Not long after I arrived in Virtue, mass importation of stone and soil began and the construction of the city began in earnest. With the help of Aether, establishing one building after another following some sort of cookie cutter template based on the area the pocket dimension had expanded to reach, was quickly and efficiently accomplished. Being as I possessed a Tier 3 skill and was significantly under the age of 16, my ability to remain up until the age of 16 was never in jeopardy.

When the barracks-like orphanage was completed, I moved into the room I shared with 3 other children of similar age. Plain, 2 bunk beds and 4 wardrobes and a square table with 4 chairs, but it was a larger room and nicer accommodations than I had any reason to expect.

I wanted to earn some money by helping with the construction efforts, though my contributions were limited as I didn't want to out myself as an Elementalist at my age, so I only used the skills I would see stonemasons and carpenters and similarly innocuous people using, and I would only assist with a particular type of work until I'd unlocked its associated skill.

Han Seoul never explained why he was angry I became an Elementalist, if I had to guess the real problem was probably his pride, but he was cunning enough that I didn't want to act on that assumption and expose myself without better understanding the ramifications of doing so. As for why I would change my job as soon as I became qualified to perform it, I'll explain that shortly.

Low quality food and water, mostly bread and hardened wheels of cheese, were provided by the linked cities while we were building, and once the construction push slowed down I started taking up odd jobs such as helping to load or unload wagons of goods, running messages, cleaning, and so on as a means of making a little money and training up enough to learn new skills.

Initially, there were few among the other young orphans seeking out work the way I had been, but I saw a number of the older kids and most of the adults similarly trying to come up with a way to earn money even though our immediate needs were being met via handouts. When the majority of the infrastructure was in place, we were still given a place to sleep for as long as we met the requirements of living in Virtue, but everything else became our own responsibility, even feeding ourselves.

Needless to say crimes of every sort were rampant in the early days, and even later when guards would actually investigate some of the more serious crimes, the dynamics of allowable crime within Virtue merely changed along with the city. A comparatively small number of extremely powerful people were essentially free to do as they pleased, while the majority of the population struggled to get by until they were eventually replaced by someone from the ground who might be the same age but was at a higher level.

Believe it or not I don't hold any sort of a grudge or particular resentment as a result of the way the cities in the sky were being managed. No one wants to die, and humanity itself is struggling to get by in this world. As horrible as it would be when a particularly powerful individual would committee a heinous act and get away with it purely due to their level or association, the fact of the matter is that even the cities in the sky weren't entirely free of the risk of invasion. They were merely more difficult to invade.

The higher level people would be the ones called on to retake lost lands, to rebuild cities, to create new cities, they were even key to producing food in bulk, and so much more… And there simply aren't enough high level people to do everything that they are needed for, so the favorable treatment they are given is more a matter of necessity than desire.

As for those who were slow to recognize the changing dynamic, or those who thought just because they were rich they could do what they wanted? Suffice it to say that those attitudes were only appropriate in the early days of the evacuation, when everyone was getting away with terrible crimes.

In this world, power trumps wealth because humanity needs power, while wealth can be effective in anyone's hands. Perhaps not all rich people will be effective to the same degree, but even a fool who stumbles on wealth will serve to enrich someone else better qualified to manage it. In other words, while you can be too powerful for someone to force you to do something, there is no such thing as being too rich to do something; even hiring people more powerful than yourself is only a limited form of protection. As for someone who lacked both wealth and power? Little more than an accusation from someone higher in the social hierarchy would be required for "justice" of one form or another to be served.

For the next decade I immersed myself in the combination of coming up with ways to earn money, and coming up with ways to learn new skills. Learning new skills was simultaneously both very simple to do, and incredibly vexing.

How would I learn new skills with my father and trainers gone and my mother essentially never existing? There are 3 major methods that I took advantage of. The first and most convenient method would be to find some work helping someone else, getting advice on how to learn the appropriate skills along the way. Developing a new skill will often require many different attempts applying Aether in an appropriate manner before the system grants the associated skill, but using this method you get a known working method to get the skill, coaching, and some practice time where you're actually being paid to improve yourself.

The second method of learning new skills, which is by far the most time consuming and difficult method of learning skills, is experimentation. Whereas learning a new tier 1 skill while assisting someone else might require a week, learning a new skill that you know exists might take a month or more if it even exists and if you are actually applying techniques that end up being appropriate for gaining skill experience.

