Alex woke up before sunrise again. Laying in bed beside Erin, he reflected on the previous day:

Well, I added a change log so I can at least see when abilities, skills, and stats have increased. I will probably want live notifications at some point, but at least this way I can look back and try to remember what happened when an increase occurred to figure out what I’m doing right or wrong.

Most of the day, however, was spent working on getting to the point where I can pay for my own food and board. I was only partially successful here – and I didn’t really ask Mother Edith how much the potions she mentioned would sell for, so I’m not entirely sure that the profit will be enough to live off of even if I do get to that point today as she expects me to.

Regardless, I did get a new skill – Identify – which has its own ability and which has been the only ability I’ve leveled so far. I’ve got to speed up my leveling.

Oh, I did get that random increase in Wisdom before I added the changelog – that most likely came from casting my Blades the day before since I didn’t really do anything before noticing the increase yesterday.

So, I need more planning. I’ve been sort of just moving from thing to thing without really thinking ahead.

Alex activated his spell language dictionary ability by thinking spell language dictionary and a wholly new interface opened in front of him. It was blue, like his status, but contained its own tabs. While the dictionary itself interested him he was trying to take some notes so he quickly switched to the second tab labeled “Notes” and began entering goals. After a few minutes, his list looked like this:

* make money from potions

* experience bars for abilities, skills, and stats

* second pair of clothes

* spell language learning

* leveling plan

Hmm … Alex mused, The potions, clothes, and spell language learning are all longer term goals than simply coming up with a leveling plan and finding experience bars for the various parts of my status. I’d also like to combine my status, abilities, and spell dictionary interfaces so that I just have one massive interface with lots of tabs or perhaps multiple windows available. The interaction is a bit dull with having to remember different commands to bring up the screens when the named tab system gives an easy and intuitive method for switching between different kinds of content.

As he mused about how to combine the interfaces and how the tabs might pull in the information his mind remembered another trick … he could simply mirror any interface screen in a tab by naming the tab the same thing as the command he could use to open the screen in the first place.

So, Alex opened up his status and added tabs for his abilities, the spell language dictionary, and notes. Chuckling internally, he switched back to his basic stats screen and began poking around the interface trying to find a record of his experience gained – or some kind of progress bar. He kept at it for about 20 minutes before he gave up, defeated.

Well, that was frustrating. Most of the time so far, I’ve been lucky enough to simply need the information that’s already collected in one of the skills I have so the system has simply given me the information when I wondered how to do something. I guess that this is something that most people don’t wonder about at level 1.

I just need someone to let me know how they measure progress, though if I were on Earth I’d look for documentation or some kind of help system …

Alex face-palmed and began blushing.

Wow, I’m retarded. Only two days have gone by and I’m already forgetting what few things Phoebe taught me. Wisdom gains information …

…

Nothing happened. No new blue screen interface. No information appeared at all.

Erm, let’s try: wisdom progress information …

wisdom leveling information …

wisdom experience formula information ding

Wisdom experience formula

floor(10*W*log(W))

Where

W = wisdom

And if that worked, maybe this will: wisdom experience information

Wisdom experience

16 mana regenerated

Ahh, so by regenerating mana I gain experience towards gaining Wisdom increases. I need to be constantly draining my mana so that I can increase my Wisdom as quickly as possible – I also need to do the same for my health and stamina since they’ll likely increase my Vitality and Metabolism stats. I’ll just check that: vitality and metabolism experience formula information.

Vitality experience formula

floor(10*V*log(V))

Where

V = vitality

Metabolism experience formula

floor(10*M*log(M))

Where

M = metabolism

Okay, so those are pretty clear. They scale like n*log(n), so they’ll get harder to level as I gain levels, but not nearly so hard to level as some RPG games which scale exponentially. Leveling these stats should mostly be a case of ensuring that I’m constantly regenerating instead of wasting time – like all of yesterday.

That said, I wonder how I’ll level the other three base stats … constitution, intelligence, and endurance experience formula information.

Constitution experience formula

2

Intelligence experience formula

2

Endurance experience formula

2

Uh … constitution experience information

Constitution experience

0 of 2 natural Vitality levels gained

Hmm … it seems like these three will simply grow as I regenerate the health, mana, and stamina that I need for the other three stats. If that’s true, then my first priority is to figure out how to constantly drain HP, MP, and SP so that I can level at the maximum possible rate. I’ll partially verify that by checking out the equivalent for Wisdom: intelligence experience information.

