Chapter 6: Winters Final Woes
Personal System Calendar: Year 00014, Day 1-28, Month I: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6858, 1st to 28th day of the 1st Month
---
End of the Cold Season
The wind was still cold but it had eased up a bit. There was less snow than the previous weeks and the farming families' weather predictions hadn't let them down for years now. Spring is proving to be just around the corner, (two weeks from now). That being said, everyone could feel it even before the snow actually started thinning out. Something in the air shifted and the village seemed to pick it up collectively, the way places that had been around long enough developed a sense for these things.
People were still wearing thick clothing right now but not as many layers as before, around one or two. After being stuck at home for a couple of months their bodies were stiff, not in a literal sense, but for the older people who couldn't do much of the regular morning exercise routine that the village holds during the worst weeks of the season, it was beginning to be noticeable. Most people here were fit though, even the older ones. Especially those who had been doing the same village morning regimen for years. They were in better shape than people their age outside the village had any right to be, and they knew it to be true.
Anyway, people get bored when they are stuck at home for weeks when the weather doesn't allow them to get out of their homes.
But now with the weather easing up they finally had a chance to go out, even if it was just to visit their friends and neighbors. To put it simply, people here are workaholics. They don't really find pleasure in resting even though that is what they spent most of their earlier lives doing. Living here has changed them dramatically. They actually liked working now. They also follow the daily standard work schedule of twelve hours with up to four more hours of overtime if it was actually needed. Breaks are given every four hours and last an hour while lunch lasts for two. So the day is equally divided without spending too much time on any one thing.
They have a very balanced work and life schedule. With a forty-eight hour day cycle there is still plenty of time left after work to spend with family or on whatever else they wanted to do. The village had made that possible. A lot of places in the world couldn't say the same.
But during winter having to do nothing actually terrified them. They looked like addicts going through withdrawals, funnily enough. Though that only lasted for the first couple of days before their bodies started accepting the rest they actually needed. After that they would ease back into whatever work they had left hanging whenever the weather permitted it.
That was their saving grace from going insane staying at home. Only those who had an imaginative mind could survive during these "winter famines" as they would have called it. So a few smarter ones began inventing games that could be played to handle really long stretches of indoor time without losing their minds, and these games to pass the time had actually become a trend lately. Some people had been opportunistic enough to begin making and selling simple ones that didn't need much space. Board games, card games, dice games. It was a small thing but it helped people enjoy their time indoors instead of just being miserable about the snow outside.
Others found different ways to keep busy. Knitting, sewing, crafting and other hobbies that had been sitting on the back burner all year. As long as their minds were kept busy there was never really a dull moment. Some of the best work the village's craftspeople had ever done came out of winter months, simply because they finally had the time to sit with something and actually be able to do it properly.
---
The Finn Household
Meanwhile the Finn household was preparing for another baby. Angeline was already around seven or eight months pregnant with two or three months to go. It was August and Angeline's first child which would add another little one to what was already a pretty full house. By now Griz (7) and Hela (6) were the oldest kids in the household and they were already pretty experienced with how to handle babies and how to entertain them when they start crying. They had watched their older brother Adam's children come into the house and had figured out most of it on their own. They had taken up the big brother and big sister roles very seriously. Though they were technically uncles and aunties to Adam's kids, the adults couldn't really explain that concept to them yet and didn't try too hard. So August and Angeline's child would be treated the same way by them, as another baby brother or sister to look after.
Anyway the adults didn't force anything on them. Kids made their own sense of things and these two had made their own sense of this family just fine.
By now Griz and Hela were also going to school, a primary school that taught them the basics. Writing their names, learning the local alphabet, being able to say and recognize both, and lastly being taught manners and good morals early on. Good foundations. The kind that tends to stick as they grow older.
Other than school they enjoyed their time bonding with this oddly put together family of people who had become something closer than most blood families managed to be.
There was also another child in the household, it was Jomi Ross, a cute little boy who is Adam and Michelle's son and Angeline's step brother, who was already four by now and had graduated from being one of the babies to being somewhere in the middle, too young to be a proper helper but old enough to think he was one of the older kids. Of course Griz and Hela had taken him under their wing the same way they had taken the others.
Meanwhile Red and Theressa had taken to winter the same way they took to most things, practically and without complaint. Red had been spending extra time with the kids, which he didn't usually get enough of during the regular working seasons when there was always something that needed him somewhere. He was actually pretty good with them. Patient in a way that surprised people who only knew him from council meetings. Theressa still ran her medical rounds even during the coldest weeks, checking in on the elderly residents and the families with young children to make sure nobody was developing anything serious from being cooped up too long. She had also been keeping an eye on Angeline, which Angeline tolerated with grace because she understood Theressa well enough to know that it wasn't really optional.
Jonathan Ross spent a fair amount of his winter afternoons teaching Michelle the basics of blade use, something she had apparently expressed a wish to learn after watching one too many training sessions from the household windows. He was a patient teacher. Michelle was not a patient student but she was stubborn, which turned out to be more useful.
The household ran on its usual low hum of small activities, meals, conversations, people coming and going between the two longhouses through the enclosed bridge on the second floor. Winter made them all stay closer together than the regular seasons did. Nobody minded. That was probably the part of winter that the village actually liked, even if nobody said it directly.
