Monday, June 6, 1983 - Hawkins, Indiana
The alarm didn't ring. Ryan was already standing in the kitchen at 4:58, lacing his shoes by the light above the stove.
Four weeks since the awakening. His routine had become almost automatic. Wake up before the alarm, dress in the dark, slip downstairs, drink water, stretch against the counter, go. His body didn't need the alarm. Gamer's Body woke him at full capacity the moment he'd had enough sleep, which was always exactly six hours regardless of when he went to bed.
He ran south on Maple. Past the Hendersons', past the Sinclairs' corner, left on Kerley, out toward the farmland where the houses thinned and the sky opened up. His minimap tracked the run in real time, a small blue dot tracing familiar streets.
No stat gain from the run. He hadn't expected one. VIT 13 was getting harder to push. The daily runs still registered as effort, still filled whatever invisible progress bar the system used, but the threshold for the next point was higher than it had been at 10 or 11. He'd need to do something different soon. Hills. Sprints. Something that made his body work in a way it hadn't adjusted to yet. Maybe add some weight.
After the run, the usual Power Strikes against the row of oaks along his way back.
He walked home, refilling his stamina on the way, and came through the back door at 5:50. Pete's door was still closed. Ryan poured himself a glass of water, drank it, then pulled the carton of eggs from the fridge.
He cracked four eggs into the skillet. Butter already sizzling from the pan he'd preheated before his run. Salt. A little bit of the dried oregano he'd found in the back of Pete's spice rack, which had probably been there since the first day of this house. He plated two for himself, two for Pete, and set Pete's plate on the table next to a fork and a paper napkin.
He sat down and ate. Selected VIT as his cooking buff target. The little fork-and-knife icon appeared at the edge of his vision, barely perceptible.
Pete's bedroom door opened at 6:15. Slippers. The bathroom. Running water. Then the kitchen.
Pete stood in the doorway. Looked at the plate on the table. Looked at Ryan, who was washing his own plate at the sink.
He sat down and ate.
This had been their rhythm for two weeks. Ryan cooked. Pete ate. Neither of them talked about it. Pete never said thank you and Ryan never expected him to. The food was better than Pete's cooking by a wide margin, and Pete knew it, and that was enough.
Ryan finished the dishes. The cast-iron skillet got the wire brush and hot water treatment, the way Pete had taught the younger version of him years ago. The other plate and the fork went into the soapy water in the sink. He scrubbed, rinsed, dried, put them away.
And the system, which had apparently been watching him do this every day for two weeks, decided that today was the day it cared.
[Through repeated domestic activity, a skill has been created!]
[Dishwashing (Passive) - LV 1]
Improves cleaning speed and efficiency.
+5% speed per level. Reduces wear on cleaned items.
Ryan stood at the sink with a wet plate in one hand and read the notification twice.
A dishwashing skill.
The Gamer system, the same system that gave him Power Strike and Earth Shaping and the ability to see invisible information about every object in Hawkins, had just given him a skill for washing dishes.
He laughed quietly, because Pete was ten feet away eating eggs, but genuine. Jee-Han's mom also gave him quests to do household chores, but he didn't get skill from them most of the time.
The skill was useless in any practical sense. He wasn't going to defeat the Demogorgon with superior dishwashing technique. But it proved something. The system was tracking everything. Every repeated action, every pattern, every habit. And when the cumulative effort crossed whatever internal threshold the system used, it crystallized the behavior into a skill. The threshold was distinct for different things like domestic tasks. But the principle was the same one that generated Power Strike and Earth Shaping.
He went upstairs to get his backpack. School started in an hour.
* * *
The side quests started that morning, and they didn't stop.
Ryan was biking to school when he passed Mrs. Williams's house and noticed the fence along her front yard. One of the posts was cracked at the base, leaning about fifteen degrees off vertical, pulling the section of chain-link with it. He'd seen it three days ago on his morning run. He'd noticed it again yesterday while Observing the Williams mailbox for the hundredth time. He'd thought about fixing it.