Intelligence experience

1 of 2 natural Wisdom levels gained

Okay, so I’ll assume I’m correct until I can get some verification later. First I need to concoct a debuff spell that will constantly decrease my HP, MP, and SP by the amount that I regenerate for each of those so that I can stay near my maximum possible values, but still gain experience towards increasing my six base stats.

Erin snorted and woke herself up. It wasn’t clear whether the sound of the snort woke her or something else, but it was certainly convenient timing. After greeting each other and getting dressed, the pair went downstairs for breakfast. They chatted amicably throughout most of their meal about their previous day but as the meal wound down, Erin gave Alex some more information about her mission.

“We’re going to check out the first floor of the slime dungeon for a reason. The more red slimes we fight there, the sooner the dungeon is likely to expel its forces towards the town. While we expect that the forces will come within the next month, that’s too long for the Wardens to be on guard against an attack and too long to keep what adventurers we have on the town’s payroll against the eventual fight.”

“We should be able to narrow it down to either within the next two weeks or after that. If it’s within two weeks, we’ll be sending out parties to check out the first level of the dungeon every two days. I’ll have to go around every three or so trips on an expedition into the dungeon. If it’s likely to be more than two weeks, we’ll just check every Sunday to see if the timeline has moved up or not.”

“That said, what are your plans for the day?” Erin concluded.

“Well, thanks for the heads-up.” Alex commented, “I think that I’ll be working on potions for most of the day. I put basically all my efforts yesterday into getting more herbs for today so that I can increase my Potions skill without spending as much time gathering.”

“I’ll eventually increase my Herbalism as well, but I’m trying to level up and make plans for increasing my level as quickly as possible. I hate feeling vulnerable and Phoebe mentioned that below level 10 people are very vulnerable. Besides, being as strong as possible will allow me to do the things I want without nearly as much danger.”

“But before that, I’m going to be poking around my skills and abilities so that I can try to figure out if I can measure the experience I have for each of them. Knowing how close I am to gaining a level is the first step in being able to prioritize how to level up.”

“Oh,” Erin interjected, “As far as skills go the formula is pretty easy: you get one-third of the sum of your abilities’ accumulated experience and the sum of whatever experience you get for using knowledge at your current level. So … for my Archery skill, for example, I get experience for doing damage to monsters. I have an active ability, Snipe, that has Archery as its governing skill. When I do damage to a monster at or below my level with Snipe, then Snipe gains experience. One-third of the total experience that Snipe has is added to my Archery skill.”

“Now, if I see a wolf, for example, which is at my level and I sneak up close to it then activate my Snipe ability while targeting the wolf’s eye – if I successfully hit its eye, I will have applied my knowledge of the arrow’s flight, the wolf’s movement, and how the Snipe ability affects the arrow's flight to gain a hit on a critical body part for the wolf. If it’s the first time I’ve done such a thing, I’ll definitely gain a bit of a reward directly to my Archery skill for showing that I am learning about Archery and getting better at successfully making hard shots.”

Alex replied, “So for skills with no ability, you have to demonstrate that you’re learning the knowledge that the skill gave you to level up. Yet with skills which govern some ability, you could just grind the skill up by using the ability enough that it forces a level up.”

“Yes, but leveling up by just using the experience from abilities isn’t the best path. If you think about your skills and try to gain more abilities as well as leveling your current abilities in the skill, you’ll be able to speed up your leveling:”

“Having 3 abilities for a governing skill means that each one only has to increase in level once for you to automatically gain a level in the governing skill. Having 6 abilities means that your governing skill can gain levels even faster than your individual abilities and you’ll be able to focus on particular areas to improve while still gaining knowledge of the overall skill by occasionally using the extraneous abilities.”

“Meanwhile, having no abilities in a skill means you really have to apply yourself to reach some kind of threshold so that the system recognizes your efforts and gives you experience. Having no abilities means that you definitely need to think about the skill and experiment as much as possible so that you can discover some ability to ease your leveling. Getting three abilities for each skill should be a major goal for you if you plan to level up quickly.”

