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CH 97: Best Stat
🕑 Added 2025-02-25 15:00:06 +0000 UTCReid was forced to rest for nearly two full days following his constitution work - and that was with Win healing out the fatigue he'd accumulated. Just like using his power for explosive strength, using constitution's vitality stores to extend his stamina had massive backlash. Reid checked the description again as Nyx had him lie down.
Intelligence: 11
A reflection of an individual's mental capacities. Intelligence improves thought processing, system data recall, and mana application. Thought processing is recommended for all scholars, scientists, and orators. System data recall is recommended for scribes and ambassadors. Mana application is recommended for all individuals. May those of high intelligence light the path forward to a better universe.
"Intelligence is the best stat. You don't have to agree with that statement, but it is objectively correct. You already have experience with this one, when you made the skill resistance. Intelligence breaks down into your own thought processes, your data recall, and mana application. The first two are really about developing the structural informational thinking that will help you keep up with more information later down the line."
"You went to middle school only a few decades ago, relatively speaking, but if I asked you to name everyone from your class, I know you can't do it. If I showed you a picture of the class, you'd suddenly be able to remember more names because you'd have faces to relate them to. Scale that up - if you live for a thousand years, you're going to forget far more information than you can even conceive of knowing right now. The same issue can happen with understanding your skills and keeping in mind what they all do. Structural organization is key to overcoming that."
"It sounds like you're telling me to make a mind palace."
"I am telling you to make a mind palace. Organizing your thoughts comes down to literally organizing information. Once you do that, we get to play with threads."
"...I can't tell if you're messing with me."
"You've already seen the threads before - they're what make up that tangled, sprawling expanse of strings in your mind that give you your connection to the system, and generally define how your mana interacts with the world and how other people's mana interacts with yours. But we'll get there later. For now, we want to create your intelligence metaspace. You've done well with the metaspace creation, so this shouldn't take too much time. Imagine your mind palace - anything that pops up when you think of cataloguing information works, and it'll be stronger if you also make it represent using strategic thinking or reviewing information."
Reid shifted through a series of mental images until he reached a combination that felt right, and a flashing glimpse popped into view before fading. That was... different. He made a mental note to ask Nyx about it later, and followed the glimpse, then another - a third, and more. Reid was prepared for the pain that had come from the others, even in a reduced state. It didn't come. He worried that he was following the wrong path, or had gotten something incorrect, but the path felt right - it was just that the experience of finding the path's destination wasn't actively hurting him. The work was still there, tedious and hard, but the sensation was welcoming rather than hostile as he pursued the glimpses to their source.
When the glimpse solidified, it more slid into view than popped into existence. There was some discomfort there - but no real 'pain'.
Reid took in the new metaspace. Its 'entry' room was a near carbon-copy of his local game shop. There was a glass counter right next to the door where the owner usually sat, with display cases and aisles making a tight maze under a low ceiling. There was a glaring difference, though. Instead of the usual neat and organized store, the space was full of clutter like it had been swept off the shelves and left there. So many cases, volumes, boxes, and figurines were strewn about that Reid had trouble taking a step in the metaspace without stepping foot on something. He lifted his gaze.
Where the side door to the game rooms would be in the actual shop, an impossibly wide archway led into a series of seemingly endless bookshelves that were reminiscent of his high school library. A circle of reddish brown reading chairs surrounded a low circular table where one space met the other. The library looked as much a mess as the game store. Reid had a massive amount of work to do - and cleaning was his least favorite chore. No - scratch that. Shoveling snow was his least favorite chore, but cleaning was still his second least.
The work was obvious, and when Nyx didn't pop into existence to give him instruction, Reid followed his gut and started to organize. At first, he could only make small, haphazard piles of things. There were comics stacked on top of games, playing cards next to dice, but the piles formed. When he'd finally gotten things to the point where no more individually loose things sat on the floor, Reid organized the piles by type.
