The Weight of Legacy

As it turned out, the hardest part of unlocking the [Meditation] Skill was knowing how to meditate, and Malwine was… not doing great on that front.

Something told her she’d dabbled in meditation before, sometime between her pottery phase and pretending to crochet. She could only guess it had gone just as terribly that time, because Malwine was nothing if not consistent.

Laying down on her crib—what other position could she meditate in?—Malwine had spent the past something-minutes trying to think of nothing at all, yet thinking over and over again about how she was supposed to not be thinking about anything. It was a headache-inducing ouroboros of irony rather than the peaceful mindfulness she thought meditation was supposed to be.

The next attempt involved breathing in and out. Two seconds in, five seconds out. Two, five, two five, twenty five—wait, what, no. Two then five…

Of course, that meant Malwine had to keep counting, and her mind had yet to slip into the blissful void she thought meditation would promise—in no small part because her breathing fell out of sync if she didn’t focus.

…Yet focusing was keeping her from actually getting anywhere with her attempts.

She tapped her hand, the mere act of trying to force stillness upon herself a grave challenge. With a groan, Malwine reopened her eyes and summoned the [Recently Exited Stasis] buff.

…She might have fallen asleep.

The buff was down to 7 hours, and there was absolutely no way on not-Earth that she actually ‘meditated’ for that long. Malwine checked the prompt with Older-Beryl’s Skills next, but no others seemed as uncomplicated as [Meditation] should have been—or simply weren’t worth getting just to test this.

[Meditation] seemed like it could at least help her restore the mana stat she didn’t have, or something like that. But she’d failed.

She’d have loved to have confirmation as to whether she could get those Skills Older-Beryl used to have on her own. She still wanted to think she wasn’t giving them up forever. There had to be a way to get them anyway, at least the interesting ones—the defense-type ones, [Enhanced Memory], and [Meditation].

Hopefully someday…

Malwine refocused on the Epic Skills. All she had to go off were the Skill names themselves. [Write Anything] sounded like it could somehow make her write things that she might not otherwise—Oh, who was she kidding. They just sounded like they'd let her write anything, or anywhere, exactly what it said on the tin.

She didn’t know what the limitations to writing might be, but Older-Beryl’s Skills overall confirmed the written word at least existed, as the presence of [Learning by Reading] also implied. It was good to have a second source for that, however, as she knew her own Skills were tailored to herself rather than necessarily reflective of what would work on this world.

[Write Anywhere], however, could almost be a suspiciously convenient solution for her lack of a notebook. ‘Anywhere’ was broad, and she was quite sure it had been lack of specificity that let Malwine use [Once and Forever] on ancestors she knew nothing about in the first place.

So if this would let her write anywhere, could she write in the air? It was a stretch, but maybe she could make this work.

Imagine if I get it and it doesn’t let me actually do that! That’d be embarrassing.