Homesteading in a fantasy world

POV Rich

I watched as the general left after a brief silence between us. People now knew the time crunch we were under no longer mattered. It was finally over. Goddamnit, that was simply horrible. The question was, am I still sane?

Why did I put myself through so much pain and misery? Why couldn’t that asshole just have died earlier? Everything still hurts. The worst offenders were the first beam attack I took and the last. Then, of course, there was my left arm that was almost cut off. Just moving it didn't feel right.

At least currently, I felt my real age, as everything hurt like it hurt back on Earth when I was close to dying. The worst feeling is if you're trying to crack a joint and it just doesn’t happen. Simply horrible.

Those black threads were truly broken. Being able to use an entire nation of people as a power source. No wonder no matter what I tried, I couldn’t even get close to him before the final battle. Even my taunt ability didn’t seem to work that well on them, but it still was able to get me a few kills when I used it at the correct moment.

Not only did my physical body hurt, but my energy body felt like a wet rag chewed by dogs. Even doing basic things constantly hurt. Slowly, I started to release my commander ability and every other ability that supported it and the army.

I had gotten so used to keeping it up, it actually hurt my energy body to release the constant supply I was giving the ability. I opened up my achievement page to see all the improvements there.

In some ways, this war was beneficial to me, but not as much as I had expected. My levels didn’t go up crazily, but there were a few standouts. Of course, 'Heroic Commander' and its 12 levels were impressive, but I also had 2 abilities that reached past the 100 mark.

Nothing happened when they reached 100, and I wonder how high they could actually go. I know that there isn’t a hard cap on the level for abilities, at least, but there certainly was a soft cap, and that was all up to you and how well you learn that ability. It seems that the system can only help you so much.

Skills did have a cap, so to say, but I was far from that. Now, however, I was finally the proud owner of two expert rank skills: Expert Energy Emissions and Expert Energy Manipulation. I got them just before the final battle.

They probably helped me quite a lot in actually surviving that ranged attack. Energy Emissions gave me not-so-exciting choices, but I ended up choosing Spectral Flare. From the small tests I’ve done, it is basically a flash grenade meant for people of high rank and who have abilities to protect themselves against more ordinary flash grenade-type abilities.

From Energy Manipulation, I was able to get one of the more known and sought-after abilities: Radiant Empowerment. It’s an ability that helps you generate energy from ambient light, but more importantly, it actually has an element of healing.

Up until this point, the only healing I had was to make my own body repair itself a bit faster when I flooded it with energy, but this should help it be a lot more efficient. Some on-the-go healing would be quite nice when my defenses have failed to keep me fully safe.

Meditation ranked up to advanced rank a few days ago while I was sitting on this very rock. There were some interesting abilities, but Mindful Recovery was the one that I picked. While meditating, this helps me fix myself properly so I wouldn’t have to worry that something healed in the wrong way. An unexpected benefit was that now meditating helped recover energy even faster.

A little while back, I was able to get my Organisation skill to rank up to advanced rank, and from there I chose Inventory Insight. It was basically a perfect recall ability for anything I considered stored, not just in my special bags or tattoo storage, but also everything stored on my land.

I also suspected that if I continue to level it up, it would also work for any job I was doing. Technically, I was still the nation's materials examiner, so I think that I should be able to even keep track of that easily from now on.

First aid was something that I advanced to advance rank towards the beginning of the war, and I’m pretty sure the ability bleed control that I picked that helps mitigate how much blood I lost, probably keeping me in the fight this entire time. It was so much more effective than just using energy wrap because it actually allowed me to reclaim blood that had already left my body.

Unfortunately, this ability didn't give me control of others' blood or even let me do fancy things with it, but the next time someone puts a hole through me, they will be quite surprised when that won't even slow me down.

Kinetic energy was a skill that also ranked up. It’s a skill that I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have survived without because being able to use kinetic force was just so damn effective. From the rank up, I chose motion dampening, and it was quite a useful ability in so many ways.

Its most useful thing was that it made controlling one aspect of kinetic energy a lot faster, and I hoped that I could get a few more abilities to make controlling kinetic energy faster and use up less of my mind's attention.

The final skill to rank up was my two-handed mastery, also reaching advanced rank. The choices were not the best, but the stunning impact ability certainly helped me kill a few of the stronger opponents I had to fight.

It worked on principles unknown to me, and while it didn't do much, even a second in our power level could be the difference between life and death. Of course, there was also the ability Trinity resonance, but that’s a stupendously complex ability that I’m glad I was able to use enough to save my life so I could finally kill that bastard. Man, did that feel great.

Now that I had chosen the ability for my adventure class, I was able to level it up as well. The first thing I did was modify the stat gain again and put everything into energy storage, as that was what my training plan still recommended.

48 stats for every level, and I was able to get four more, taking my adventurer class to level 84. I was quite disappointed that I didn’t get any skills or abilities that were worth taking. One of the choices would allow me to make my body glow a bit. Why would you ever take that and not the stat points?

This did, however, bring me above the 2560 stat point I needed for a new trait. I also got wisdom to the next milestone, giving me a trait: mind-body harmony. It was promptly consumed by giant amongst men. Fortunately, this trait was quite straightforward and it was something I appreciated.

The trait I got from my energy storage was a bit different. It was called energy dynamo and as soon as I received it, I felt a new structure appearing inside my energy body, connecting to my actual body.

It was weird and I couldn’t understand how it worked no matter how much I looked at it. Jumping off the stone and moving around a bit confirmed to me that it functioned. It made energy from my movement.

It wasn't much, but after testing it a little bit, I found it to be better than just my natural regeneration. Now, I couldn’t fully test it because I was still quite hurt, but this will definitely make me even more sustainable during long fights.

I was quite pleased with myself as I now had so many different ways of gaining energy without having to wait for the system to give it to me. But before I closed the page, I looked at the adventurer section and had to facepalm.

How could I forget that my body skill wasn’t just an expert rank but it was actually master rank? It was a bit annoying that the skills and abilities given by the adventurer class were put in a different section to the rest. Well, at least there was an adventurer section, thanks to that crazy mage who was somehow able to actually add this to the achievement page.