Saturday, June 20, 1983 - Hawkins, Indiana
The level-up notification appeared while Ryan was nailing a replacement board to the Miller house porch.
Ryan drove the nail flush with three clean strokes. Six weeks of daily repairs had turned his swings from clumsy impacts into something approaching carpentry. The system had been tracking the improvement, and the improvement had been leading toward Level 5 for three days.
A pulse of warmth that started in his chest and spread outward, the same full body reset that came with every level gain. His HP and MP refilled to maximum in the span of a heartbeat.
[Level Up! Level 4 → Level 5]
[You have gained 5 stat points!]
[You have gained 1 skill point!]
[HP and MP have been fully restored.]
Ryan set the hammer down on the porch and sat on the new board, letting the warmth settle. The XP had stacked from a week of dailies, the Handyman chain quest completion, and the Builder's Foundation Stage 2 reward. He'd been watching the bar creep toward the threshold since Monday.
He allocated the points without hesitation. Three into INT, two into WIS. Same split as every level. The strategy didn't change because the logic hadn't changed. Physical stats grew through training. INT and WIS are too difficult for it.
INT: 26 → 29. WIS: 18 → 20.
The MP expansion was immediate. His pool deepened, the reservoir in his chest swelling with the new capacity. He could feel the difference between 305 and the new total.
And then the second notification appeared, and Ryan stopped breathing for about two seconds.
[Level 5 reached! New skills unlocked:]
[ID Create (Active) - LV 1]
Create a pocket dimension overlaid on your current location.
Available tier: Empty ID (no enemies)
MP Cost: 50 | Cooldown: 1 hour after exiting
[ID Escape (Active) - LV 1]
Exit the current Instant Dungeon.
MP Cost: 30 | Cooldown: None
Ryan read the notifications sitting on the back porch, and his hands were shaking. The manhwa's most priceless skill was just delivered.
He had dungeons now, and that means he got himself XP farm.
He pulled up ID Create's full description and read it twice. Empty ID at LV 1. No enemies. The next tier, supposed to be something called Vine Crawler, unlocked at LV 5. Four more levels of the skill before he saw his first monster. He notices it is the same skill but different monsters, maybe this world is influencing the system more than he knew.
He'd been grinding toward this moment for weeks, and the system was telling him he needed to grind more before the grind could start. Four levels of ID Create meant dozens of uses, and each use cost 50 MP with an hour cooldown after exiting.
But the Empty ID wasn't nothing. It was a copy of the real world with no witnesses, no noise complaints, and no property damage that carried over. A private training room the size of a world.
He stood up.
Walked inside the house, and activated ID Create.
* * *
The world drained.
Color bled out of the kitchen like water through a cracked glass. The avocado-green countertops went gray. The oak table went gray. The afternoon light streaming through the back window went flat and pale, as if the sun had been replaced by a fluorescent tube at the wrong color temperature.
Sound died. The crickets outside, gone. The faint hum of the well pump, gone.
His own breathing was the loudest thing in existence.
Ryan stood in the center of the copied kitchen and turned a slow circle. Everything was here. The table he'd repaired. The cabinets with the new hinges. The scrub marks on the countertop where he'd cleaned away four years of grime. The system had copied the space down to individual scratches on the floor. Kind of looks like the Upside-Down world.
He walked to the back door and opened it. The sky above the tree line was a uniform pale nothing, not cloudy or clear, just absent. Like a rendering engine that hadn't loaded the skybox.
His minimap showed the property as a small island of mapped terrain surrounded by fog.
Ryan closed the door. Went back to the kitchen. Stood in the center of the room and thought about what to do with a pocket dimension and no enemies.
Train.
* * *
He had about 285 MP after the ID Create cost. Enough to work with.
Power Strike against the kitchen wall. Full force, there was no need to hold back, because the wall was a copy and the damage wouldn't carry over to the real house. The impact cratered the plaster and sent a spiderweb of cracks across the surface. LV 5 Power Strike at STR 13 hit hard enough to punch through drywall.