And the system had noticed him thinking about it.
[Quest: "Good Neighbor"]
Help repair the Williams fence.
Reward: 50 XP, +1 CHA
Time Limit: None
Ryan stopped his bike. Read the quest notification.
The system had been stingy with quests for weeks. The Welcome to Hawkins quest on day one. The Daily Training Regimen on day four. And then nothing. Twenty-five XP per day from training, plus the small skill creation bonuses, and that was it. He'd been living on a drip feed.
Now it was offering him fifty XP for fixing a fence post. That was two days of training rewards for maybe an hour of work.
He accepted the quest and kept riding. He'd come back after school.
By lunchtime, he had two more.
The first popped during his library visit at ten. He'd been reading a physics textbook, the second one he'd attempted, working through chapters on thermodynamics and wave mechanics. The physics wasn't generating a skill, same as chemistry. But the system was watching his reading habits.
[Quest: "Bookworm's Progress"]
Read 10 specialized texts.
Progress: 8/10
Reward: 100 XP, +1 Skill Point
Time Limit: None
Eight out of ten. The system was retroactively counting the books he'd already finished. The first aid manual, the three martial arts books, the survival guide, the chemistry textbook, the carpentry guide, and the biology text. Three more and he'd earn a hundred XP and a skill point.
The second quest appeared when he biked to the Miller property after school and started clearing the third back room, the one he'd been putting off because the ceiling had a water stain the size of a dinner table and the floor was covered in mouse droppings.
[Quest: "Builder's Foundation"]
Complete basic structural repairs on the Miller Property.
Stage 1: Clear and clean 3 rooms.
Progress: 2/3
Reward: 75 XP
[Additional stages will be revealed upon completion]
Two out of three. The kitchen and dining room counted. One more cleared room and he'd bank seventy-five XP.
Ryan swept the back room while his brain ran numbers. Fifty from the fence quest. A hundred from the reading quest. Seventy-five from the property quest. Two hundred and twenty-five XP from three side quests that hadn't existed yesterday.
He stopped sweeping and leaned on the broom handle.
Why now? Why were the quests appearing now, after weeks of almost nothing?
He thought about it for a while. The system tracked behavior. It rewarded patterns. For four weeks, Ryan had been doing the same things every day with the same goal. Get stronger, get XP, get ready for November. He ran. He trained. He read. He built. He Observed everything he could see. Every action pointed in the same direction.
So, Ryan guessed it was like a recommendation engine. Watch enough action movies and the algorithm starts suggesting action movies. Spend four weeks actively hunting for every possible source of experience points, and the system starts generating quests that match the behavior it's already tracking.
He was basically teaching the system what he wanted, and the system was responding by giving him more opportunities to get it.
Ryan picked up the broom and kept sweeping. The mouse droppings went into a pile. The dust went after them. He worked until the floor was bare wood, stained and scarred but clean enough that he could walk across it without stepping in anything organic.
[Quest Complete: "Builder's Foundation" - Stage 1]
3/3 rooms cleared and cleaned.
Reward: 75 XP
[Quest Updated: "Builder's Foundation" - Stage 2]
Complete structural repairs in 3 rooms (fix doors, windows, and flooring).
Reward: 100 XP
Seventy-five XP banked and stage 2 was already feeding him the next target.
* * *
He fixed Mrs. Williams's fence on Tuesday after school.
The post was rotten at the base. Termite damage, from the look of it. Ryan dug out the old post with a shovel he'd brought from home, cut a new one from a piece of pressure-treated four-by-four he brought from the Williams shed, and set it in the hole with packed gravel and dirt. The chain-link section went back on with the existing hardware. The whole job took about ninety minutes.
Repair leveled from the work.
[Skill "Repair" has leveled up! LV 1 → LV 2]
Mrs. Williams came out with lemonade and five dollars. Ryan drank the lemonade, pocketed the money, and thanked her.