I never stopped training for attribute improvements, and I never stopped experimenting to find new magical skills, but after my first couple of years where I got some wins in, almost every subsequent magical skill I was able to unlock I was only able to do so after finding out information about that skill from some other source, such as a former adventurer describing how he'd worked with a mage that was able to influence the thoughts of monsters using Aether. His description was imperfect, but that conversation was enough to put me on the trail of mental magic, which led to eventually uncovering how to create compulsions, charms, and so on, eventually leading to its own tier 3 skill despite not having had someone to "show me the ropes".

The third method which I would frequently utilize to learn a new skill was to hire someone from the Adventurers Guild. While powerful people can get away with heinous crimes as long as they are not egregious in quantity and severity, not everyone with great potential or ability is a good fit for the military. The Adventurers Guild is a popular fallback career for those who didn't want to join the military, but still wanted to be able to put some of the combat skills they'd been learning into practice. The Adventurers Guild is the perfect home for those who are capable but don't fit elsewhere, and is a perfectly viable route to attaining power and influence without having someone telling you where you have to go and how to lace your boots.

The primary purpose of the Adventurers Guild is to remap the land, to recover lost technologies, to explore old crypts and return with wealth, and so on. In other words, their primary purpose is to Adventure. The reality however is that those types of work are generally speculative, often dangerous, and rarely will an adventure of that nature result in a payout. So? Most Adventurers pay for their day to day living expenses by accepting posted jobs.

If a particular city or kingdom needs to move its army somewhere, the Adventurers Guild might have postings for dungeon clearing to reduce the risk to their local populations while the military is stretched thin. If an enchanter wants a special material found from a certain type of creature? If a wealthy merchant wants a guard for a specific period during a dangerous journey? Or, and this is why they are of interest to me, anything else that doesn't involve running around and assassinating people. Like, say, training.

I don't have much in common with people my own age, and while I didn't yet have a way to keep up to date on my own level, nor a desire to constantly have other people check on my behalf, it was extremely safe to say that I wasn't high enough level to hang out socially with people who would have skills that I'd need. Since experimentation is a poor way to pick up new skills, learning how to apply Aether to common tasks so that I can count a skill as having been learned and acquire the associated attribute boosts is pretty much the only thing I have going on.

So, I continue chasing information through books and using that to inform my decision making, and when I have enough money to get a tutor, I'll hire an Adventurer to spend a few hours going over the basics of a skill with me so that I can learn it via self study after having been taught techniques to acquire the skills.

A few hours isn't nearly enough to learn a skill, but it's enough to learn what I need to do to learn the skill; and after a few hundred or thousand attempts I'll generally get the desired skill. Beyond that, I would even take it to another level, occasionally teaching my roommates how to use a particular skill.

It turns out that even teaching is a skill, and you can get credit for it by using your Aether skills to demonstrate techniques, or creating learning aids such as illusionary diagrams, and teaching was one of the skills used to qualify for higher level leadership related abilities.

Obviously the classes and timing I would choose to teach to my fellow orphans were determined by skills I was working on unlocking or upgrading, rather than being based on what would do the students the most good, but formal education is really only a thing for the rich, or for those willing to sign away noteworthy chunks of time in the service of large organizations, so it was a win-win even if it wasn't optimized.

Speaking of skills, I never explained what actually goes into getting a Tier 3 skill. I started writing down what skills I knew I had when I started learning about how the skill system worked, but honestly without being able to see my Soul Scroll there are going to be mistakes in there. It wouldn't be as bad if it weren't for the merges, but when you include them, keeping track of which skills were learned to get to which skills, trying to keep track of them would be ugly even if you didn't have to rely on single sentences that appear without warning and then disappear a few seconds later. Put together, even though I'm rather meticulous, it still gets pretty ugly.

Here's an example of what I mean:

To gain the Rogue skill, which is tier 3, you need to pick up a series of tier 2 skills. Let's look at the tier 2 "Deceit" skill. To get that, I had to learn the Deception skill, the Palming skill, as well as the Impersonation skill. Once I'd learned the three of them; how to deceive someone with my tongue, with my hands, and with my mannerisms, those skills automatically merged themselves into Deceit. Where Deception, Palming, and Impersonation were all tier 1 skills, Deceit is a tier 2 skill. Presumably, that means that someone identifying me if I only had those skills would see something like "Deceit Han 10". Yes, "Deceit", not even "Deceiver". They don't start sounding like class names until Tier 3.

Speaking of Tier 3, to get to Rogue I had to learn Stealth (which required Hiding, Moving Silently, and Shadowing), Acrobatics (which required Tumbling, Jumping, and Balance), Trap Mastery (which required Disable Traps, Create Traps, and Trapping), and Assassination (Poison Use, Ambush, and Scheming). In other words getting the Rogue skill required that I first learn 15 tier 1 skills, which would then merge into 5 tier 2 skills, before finally culminating in the tier 3 "Rogue" skill.