“Okay, thanks for the info.” replied Alex. “It’s already seven, so you should probably go on your expedition. I’ll be waiting for your return tonight!”

Erin said goodbye and headed out to scout the slime dungeon. Alex sat at the table for a bit longer exploring the experience formulas for skills and abilities. Regardless of the skill or ability, he found that the formula was based upon the same formula as Wisdom, Vitality, and Metabolism: floor(10*N*log(N)). The only difference from the stats’ formula was that since skills started at level 1 instead of the 10 which the basic stats started from, the formula used M+9 in place of N above. So the full formula for each skill or ability was: floor(10*[M+9]*log(M+9)). At level 1, every skill or ability took 100 experience to gain a level. To get from 2 to 3, it took 114 experience and 129 to the next level.

Using the simple scripting language he’d remembered to manipulate the interface, Alex was able to modify the stats and abilities pages to include the experience for each stat or ability. There was plenty of room below the names of the stats or abilities to include their actual level as well as the experience bar, leaving the description of the ability to cover the right portion of the screens. He also added a short descriptor below the experience bar to explain what was being shown … so the Wisdom descriptor currently showed as “16 / 114 (14%)” and the experience bar was 14% full.

He also added a small script to help him figure out when he gained experience directly to a skill instead of through an ability. He did this by monitoring a skill’s current experience as well as the current experience for all the abilities it governed. When the skill’s experience increased, the script checked all the abilities that the skill governed and, if the total experience that the skill gained was more than one-third of the experience gained by all its governed skills, then something happened which increased the skill’s experience other than an increase in ability experience. Alex marked these events by logging a change in the changelog: “time – Skill X gained special experience”.

Okay, well I’ve gotten some things done this morning already. I can mark off experience bars from my list – and it’s only eight thirty! I also have pretty much the best leveling plan I can come up with for basic statistics already: a constantly-running debuff spell that drains my HP, MP, and SP to allow natural regeneration to always be running. I’ll aim to keep each stat at least one full natural regeneration cycle away from max so that I don’t have to worry about the actual interval that regeneration uses.

Hmm … the question now is if I should immediately go to work on potions or if I should try to quickly put together a spell to allow my regeneration to run at maximum. Alex ruminated on the question for a few minutes but finally thought I don’t really want to waste the regeneration time, so I’ll bang out a debuff spell first. If I don’t make enough progress in potions, I’ll still sell to Mother Edith what I make today so that I have some cash to buy some more ingredients for tomorrow and, hopefully, that will be enough that I don’t have to go back to harvesting before I achieve the level of potions that Mother Edith can sell to customers.

So, Alex spent quite a bit of time learning about the spell language. He first opened up his spell language dictionary and examined his Blade spell. After switching back and forth for a few minutes trying to translate the spell from the hexagon-based figures to English so that he could understand it, he messed about with the interface until he figured out how to have two screens up at once. He immediately split his interface up into three screens with the dictionary to the left, the spell in hexagon form on the right, and his English translation in a new tab of his dictionaries’ notes section below both of the above screens.

With this change, he was able to translate the spell far more quickly. He was lucky that the goddesses recognized the value of a search function: one was built into the spell language dictionary, so all he had to do was draw each glyph and he’d immediately be taken to the entry for that glyph in the dictionary.

As he translated the spell he grew more and more excited. It contained some of the hallmarks of a structured programming language. There were branching constructs (if blah is true then do blah else do blah) which allowed the mage to choose between two different actions based upon some kind of condition. There were looping constructs (while blah is true do blah). There were places to store information (store value in location). There were ways to compound commands (do all of blah and blah and blah …). There were even obvious calculations being performed (value + value).

If the spell language is effectively a programming language for physics, then I’ll be able to do a lot very rapidly. All my learning and experience that I applied for years to my job will have real-life consequences here. I’ll be able to make spells more mana-efficient, have better power-scaling, and experiments with different kinds of effects will be relatively painless!

Ah … that is if there aren’t any more “gotcha's” like when I didn’t complete my first casting of a spell and I got blow-back … I wonder what happens when you make a syntax error in the spell language? Probably nothing good.

Shit. Completing a new spell before I go to work on Potions is unrealistic. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I do know just enough to be dangerous to myself. With the pain I endured from my first experiment with spells, I’m certainly not going to rush this.