[Quest Complete: "Good Neighbor"]
Reward: 50 XP
[CHA +1]
The five dollars were heaven gift, because he was a fifteen-year-old with no income trying to renovate a house.
He rode home and did the math at his desk.
Daily training quest with 25 XP per day.
The Dishwashing skill had triggered something else too, a notification he'd almost missed that morning.
[Quest: "Household Duties"]
Keep the household clean and maintained.
Requirements: Complete daily chores (dishes, cleaning, basic maintenance).
Reward: 15 XP
Resets daily at midnight.
Fifteen XP per day just for doing dishes and keeping the house from falling apart. On top of the twenty-five from training. Forty XP daily from repeatable quests alone.
That means forty XP per day times fourteen days was 560 XP. Plus the side quests, 50 from the fence, 75 from the property Stage 1, 100 from the reading quest when he finished it. Plus, the 10 XP bonuses from the Dishwashing skill creation. Plus, whatever came from the property Stage 2 and any other quests that appeared.
The XP was stacking. The bar was filling. He was at 390 out of 600 for Level 3 at the start of this week.
He closed the mental spreadsheet and opened his actual textbook. Algebra homework wasn't going to do itself, and if he didn't turn it in Mr. Henshaw would call Pete, and Pete would give him a look that was worse than any detention.
* * *
Wednesday. D&D at Mike's basement.
Mike was running a new dungeon, something he'd been designing for two weeks, and his DM energy had the manic intensity of someone who believed his own story was the best thing anyone at the table had ever experienced. His binder was thick with hand-drawn maps. The encounter notes were color-coded.
Dustin's halfling had been resurrected after last session's pit trap death, which Mike had allowed on the condition that Dustin's character came back with a phobia of holes. Dustin had agreed and then immediately forgotten about it.
"There's a pit in the floor," Mike said, reading from his notes. "Ten feet wide, stretching across the corridor. The edges look crumbly. What do you do?"
"I jump across," Dustin said.
"You have a phobia of pits."
"Since when?"
"Since you agreed to it last week. Roll a Wisdom save."
"That's not even a real mechanic!"
"It is in my dungeon."
The session ran two hours. Ryan help when the party needed them, held back when they didn't.
Mike noticed. Ryan saw it in the way Mike's eyes moved between them during the gnoll fight, watching Ryan watch Lucas, processing the fact that Ryan had stepped back to let someone else lead.
After the gnolls were dead and the loot was divided, the party made camp in the dungeon. Dustin started complaining about summer.
"We've got like three months and nothing to do. My mom wants me to go to science camp but the good one in Indianapolis is full and the one in Lafayette is for little kids."
"We have D&D," Mike said.
"We always have D&D. I mean something real. Outside."
Lucas leaned back in his chair. "We could go to the quarry."
"We always go to the quarry. I mean something different."
The timing was right. Ryan had been waiting for an opening like this for a week.
"What if we trained?" he said.
Four heads turned toward him. Dustin with his mouth open around a chip. Lucas with one eyebrow raised. Will looking up from his sketchpad. Mike with the expression of someone whose curiosity had just been hooked against his will.
"Trained how?" Mike asked.
"Like our characters." Ryan leaned forward. "You designed a campaign where our characters crossed a mountain range. Could Garrett do that if I couldn't do a pull-up?"
"Garrett has a 16 Strength," Mike said.
"And I have a fifteen-year-old body that gets winded running to the bike rack. What if we built real character sheets? Physical ones. Set challenges. Complete them, level up."
Lucas was already interested. Ryan could see it in the way he sat up straighter, the competitive instinct waking up behind his eyes. "Like what kind of challenges?"
"Running. Climbing. Navigation. Maybe some self-defense stuff. I found a book on judo at the library."
"Judo?" Dustin looked skeptical. "We're not ninjas, Ryan."
"We're not fighters either. We're four teens who can't throw a proper punch. What happens if Troy and his goons corner us again?"
