he slid the pendant over Tsar’s neck and rested the chain on his shoulders.

Tsar was dumbfounded. Radgar wasn’t going to train him anymore? Was he free to stay for a while longer? Did they expect him to pack up his stuff and head out right away?

“Well don’t be upset boy, you’ve just graduated the academy class work. You have adventures to go on. Spells to figure out and people to meet beyond my own home. You’ll need to hit level 30 before you can head out. But I wouldn’t be surprised if you are damn close already. You are going to have a lot of notifications to go through. But for now, let’s drink.” Radgar said as he downed a cup of wine.