Tyrants of Earth - The Legend of Artigan

Day twenty out of seventy-two.

“[Resource Overdrive: Aura], do you think there’s any chance you can change that classification to mana or qi?”

“Not anytime soon. Besides, even if I could, I’ll need time to be in places of power or set up elaborate rituals for either energy source.”

“But you said you could advance in realm with just aura alone?”

“I could, but it’s a bad idea. I’d be potentially ruining both my antimagic side and the developing conceptual benefits of my body. It’s better to let the Trial System push me as far as I can for now.”

“Is that truly better? An artificial system you have no idea how it works or limitations of…”

“I have it on good authority that it’s better than what I can do alone. For now. Besides, my pace isn’t going to slow down anytime soon. The way it is now… I could probably rush to realm ten in under a year without needing to acclimatize.”

Not that he was going to, not after going through all the experiences he had in Valmere.

Of course, when he told him about all of the Trial System’s upgrades that went beyond just concepts they wanted more data from him.

“Wait… blood samples? Hair and skin tissue? Come on, now that’s unnecessary.”

“We should have done it sooner. Your body may be a marvel and we can track the changes within each realm grade.”

Ryan leaned away from a wandering scalpel, then he thought of an idea.

“I’ll trade you. A full body scan for that theme-song ring.”

…

Day thirty out of seventy-two.

The new [Student] managed to learn a skill. They couldn’t say for certain it was a skill but…

“I swear, something just clicked. My memory has drastically improved overnight.”

And he proved it, the researcher’s memory was significantly higher than it had any right to be at his realm grade.

Ryan frowned.

“Maybe a skill like [Improved Memory] then?”

Fetterue looked like she wanted to hit him, though that might have been because this was their third consecutive day working together. He had noticed that she would get tetchier the longer he stuck around her without taking a break. Ryan had no idea why that would be the case though.

“What this implies is that the Trial System isn’t the sole owner or granter of these skills. It confirms that there might be a firmament for skills, like there is for magic.”

The firmament of magic was what they used to reference the framework that spells were built off of, it existed all around them and was supposed to update every time that someone came up with a new spell.

Fetterue and the researchers had been arguing that skills like [Cleave] or [Double Stab] had some other sort of ‘firmament’ that they did not understand.

But now that Ryan saw it in the wild… he had a different thought.

“I think it’s different. I think the skills are actually in the class itself. That would explain why one or two skills are learned from class resonance at most.”

Had they found a backdoor into the Trial System?

“I’ve changed my mind. You will be using that [Class Change] skill on as many people as you can. We will research this ourselves.”

And with that decision, Ryan got his final quest update.