When Ryan wasn't looking, Troy Walsh had shoved Lucas into a locker two weeks before school ended. The bruise had lasted four days. Nobody had forgotten.
Mike tapped his pencil on the table. "So you want to run a real-life campaign. With physical challenges instead of dice rolls."
"Basically."
"And we'd have character sheets."
"If you want to make them."
Mike's eyes narrowed. He was already designing it. Ryan could see the gears turning, the DM brain repurposes itself for a new kind of game.
"Saturday mornings," Mike said. "I'll make the sheets."
* * *
The first Saturday session was June 11th. The four of them met in the woods behind Randolph Lane at eight in the morning, which for Dustin was essentially the middle of the night.
"Why does this have to be early?" Dustin asked. He was wearing a Star Wars shirt and gym shorts that went past his knees. His sneakers were untied.
"Because it's cooler in the morning," Ryan said. "And because nobody else is out here."
The woods behind Randolph were thick and mostly ignored. A creek ran through the center, shallow enough to wade. An old oak had fallen across it at some point, making a natural bridge. Beyond the creek, the trees opened into a clearing near an abandoned barn that belonged to a farm nobody had worked in years. Ryan had mapped the whole area on his runs before.
He started them with a jog. Half a mile, creek to barn and back.
Dustin quit at the quarter-mile mark and sat on a log, breathing like he'd been underwater. Lucas ran the whole thing, red-faced and competitive, checking over his shoulder to see if anyone was gaining on him. Will kept up without complaining. His stride was short and his breathing was rough, but he didn't stop.
Mike ran it in third place, which bothered him, because Mike didn't like being third at anything.
"Okay," Ryan said, barely winded. "Now we climb."
The fallen oak across the creek was about two feet in diameter and spanned maybe twelve feet of water. Ryan climbed up on one end, walked across, jumped down. The bark was rough and solid under his shoes.
Lucas went next. Made it across without hesitation.
Will went third. Slower, careful with his feet, but he got to the other side and dropped down with a small smile.
Dustin stood on the bank and stared at the log. "If I fall in that creek I'm going home."
"The creek is six inches deep," Lucas said from the other side.
"Then it's six inches of humiliation."
Mike shoved Dustin from behind, not hard, just enough to force a step. Dustin yelped, grabbed the log, and hauled himself up with more upper body strength than Ryan expected. He crossed in a half-crouch, arms out for balance, and jumped off the far end with a sound that was half gasp and half war cry.
"See?" Ryan said. "You're fine."
"I am NOT fine. I'm traumatized."
After the obstacle course, Ryan taught them the wrist escape from the judo book. A simple technique: someone grabs your wrist, you rotate your arm toward their thumb, the weakest point of the grip, and pull free. Physics, not strength. Leverage against anatomy.
They practiced on each other in the clearing.
Mike argued about whether the technique would work against someone bigger.
"It works because of the thumb," Ryan said. He grabbed Mike's wrist. "Doesn't matter how strong they are. The thumb is the weak link. Twist toward it."
Mike twisted. His hand came free. He looked at his wrist, then at Ryan.
"Where did you learn this?"
"Library book. Judo and Self-Defense, 1974 edition. It's in the sports section."
Mike studied him for a beat.
Ryan kept his face neutral. Mike was smart enough to notice that Ryan had read a self-defense book unprompted and then organized a physical training group for his friends, and those two facts together painted a picture of someone who took the bullying problem seriously.
Ryan taught them to throw a punch. "Fist tight, thumb outside, rotate your hip into it. The power comes from the ground, not your arm."
Lucas's punch cracked against the air with a snap. Good instincts.
Will's punch was tentative, pulled, the kind of punch someone threw when they were afraid of hurting their own hand. But his form was clean. Ryan corrected his stance, moved his back foot six inches to the right, and Will's second attempt had actual force behind it.
Mike used too much shoulder, not enough hips. He overextended and almost elbowed Dustin.
"Watch it!" Dustin jumped back.
"Sorry."
"No you're not."