He threw ten Power Strikes in quick succession. Left, right, left, right. The wall looked like someone had attacked it with a sledgehammer. White dust filled the air. His knuckles tingled from the impacts, but nothing hurt because Gamer's Body didn't know pain, just resource depletion.
Then he tried something new.
Mana Bolt was the ranged attack he had been planning ever since his visit to the library. It is definitely the most iconic skill from the manhwa, and essentially the go‑to choice for a beginner's energy‑projection ability.
The concept was straightforward.
Shape MP into a compact mass, accelerate it, release it toward a target. The same principle as Power Strike but externalized.
First attempt. He raised his right hand, palm out, and pushed MP toward his fingers. The warmth moved through his arm, gathered at his palm, and sat there. A faint glow, barely visible in the gray light. He tried to compress it, shape it, launch it.
The energy dissipated. His MP dropped by maybe eight points and nothing happened. The glow faded and the warmth receded back toward his chest.
Second attempt.
He changed the mental model. Power Strike worked because he was adding force to an existing motion. There was no motion here. He needed to create the motion. Not push the energy, build it.
He held his palm out and focused on forming a sphere. Small, tight, compressed. He could feel the MP pooling in his hand, gathering into something denser than it wanted to be. The glow returned, brighter. A pale blue marble of light sitting above his palm, wobbling, unstable.
He tried to fire it by pushing it forward. The sphere lurched about two feet from his hand, wobbled sideways, and popped like a soap bubble. A small flash of light and a sound like a dry twig snapping. His MP dropped another twelve points.
Getting somewhere. The shape held, but the launch failed.
In his third attempt sharp Mind started doing something. The first two attempts had taught the system what he was trying to do, and the accelerated learning speed from the INT 25 threshold was compressing the feedback loop. He already understood what went wrong. The sphere needed directions baked into its structure, not applied after formation.
He raised his palm. Built the sphere. This time he shaped it with forward momentum already encoded into the MP structure, a compressed point of energy that knew where it was going before it left his hand.
The bolt fired.
A streak of pale blue light crossed the kitchen and hit the far wall with a crack that echoed in the silent house. The surface exploded. A hole the size of his fist punched into the wall, edges singed and smoking.
[A skill has been created through a specific action!]
[Mana Bolt (Active) - LV 1]
Fire a bolt of condensed MP energy.
Damage: INT × 1.0 | Range: 30m
MP Cost: 15 | Cooldown: None
INT times 1.0. At INT 29, that was 29 points of damage per bolt. More than double what Power Strike dealt at STR 13. The range was thirty meters, which was the length of a basketball court. He could hit targets from across a parking lot.
Ryan fired two more bolts at the ruined wall. The first hit clean, punching another hole. The second went wide by about a foot, accuracy degrading with consecutive rapid casts. His hands were steady, but the aim needed calibration. And much more practice time.
He spent the rest of his MP on alternating Power Strikes and Mana Bolt, working through the pool until it scraped empty. Then he activated ID Escape.
[ID Escape activated.]
Color rushed back.
Sound crashed in like a wave.
The kitchen was intact with no craters on the walls. The copied dimension had absorbed all the damage and dissolved when he left.
Ryan sat at the kitchen table and closed his eyes, activating Meditation. The warmth trickled back into his chest, steady and building. About twenty MP per minute with Meditation active at LV 2, his WIS 20 feeding the recovery. From empty to full in under twenty minutes. He'd wait for the cooldown to expire. Then he'd go back in.
* * *
The grind was mechanical and it was beautiful.
Three cycles a day. Create the Empty ID, train inside for twenty to thirty minutes until MP ran dry, escape, meditate for fifteen to twenty minutes until the pool refilled, wait out the remaining cooldown, repeat. Each cycle was roughly sixty to seventy minutes from start to start. On good days he fit four cycles in an afternoon.
Ryan's afternoons at the Miller property became a rotation. Mornings were still physical training and the daily quest. Library visits dropped to twice a week. The property's real-world repairs happened in the gaps between cooldowns while he waited for the timer.