So thinking, Alex got up and went to Mother Edith’s shop. He received the herbs he’d effectively bought the day before and immediately went to work making new potions. Unfortunately, he seemed to have hit a barrier. He couldn’t get above 8 units per second for 25 seconds. He stopped for a few minutes and watched the two girls making potions on the other side of his table.

After watching for a while, he realized that the girls were always adding Striander, which was one of the herbs needed for all three of his basic potions, first. When Mother Edith had helped him to make his potions yesterday, she hadn’t mentioned the order he should add them to the mortar and pestle while grinding the paste. Both girls were doing it, though, and they were doing it consistently.

He decided to try it himself.

After that decision, none of the potions he made were under 10 units per second for 27 seconds, but he still hadn’t hit 10 units per second for 30 seconds. Extending his previous thought, he wondered if he should be adding the mana flower’s leaves, which was also required for all three potions, second instead of third. Immediately after making that change, every potion he made was over Mother Edith’s limit. He even had several which were better; his best was 12 health per second for 32 seconds.

He asked Mother Edith about the order of the ingredients and why it helped the final product so much. Her response was enlightening: “Little Alex, making potions is like any other creative process. There are better and worse ways of doing things. The Striander that you are using is the base and catalyst for all three potions. When you crush it first, it stabilizes the remaining ingredients when you’re crushing them.”

“By having the base in the mortar when you crushed the other ingredients, you largely slowed the basic magic of those ingredients from escaping into the surrounding sea of mana. When you added the mana flower’s leaves into the mortar second, you added yet another stabilizing element before adding the most unstable bits. The mana flower’s leaves form a sort of barrier against mana flow, so adding the final ingredients last allowed your base to slow down the release of their magic while the barrier formed from the mana flower leaves kept what did escape from the base from going anywhere until it could be reabsorbed by the mixture.”

“Learning that the order of ingredients is important is the first major step to becoming a successful alchemist. Congratulations! From now on, you’ll be able to slowly make enough money to live off of. I’d recommend that you keep buying the ingredients from me directly and just make as many potions as you can until you get your Potions skill up to level 10. You’ll not make as much as you would if you collected the ingredients yourself, but you’ll still have enough to afford the West Inn and you’ll be able to use more exotic herbs far faster than if you collect all those basic herbs yourself. Collecting those herbs will then level up your Herbalism skill far faster than the basic herbs would have.”

Alex said “Thanks for the advice! I’ll certainly follow it since I want to level up as quickly as possible to level 10. I’d really like a second pair of clothes, though, so that these can be washed. Do you think it’d be okay to buy those today?”

Mother Edith replied “Ach, another pair of simple pants and shirt would cost you 5 small silver. I don’t want you to be smelling, so I’ll lend it to you. You can pay me back when you’ve got it free but I’d expect that to be before a month from now, okay?”

Alex agreed and Mother Edith gave him the currency along with two small copper for his and Erin’s trips to the cleaning room for the night. He went to get a late lunch – his work on the potions had taken him until 2 pm.

As he ate, he heard snippets of conversation from around the room “… dungeons’ attacks are still really odd, my grandma always said that the dungeons used to spawn no more monsters than what they needed to defend themselves …” “… wish that we’d get back to the old days when it was safe to travel …” “… hope the slime’s attack isn’t too coordinated this time. I know they’re not the brightest, but masses of level 10 monsters are still a threat to most of the people here …” and so on.

Most of the women around him seemed to have heard about the Warden’s report from yesterday and were worried about the attack, but the one talking about the change in the dungeons’ actions intrigued him. He decided he’d ask Erin for more details about it tonight if she wasn’t too tired from her trip. He was coming to believe that nearly everyone in town paid for lunch from one of the two inns – easily over a hundred people moved through the inn while he was there for only a single hour.

After lunch he had no immediate plans besides going back to Mother Edith’s and training his potions skill even further, so he went to his room quickly to examine his status and see how he was progressing.

His Potions skill had gained a level. By examining the changelog, Alex figured out that he must have gained 100 experience for the skill when he finished his first potion with the ingredients in the proper order. The Identify skill had also gained a level, apparently shortly before his breakthrough in Potions he’d finally used the active Identify ability enough to push the skill over the threshold.