It was a different kind of painful. Everything was tedious, and there were so many things to move and organize and consider before he moved things around. Did playing cards for a series go with the volumes and movies associated with the series, or did they go with other playing cards? Should unpainted figurines be displayed separately from everything else? And why were most of the volumes seemingly blank, with nondescript titles? Reid pushed past the questions as best as he could, and worked himself until he felt completely mentally drained.
He schlepped himself over to the counter, and was ready to sit down on the old worn stool when he startled. Nyx sat there, silent. Although her impossibly black mouth was open in what seemed to be a smile, her eyes looked haggard.
"You've got the right idea here, Reid. Good work putting it together."
Her voice sounded just a bit raspy. "Nyx, are you alright? You look... tired."
"I'm starting to fade." Panic rose in Reid "Fading! Not dying. It means I've been doing too much energy expenditure - talking and teaching and the like." She looked down at the glass countertop. "I've got enough in me to see you and your friends through the rest of their lessons, and then I'll go into a kind of hibernation for a while. I'll see you, but you won't hear from me."
Reid's hairs stood on end. Nyx had an odd sense of time - and she'd only just 'woken up'. Now, she was preparing to go back into a dormant state, and the only thing she'd done in her time was teaching Reid and his friends. "How long is a while? How long will you be out?"
"That depends on a lot of different things, Reid. I'm not going to make promises and have you worrying about me missing some arbitrary date. The best thing you can do is grow in power and set yourself up properly. If you do that, then kill something to put yourself into F grade, I can steal some energy to come back. Or, if you find a beacon, I can pull excess power from that to wake back up. But no matter the case, you being balanced and ready is the key to making things happen faster."
Reid's resolve hardened. "I'll get there. I'll hit the limit on everything and then get you back to full health."
"I'm not wounded, Reid - just spent. But use that urgency. You have enough left in you to take the next step before you rest up again. Head to the strings."
Reid spared a glance at the stat as he shifted his internal focus away from the 'gaming-library' metaspace. It confirmed his worry that he hadn't made much progress with his work.
Intelligence: 11 -> 16
The familiar tangle of strings appeared before him, stretched so far into the distance he couldn't make out where it stopped. The ones for his status screen and the few skills and resistances he understood were present there. Nyx started him off just exploring and moving through threads, trying to guess their purpose. Then she took him back into the ones he did know.
"There are patterns in the strings. The lengths of them and the individual strands that make them up all have meaning and purpose. When you tied that one with the ends and put aglets on it, you were doing some shoddy overarching work, but you managed to... mess up the right way. It's not flawless, and part of that was your intent while crafting it. You left some threads loose, like the one sticking out a third of the way down. In your mind, you didn't consider Susan's skill one you wanted to keep out - so this thread frayed itself loose. That's what allows you to be impacted by healing skills."
"Now, it's a flaw and not a design, so it's actually been making healing skills less effective when they're used on you, and it only allows healing. Even things in the same skill family, like purification or reinforcement or other boosting skills are blocked and wouldn't take effect with you. Your idea was okay, but you didn't understand everything you were actually doing. Similarly, you fully block informational skills like identify - but the better practice is to separate and manipulate that strand so you can give identify limited access. You probably have the aptitude to set things up to give identify a bit of false information, too."
"I can lie to identify... If that's possible, does everyone do it?"
"No - because they can't. There is a skill called obfuscate that does something similar, and there's a bit of informational manipulation people can do if they have the right level of titles. Contracts will allow someone to partially hide things like their affiliation, or their race - but that's just hiding information, not falsifying it. Reid - I cannot stress this enough - without the level of self-manipulation you're capable of, putting forward false information is an extremely difficult task. So much so that no one should even think to question what you put up for display if you get it right."
"You could changing your name to display as 'Roc' instead of 'Reid' if you do let details through. You could change your affiliation to the current planet or force you're in the territory of. It is something that can make you a master of disguise - but it is intensely difficult. This might be the hardest thing I ask you to do in this entire training stint."
A thought popped back into mind from his metaspace creation. "Hey, speaking of difficult things - creating the intelligence metaspace felt... really easy compared to the rest. Almost no resistance and no real pain." He could practically hear her smiling in her response.