Day one gave him ID Create LV 2.
[Skill "ID Create" has leveled up! LV 1 → LV 2]
MP Cost: 47 | Cooldown: 55 min
The cost reduction was small but helpful. Three fewer MP per cast meant three more MP available for training inside.
Days two and three pushed it to LV 3.
[Skill "ID Create" has leveled up! LV 2 → LV 3]
MP Cost: 44 | Cooldown: 50 min
He'd need more cycles per level going forward.
Inside the Empty ID, his other skills were climbing. Power Strike got ten to fifteen reps per session. Mana Bolt got eight to ten, with improving accuracy as his brain was improving his aim. Earth Shaping practice on the copied floors and walls. Unarmed Combat forms against empty air, which wasn't great for leveling but maintained the muscle patterns.
By day four he'd settled into a rhythm that felt very familiar to him. It was like an agile sprint cycle. Two-week burst of focused effort on a specific delivery with a hard deadline.
Then on day six, he pushed LV 3 to LV 4. The sessions inside were getting more productive as his MP pool grew from the Level up allocation
[Skill "ID Create" has leveled up! LV 3 → LV 4]
MP Cost: 41 | Cooldown: 45 min
Ryan could feel the system resisting, demanding more repetitions per level, stretching the space between gains. Each cycle mattered less individually, and only the accumulation pushed the bar forward.
On the ninth day, Tuesday June 29th, Ryan activated ID Create for the second cycle of the afternoon and felt the skill window change.
[Skill "ID Create" has leveled up! LV 4 → LV 5]
MP Cost: 38 | Cooldown: 40 min
[New tier unlocked: Vine Crawlers]
Enemies: Shadow Vines (LV 3-8)
Warning: Combat encounters. Prepare accordingly.
Ryan stood in the gray kitchen and stared at the notification. Nine days of creating pocket dimensions and training alone in dead silence, punching walls and firing bolts at plaster targets that couldn't hit back.
He exited the Empty ID, sat on the back porch, and meditated until his MP was full. Then he ate an apple from his backpack and thought about what he was about to do.
Shadow Vines. LV 3 to 8. Plant-type enemies. In the manhwa, the lowest-tier dungeon Zombies were weak individually but dangerous if you let them pin you down. Vines also meant grappling, constriction, attacks from unexpected angles. Walls, ceiling, floor. They'd come from everywhere.
His stats were decent for this fight. STR 15 from a week and a half of continued physical training. VIT 17. DEX 15. INT 29 with Mana Bolt as his primary damage skill. He had Power Strike for close range and Earth Shaping for environmental control. He had 335 MP, which was twenty-two Mana Bolts or eight Power Strikes and sixteen bolts, or some combination.
Ryan went back inside. Closed the door. Took a breath.
Selected Vine Crawlers.
Activated ID Create.
* * *
The house went wrong.
The color didn't just drain this time. It rotted. The gray walls darkened to a mottled brown black, like wood soaked in old water. The afternoon light from the window turned sickly green, filtered through something alive that had grown across the glass.
And then the vines came.
They pushed through the cracks in the wall. They rose from the gaps between floorboards. They dropped from the ceiling in slow, seeking tendrils, dark as old blood and covered in a sheen of moisture that caught the green light. They moved slowly like they were trying to feel the air around them and look for prey.
Ryan's heart hammered. Gamer's Mind held the panic at arm's length, kept his thinking clear, but the sight of dark vines crawling across familiar surfaces triggered something in his gut that the skill couldn't fully suppress.
He raised his right hand and fired.
The Mana Bolt crossed the kitchen and hit a vine cluster on the far wall. The bolt punched through two tendrils and exploded against the wall behind them. Vine matter sprayed. A thin, sour liquid spattered the floor.
The remaining vines reacted. They surged. Three tendrils whipped toward him from the left, fast, faster than he'd expected from something that had been creeping seconds ago.