In general, no less than 3 skills are required to become a higher tier skill, though I'm not aware of any that would require more than 5, and there are often multiple skills that can unlock the same higher tier skill, though I don't always know what the acceptable substitutes are.

For Rogue though, one example is that rather than learning Impersonation as a tier 1 skill to get to Deceit, I could have just as easily learned Disguise. I felt that having more practice mimicking a single specific person would be a better practical experience for me than using Aether to appear as a larger number of generic individuals, though after acquiring Rogue it is a fairly simple matter to disguise myself should I choose to do so. Once you have the higher tier skill, everything that could be used to qualify for the skill falls under the umbrella of things you are capable of performing if you think to do so and have an appropriate skill level.

Similarly, if you learn a lower level ability due to a different skill, it counts when and where it could qualify you for something else. For instance I never actually learned the "Acting" skill when I was working to unlock Bard, because it is also a possible qualifier for Rogue, so I counted as having the skill by the time that I would have needed it to learn Bard.

If I were to later try and unlock any other skills where acting were a requirement, that requirement would still be met without needing to do anything to expand it. What that ended up meaning in practical terms is that several times I've been surprised to discover unlocking a tier 1 skill ended up snowballing into higher tier skills without me actually expecting or intending that they do so.

So how does one learn a skill? Well that's the thing about skills, is that it can vary quite a lot. Using a sword isn't actually a big deal, pretty much everyone has at least some weapons training, but just swinging it around and hitting people doesn't learn a skill, much less level it. No, the skills aren't based on your physical ability to do things with it, but rather your ability to apply Aether in the execution of that skill.

It's theoretically possible for a person who doesn't even officially have a swordsmanship related skill to be a better swordsman than someone with level 100 swordsmanship, however the person with level 100 swordsmanship can do incredible things with their sword that require Aether. What exactly they can do varies by the person and what they are most comfortable with, but some examples might be that their sword is impossibly sharp, and that they can swing their sword and have a wave of sharpened Aether come from it, cutting monsters in half from dozens of meters away.

In a real fight of course the ability to seamlessly incorporate magical effects into your attacks is usually many times more than enough to make up for any differences in nonmagical ability, but if you somehow convinced that hypothetical level 100 swordsman to avoid using Aether skills entirely, there's a real chance he might get decimated by someone who'd practiced a bit of nonmagical swordsmanship.

So I mentioned levels before, and then I also made it sound like skills have levels: That's because they do. Like the levels a person has, skills also have levels, though the numbers for skills don't get nearly as high as the overall persons level. In general increasing skill levels will increase your personal level a little at a time, but not very much and not very fast. If you go your whole life without fighting any monsters and only training in a normal array of skills, you'll probably die of old age somewhere around level 200, with your skill levels somewhere in between 50 and 100.

Aside from being more proficient in doing the thing the skill does, what makes skills worth leveling up is that skills sometimes give attribute points depending on the specific skill and the skill tier. I can't see my attributes until I hit 16 years old, but I can still increase them via training and skills, and the better off my attributes are, the better off I am.

Even if that weren't the case though, the more practice you have implementing magic while doing something, the more likely that thing is to be amazing, so even though chasing attributes is definitely high on my list of interests, day to day magic would have been a worthy goal in its own right.

Similarly to how higher skill levels tend to result in better outcomes, so do higher tier skills tend to be an advantage that you want to get established sooner rather than later. While you can get your skills merged basically at any point, when the skills are merged together you won't be able to acquire the attribute boosts associated with the higher tier skill leading up to your merged skill level until you've caught up to the highest level your associated subskills reached.

One might think it would be better to get 3, 4, or 5 lower tier skills all to rank 100 and then merge them, rather than counting on a single skill for their attribute increases, but honestly the attribute boosts from skill levels are rare and far from overwhelming at lower tiers, enough so to offset the difference in quantity in most cases. You'll usually get an attribute when you get a skill, and then again every 10 levels, with a few milestones where you get a particularly large bonus.

When I first got Earth Conjuration, the tier 1 skill, I received + 1 Intelligence, and the same was true for the rest of the tier one Elementalist related skills. That's pretty much the case for every skill, when you first learn a tier 1 skill, you get 1 point in an associated attribute. Realistically, at level 11 I would probably receive another +1 Intelligence from each, same for 21, and at 31 which is where you move from a beginner to an expert, I would probably gain +2 intelligence for each of the 12 tier 1 skills that were used to eventually merge into Elementalist.

