The Way Ahead

Edwin’s entire world was one of swimming pain when he finally came to, as it felt as though his entire body was on fire. Even still, his mind was foggy and slow, trying to piece together what had happened. Slowly, his muddled and distressed mind managed to recall what he’d gone through.

Jogging… plants… talsanenris… panther… pain.

The last thing he could really remember was Inion reaching him. She hadn’t even been that far away, it had just all happened so fast. Perhaps Reflexes might have been a good choice? Or rather, he needed to prioritize getting Speed… however he might manage that.

He tried to open his eyes, but the effort proved to be too much for his exhausted body, bone-deep weariness of the sort he hadn’t felt since before he came to Joriah. Still, he didn’t need to open his eyes to check his notifications.

Level Up!

Skill Points 833→839

Progress to Tier 2: 998/1770 (Avg level: 45/77)

Firestarting 62 → 63

Flexibility 36 → 37

Harvesting 40 → 41

Packing 43 → 44

Sleeping 40 → 41

Walking 49 → 50

Huh. Nice haul, considering how quick it’d all been. Then he tried moving again and realized it probably hadn’t been that quick, at least not including recovery. His muscles screamed in protest, lacerations burning like they were on fire, his upper arm especially, as he slowly pulled his eyes open...

…He was back in Obairlann. Huh. He hadn’t really expected that, though he probably would have if he had given thought to the matter. As he cast his gaze around, he realized why his arm burned so much, as Inion gently stroked his forearm, a smile on her face.

“Oh good, you’re awake.”

“You… brought me back?” he asked, his voice cracked and dry, sending him into a coughing fit which in turn sent renewed waves of agony throughout his battered body.

“Drink this.” Inion proffered his canteen, which he struggled to take, but his arms were unresponsive. He didn’t feel paralyzed, not that he’d know what that would feel like, but he certainly was without use of his extremities for the time being. Noticing his struggle, Inion carefully helped him prop up his head and trickled the delightfully cool water down his throat.

“…How long was I out?”

Inion shook her head, “Not long. Just about a day, maybe two?”

“You…” he took another sip of water, “You don’t know?”

“Time isn’t obvious for us. No internal sense of time passing, unlike you messy mortals, and I’ve been too busy tending to you.”

“Tending to me? I can barely move! I feel like half my body is torn to shreds!” Sounding indignant was an art, especially with no voice and an inability to gesture, but Edwin felt like he could manage it.

“Yeah. That’s still an improvement.”

“Was it… really that bad?”

She started listing things off, counting on her fingers, “Let’s see… you had Skill-enhanced claws tear up your back, followed by you picking up a System-empowered cougar using its claws in your arms and legs as leverage, your torso got bitten a couple of times that I don’t think you even noticed, and to end it all, you shoved your hand down its throat, getting it almost completely bitten off in the process, and burned it to death using your fingers as fuel. Yes, it really, really was that bad.”

Edwin tried to wince, but found his body wasn’t even capable of that much, “Touché,” he painfully agreed.

She sighed, “I’ve been doing my best, I even had you in the pond for a few hours at one point, but my healing really only goes so far and so fast. Really, you’re lucky the hand was still hanging on by literal threads- I didn’t think I’d be able to heal it if it was fully severed. Even as it was, I was surprised it worked.”

“Shrug. Guess it’s good I didn’t, then.”

Inion looked at him strangely, “Did you just say the word ‘shrug’?”

“What? It’s not like I can actually do it at the moment. That’s the best I can really give at the moment. Can you help me sit up, by any chance? Laying down and drinking water feels like it’s about to go badly.”

“For the moment, but you do need to generally stay down. Take it easy for a few days, maybe a week or two. I don’t trust my work with your hand to hold up to too much.”

Edwin sighed. He hated being laid up. He always had been back on his feet way sooner than he really should have been, when he got sick or injured, and his inability to do so at the moment was annoying him more than a little.

“Why couldn’t you have done anything? Aren’t you some great and powerful ancient fey or whatever? Is a single panther really too much for you?” he teased, once he had his water and was lying back on the rhoreed mats he used as a bed.

“Do you want my help?” she playfully accused before shrugging, “I’m waterbound. I can venture away from streams and ponds for some time, absolutely, but I still am giving up a significant amount of my power when doing so. Not only are nearly all of my combat-related Skills related to water, I’m just weaker as well being that far from my pond. If I had tried to interfere more than I did, you would have likely had to protect me.”

“Oh really? You’re that delicate?”

She stuck her tongue out at him, “Just you wait, I’ll make you take that back when something tries to attack you next to a river or something.”

“Sure you will.”

“I will! Just you wait.”

As he shifted beneath his blanket (really his cloak), a thought occurred to him that he simply hadn’t previously noticed on account of his attention being mostly occupied on the burning pain covering his entire body.

“…Inion, where are my clothes?”

Instead of giving a verbal response, she pointed towards the table. Draped over the back of one of the chairs was Edwin’s shirt and pants.

…Well, what was left of them, anyway.

“Ah. Yeah, that’d do it, I suppose.”

It took another day and a half of resting and tending-to by Inion before Edwin was able to even start to move around. Even once he could move his (left) fingers and arm, he spent most of his time Sleeping and tending to his own wounds with First Aid. His right hand was unresponsive for another week, and weak after that. He hadn’t properly appreciated the degree to which his Sleeping skill accelerated his healing, especially as a part of other healing efforts, but given its leveling rate, it had to be doing something impressive.