He sidestepped. One vine missed. One caught his forearm and wrapped tight, the grip strong enough to bruise if his body worked on normal rules. His HP bar ticked down. Fifteen points from a single vine grab.
Ryan twisted his arm, got his hand free, and drove a Power Strike into the vine at the point of attachment. STR 15 times 2.0 at LV 5. The vine exploded. Green-black pulp splattered across his wrist.
More coming. From the ceiling, a thick cluster dropped toward his head. He threw himself sideways, hit the floor, rolled, and came up firing. Two Mana Bolt s in quick succession. Both hit. The cluster shredded, tendrils falling in pieces.
A vine from the floor caught his ankle. He stomped it with his other foot, felt it squash, pulled free. Another wrapped around his right leg, tighter this time, and started pulling him toward the wall where a mass of vines had gathered into something that looked almost like a mouth.
Power Strike to his own leg, careful, angled so the force went into the vine and not into his shin. The vine tore apart. He scrambled backward, put the kitchen table between himself and the wall cluster, and started firing bolts as fast as he could shape them.
Eight minutes. It took eight minutes to clear the kitchen.
He stood in the middle of the room, breathing hard, covered in vine residue, HP down to 215 out of 260. The floor was a mess of dark plant matter and the sour liquid that the vines bled when cut. His MP was at 140, more than half gone from a combination of Mana Bolt s, Power Strikes, and one Earth Shaping he'd used to rip a section of floor vines out by the root.
The vine remains shimmered. Flickered. And dissolved into drops of light that coalesced into small objects sitting on the kitchen floor.
Loot.
Ryan picked up the first item. A bundle of dark fibrous material, dry and surprisingly tough. He Observed it.
[Vine Fiber (Common)]
Crafting material. Tough, flexible fibers from Shadow Vine remains. Used in ropemaking, basic armor reinforcement, and alchemical binding.
Two bundles of Vine Fiber. And beside them, a small glass vial filled with dark liquid.
[Shadow Sap (Uncommon)]
Alchemy ingredient. Concentrated sap from Shadow Vines. Used in basic potions and as a reagent for dimensional crafting recipes.
And twelve dollars. Crumpled bills that had materialized from nothing when the vines dissolved. Ryan picked up the bills and smoothed them out on the kitchen table. Alexander Hamilton. Andrew Jackson on a five, plus seven ones. Real US currency, generated by the system, spendable at any store in Hawkins.
[A.N.: It is real money that can be spent anywhere. Imagine that every serial number or verification detail perfectly matches genuine U.S. currency, making it completely indistinguishable from the real thing.]
He stashed everything in Inventory and ran Vine Crawlers twice more that afternoon. He decided to stay in the Miller house ID version for now.
Second run was smoother. He knew the attack patterns now. Vines from walls and ceiling first, then floor vines after a delay. The mass clusters were the real threats. Individual tendrils were HP tax. He cleared the room in six minutes with better MP management, spending more on Mana Bolt s and less on panic Power Strikes.
Loot: Vine Fiber (×3), eight dollars.
Third run. Five minutes. His movements were tighter, reactions faster. He was learning to read the way the vines do their lunges, a slight thickening at the base before the whip came.
Loot: Vine Fiber (×1), Shadow Sap (×1), eighteen dollars, and a small bottle that Observe identified as:
[Minor HP Potion]
Restores 50 HP when consumed.
Thirty-eight dollars in one afternoon from killing shadow plants. Plus materials, plus combat XP that dwarfed weeks of daily quests. He can use this first piece of evidence to verify that the dungeon economy was real and functional and could fund everything he needed.
Ryan held the HP potion up to the window. The liquid inside was red, almost luminous. Can it cure cancer? He should try to check consumable like HP potions on someone without the Gamer system.
He put the potion in Inventory and went to wash the vine residue off his hands at the kitchen sink. The contrast between the gray horror of the ID and the warm June evening outside the window made his chest tight. The Upside Down was going to be very f**ked up.
* * *
The physical changes were getting hard to hide.
