chapter 150
POV: Remi
As I was sitting in the meditation room, my mind was focused on my skills. With some of them, I had come a long way, while some were still at the beginning stages.
Now I have a couple of journeyman skills and even one adept. Sixth Sense was a skill that I needed to use constantly, and that I focused on the most to figure out how to actually advance it.
The knowledge the Duke passed on to me finally allowed me to understand my skills, how they are connected to me, and how to figure out how to actually train them properly. Each one needed their own workout plan. This was something you could only figure out if you put hours into trying to understand them.
I also let FH do some research, which confirmed some of my suspicions. The average skill proficiency seemed to be apprentice, with the masses only reaching adept in really rare cases. But there are three ranks after adept, and each one of those is a massive upgrade to the complexity and power of your skill.
For most of my skills, I already had the workout plans. In my mind, I put together for each skill all that I knew about them and how I needed to improve them. This I would be adding to our database. We still had plenty of time before dropping out of FTL, so it was time to get busy with the skills I didn’t have workout plans for.
I think it’s best to start with one of my newer skills. Crimson Empowerment was something that I didn’t purposely choose to use, as I wanted to keep this hidden. Now it was safe to finally start exploring what this skill could actually do.
My mind sank into my core and quickly found the Crimson Empowerment skill. It was quite complex and seemed quite powerful. As I focused on it, it started to reveal its secrets to me.
At the current stage, I could barely use it. It was used more instinctually than anything else, without any actual control over it. If I kept using it like this, it would never advance. In fact, it seemed like even the basic training exercises for me to learn how to use this skill were beyond me.
Obviously, this wasn’t a starter skill that you can pick up quickly, but there were two baser components to this skill. It seemed this Crimson Empowerment was a more advanced form of fire and lightning.
Now the steps forward were clear. I needed a starting fire and lightning skill. Fortunately, my basic affinity has two free skill slots. Hopefully Bob would have the skills I needed.
“Bob, a question. Do you have basic fire manipulation and lightning manipulation skill types?”
“Wait a moment, I’ll check.” A couple of seconds went by before I once again heard his voice in my mind.
“I have something called Simple Flame. The description says it will allow you to create flames above your hand that are strong enough to easily light fires, if you practised it enough. Oh yes, and it does say it’s good for practising if you want to use more advanced fire-type skills.”
“For lightning, I have a couple of choices, but I think Spark will be the best. Once again, quite a simple skill that can at best be used as a short-ranged taser. Both of these should work with your basic affinity, and I think Spark could work with your Mechanist. Should I take them out?”
“Yes, I will be there in a moment.”
Getting up, I descended to the 2nd floor, meeting up with Bob. He already had the two skills with him.
“So what do you need this for?”
“My Crimson Empowerment skill is more complex than I thought. I need to practise its baser components and how to manipulate them to properly start advancing it.”
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“Makes sense. I myself have been having a bit of a problem figuring out how to improve my inventory skill. Just repeatedly doing what the skill allows me to do doesn’t seem to work. I did try to do what you said, and I did see the skill more clearly, but it didn’t give any insights into it.”
“Well, of course, we only had their first lesson. It is already good that you can sense your skill better. That will continue until you feel like you can see all of it, and then we can move on to the next steps of actually interpreting what you now can perceive.”
“Got it, Captain, only two hours left before we drop out of FTL.”
I gave him a nod back as I headed to my meditation room. Simple Flame was absorbed swiftly, and my understanding of it was quite comprehensive, even with this short of a time frame. Next, I absorbed Spark. The process was as simple as with Simple Flame.
I would still need to let them settle a bit longer in my core before I properly started exercising. Then, from my inventory, I took out the two most important skills I stole. One was named Will’s Power, the other Mind’s Clarity.
These two required all three of my affinities. Yet my basic skill slot was currently showing 22 of 22 slots filled. That, however, wasn’t actually true. With every rank up your core got more complex.
What this allowed you to do was have higher-ranked skills. But you see, if you used low-ranked skills—and especially skills that were quite simple—you could easily fit multiple skills into one slot.
So right now, I had basically almost an entire slot open in my basic affinity. I would say about 92%. I picked up the Mind’s Clarity skill stone. This was quite a special skill and something everyone needed for balance.