"I really am not."
Wrestling broke out between them. Ryan let it happen. Dustin got Mike in a headlock that lasted about two seconds before Mike squirmed free.
Will sat on the fallen oak and Ryan sat next to him.
"You okay?"
"Yeah." Will closed the notebook. "This is fun. The running part was hard."
"It gets easier."
"Does it?"
"Your body adapts. Two weeks of this and the half-mile jog won't even wind you."
Will nodded.
In few months, the Upside Down would take this kid. Drag him into a version of these woods that was dark and cold and choked with vine-like things that moved on their own. He'd spend a week alone in a dimension that ate hope.
Ryan looked at Will's arms. Thin. His chest was narrow under the t-shirt. HP 70 out of 70. The lowest in the group by a wide margin.
If he could get Will stronger before November, even a little, maybe it would matter. Maybe the extra stamina would buy Will an extra hour in the Upside Down. Maybe the self-defense training would give him the instinct to run when every cell in his body wanted to freeze.
Maybe. A lot of weight on that word.
* * *
[Level Up! Level 2 → Level 3]
[You have gained 5 stat points!]
[You have gained 1 skill point!]
[HP and MP have been fully restored.]
June 14th. Tuesday. The notification appeared while Ryan was doing dishes after breakfast, which felt appropriate somehow. The daily XP from training and household quests, plus the fence quest and the property Stage 1, had pushed him over the 600 threshold.
He put the last plate in the drying rack and allocated the points at the kitchen table while Pete drank coffee and read the paper two feet away.
Three into INT. Two into WIS. Same allocation as Level 2. The strategy hasn't changed. He needs to expand the MP pool, improve regen, build the foundation for everything else. Physical stats could grow through training. INT and WIS couldn't, or at least not fast enough to matter. Every level-up point that went into INT was a point that would take week of library study to earn through training gains.
INT: 18 → 21. WIS: 14 → 16.
His pool expanded from 145 to somewhere around 185, and he could feel the difference. The warmth in his chest was denser, the reservoir deeper. Forty more points might not sound like much, but it was three extra Earth Shaping casts or four more Power Strikes per cycle.
WIS 16 meant faster regen too. About 8 MP per minute, up from 7. The difference was small in isolation. Over a twenty-minute session meant twenty extra points recovered. Over a day of cycling between training and rest, it added up.
He saved the skill point again. He had two banked now. He still didn't know exactly what he wanted to do with them. He'd experiment when he had a clear target.
Pete turned a page of the newspaper. Ryan got up, put his plate away, and went to grab his backpack.
"Ryan."
He stopped. Pete almost never said his name. Their conversations were "morning" and "yep" and the occasional comment about the Cubs.
"Yeah?"
Pete was still looking at the paper. "You've been cooking a lot lately."
"Yeah."
"The eggs are good."
Pete turned another page. That was the entire conversation. Ryan stood there for a second, processing the fact that Uncle Pete had just given him a compliment, possibly the first one in months, and then he went to school. On the way, he was thinking what a real progress Pete made today.
* * *
The second Saturday session was June 18th.
Lucas had been doing push-ups at home all week. He announced this immediately upon arrival, before anyone had even put their bags down, he was definitely expected to be commended.
"Twenty-five," he said. "Every night before bed."
"Twenty-five is a lot" Will said.
"It's nothing," Ryan said. "But it's a good start. What's your max in one set?"
"Nineteen."
"That's solid."
Lucas grinned. Ryan knew the grin. Lucas was competitive and serious about everything he did. In the show, that quality had made him the first to take the Upside Down seriously and the last to give up on any plan. Even if he didn't believe Eleven at first.
In real life, standing in the woods behind Randolph Lane in a camo headband and basketball shorts, it made him the best training partner Ryan could have asked for.