Since the ID skill was gifted his training volume had doubled. Power Strikes against walls at full force, sprinting across copied rooms, grappling with vines, all on top of the morning routine that had been escalating for six weeks.
Week six gains were insane.
STR 13 to 15, VIT 15 to 17, DEX 13 to 15.
Three stats, two points each. Six physical points in a week. The combination of real-world training plus ID combat was pushing more stress through his system than running and push-ups alone ever could.
Ryan came to the Saturday training session on June 25th and Lucas stopped mid sentence.
"Dude. Are you taller?"
Maybe. Half an inch, possibly. The growth was ambiguous enough to deny. But his shoulders had widened. His arms had definition that hadn't been there a month ago, the kind of lean muscle you saw on swimmers and gymnasts, not bulk but visible structure under the skin.
"I've been running every day," Ryan said. "And doing push-ups "
Lucas studied him for a second longer, then accepted it. Because it was true, as far as it went, and because all four of them were showing changes. This weeks of Saturday sessions plus individual training had shifted the group's baseline. Lucas was leaner. Mike's posture was better. Will's legs were stronger from the running. Even Dustin, who complained the most, had stopped getting winded on the half-mile jog.
Ryan pushed the session harder. A full mile run. The obstacle course expanded with new elements he'd scouted during the week, a low crawl under a fallen branch, a balance walk along a narrow creek bank. Hip throws, which Lucas picked up in four attempts and Will needed twelve but got it before the hour was over.
Mike pulled him aside after.
"Where did you learn hip throws?"
"The judo book. Same one I showed you."
"I read that book. It didn't make this much sense."
Mike had a way of asking questions that weren't questions, daring you to disagree so he could dig into the disagreement.
"I've been practicing at home," Ryan said. "It takes repetition."
Mike looked at him, "Saturday. Same time," he said and turned and walked toward his bike.
* * *
His friends, now proven, were training on their own.
Tuesday afternoon, Ryan biked to the Sinclair house to return a borrowed D&D manual. He found Lucas in the backyard doing push-ups on the grass, headband on, counting under his breath. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. His form was rough, elbows flared, but his face had the look of someone who was serious about doing it.
Ryan watched from the fence for a moment before calling out. "Your elbows are flaring."
Lucas dropped flat and glared up. "How long have you been standing there?"
"Long enough to see your form sucks."
"My form is fine."
"Your elbows are at forty-five degrees. Tuck them in. Closer to your ribs." Ryan leaned over the fence and demonstrated the arm position.
Lucas adjusted and did five more. They were harder but he could feel the difference in the way his chest engaged. He finished the set and sat up, brushing grass off his palms.
"I've been doing these every day. Don't tell Dustin."
"Why?"
"Because he'll make it a competition and then quit when he loses."
Ryan grinned.
That was Lucas. Once he decided something was worth doing, his commitment was absolute. No half measures, no bargaining with himself about taking days off. This conviction only reinforced Ryan's opinion of him. In the show, that same quality made Lucas the one who never flinched when things went bad. Sure, he acted like a jerk to Eleven in the first season, but he also had real strengths, and his relationship with Max later on made it clear just how loyal and dedicated he could be.
At D&D that Wednesday, Dustin mentioned offhandedly that he'd been "doing laps around the block" in the evenings. "My mom thinks I'm looking for cats." Mike rolled his eyes. But Mike also said, without making a big deal about it, that he'd been "practicing the throws" Ryan had shown them. He didn't elaborate. Mike was competitive enough to train in secret and proud enough to act like it came naturally.
Will told Ryan on a bike ride Thursday that he'd run to the end of Mirkwood and back without stopping. "Two miles. I timed it." The pride in his voice was quiet but unmistakable.
"That's great, Will."
"It's not fast."
"Fast doesn't matter yet. Distance matters. You went two miles without walking."
Will nodded. He was pedaling steadily beside Ryan, matching pace without struggling, and that alone was different from a month ago. The kid who'd been the weakest in the group, the one that would spend a week alone in the Upside Down in four months, was building a foundation.
