Once the storm had fully set in the crew Caravan crew had already begun to settle in for a long wait. Some pulled out books, others began to chat, and some began to exercise. There wasn’t enough room for anyone to jog, but they could jog in place in-between pushups and weight training.
Petra had pulled Seras out of her comfy corner and made her join in the workout. It seemed that during the duration of the sandstorm the caravan crew were going to guide her through the process of essence training. Step one was physical exertion.
Jogging, stretching, and strength training. Matched with hand eye coordination and some strange dance that required her to make a lot of awkward steps and holding her arms at weird angles.
With the exception of the weird dance Seras excelled at everything, as she had expected. Her body was a machine, and machines didn’t tire, just wore out. She could keep up a jogging pace without slowing or losing form for as long as her battery did. When it came to strength training Seras matched Petra’s best, and could even last longer. This was despite the fact that Petra had the Might essence boosting her strength, the physical fortitude of Leonids, and being at the peak of Iron rank.
When Dustin saw that he lent Seras his set of magically enhanced weights. They looked like the same as what Petra had, but were heavier than they looked. It was after that when Seras finally felt something give. Pushing against the limits of her strength Seras got a notification.
Biolite left arm Muscles have been overtaxed and are now at 76% of peak strength. Auto repair in progress, time remaining 3 hours and 1minute.
Seras let the weight down and sighed. “That’s it for this arm, just got the alert that the strain exceeded its limits.”
Petra looked curious. “You get messages for when your arm''s tired? I just know when I’m tired.”
Seras frowned “I don’t get tired; I still haven’t slept since coming here. But my body does break, and I get to know when that happens. Right now my arm is at 76% of its max strength, and it’s going to take about three hours to repair.”
Petra scowled “That still seems very strange to me. You said the repairs were new thing, so how did you fix yourself back on your world?”
“I went to a chop shop to get things fixed or replaced. They have the right tools to fix me up. But I’m not in the habit of intentionally breaking my body, we’re only doing this to see if I can advance like you do. Personally I don’t think it’ll work.” Seras groused. She didn’t feel physical exhaustion, but the workout had been a tedious waste of time.
“The theory is sound” Garret said across the room. he had finished his workout and was now reading a medical text of some sort. “That’s how ordinary people get stronger. Pushing the limits of their strength, shredding muscles, and then repairing them stronger. It''s also how Iron and Bronze rankers get stronger as well.”
Seras frowned “That can’t be real, right?” then she did a quick search of her stored data. “Never mind, I guess that is how you meat bags get stronger. That’s weird.” She scrunched her nose at the thought.
“Yeah well, you said your arm was at 76% right” Petra said with a predatory grin, which was very intimidating considering she was a literal predator. “That means we still have another 75% to go before we move onto your other arm, then the legs, then your core.”
Seras groaned. “Nooo”
~~~*~~~
Petra kept her word, and worked Seras until her body literally gave out on her. Seras slumped back against the rock wall when her body could no longer support her weight.
She had just called up a dumb action movie to watch when a book thumped into her lap. Seras glared up at Flint. “What’s this?” she asked.
“Primer on magic theory, you should read while you’re recovering.”
“Repairing” Seras corrected before she glanced at the book in her lap. “I can’t hold it right now, mind if I store it away until I can?”
Flint grunted “Do what you want, just don’t tear the pages.” Then he left.
Seras opened her pocket space and chucked the book in, the moment it flew in an alert appeared on her HUD. She opened the alert.
Unlocking the world around you, a primer on magical theory By Roland Dundee has been added to archived knowledge. Archived knowledge can be accessed at any time through the net connection ability.
“Huh?” Seras said out loud.
Flint stopped and turned around “What?”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“Nothing.” Seras said quickly. She opened her space back up and took the book out.
Unlocking the world around you, a primer on magical theory By Roland Dundee has been removed from archived knowledge.
She put it back in.
Unlocking the world around you, a primer on magical theory By Roland Dundee has been added to archived knowledge. Archived knowledge can be accessed at any time through the net connection ability.
Nifty. Seras had spoken with Dustin on her outworlder abilities, and he had told her about some of the other outworlder abilities he had heard of. Outworlders always developed abilities that were supposed to help guide them through their new worlds. One Dustin had spoken of received that guidance in the forms of prophecy, another could summon grimoires full of knowledge.
Seras’ net connection ability seemed to fit this general trend, but for some reason hers was blocked, incapable of accessing the greater wealth of this world’s knowledge, limited to only what was public and widely disseminated through magical means. Apparently, the ability to view books in her pocket space like a net page was another facet of that ability.
She checked her repair timer. Six hours, considering that her muscle strength was all down to ten percent, and she hadn’t boosted the repair time Seras couldn’t complain. It seemed that for strength degradation once a certain threshold was reached three hours of repair were required for a full repair, but after that every additional bit a degradation only added a few minutes. It meant she wouldn’t have egregious repair times to sit through while they tested whether or not her strength could improve.
The repairs did eat into her battery life though, and the diluted stamina potions she had wouldn’t last forever. Once again, she found herself wishing for a quick power hook-up. five, maybe ten minutes of hooking in and she would be at full charge once again.
With nothing better to do she cracked open the primer and began to read.
“Magic, that essence that drives our world forward and empowers us to face down monsters, is not of this our world at all, but rather it is of the astral-“
The words were flowery, and wherever the author could have used one word he used ten, but it was interesting. Her eyes glossed over the formulas sprinkled throughout the text, as she had almost no context for them, and the text was riddled with tangential anecdotes. But it was informative.
