Chapter 546 - One month later

During the first month here in the valley, I’ve learned quite a few interesting things.

One of them is that swimming for the first time is surprisingly difficult. Even though I can hold my breath for a really long time, it’s incredibly annoying to stay underwater. Water has a certain density, and a normal human with normal strength can swim fairly easily. But that changes once your body becomes heavier and more dense; you have to exert more effort just to stay afloat.

If your physical stats aren’t that high, if you don’t actually know how to swim, and if—because of your stubbornness—you refuse to use your skills or other abilities to get out, you might find yourself in an awkward situation. Like the time I cut off all telepathic communication, trying to figure out how to swim on my own, only for a cute corgi pup to dive into the lake and pull me out by my hair.

Yes, things like that can happen. Even to the best of us. Yup.

Being called “The Drowning One” by a literal cat girl might be one of the consequences of that kind of stubbornness. As is someone hiring a pair of random twins with top-notch infiltration skills to swap out her luxurious catgirl shampoo for pink dye. Stranger things have happened.

But I’d be lying if I said I haven’t enjoyed my time here so far. It’s not something I will talk about often, but some of the memories I’ve made with the others here are ones I’m sure I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life.

Even though there’s a war raging outside and sometimes we sense attacks beyond our “territory,” we still feel safe. That might be because we know a certain person would absolutely destroy anyone who dared to break the deal she made. If I had to bet on her or one of the Absolutes, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second.

Yet alongside that feeling of safety, there’s also regret. Some of the kinder-hearted members of Group 4 feel bad for siphoning resources from the lumorans, who are out there fighting for their lives. They’re just natives of the tutorial doomed to disappear once we leave this floor, but I’ve noticed that we’re starting to ask less and less from the lumoran Champion with the crystalline arm whenever she appears bearing gifts for Lissandra.

Everyone is busy with training and other projects, but once a week, we spend two hours together. In those two hours, no one talks about training or uses mana, and no one mentions the tutorial or anything tied to it. Instead, we talk about ourselves: our pasts, our hopes, our dreams. We share silly things we’ve seen or experienced, and sad things that have happened to us or the people around us.

We talk about our favorite foods and argue about which dishes are better. We complain about the endings of movies we otherwise liked. We joke, we fight, we smile, and sometimes we just sit there quietly.

Of course, not everything is perfect, and this isn’t some fairy tale. We still argue. Lily refuses to speak to Tess for a week after Tess takes a joke too far. Sophie starts insulting Myrra for repeatedly interrupting her training, even going so far as to use her [Manipulation] against her when Myrra pushes it too far. Only Min-Jae’s quick intervention prevents a bigger fight—though multiple wounds were still inflicted. Since then, Myrra and Sophie mostly avoid each other.

Another time, Maya accidentally injured Aaron during her training, badly enough that Lily had to intervene and heal him. Although the twins said they understood it was an accident, I remember two weeks ago when they quietly blamed Maya for being careless whenever they talked to each other.

There have been a few more minor conflicts, all of which are already forgotten.

Some people worry about being under-leveled, but nobody is anywhere near 300. Reaching that level would be nearly impossible right now, given the situation outside. Most of us, however, are already above 250, so at least we’ve gained that body upgrade.

Lissandra—who appears and disappears whenever she feels like it—once overheard their complaints and decided to give one of her rare lessons. She trashed their “dumb thoughts,” calling them all sorts of names, but she also emphasized the importance of skills, proper mastery over them, and a solid foundation. She ruthlessly pointed out about ten mistakes for each person. What they were doing wrong, where they were lacking, how suboptimal their training was, and so on.

She always seems to know an absurd amount, similar to how she saw Whitey just once in my mind space and still understood so much about him. I can’t help but wonder if she has some kind of special eye trait or other senses. I’m sure she’s capable of perceiving things I can’t and she probably reads “lower-leveled” people like open books.

I asked her about it a few times, but her answer is always the same:

“If you’re curious, improve your abilities and find out how I’m doing it.”

Classic Sandra.

She barely teaches me anything directly, mostly just updating my “evil orb” training to make it harder. I’m currently at version 3.0. I once thought I could make it even more challenging by changing the orbs’ shape to pyramids.

Nope.

Just the basic spherical shape is already too hard to keep up with. Their constantly shifting frequencies and changing speed make them unpredictable, forcing me to remain on guard. And there are dozens of smaller orbs inside the main one, layer upon layer, that sense when I get comfortable and then activate just to show me how lacking I am.

To top it off, the Cockroach sometimes uses dozens of these orbs at once to train, while I have trouble dealing with even a single one. Other than that, Lissandra mostly just observes my progress on preparing the Champion’s Heart—a process that, to my frustration, is going nowhere fast.