It might matter. It might buy him an hour. Of course, Ryan will try to prevent it.
* * *
The Vine Crawler grind changed everything.
After the first day's runs, Ryan went back every afternoon. The combat XP was several times what the daily quest provided. His level bar moved visibly after each clear, and the loot was funding his property renovation in ways that lawn-mowing money never could.
Between Vine Crawler runs, while meditating to refill MP, Ryan worked on the real Miller house. Earth Shaping had hit LV 4 during the Empty ID grind, and the jump in control precision was real. The radius was 3.5 meters now, the weight limit INT times 8 kilograms, and with INT climbing from level-up allocations, that limit was rising fast.
[Skill "Earth Shaping" has leveled up! LV 4 → LV 5]
Radius: 4m | Weight: INT × 9 kg | MP Cost: 11
Now affects soft stone.
LV 5 let him work with soft stone. The fieldstone foundation that he'd been unable to touch at LV 1 now responded to his shaping, reluctantly, with heavy MP cost per square foot, but it responded. He sealed two cracks in the basement wall that had been letting water in since before the Millers left. The patches were rough but watertight.
He'd been channeling MP into repairs for weeks. Small amounts, unconscious, just the natural flow of energy that accompanied any sustained skill use. But when he started deliberately pushing MP into the wood while rebuilding a section of back porch railing, the system noticed.
[A skill has been created through a specific action!]
[Mana Crafting (Active) - LV 1]
Infuse MP into materials during construction or repair.
+10% durability to crafted/repaired items.
MP Cost: 5/minute
The railing section he'd been working on when the skill triggered was measurably harder than the wood next to it. Same pine boards with the same dimensions. But the infused section resisted his thumbnail with a firmness that felt closer to hardwood than pine. Ten percent at LV 1. The scaling on this skill would turn regular materials into magical ones.
Two days later, from the sustained daily MP expenditure across skills, Mana Sense triggered.
[Through sustained magical practice, a skill has been created!]
[Mana Sense (Passive) - LV 1]
Awareness of MP flow. Detect active magical or dimensional energy within 5 meters.
His own MP pool pulsed faintly in his chest, visible to this new sense as a warm glow. The Mana residue in the porch railing hummed at a lower frequency. And at the edge of his range, five meters out, just past the privet hedge, the ambient background energy of Hawkins registered as a flat, even nothing.
Except it wasn't quite nothing. There was a texture to it. A faint grain, like the static on an untuned TV, and if he concentrated, the grain seemed to have a direction. South and east, toward Hawkins Lab.
* * *
Ryan was at Melvald's on a Thursday afternoon buying batteries for his flashlight. The property work ate batteries fast.
Joyce Byers stood behind the counter, sorting a rack of magazines into the display. Her movements were automatic, hands working while her eyes stayed somewhere else. She looked tired. The kind of tiredness that wasn't about sleep.
Ryan set the batteries on the counter. Two packs of D-cells.
"You're Pete Reed's nephew," she said. She'd rung him up before, though it had been weeks since the last time.
"Yes, ma'am."
Joyce reached for the batteries, scanned them, and punched numbers into the register. "Will talks about you. The training thing you boys are doing."
Ryan's throat tightened. He kept his face neutral.
"He's been running in the mornings," she said. "Before I even get up. I hear the front door."
"He's doing great," Ryan said. "He ran two miles last week without stopping."
Joyce smiled. It was tired and real and it cracked something in Ryan's chest that he wasn't prepared for. "He seems happier this summer. More energy." She handed him the bag. "Whatever you boys are doing, keep doing it."
"We will."
"That's $3.42."
He counted the change out, took the bag, and walked to the door. His eyes stung and he pressed the heel of his hand against one of them, pretending to rub away sweat.
Joyce Byers.
In four months, she'd be hanging Christmas lights on her walls and talking to a boy trapped in another dimension through flickering electricity. She'd fight the entire town's assumption that her son was dead. And She'd scream until someone listened.
