Waking up in a sweat, Urist sat up, short of breath.

A weird dream a nightmare or what?

Wiping the sweat off his brow, he soon took noticed that all the dwarfs were huddled talking lazily to one another. He sighed in relief that they listened and stayed in the base until they could confirm the marketplace. Looking at the timer in his head it displayed 10 A.M. which meant the time was almost at hand.

Urist rustled his hair and asked, “What's the status report. Did anything happen to me while I was out cold?”

Seeing their boss wake up the dwarfs grew excited, “Boss. It’s as you said two new dwarfs came out of that strange room.”

“Boss are you alright? You passed out so suddenly.”

Waving them off Urist smiled, “I’m fine, I’m fine. Tell me who are these new dwarfs?”

The pack of dwarfs moved out of the way to reveal two figures standing. One a short dwarf wearing overalls and the other being a tall male dwarf wearing gambeson armor and a copper sword on his belt.

“And your names are?”

The stoic looking military man spoke first, “I am named Elrish and I am a warrior.”

Behind him, the timid girl replied, “I’m Yri and umm I’m a farmer…”

Standing up Urist went over to them and placed his hands on their shoulders, “Welcome to the mountain home. Your talents are much needed.”

It startled the new dwarfs a bit, but they didn’t shrug off Urist’s hands. Welcoming them Urist turned to the rest of the members, “Ok everyone we have a lot to prepare for and get ready. Everyone follow me back to the room to assign your abilities.”

The pack of confused dwarfs followed after Urist, thanks to the light of the room, it was easy to travel to. Walking to the red crystal in the room Urist put his hand on top of it and a screen appeared in front of him.

Name: Urist

Gender: Male

Race: Minor Dwarf

Position: Civilization Leader

Age: 8 days

Exp: 217

Knowledge: Otherworldly(Tier 1) (Tier 5 - locked), Survival(Tier 5), Forging(Tier 3), Planting (Tier 1), Cooking (Tier 4), Fishing (Tier 2), …”

Skill Slots:

Head: [Empty], [Empty], [Empty]

Body: [Dwarven Bloodline(Tier 1)], [Empty]

Legs: [Empty], [Empty]

Available skills: Head: Origin Flame, Head: Map, Legs: Explorer, Head: Swordsmanship, Body: Strengthening, Head: Mana Seed…

Since he was the one to bind the crystal he knew what all this information meant and started to explain to the dwarfs behind him. The two most important things to know is tier, experience, knowledge, and skill slots.

Tier was a simple one to understand that the higher the knowledge the more they understood of that subject. For Skill Slots, it would be showing the person proficiency in invoking the skill or its passive ability.

The experience came from doing certain things in one life such as making things, killing things, and discovering things. The experience could be used to upgrade knowledge or skills to a higher tier level if the Armament Stone was at a higher level.

Knowledge was more of a ranking about how much information a person had about a subject. The knowledge could be increased by life exp points or doing the hard work for yourself.

On the other side of the Coin, Skill Slots was the limit a body could hold that could be expanded. The method he learned of was raising bloodlines, eating special things foods, lucky encounters, or using items.

Urist thought the crystal itself would be pretty bullshit if it didn’t tier soft-lock levels. For example to learn a level one skill you’d have to spend 100 life exp. But if you wanted to upgrade a tier-one to a tier two, the person would have to use 1000 life exp points. And to rank it up to tier 3 it came to a whopping 10000 points.

If it was a tier 2 crystal the points would be reduced to 200 points and tier three would be reduced to 2000 points.

After telling the dwarfs all this information, Urist asked them how many Skill Slots they had in each category and was surprised. Uria had five head, one for body and one for leg Rat and Rork had two head, three body, two leg.

Ormila, Urmom, Ulrn, and Ariel had the same layout Three head, Three-body, and one leg. Uroa and Briana had four head, one body, two legs. Urist concluded that they must have settled in such a way because of how they worked these last seven days.

If not, it would be too much of a coincidence for the skills to take such a layout. I wonder how our new arrivals stack up to us? Urist turned to the new members and them to check their skill layout. He found out that Elrish had two:four: one while Yri had two:two: three.

Urist helped everyone pick out skills except for Elrish and Yri who said they already had skills slotted. One by one he and the dwarfs in question went through the options and they picked out ones fitting for their jobs. Asking them to show the detail of what the skills implied.

It took about a half-hour to set everyone skills before Urist himself decided to do his own. Everyone besides the two newbies sat around as the knowledge of the skills integrated with their bodies.

For Urist he picked out the skills Origin Flame, Map, and Mana Seed for his head skills. For his Body skill, he chose Strengthening.

And finally for legs Explorer and a skill called Forest Feet. When he pressed confirm another wave of information flowed inside his brain making him double over.

New timers started popping in his head telling him that it would take an hour for all the skills to integrate. It didn’t feel that good, but he managed to get some words out to the new dwarfs.

“Elrish, Yri as I told you before keep the fire going and eat bring over some water bottles, smoked fish, and squirrel jerky. We’ll eat together after this passes, sorry to put you through this right in the beginning.”

Elrish gave a hearty chuckle, “No worries boss we are family now right?”

Holding his pounding head, Urist nodded his head with a smile, “Yes, we are.”