He’d also gained another level in the Identify ability, but that wasn’t nearly as exciting to Alex as almost having enough skills leveled to get an overall level increase. In fact, when he looked through his skills, he noticed that his spell language experience bar was nearly full – 98% of the way full.

I must have shown comprehension of the spell language by just translating the Blade spell. I bet if I translate one more spell, I’ll level that up and reach my first personal level gain!

So Alex spent 45 minutes translating Heal from the spell language to English. After he was done, he looked at his status and was excited to see that he’d gained level two in the spell language skill and, thus, increased his personal level to 2!

He did a quick victory dance and decided that he wanted to go see a mage to see if he could figure out a safe way to experiment so that he could design his debuff spells to increase his base stats. Only having a single point increase was unacceptable, but he hadn’t remembered to cast a spell before heading to Mother Edith’s this morning and so he hadn’t even gotten the mana regeneration that he could have had for free throughout the morning and early afternoon.

He went downstairs and asked Marta where he could find someone who could talk to him about making spells. She blinked, nonplussed, and said: “I’m not so sure that anyone in Scottstown makes spells, but if someone does I’d lay money that it’s Victoria over at the Wardens’ place. Just go east past the square, then head south on the first cross street. The Wardens’ building is the large one with a stable, you can’t miss it.”

Alex thanked her for the help and made his way to the Dungeon Wardens’ building. Upon entering he found a small room with several tables and chairs. Only a few ladies were present and they were split up into a group of four playing a card game and another group of five playing a dice game. He asked the first group if they could direct him to Victoria and got some weird looks, but one of them told him to check the basement down the stairs around the corner – and she pointed towards the corner in question. After thanking her, Alex headed that way.

Once he descended to the basement, he saw a red-headed woman with a thin, athletic frame inside an extremely clear glass room. The walls were glass as was a layer over the floor of the basement and the ceiling of the basement as well. There were lines etched into both sides of the glass forming lots and lots of hexagons of the spell language. He saw dozens, if not hundreds, of individual clusters of spell language.

He didn’t see a door to the room. The woman was facing away from him and looking down at a table full of paper – the first paper he’d actually seen since entering Marin.

I’m not so comfortable touching that large of a spell working, so I’ll try calling out to her. Alex thought before he engaged in the most futile minutes of his life so far. No sound would get through to her. Finally, he gave up and gently knocked.

…

Nothing …

…

He knocked more firmly. He banged. Again, he looked around in despair and noticed a humongous hammer leaning against the wall near the stairwell. It had some pretty significant scarring on the face of one side and the entire half of the hammer from that face to the shaft was covered in … burn marks and ash?

Nervous again, he barely hefted the hammer. He had to support it close to the head of the hammer well over halfway up the shaft. He waddled back to the Glass Vault of Insecurity and turned his entire body with his hips to the right. Turning back towards the vault, he led with the burnt end of the Hammer of HolyFuckHowHeavyCanItBe? and, just as the hammer reached the glass, he lost his grip on it dropping it and wrenching himself backward.

If that lands on me, I’m just going to die. was Alex’s thought as he fell back on his left side and his right ankle popped from his body’s thrust away from the floor and the descending Hammer of Hephaestus’ Wrath.

Finally, the woman in the Glass Vault of Insecurity deigned to notice his presence – just in time to see him plonking on his ass and rolling heels over head to try to escape the vengeance of the Hammer of Hippocrates’ Bane.

Not only is that the heaviest hammer in existence, it’s also a strong candidate for a tool of vengeance from the God of Smiths upon an unworthy challenger as well as potentially the strongest violator of the Hippocratic Oath. Alex thought as he recovered by staring at the ceiling in exhaustion.

He heard a soft sigh of air and felt a pressure change and then “I’m sorry, were you trying to get my attention?”.

Looking up he met Victoria’s eyes for the first time. They were a soft green. He blushed from his encounter with the hammer and stood up before saying “I’d heard that you might be the only person in town who designs spells. I’d like to make some spells of my own, but after suffering from an immense headache due to simply not completing the casting of a spell I had second thoughts about whether or not I could even survive making a single error in writing a spell. I was hoping that you might have some advice on how it’s done safely.”

Victoria blinked once, twice, three times … then she burst out laughing.