Dustin had discovered something during the week. He was good at the navigation challenges. Ryan had set a compass-and-landmark exercise during the first session, finding the old barn from the creek using only sun position and terrain features, and Dustin had gotten there first. His science brain, the same one that processed chemistry and biology and the mechanics of radioactive decay, could also read landscapes. He noticed elevation changes. He tracked water flow patterns. He identified north from tree moss and shadow angles before Lucas had finished pulling out the compass.
"I have a DEX of 6 and a Wisdom of 18," Dustin said, pointing to the character sheet Mike had made for him. "That means I suck at everything physical but I'm basically Gandalf."
"Gandalf had higher Strength than that," Mike said.
"Gandalf is older. I'm just entering my prime."
Will's jog was steadier this week. His breathing was more controlled. He didn't stop when his legs started burning, just dropped his pace and kept moving. The kid was determined.
Ryan pushed the difficulty up. Longer run, a full mile this time. Lucas and Ryan led, Mike and Will in the middle, Dustin bringing up the rear but still moving. An obstacle course through the woods, walking over the fallen oak, under a low branch, around the creek bend, up the slope to the clearing. Light-contact sparring in pairs, Ryan with Mike, Lucas with Dustin. Will watched and then practiced the wrist escapes on Ryan, who let him work on the technique until the rotation became automatic.
"What's next?" Lucas asked when they were done, breathing hard, hands on his knees.
"Endurance," Ryan said. "And throws. I'll show you a hip throw next week."
"Where are you learning all this?" Mike asked. He was sitting on the ground, arms on his knees. Sweat darkened his collar.
"Books."
"You continue to read judo books for fun?"
"It's not for fun. It's useful."
"Alright," Mike said. "Next Saturday."
They biked home as a group, splitting off one by one at their streets. Lucas peeled off first, then Dustin, then Will. Mike and Ryan rode together for another two blocks.
"You're different this summer," Mike said without looking over.
"Different how?"
"I don't know. Focused, or something. You look like you're training for something."
"Aren't you?"
"I'm doing it because you said it'd be cool. You're doing it because..." Mike trailed off. He didn't finish the sentence because he didn't have the end of it yet. He just knew that Ryan had one. "Never mind. See you Wednesday."
Mike turned left toward his house. Ryan kept going straight.
He would have to be more careful around Mike. But he also knew that even in Mike's wildest guesses, he would never figure it out. At most, Mike might assume that Ryan just wanted more sports and less D&D or something along those lines of thoughts.
* * *
The property ate his afternoons.
Earth Shaping at the Miller house had become a daily practice session. Two to three hours, eight to ten casts per visit until his MP bottomed out, then Meditation on the back porch to recover, then more casts. The skill was hungry for repetition, and the property was hungry for work. A good match indeed.
[Skill "Earth Shaping" has leveled up! LV 1 → LV 2]
Radius: 2m → 2.5m. Weight limit: INT × 6 kg.
MP Cost: 15 → 14 per use.
That came on June 10th, four days into the intensive practice. The cost reduction was the real prize. One fewer MP per cast meant one more cast per session before he ran dry. And the weight limit climbed with every INT point he added, which meant the skill was getting stronger in two directions at once. His own stats feeding the skill's formula.
Five days later:
[Skill "Earth Shaping" has leveled up! LV 2 → LV 3]
Radius: 2.5m → 3m. Weight limit: INT × 7 kg.
MP Cost: 14 → 13 per use.
LV 3 with INT 21 put his weight limit at 147 kilograms. He could move serious stone now. The floor in the master bedroom, which had been rough and uneven, got smoothed to something approaching level. The crack in the foundation wall, the one he'd noticed during his first week at the house, got sealed with packed earth pressed so tight it was nearly as hard as the concrete around it. Not a permanent fix. Not even a good fix by any construction standard. But good enough to keep water out for a season, and the system counted it as repair work.
The control precision at LV 3 was the real leap. At LV 1 and 2, Earth Shaping had moved dirt in lumps, like shaping wet clay with oven mitts on. At LV 3, he could feel individual layers. He could separate topsoil from packed clay. He could compress loose gravel into a firm surface. The skill was developing fine motor control, and his hands had started doing things he didn't consciously direct, small adjustments in finger pressure that the system translated into more precise energy application.