That's a lot of Intelligence, right? And all the attributes matter, so that's very nice. For instance, by the time your Intelligence reaches 1,000, you're supposed to be able to remember basically everything you experience from that point on. I would expect those 12 tier 1 skills would, over the course of 31 levels, add 60 to my Intelligence Attribute, which is a pretty noteworthy step towards 1,000 Intelligence. So let's look at why it's preferable to merge them. Let me compare that to the Tier 2, and finally Tier 3 versions of the skills.

By merging those 12 skills into the 4 tier 2 elemental manipulation skills, I gained an additional +1 to Intelligence, one for each new skill. Most likely, at level 11, I would have then received a + 2 to Intelligence, and an additional +2 to all attributes, same at 21, and then at skill level 31 I would most likely gain a + 4 to Intelligence and an additional + 4 to all attributes.

Since there are a total of 7 basic attributes, this would mean that over the course of 31 levels I still gained the initial 12 points from learning the T1 skills, then an additional 4 from learning the T2 versions of the skills, then 16 points at levels 11 and 21, and an additional 32 points at level 31, for a total of 80 attribute points gained rather than the 60 I would have seen if I'd left my skills at tier 1.

By merging those 4 remaining skills to T3, I received 8 Intelligence. At level 11 I can expect to gain an additional +10 Intelligence as well as another 10 to all attributes, and the same at level 21, and then at level 31 I can expect to gain 50 Intelligence and an additional 50 to all attributes for moving from Beginner to Expert.

Meaning that in total, by merging to a Tier 3 skill, by the time I hit skill level 31 I will have netted the 12 for learning the tier 1 skills, another 4 for learning tier 2, and another 8 for learning tier 3, for 24 total Intelligence at level 1. By level 31 I will have gained 80 attributes at each of levels 11 and 21, and another 160 at level 31, for a total of 344 attribute points.

Tier 3 skills tend to sound like classes, and this is also the tier where the skills begin to align with how people identify themselves, because the difference in the value you get out of a T3 skill is simply incomparable to previous tiers, which is why leading up to the age of 16 I'd been prioritizing learning new skills rather than honing existing skills. Putting it bluntly, my intention is to take the fullest possible advantage of this protected environment to set myself up for long term success, even though I fully expect difficulties in the near term for doing so.

I've been diving through books to learn about the world in general, but also about the system, and the results so far have been exceedingly diverse. Even I don't know what my Soul Scroll will reveal to me when it finally becomes available… But I do know that I've been training, hard, ever since I entered this world, and I also know that I intend to combine the skills I've been able to pick up into as many tier 4 skills as I can before I change my focus towards improving what I've already learned.

I've already learned a few tier 4 skills, mostly by accident rather than deliberate machination. Remember what I said about previously merged skill umbrellas qualifying me for unexpected skill upgrades and creating snowball effects? Well, there you go. I didn't even know Erudite was a skill, much less tier 4, but I know to expect it to be one of my skills when I can finally access my soul scroll.

Before you get too excited about me having a tier 4 skill, I actually have several, and the attribute bonuses are fantastic even at level 1. Long story short the first one I gained was Erudite, and I gained it while focusing on the Aether surrounding one of my room mates while asking him some questions.

I was hoping to see if I'd be able to observe any changes using a variety of Aether related techniques, which could then help me to determine if he was lying. Did his temperature increase? If I create a concave lens using a thin layer of water Aether, and also suspend a convex lens to serve as the objective, focusing on his jugular vein, would I be able to tell if his heart rate increased? What about if I check for pupil dilation? Can I do it discretely?

These are the sorts of tests I was performing when I gained the notification that I'd picked up the insight skill. As soon as I unlocked insight, it was promptly removed, along with Deduction and Induction, which were then replaced by Perception, which was promptly replaced by Detective, and finally Detective too was removed, leaving me with Erudite and a completely unexpected boost of 50 total points to my Intelligence attribute (1, then 1, then 8, then 40).

You might think that since most people stop at Tier 3, having a tier 4 skill makes me untouchable in some way, but it doesn't. They aren't super common, but they aren't particularly rare either. Almost all Adventurers have tier 4 skills, as will most famous people. Tier 3 skills are something of a minimum baseline skill level to get through life, but tier 4 skills are the norm for anyone who expects to test themselves in life. I don't have solid numbers, but I'd guess that probably somewhere in the range of 30% of people have one or more tier 4 skills.

What about Tier 5? As far as I am aware there is no tier 5. If there is one I certainly hope to find it, but with twenty thousand years of publicly accessible history to draw from, it seems likely that tier 4 truly is as good as it gets.