The next several days flew by in a blur. The New Reader quest kept repeating itself, though the number of books doubled each time, as did the experience points I gained. The problem was the other reward. Skills, it turned out, as I was worried they were, were yet another progression system locked behind a level requirement. This one was level twenty-five, and each successive quest only provided another rank to the reading skill that I had no access to yet.

  At least the good news was that the quest line had forced me to finally learn more basic concepts of the system. Without being strong-armed into the very specific direction the System had in mind for my education, I was free to start poring through introductory guides to any topic I could get my hands on. There were many such topics.

  Attributes were more or less what I had expected them to be. They were a numerical value abstraction of someone's core components. The range and granularity were much greater than I had expected, though. I had been imagining something similar to a tabletop roleplaying system, and while that wasn’t an incorrect assumption exactly, as the attributes were organized into several basic categories: Senses, Actions, Reactions, Interactions, Soul, Core, and Luck.

  Everything got much more complicated once you went below those top-level designations. It seemed that when it was designed, it had taken into account that some attributes were not a universal constant, and tried to boil it down to labels that were universal. Senses were a broad category that covered all ways a person perceived the world. For example, it was something that covered anything from how far a human eye could see to the pain tolerance certain parts of your body could handle. Those were sub-attributes that were applicable to someone with my body, but there were also things that covered the detection of underwater scents or electromagnetism readings with antennas.

  Actions governed anything someone consciously did. Things like strength and memory fell into this category. Reactions were things that happened on a subconscious level, caused by external phenomena. This included willpower and fighting off most diseases.

  Interactions were where types of charismatic influences fell. Physical beauty seemed to be the main aspect of it. Soul and Core were pretty straightforward and governed all aspects of those components. Luck was mostly a mystery and was used as a catch-all for attributes that didn’t seem to fit anywhere else. Either an exhaustive list of all known sub-attributes hadn’t been written, or I just couldn’t find it. Given the infinite complexity of life, I assumed it was the former.

  Something else stressed was that just because an attribute had been raised did not remotely make the person stronger in it. It would unlock the associated attribute and give them basic access to it. But you had to train the aspect associated with it. What it boiled down to was that these higher values were just a new potential that a person’s body could be conditioned to reach.

  Skills were exactly what they sounded like, but even the lowest rank of them granted a benefit above what would normally be possible for someone without a core. That meant that reading was likely to improve either my speed or my retention. Both skills existed, but I wouldn’t learn just which one I had until I was able to get into the menu, which I also had learned was impossible to do until I created my core.

  For virtually everyone, there was no purpose in delaying the formation of their core, and it was usually done before much leveling had even occurred. It was impossible, though, to progress past level twenty without a core. At that point, the soul was no longer able to contain the energies a person had gained alone. This was the reason cores had been developed at all, as a way to break through the soul-level barrier. And while that meant I was locked out of the skill system until I could form my core, it did not mean I was locked out of the attribute system.

  Thanks to the less restrictive reading quests, I was gaining experience at a much quicker pace. It took me only four days to hit level five and unlock the said system. I had plenty of points ready to assign. After the usual dinner with the brothers, I laid down comfortably on my bed and pulled up the menu, incredibly eager to see just what my options were. I dismissed the pop-up about unlocking the menu and selected it.

  Core was missing, but that came as no surprise to me. I didn’t have one yet. And without one, how could I have any meaningful progress in anything related to it?

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  I had been wondering how my attributes would be organized. I knew it was possible and entirely likely that I would have higher-level generalized attributes for the senses. I was surprised to see the same in the other three that had it, though. I had expected those to be a bit more straightforward in their lists, but apparently not.

  Part of the reason there was no exhaustive list is that you didn’t get to see all the sub-attributes you could potentially grow your body toward, just those that you had some rank in already, knowingly or not. It was entirely possible to gain more from later changes. While I may have felt the tiniest bit insulted at some of the attributes’ starting values, I also wasn’t totally surprised by any except for cheat death. Every author had agreed that starting with a luck skill would give someone a leg up, but as they were incredibly unpredictable, no one should ever count on it. I selected cheat death and read the description.

  You should be dead. The fact that you aren’t is one of the most improbable events to have ever occurred in your universe. Every point placed into this attribute will further raise your chances of not dying when the numbers otherwise say you should.