Basic Crafting and Repair leveled from the daily property work.
[Skill "Basic Crafting" has leveled up! LV 1 → LV 2]
[Skill "Repair" has leveled up! LV 2 → LV 3]
Repair hit LV 3 because Ryan was fixing things constantly. Door hinges, window frames, cabinet doors, the staircase railing that had been wobbling since the Millers left. Every fix was a rep, and the reps accumulated fast at low skill levels.
* * *
Physical training kept paying out, and the routine had only escalated.
Forty-minute runs, push-ups past sixty-five, pull-ups at fifteen on the oak branch behind Pete's shed. Plus, the unarmed combat forms, from the library books, which he practiced in the master bedroom at the property.
Week four gains:
[Through intense training, STR has increased by 1!]
STR: 10 → 11
[Through intense training, VIT has increased by 1!]
VIT: 13 → 14
[Through intense training, DEX has increased by 1!]
DEX: 11 → 12
[Through intense training, STR has increased by 1!]
STR: 11 → 12
Week five gains:
[Through intense training, VIT has increased by 1!]
VIT: 14 → 15
[Through intense training, DEX has increased by 1!]
DEX: 12 → 13
[Through intense training, STR has increased by 1!]
STR: 12 → 13
Seven physical stat points in two weeks. Roughly one point every two days, rotating across his physical stats based on which training pushed the hardest. STR gained from push-ups and Power Strike impact. VIT gained from the long runs and from pushing through the stamina floor. DEX gained from footwork drills, agility exercises, and the unarmed combat movement patterns.
The pace would slow. He knew it.
But right now, with physical stats in the low teens, every morning run was free money. He'd wring every point he could out of the golden window while it lasted.
* * *
Cooking hit LV 2 from twice-daily cooking. Breakfast every morning, sometimes dinner when Pete was working late and the kitchen was empty.
[Skill "Cooking" has leveled up! LV 1 → LV 2]
Cooked meals provide +4% to a chosen stat for 1.5 hours.
The buff percentage was still tiny. But Four percent of STR 13 was 0.52, which was already considerable.
Pete noticed the food was better. Didn't say anything. Just ate more. Ryan cooked dinner three nights that week. Hamburgers, because that was Pete's go-to. Scrambled eggs with onions and cheese. A stew made from canned vegetables and ground beef that came out better than it had any right to.
Observe climbed from constant use. LV 4 to LV 5 by the end of the second week, and the jump brought richer background data and sharper disposition readings.
[Skill "Observe" has leveled up! LV 4 → LV 5]
At LV 5, the information windows had depth. People didn't just show as "Friendly" or "Annoyed." He got more layers. Mrs. Williams was "Friendly (grateful, remembers fence repair, positive association with Ryan)." Mike was "Friendly (trusting, watchful, minor suspicion about recent behavioral changes)."
The minor suspicion note on Mike was new. And probably very accurate.
Power Strike reached LV 5 from daily repetition, and the damage multiplier ticked up to STR × 2.0. At STR 13, that was 26 damage per hit. Against the trees, the impacts were getting destructive. Chunks of bark flew off. The wood underneath cratered.
* * *
The reading quest finished on a Thursday evening. Ryan sat in the library reading a book on metalworking, the tenth specialized text the system had tracked, and the notification appeared between paragraphs about forge temperatures and quenching techniques.
[Quest Complete: "Bookworm's Progress"]
10/10 specialized texts read.
Reward: 100 XP, +1 Skill Point
Three skill points banked now.
The metalworking book didn't generate a skill, same as chemistry and physics. Too theoretical, not enough physical action involved. But the reading contributed to something else. Hours and hours of intensive study, six books per week across multiple subjects, and his INT had been tracking the cumulative effort.
[Through intensive study, INT has increased by 1!]