~~~*~~~
Four hours into reading the primer Dustin came up to her.
“Good movie?” He asked, his smile was friendly, but his eyes were judgey.
“Magic primer, I found out I could read it with my HUD if I stuck it in my pocket space.” Seras explained.
“So, you’ve been reading this whole time?”
“As much as I can. This Dundee dude needs to learn how to get to the fucken point, I’m three chapters in and only about half of it is actually useful. The rest is anecdotes and flowery bullshit sentences that go nowhere.” Seras complained.
Dustin laughed. “Yes, I’ve often felt that these dusty old texts could have been half as large while covering twice as much ground. But Flint tells me that doing so would be some sort of grave taboo amongst magic researchers. ‘A simpler text would imply a simple writer’ or something to that effect. You said your world has something similar to magic, this ‘science’ thing, are those books much like ours?”
“Technically your world has science too, I think you guys just ignore it in favor of Magic.”
Dustin grinned “Of course, why bother with science when you could just study magic to make the amazing possible?”
“Science is just as amazing, just look at me. I’m the living byproduct of millennia of scientific study. But to answer your question, no. A science textbook is concise and to the point, with zero fluff. Where it might need ten words to describe a process it instead invents a new word to mean that exact thing and nothing else. It describes the fundamental forces of reality in the simplest terms possible since that’s literally the aim of science, to take a phenomenon and distill to its basest principles through controlled testing and study. I’ve got a book on gravity downloaded, and it describes what gravity is in the first five pages, the rest of the book is how it interacts with everything else. Whereas with this book I’m five chapters in and he’s still working his way up to explaining magical density.”
“He doesn’t actually explain that until the second volume.” Dustin said with a contrite expression.
Seras through her hands up “Then what was the point of this one?”
Dustin scratched the back of his head. “You’ve got me beat. What’s gravity?”
“It’s the things that makes things fall” Seras said with a hand wave. “You guys probably have a different word for it.”
Dustin blinked “Not that I can think of. No one’s ever put that much thought into why things fall. They just do.” he said pointedly.
“Wait seriously. You guys don’t know about gravity, it’s a fundamental constant of reality.” Seras stopped short as she remembered the upwards flowing water. “Or its supposed to be.”
Dustin shrugged “I guess no one ever thought it was important enough to name. Is it really that big of a deal?”
“Like I said, it’s a fundamental force, like so fundamental that if it was just a single decimal point different then there’d be no reality at all. It’s the force that allows the hydrogen fusion that fuels the sun, its what spins the planets around, and its what keeps our feet on the ground.”
Dustin’s eyebrows rose. “That, I don’t know how to take that. But we’re off topic, again.”
“What was the topic again?” Seras asked as she added ‘Investigate gravity’ to her list of things to do. It was a new and ever-growing list of things that ranged from train, to get third essence, find summoning materials, invent electricity, and meeting one of these supposedly living Gods this world had.
“The third pillar of essence advancement, meditation.”
“Wait the first was working out, what was two?”
“The first isn’t just working out, its pushing work limits through training. Exercise is just one aspect, there’s also training your mind, and aura control. You can’t really do the last one yet though; you need an essence ability for proper aura control.” Dustin explained. “The second aspect is truly pushing your limits in a life-or-death ordeal. Which is commonly done through fighting monsters.”
“But it doesn’t have to be monsters.” Seras said, seeing the hidden meaning behind his words.
“No” Dustin said grimly “Sometimes other people can push your limits far better than monsters, but that isn’t exactly reliable. And the adventurer society strongly frowns upon using war to push essence abilities.”
“Does that actually stop countries from fighting?”
“In a way. When war breaks out the society tries to intervene and find a peaceful solution as fast as possible. When that fails they cut off the contract payments and encourage the adventurers not engaged in fighting to pullout for a time. Monsters appear and they aren’t cleared out, the local armies try to do the adventures job. But the nature of war means those very same people are also the ones campaigning. The economy starts to suffer. And one way or another the war ends. Its not always this cut and dry, but in general that’s what happens, and the threat of that is usually enough to get both sides to the negotiating table.”
“I see. And this third pillar?” Seras asked.
“Meditation.”
She snorted. “What, like clear your mind and chant this mantra to fix your drug addiction.” She mocked.
He frowned “I see you already have some… preconceptions.”
Seras blushed, she had run her mouth without thinking. Back home it was normal to scoff at the dopes falling for ‘meditation clinics’. “Sorry, we don’t, I don’t think our way of approaching meditation is like yours. A lot of people fall for scam clinics with their ‘patented’ 100% effective soul cleansing mantra’s.”
“I take the clinics were fake.” Dustin surmised.
“It was all Heidel shit. Hope dangled on a hook for all the poor desperate chumps to chomp down and lose what little money they had left.”
Dustin looked saddened by what she said, but he kept his words to himself. “Well this is real. The training, the fighting, it’s all to push your limits and bolster your power. The meditation is to guide that power, so it doesn’t go to waste or overtake you. I spent nearly a decade refining my meditation sessions. Reading manuals, talking with adventurers, and just trial and error. It might not be as good as what the nobility teach their young scions, and it certainly isn’t the equal of any adventuring academy like the famous Remore academy, but it’s a damned shot better than nothing.”
Seras frowned, “Alright, lets get this over with then.” She said, not looking forward to a dull session of sitting and clearing her mind.