August had also been getting some proper sleep for once since he didn't have much to do that urgently demanded his time. He would check in at the barracks from time to time and get regular updates, including the situation at the refugee camp outside the forest. He also checked in with Captain Alphonse's reports to stay on top of the numbers there. But other than that this was a rare stretch of quiet even for him. So naturally he spent some of it the only way a person like him knew how to spend their downtime. Checking his stats and skills. Running battle simulations in his head. Thinking of ways to use what he had to be more efficient than the last time he had used it. He never really stopped training even when he had nowhere to train and no one to train with. The mind worked just as well as the body if you used it right.
This was also a good time to have his equipment checked by Admin Magnus, for maintenance and possible upgrades. Magnus seemed genuinely happy doing it, happier than usual since he had proper time to go through things carefully instead of his regular administrative duties in the celestial plains. Manager Dorothy, the other person who manages his system, had become noticeably less cold over the years too. He hadn't met either of them in any real sense but he could get a feel for both their personalities just from their voices and how they communicated with him. A cool grandpa and a woman who had decided somewhere along the way that holding on to that cold attitude towards him all the time wasn't really worth the effort.
Anyway, his regular daily stat point had changed. It wasn't measuring individual skills separately anymore. It had become a unified daily increase applied to all his main stats. It was now worth thirty points up from what it was before (+10). This happened as the system recalibrated itself at some point over the past year. Everything counted toward it now. Combat, study, physical activity, even the mental simulations he ran while sitting quietly at home during winter. As long as his mind and body were being used in a meaningful way that day, the number went up.
This was also one of the reasons that he was already considered by his two masters to be at a grandmaster level in actual strength even if his system rank hadn't officially certified it yet. This daily growth had no ceiling and as long as he had something to do all of his stats kept growing regardless of what his level said. His level gave him additional stats when he ranked up too, but that daily growth ran underneath everything else on its own track. It didn't stop for anything. There was nothing normal about it by anyone's standards in this world, that is if they had known about it.
He had now reached the peak of the Expert rank according to his Personal Panel System and was on his way to become a certified Master rank, which was the system's own formal evaluation that ran separate from his actual combat ability. His actual current strength was already that of a High-Tier Master without armor and a Low-Tier Grandmaster in full combat gear.
But to get through the Master certification he had to pass the third trial first.
---
PERSONAL SYSTEM TRIAL - The Third Trial
"TO KNOW ONES SELF IS THE PINNACLE OF MASTERY. LET GO OF DOUBTS, AND SHOW TO THE WORLD THAT YOU ARE NOW WORTHY OF THE TITLE MASTER."
REWARDS: PERSONAL SYSTEM LEVEL 3 TO 4 UPGRADE, MASTER RANK TITLE, A FRAGMENT OF YOUR OTHER PAST SELF (CURRENT FRAGMENTS 2/4, +1 WHEN COMPLETED), AND RECEIVE A GREAT BLESSING FROM THE HEAVENS.
The task seemed simple but it was very vague. The first two trials had clear instructions. The first tested his strength. The second tested the wisdom of how he used it. Now it was asking for complete mastery of himself. But what did that actually mean?
He was already pretty satisfied with who he was. Even Master Ben and Master Miles had already acknowledged that he was already at that level. A master level being, and even bordering on grandmaster. Though there was still a formal process to go through to earn the Grandmaster rank, which means other grandmasters would have to acknowledge him officially first before the title meant anything in the broader world. He had only met a handful of them so far, barely enough to count on his two hands.
But the system's own trials were asking for something beyond that. A complete understanding of himself. To go deeper and actually figure out what that phrase meant for him specifically. He turned it over for a while and kept coming back to the same wall. He didn't have the answer on his own.
He would need to ask his masters about it. Both of them. Master Ben's take on it would probably be different from Master Miles's. Ben thought in terms of creation and construction, of what a person was made of and what they could be built into. Miles thought in terms of application, of what a person did with what they had and whether they were honest about the gap between the two. Getting both perspectives felt like the right approach before he attempted anything else on his own.
He made a mental note to visit both of them once the spring training schedule kicked back in. During winter they had all given each other a bit of breathing room. Ben had been in his tower mostly, working on his constructs and apparently dealing with whatever correspondence Mirabeth had been sending from Arabaya, after she left earlier to head back there. She only stated that she would get a few things from her house there and would return to the village by early spring. Miles on the other hand had done his own version of a quiet winter, which would mostly have looked like from an outsider's perspective, a man sitting in a tavern doing nothing but enjoying his warm served milk, though August suspected that he was never actually doing nothing.
The rewards from finishing this trial weren't bad either. The last one was something he hadn't seen before. A blessing from the heavens. He wasn't entirely sure what that meant in practical terms. Gods had already built him a system and arranged his reincarnation into this world, so a blessing wasn't outside the realm of what was possible. But what form it actually took in practice he had no idea. Something that he would have to ask Admin Magnus about when the equipment review was done.
He would also receive another fragment of that other worldly self of his. Though he still hadn't taken the time to look at the second one yet. It kept slipping his mind during everything that had happened over the past few years. He really should have done it before the season ended before things got busy again. Once spring arrived and the camp situation moved into its next phase and training resumed properly, he wouldn't have stretches of quiet like this one. He needed to use it while he had it.
He was still sitting with all of that thought when Angeline called for him from the other room.
"I'm coming, dear."
He set it aside and got up his chair. The battle simulations could wait.