There was a terrible cost to us living creatures having this type of power. The saying “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is one of the most fundamental truths of life.
You can manage that corruption to an extent, but the more powerful you get, the stronger the corruption gets. That’s why you need some skills that help you keep grounded, to help you keep that part of yourself controlled.
This was a skill Verrona was missing, her father denying it purposefully. Fortunately, the Duke fixed that problem, and in doing so also allowed me to understand how necessary something like this is.
Kinda wish we had skills like that back on Earth. This simple recommendation could have helped so many people I tried to help.
It took a while longer to absorb this skill, but by now, I was quite skilled at understanding skills, making the absorption process faster.
Looking at the time, I should just barely have enough to finish the last one. Will’s Power was something that would help me against mind-controlling skills, but also give me the strength to use Mind’s Clarity better.
This skill was an all-around improvement to absolutely everything. Each skill could make use of it. An absolutely vital skill for everyone. Now, while these two skills were quite special and stronger than average thanks to them using multiple affinities, it didn’t mean that single-affinity versions of these skills would be useless. In fact, it was the exact opposite.
So to Bob, I once again sent a message, this time explaining what these two new skills do, and to be on the lookout for similar skills that would work with everyone else’s affinities. There are different types of skills out there for absolutely every affinity, so there was no doubt in my mind we would find these two lynchpin skills that everyone needed for all of my crew members.
A little while later, a message came from Bob: “The hunt is on, Captain.”
Only a few minutes were left before we dropped out of FTL, so I made my way to the command centre. As we dropped out, the blackness that surrounded us was replaced with the blue star.
We were at the edge of the solar system, and we definitely didn’t want to get closer to that sun. There were no planets here, an empty system, which our sensors confirmed some seconds later.
“Let’s get to work. We don’t want to linger for too long,” I said out loud, and in my mind hundreds of drones checked in, ready to work.
In my absence, FH learned a few new things about her inventory skills. Her Expansive Swarm skill could be made to have its opening portal even on the outside of the ship. The best part was that it kept the atmosphere inside even with an opening to outer space.
So drones easily flew out and started to cut up all the covering plates that were secured to the ship. We were still flying quite fast, only needing about ten minutes of high-G acceleration to get back into FTL just in case.
With our current trajectory, it meant that we would be leaving the solar system and the protection the sun gave us from cosmic radiation in about three days, but we should be well finished before that.
As I watched the drones work, I realised that their cutting implements were quite far behind our current technological knowledge. While hard light wouldn’t be the best solution, plasma-light technology would improve their cutting capabilities tremendously.
Too bad the crystals that I currently have aren’t good enough for that, and the cost for each one is something that Bob would probably strangle me over if I wanted to upgrade our entire drone fleet. We should be able to swing at least twelve of these.
All my plans ground to a halt when I realised that these drones still couldn’t use affinity-changed mana that was required to use magic tech. While the ship, thanks to FH, could use it, the drones were a different thing as they were separate from the whole.
Maybe if they had some type of physical connection, it could work similar to how fiber optic cables were used back in the day with drones to have a physical connection.
That definitely needed some testing. Regardless of my current ideas, the drones were making quick work of our coverings. Slowly, the proper shape of the ship was revealed, and the turrets that had been hiding for quite a while started running diagnostics, popping out of their housings to see if everything still worked properly.
When we finally uncovered the two side engines, I took the left one, Bob took the right one as we personally went out using space suits to install the propellers. This required more precise work than the drones could handle.
The drones around us continued to work, with all of the cut-up panels being stacked up and then made into drones so they could be stored inside FH’s extended storage. It felt so good to work like this, but the work itself was short-lived, as in less than 17 hours we were finished.
“It’s always easier to dismantle than to build,” Bob said to me as we were doing final inspections outside the ship so that everything had been removed and nothing was damaged.
“We will most likely need to get even better at dismantling. Because after our upgrades, it’s time to start testing ourselves against space monsters, and that would inevitably also lead to fighting other spaceships.”
Bob didn’t answer back, but I quite easily got the sense of what his face currently looked like. His smile most likely would look quite demonic to anyone else but me. I’m pretty sure I mirrored his.