INT: 21 → 22
That came the same evening. And then, three days later, after a marathon reading session at the library that covered geology, advanced first aid, and the first hundred pages of a psychology textbook:
[Through intensive study, INT has increased by 1!]
INT: 22 → 23
Two INT points from training in one week. His INT was climbing faster than any physical stat because he was studying six to eight hours per day across library visits, property work, and evening reading. The system treated intensive mental effort the same way it treated intensive physical effort.
[Level Up! Level 3 → Level 4]
[You have gained 5 stat points!]
[You have gained 1 skill point!]
[HP and MP have been fully restored.]
June 19th. Five days after Level 3. The XP from daily quests, the property Stage 2 completion, and the reading quest had stacked fast enough to push him over the Level 4 threshold in under a week.
Three into INT. Two into WIS. The same allocation, for the same reasons. His physical stats were climbing through training. INT and WIS needed the level-up investment.
INT: 23 → 26. WIS: 16 → 18.
And then he stopped. Because the status window showed something he hadn't expected.
INT wasn't 26. It was 25 with a +1 from the level-up pending. The system was processing the points in order, and INT 25 had triggered something before the last point applied.
[INT has reached 25!]
[Threshold Bonus Unlocked: Sharp Mind]
[+15% MP. Skill learning speed increased. Can learn skills from observation more easily.]
Ryan sat on his bed and read the notification four times.
Sharp Mind. The first stat threshold bonus. The INT 25 breakpoint from the manhwa.
The fifteen percent MP bonus recalculated his pool immediately. He could feel it happening, the warmth in his chest swelling, the reservoir deepening. His MP didn't just increase by a number. It expanded.
He pulled up the status window and watched the numbers settle.
[Status Window]
Name: Ryan Reed
Title: The Gamer
Level: 4
HP: 235/235
MP: 305/305
STR: 13
VIT: 15
DEX: 13
INT: 26 (Sharp Mind)
WIS: 18
CHA: 8 (+1 From the side quest)
LUK: 5
Stat Points: 0
Skill Points: 4
MP 305. He'd started at 100 on day one. In five weeks, his pool had tripled.
He could cast Earth Shaping twenty-three times before running dry. He could throw thirty Power Strikes.
And the skill learning speed increase meant every book he read, every new action he attempted, had a higher chance of generating a skill. The system was literally getting better at learning from his behavior.
The INT-first strategy was paying off exactly the way he'd hoped. His STR 13 and DEX 13 were still average man numbers. A grown man could still outmuscle him in a fair fight. But fair fights weren't his plan. The plan was MP capacity, skill diversity, and the compound growth that came from having a deep enough resource pool to train harder and longer every day.
He closed the status window.
Hawkins in late June. The fireflies were out in force. Ryan could see them through his window, blinking in the backyard, small cold lights drifting above the grass.
Level 5 was next. ID Create lived at Level 5, if the system followed the manhwa's. He didn't know for certain that it did. He didn't know for certain that anything he remembered from the manhwa would map cleanly onto how this system actually worked. But the thresholds had matched so far. Skill creation, stat training, meditation multipliers.
When he unlocked ID Create, the grind would change. Real dungeons with real enemies and real XP rewards, instead of fixing fences and reading library books. The slow phase was almost over.
Ryan set his alarm for five AM. Force of habit. The alarm was unnecessary and had been for weeks. But the act of setting it was part of the routine.
The grind continued.
[A.N: Sorry for the slightly chaotic ending to this chapter, I really wanted to reach the ID reveal, so I had to slam the gas pedal and drag you along for the ride. I regret nothing… but I do apologize. A little.
Also, even though this is a GAMER story, I promise there will still be plenty of actual character interaction and not just endless XP farming. This grinding phase is mostly for Arc One, since, you know… preparing for the Upside Down kind of takes a lot of grinding.
Don't forget to drop some comments and power stones.
And if you spot any inconsistencies, typos, or reality‑glitches, please let me know before they evolve into full‑blown plot holes.]