He pushed through the door into the July heat. The sun was bright and the sidewalk was warm and a kid rode past on a bicycle.
Just another thing to worried about… the list is endless.
By the first week of July, the numbers had shifted from encouraging to ridiculous fast-paced impact.
Two more level-ups came fast, driven by the Vine Crawler XP that stacked daily on top of the quest rewards. Level 5 to 6 took five days. Level 6 to 7 took six. Each level-up went to the same allocation. Three INT, two WIS. The same reasoning with the same compound returns.
Physical stats from the dual training: STR 15 to 16, VIT 17 to 18, DEX 15 to 16. The gains were slowing. Three points across a week and a half instead of six. The golden window was narrowing as his physical stats pushed further into the mid-teens, and the system demanded more stress per threshold.
His body was faster and more fluid than two weeks ago. Now his Power Strike cratered vine clusters that had taken two hits to kill in the first sessions.
Ryan was counting his earnings on the workbench he'd built from scrap lumber. Sixty-two dollars from today's Vine Crawler runs. On top of the few hundred dollars accumulated over the past week and a half.
This money was enough to buy lumber and nails and weatherproofing supplies from the hardware store without counting pennies. Enough that, with a few more weeks of this, the Miller house could start looking like a real base instead of a cleanup project.
He stashed the cash in Inventory and pulled up the status window.
[Status Window]
Name: Ryan Reed
Title: The Gamer
Level: 7
HP: 295/295
MP: 440/440
STR: 16
VIT: 18
DEX: 16
INT: 35 (Sharp Mind)
WIS: 24
CHA: 8
LUK: 5
Stat Points: 0
Skill Points: 7
Skills (24):
Gamer's Mind (Passive) - MAX
Gamer's Body (Passive) - MAX
Observe (Active) - LV 6
Physical Endurance (Passive) - LV 3
Power Strike (Active) - LV 6
Meditation (Active) - LV 3
Mapping (Passive) - LV 1
Basic First Aid (Active) - LV 1
Unarmed Combat (Passive) - LV 2
Survival (Passive) - LV 1
Lockpicking (Active) - LV 1
Basic Crafting (Active) - LV 2
Repair (Active) - LV 4
Structural Analysis (Passive) - LV 2
Cooking (Active) - LV 3
Earth Shaping (Active) - LV 5
Dishwashing (Passive) - LV 3
Mana Bolt (Active) - LV 2
ID Create (Active) - LV 5
ID Escape (Active) - LV 3
Sprint (Active) - LV 1
Physical Resistance (Passive) - LV 1
Mana Crafting (Active) - LV 1
Mana Sense (Passive) - LV 1
Twenty-four skills. Fourteen of them leveled at least once since the awakening them. The combat skills were climbing fastest now that he had real targets. Mana Bolt had hit LV 2 from dozens of casts during Vine Crawler runs. Power Strike was at LV 6 from the combination of tree punching, wall punching, and vine punching. ID Escape had leveled to LV 3 just from repeated exits.
Sprint and Physical Resistance were new. Sprint had triggered during a Vine Crawler run when he'd pushed into a full dead sprint to avoid a ceiling cluster, consciously pouring MP into his legs for speed. Physical Resistance had appeared after enough vine hits had accumulated across sessions.
The Vine Crawler ID was still the only combat tier available. The next unlock was Demodog Den at ID Create LV 10. Five more levels. More cycles, more grinding, more hours in the gray copy-world fighting plants that bled sour liquid and dropped pocket money.
But the direction was right. The XP flow from combat was four or five times what he'd been earning from quests alone. At this rate, he will level faster and faster.
[A.N.: Sorry guys…and girls! I had a busy week, so the chapter was delayed. I'm trying to manage more updates, but I didn't have enough time to translate and edit everything properly.
Also… I haven't seen many comments lately, so I'm starting to wonder if I'm just posting fanfic into a black hole. If you're out there reading this, throw me a comment so I know I'm not alone with the void.]