"Ah, I see - my student wants more challenging trials. Really, Reid - creating a metaspace is a hard task. If you don't get it right, you can injure your metaphysical self and greatly slow down your progress. But as you progress, the task becomes easier. Your third metaspace was also easier to resolve than your second. Your fourth was easier than your third. Your fifth should end up easier than the fourth. As long as some block doesn't stop you, you've already made the path, and just need to keep traveling it."
"But enough of that. You're going to work while I take a powernap. Remove all your changes to that string, then separate out and catalogue every thread. Don't try to understand what skills they represent, just sort them into piles."
Her voice dissipated, and Reid set himself to task.
He found and pulled the resistance string into focus. Aglets were moved. Ends untied. Then, he unwound the thing.
There were more threads than he had expected - many, many more. They spread and sprawled out in a slightly jumbled heap so vast that it took Reid minutes to sweep his attention from one side to the other. Nyx was certainly right about this being difficult.
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Reid had no idea how much time passed, but he stared at the four sorted piles of thread. There were variances in each pile - different lengths, or colors, or thickness - but they were each the same material.
Pile one was 'Regular' thread. It reminded Reid of what he would expect to see in a sewing kit, and included two familiar items. Bertrand's Puppeteer was a thin, long beige bit of thread. The Crimson Titan's Paralyzing Roar was a thicker, decidedly brown one. Two was enough of a pattern for Reid to label the regular strings as 'stuff to outright block' - especially given what he understood about the other types.
The second pile was 'Metallic' thread, and Reid was calling this one 'stuff to let in'. It included healing - which was also the only thread in the pile Reid recognized.
The third was 'Plastic' thread, which felt a bit like fishing line. He also only recognized one thread from this pile - Identify. He assumed the rest were also 'informational' in nature.
The fourth and final pile was 'elastic' thread. He wasn't quite certain what the elastic ones were all about. Some of them looked metallic, others looked regular. If he wasn't paying attention to the texture and feel of each thread he sorted, Reid would have easily grouped them in with the piles they were most similar to.
Reid paused his work, and asked for Nyx - but she gave no response. That was okay. Even if she was still napping, he could make his own progress.
The elastic thread was wound into a string - and then left completely alone. He had no idea what he wanted to do with it, so nothing was the best answer. Next, he brought the metallic threads together. Once the metallic string formed, Reid frayed the ends intentionally until each ending was clearly and apparently visible, with spacing between each. His goal was to let those ones in as freely as possible.
Regular thread was wound into a string, then taken back apart. The work of putting everything together and separating it was intense and took much of his concentration, but Reid wanted to get this one right. He set to making a regular string again - but more tightly wound this time. He repeated the process once more before he was happy with the raw result. Reid followed on that success by doing the same kind of aglet-and-knot closings he'd attempted at first. He carefully inspected his work, and only moved on when he was satisfied there were no frayed strands he could see.
The last one - the plastic - was the most difficult. He had to experiment multiple times to figure out what exactly he needed to do - but couldn't come to a conclusion. Not with every plastic thread together. In a fit of angry progress, Reid haphazardly pulled the identify thread from the rest of the plastic string. If it wouldn't do what he needed it to as a whole, then Reid would just make it work on its own. He practically infused himself into the strand as he worked to figure out how the thing needed to be manipulated.
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Intelligence: 16 -> 41
Reid pulled himself up to an elbow, head throbbing and lips parched. He'd lost himself in the work, and an unhealthy amount of time had passed while he forced progress.
Nyx failed to answer him, so he called Win over for a round of healing. Despite her obvious worry at his state, she was past protesting against his tendency to overwork himself.
When she finished, he let himself drift. His mind swam with images of threads, loops, and knots. He could feel the phantom echo of a metronome consistent pounding in his head. But the pain was alright. It was all fine.
No matter how long it had taken and how difficult it had been, Reid had results.
When he woke again, he'd even be able to test them.
