Magical Engineering

I still needed to dive into my class today, but first, following the advice of the book, it was time to look over my long-ignored interaction attributes, starting with moving presence up to five hundred. I didn’t feel anything noticeably different and started to assume that only came from changing my senses. Assuming my understanding was correct on how most attributes worked, I still needed to spend time training the part of my being associated with it towards that new limitation. The problem there was that I didn’t know how you trained your presence.

Four more secondary stats were unlocked below presence after my point expenditure: Influence, Defiance, and an awareness attribute for each. With what Karlinovo’s book had said, I had a feeling these went beyond just people in how they interacted with reality. How did the awareness attributes work exactly? Would something ping in my brain to alert me, or would it just be more obvious that someone else’s influence was acting over me?

These were questions that I likely wouldn’t find answers to on Earth. The implications of their value when dealing with other factions was an interesting thought. Did the heads of the big factions have these attributes pushed as far as they could, or did they employ specialists for faction negotiations?

After investing five hundred ranks in each of the new attributes without finding a maximum value, I decided to call that good enough for now. I just still couldn’t get myself to risk using all of my spare attribute points, especially when I was about to go potentially invest levels into my class. Like presence before, there was no immediately noticeable change as far as I could tell, but I made a mental note to force myself to pay extremely close attention in future conversations to see if I could spot anything. Even if that sounded like torture, it was important to test out these changes.

Putting aside my own attributes for the moment, I pulled up my class orb instead. In my earlier rush through the Path of the Dungeon, I had more or less entirely ignored anything else. That meant that the Path of the Mana Weave had been virtually unexplored outside of the top level despite having enough mana orb types to have unlocked at least one path.

The first step was adding the ten million experience needed. It was still an odd sensation as whatever the source was that made up the value left my core and flowed into the class orb. Several new options appeared under the newly unlocked Types category.