Magical Engineering

The next several days flew by in a blur. The New Reader quest kept repeating itself, though the number of books doubled each time, as did the experience points I gained. The problem was the other reward. Skills, it turned out, as I was worried they were, were yet another progression system locked behind a level requirement. This one was level twenty-five, and each successive quest only provided another rank to the reading skill that I had no access to yet.

At least the good news was that the quest line had forced me to finally learn more basic concepts of the system. Without being strong-armed into the very specific direction the System had in mind for my education, I was free to start poring through introductory guides to any topic I could get my hands on. There were many such topics.

Attributes were more or less what I had expected them to be. They were a numerical value abstraction of someone's core components. The range and granularity were much greater than I had expected, though. I had been imagining something similar to a tabletop roleplaying system, and while that wasn’t an incorrect assumption exactly, as the attributes were organized into several basic categories: Senses, Actions, Reactions, Interactions, Soul, Core, and Luck.

Everything got much more complicated once you went below those top-level designations. It seemed that when it was designed, it had taken into account that some attributes were not a universal constant, and tried to boil it down to labels that were universal. Senses were a broad category that covered all ways a person perceived the world. For example, it was something that covered anything from how far a human eye could see to the pain tolerance certain parts of your body could handle. Those were sub-attributes that were applicable to someone with my body, but there were also things that covered the detection of underwater scents or electromagnetism readings with antennas.

Actions governed anything someone consciously did. Things like strength and memory fell into this category. Reactions were things that happened on a subconscious level, caused by external phenomena. This included willpower and fighting off most diseases.

Interactions were where types of charismatic influences fell. Physical beauty seemed to be the main aspect of it. Soul and Core were pretty straightforward and governed all aspects of those components. Luck was mostly a mystery and was used as a catch-all for attributes that didn’t seem to fit anywhere else. Either an exhaustive list of all known sub-attributes hadn’t been written, or I just couldn’t find it. Given the infinite complexity of life, I assumed it was the former.

Something else stressed was that just because an attribute had been raised did not remotely make the person stronger in it. It would unlock the associated attribute and give them basic access to it. But you had to train the aspect associated with it. What it boiled down to was that these higher values were just a new potential that a person’s body could be conditioned to reach.

Skills were exactly what they sounded like, but even the lowest rank of them granted a benefit above what would normally be possible for someone without a core. That meant that reading was likely to improve either my speed or my retention. Both skills existed, but I wouldn’t learn just which one I had until I was able to get into the menu, which I also had learned was impossible to do until I created my core.

For virtually everyone, there was no purpose in delaying the formation of their core, and it was usually done before much leveling had even occurred. It was impossible, though, to progress past level twenty without a core. At that point, the soul was no longer able to contain the energies a person had gained alone. This was the reason cores had been developed at all, as a way to break through the soul-level barrier. And while that meant I was locked out of the skill system until I could form my core, it did not mean I was locked out of the attribute system.

Thanks to the less restrictive reading quests, I was gaining experience at a much quicker pace. It took me only four days to hit level five and unlock the said system. I had plenty of points ready to assign. After the usual dinner with the brothers, I laid down comfortably on my bed and pulled up the menu, incredibly eager to see just what my options were. I dismissed the pop-up about unlocking the menu and selected it.

Core was missing, but that came as no surprise to me. I didn’t have one yet. And without one, how could I have any meaningful progress in anything related to it?