  That was it; there was no numerical breakdown of how the points affected the statistics or anything quite so useful. This was why luck attributes were considered their own particular category. The authors I had read claimed that anyone who studied them always ended up with nothing to show for the time spent. However, luck worked. It also seemed to work to keep that a mystery from everyone. I reread the names of the senses, not fully connecting them all to what they did. I knew the ones that represented sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, and I was pretty sure vestibular had something to do with balance.

  I was drawing a complete blank on the other two. One had to involve a sense of pain, and the other one was likely tied to spatial awareness, but I couldn’t say which was which. Selecting any of them for further information didn’t help either, as apparently, I had to allocate a single attribute point before I was provided a description of an attribute. I wasn’t sure why that didn’t apply to cheat death exactly, but maybe it had something to do with the manner in which I gained it.

  The System seemed to work under the idea that a person with the attribute should already know what it was. While that was frustrating, I did have sixty-three points to spend, and I was unlikely to spend them on the same attribute. There were caps on how high one could spend, but they also weren’t universal, and I wouldn’t know I was at the cap and how to get past it until I was there.

  So, I started by quickly assigning a single point to each of my senses so I could get a better idea of what they did. That wasn’t the best idea, but everything in my body suddenly felt just slightly charged, almost stronger, but not quite, which in a normal circumstance tends to cause a nasty headache. When one of the senses that you had increased was the one that controlled feeling pain, that headache was multiplied.

  My head felt like someone had hit it repeatedly with a hammer. The room was instantly both too loud and too bright. The air smelled and tasted wrong. I could feel my insides moving. I rolled onto my side and curled into a ball, hoping that this would end soon. I hadn’t realized how quickly my body would adapt to small potential increases.

  It took nearly an hour and expelling the contents of my stomach for my body to start to get used to the changes. That had been a colossal mistake. I even knew that one of the senses was pain, so I should have realized the possibility of what would happen, but I had been too much like a kid just arriving home after trick-or-treating. I vowed that from now on, I would only raise one attribute at a time, and the smell of my room as I cleaned up what had happened helped to imprint that pretty firmly.

  It turned out that I was right, vestibular was balance. Nociception was a sense of harm to my body, and the cause of the increased pain. I could think of a few reasons why I might want to increase it in the future. It was likely a good way to track internal changes in my body before they became a real problem, but I would need to boost my pain tolerance before that was a realistic path. My joints already ached more than they had, and that was going to be a problem.

  Proprioception was my sense of position in the space around me, and the one I had wanted to identify the most. I could use it to offset some of the knee problems I currently had. Boosting that should, in theory, solve the constant issue I had with running into things. But before I could spend points on that, I needed to find the cap for all of my reactions. These would be important for core creation, so that meant I needed to get them as high as I could.

  I placed ten points into each of them, this time only one at a time. The only real change I felt immediately was that the pain in my body seemed easier to ignore. I didn’t know at this point if that meant my body was actually stronger or just more capable of shrugging off wounds that would still cause lasting long-term damage. I didn’t really want to experiment yet either.

  I moved mental resistance up to twenty-five next, as that was closest, and there I found my first cap. Once I was able to break through this, it should, in turn, give me access to some of the specific attributes below it. Essentially, the furthest attribute down the chain had the most dramatic effect on the specific thing it controlled, while anything above also applied, but the boosts they gave were spread out and less.

  On a whim, I decided to put the last thirteen points into mental use. With the increase of pain tolerance, I decided to wait on my original idea and see if I could instead increase the speed at which I was gaining knowledge. That had the potential to cause a feedback loop to improve my stats even faster. Anything I could do to move towards an exponential gain seemed the smart way to go.

  All in all, despite the memory of the throbbing headache I had caused myself, today had been the most productive day I’d had since I arrived in this world. I hoped that was a sign of future things to come. I remembered that I still had to save my world, so I decided not to dwell on that hope and instead take a well-deserved long rest.

  What the hell is luck, anyway? Why are we breaking that down as its own attribute? Was it always this way, or did the System decide to group it because every single sapient species seems to have some concept of the idea that they can just be better or worse at chance than someone else somehow? Why have we just accepted that reality? Is the System altering reality to make things better for those with higher luck attributes, and if so, why are those few chosen?

  Grom’s Musings

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