Chapter 50: Arrival
*Cadence Lee (as Hewka) POV*
The conversation that night was a watershed moment for me that I worried would change everything. In hindsight, however, it isn’t really that surprising that nothing much changed at all. Rei asked me if I wanted to be called Cadence and I told her that, as far as I was concerned, I was Hewka in this life, and that was that. The greatest change was that I now had both Rei and Tamlin pestering me for stories on occasion, and it only got worse when the rest of Seeking the Horizon was brought in on my secret.
Mostly they were curious about my first life because it was so different from what they knew. They had a difficult time wrapping their head around the idea that Earth had lacked a System - to them it was akin to saying that Earth had lacked sound or light or maybe even something more fundamental like gravity.
“But how do you get better at Skills without the System?” Tamlin asked me one day, in utter confusion. “If you can’t level Skills, how would anything even function? No one would be able to do even the easiest task!”
“Does the System give you Skills?” I ask, mostly rhetorically. “Or does it merely catalog and acknowledge them?”
“It does reward you,” Rauvin noted as we walked. “Each level of a Skill gives you something, are you saying that those percentage rewards are natural?”
“To an extent?” That is actually an interesting question, because it isn’t like the effects of a Skill’s level aren’t things that existed in my previous worlds. Was the reduction of effort in my Dig Skill, for example, something the System gave me or merely reflecting how my increased ‘expertise’ meant that digging was easier?
“I think that that part is a reward from the System itself,” I said, thinking out loud. “But it isn’t wrong to say that the more you do something, the easier that thing comes to you. Or even something like singing: Singing, the Skill, might decrease your need for breath, but practicing singing in general increases your lung capacity.”
Not that I knew the details, it wasn’t like I had studied it. That was a problem with a lot of things really. If I knew I would be reincarnated into ancient fantasy worlds I would have tried to learn a lot of different skills that would come in handy. Hindsight is twenty twenty, I guess.