He even finally managed to attach the two Skills! Running Mana Infusion through First Aid, then into the nebulous network which was Sleeping as he activated it drastically improved his recovery rate. He was even offered a Skill for it! Bed Rest wasn’t useful enough to warrant taking it, though. Not when he had his essentially-finalized Skill list.

Even with all of his and Inion’s Skills, it took him almost a week before he was properly back on his feet. He didn’t want to waste the time and so spent quite a fair bit of that working on some of his more neglected Skills- namely, Mathematics and Visualization. By linking the two together through Mana Infusion, a longstanding task he finally managed after several dedicated days of attempts and for which Inion was of precisely no help, he was able to create almost a 3-dimensional graphing calculator. Attaching Status allowed him to adjust them flexibly by offloading some of the numbers to the almost computer-like interface, and trying to Almanac his imagination, while unsuccessful, did bring him up to level 90 in the Skill.

Congratulations! For reaching level 90 in Outsider’s Almanac, you have unlocked the Expert path!

Inion confirmed that getting the Expert path wasn’t terribly uncommon, and in the vein of the Novice/Beginner/Trainee Paths. At 60 points, Edwin probably wasn’t taking it any time soon, given his wealth of more appealing options, but it was still interesting.

Once he was finally up and moving again, it still took some time before he was at full capacity. He took the time to try and repair his clothing, which even with Construction was no easy task, given he didn’t have any sewing materials. In the end, he had to declare his shirt, which was honestly more rags at this point than actual clothing, a lost cause. He managed to patch up his pants with strips of cloth from his former shirt, attached with glue. It… wasn’t ideal, by any stretch of the imagination. But it worked, and kept Inion from giggling, so he counted it as a win.

Just another thing to get in town, I suppose. It’ll have to be my first stop, though.

He still had a couple of marks, picked up from minor wounds here and there, but they were all dwarfed by the massive claw marks he now had covering his arms, legs, and torso. Inion claimed they looked good on him, but Edwin trusted neither the fey nor her fashion sense, so he remained skeptical.

Inion had fortunately kept the magical plants they’d found- even getting a few talsanenris berries, much to Edwin’s delight- as well as the body of the panther, though he didn’t get much from it beyond some sharp teeth, claws, and a couple levels in Harvesting. Largely, though, he readily accepted ‘gardening’ as his task of choice while his beaten and torn body healed.

Magical healing was amazing. If he’d gotten the kinds of wounds he had back on Earth, it would have taken extensive surgery, oh so many stitches, and probably even more for him to fully recover. Here, though? Other than his slowly fading scars, he was up and about, no physical therapy required.

He also ran some experiments with talanenris. True to their reputation, all it took to grow them once they were picked was to place one of the white berries in the sun, on soil, and pour some water on it. From there, it was possible to watch it grow in real-time, a black stem growing while white roots dug into the ground. Within an hour, the resulting bush was the size of his head, and it flowered within two days.

It took about a week for new berries to grow, but that was still an insane turnaround. He took several of the fresh berries and planted them around the clearing, growing more and more bushes until he was flush with the magical plants, nearly making himself a hedge out of them. Once he had a larger stock, he could experiment, and he did so with gusto.

Talsanenris placed on stone would still germinate when exposed to light and water, but would swiftly wither if not given soil. He could even hold it in his hand, to much the same result. Dropping it directly into water, strangely, didn’t result in growth- until something solid, such as the bank of the stream or the edge of a bowl, came into contact with it, at least. He could trick it with a pebble, though, but the plant withered away just as if it were on rock.

So. It clearly didn’t need photosynthesis, or at least needed it much less than normal. However, it was still limited to needing nutrients. He’d need to try and figure out a fertilization method, then he could try hydroponics before to figure it out for sure.

The berries were edible and oddly bland to his tongue, though not to his mana sense. However, when he ate them, he could feel the magic within them become digested and fill his body with energy, as though he had eaten a pile of sugar. The energy rush took several days to fully dissipate, but Edwin suspected that was due to Survival. The effect didn’t seem to lessen any if he picked a berry and then ate it a few days later, though he hadn’t tried it on dried berries or any older than a week.

Using talsenenris as a sort of fertilizer had mixed results. The plants he applied the crushed talsanenris to grew incredibly quickly, almost as fast as the bush itself, but also withered if he used too much. Unlike the natural plant, they must not have been used to extracting so many nutrients from the ground in such short order.

Crushing the berries and mixing them with water into a smoothie gave Edwin a major boost to energy, like the world’s strongest cup of coffee and largest meal all at once. He was hyperactive and didn’t sleep for a day after drinking it, though admittedly he crashed pretty hard afterwards. Not something to be used on a whim, though useful if he wanted to pull an all-nighter.

The berries were already so full of mana he couldn’t Infuse them any further, but Infusing the soil where it grew seemed to speed up the growing process, allowing it to yield berries in five days rather than seven.

He mixed up another batch of healing salve once his first one was depleted, using them to help himself mend faster, but found he only had enough for two, maybe three more sets. He was fairly certain that some steps and ingredients in the potion were superfluous, but the only question was which.

Well, only one way to find out. It was time to do science.

Level Up!

Skill Points 839 → 878

Progress to Tier 2: 1036/1770 (Avg level: 48/77)

First Aid 34 → 47

Sleeping 41 → 44

Mathematics 42 → 51

Visualization 49 → 56

Outsider’s Almanac 89 → 90

Purify 32 → 37

Harvesting 40 → 42