Even after more than a month since I started, I haven’t made the kind of progress I find satisfying. All three of my attempts have ended terribly.

The first attempt failed before it really began. The seals I’d built over the base Lissandra left on the heart broke at the first sign of my mana, and the resulting backlash melted the top of the cliff, shifting the waterfall and the water flow along with it.

The second attempt ended similarly, though with a smaller explosion of heat.

The third time, the constructs I prepared within my body, connected to the heart, and unleashed a terrible backlash that tore through me, leaving wounds that nearly killed me. It even slightly damaged my Mana Heart—a really minor injury, but one that still took a week of Lily’s help to mend.

While Lily can heal her own Mana Heart if it’s damaged, it’s more difficult when it comes to others. None of us truly know much about Mana Hearts, so I see them as a major weakness. It’ll probably become even more pronounced the stronger someone gets, and the more “evolved” their heart becomes.

I know some bodily conditions can cause trouble for healers. For instance, Lily’s [Disintegration] can slow the healing of wounds she inflicts or make it nearly impossible if she wills it. Then there was Champion Feroy’s sickness, which made it hard for him to use mana without specialized tools. Apparently, even much stronger lumoran healers couldn’t fix him, and you’d think a Champion would be worth that investment.

Whitey is another example. Yes, he likely never found healers as powerful as those Champion Feroy had access to, but he still couldn’t get his heart or parts of his body restored in the tutorial or in the Beyond.

I won’t lie—I’m a bit disheartened. Hehe, dis-heart-ened. Heh. Okay, never mind. After all the preparations, theorizing, and experiments Lily and I have been working on since Lissandra promised to bring me the heart, every attempt feels like a dead end. Each time I find one solution, it reveals even more problems, adding to the cycle of repeated failures over the past few weeks.

It’s frustrating. It really is. So I do what I never wanted to: I scrap everything and start over. Alone, in my room. I stop all my usual training and pour my entire focus into this one task.

Two more weeks pass like that, and then it’s time for one of our weekly meetups again.

The entire group gathers on the terrace of the manor where we’re staying. Even though it’s night, we can see flashes of explosions far in the distance—the fighting is deep in lumoran territory. Yellow and red bursts of light, lightning arcs, mana constructs flaring in the air, and the activation of the Absolute’s web. There are counterattacks against that Absolute, humming vibrations we can feel even here, and the echo of explosions rolling over us many seconds after they happen.

Yet we remain safe here.

As usual, the terrace is lit only by mundane items—no one uses mana, no one trains, and no one talks about the chaos we can see far away. It all feels so distant.

But, as I’m used to doing, I push all my implementation problems aside and try to appreciate these two routine hours we have.

It’s a nice compromise. I spend most of my time alone, doing whatever I want in the silence I often enjoy. Then, on one of those nights, I spend a few hours with others, get my dose of socialization, and sneak back into my cave, only leaving it when I feel like it.

“Nat, what’s the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you?” Tess asks.

I’m petting Biscuit, who’s curled up in my lap. “Look, Tess, I know some of the others shared their stories, and I’ll definitely use that information against them sometime in the future, but you can’t seriously think I’m going to tell you mine.”

“Glub glub glub!” Myrra, seated to my right, makes drowning sounds.

“That might be it,” I sigh. “And fuck you, Myrra.”

“Blub blub blub!”

“Motherfu—”

Tess waves to get my attention, smiling. “When I was around nine years old, I really wanted a group of friends like the Fellowship. So I wrote this ‘Friendship Contract’ with rules about loyalty, honesty, and even secret code words. I tried to make my classmates sign it during lunch one day.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

“Damn it, Tess. That's… kind of sad.”

She just smiles and turns to Aaron. “Your turn.”

He hesitates for a moment, then shrugs, smiling brightly. His brother next to him already starts giggling, probably knowing what’s coming. “When I was around ten, I went to the school bathroom, and the stall I tried was locked. You’d think, oh, that means someone’s inside, right? Well, not me. My first thought was: ‘How the hell do you lock a bathroom stall behind you?’ It shouldn’t be possible.”

Oh boy. I can already guess where this is going.

Aaron giggles. “So, obviously, I crawled under the stall… and yes, someone was in there. I think a part of me died that day.”

Myrra asks what a bathroom stall is, and a few others laugh. Some are understandably baffled as to why he’d do that.

Min-Jae join in, unprompted. “I once walked in on my older brother watching porn on his PC. He panicked, froze for about five seconds, and then shut off the monitor. Then he spent the next two hours taking his entire PC apart, muttering that something must be wrong with it. He’s a jerk, but to this day, I still cringe at that memory.”

The laughter this time is even louder.

But then Myrra innocently asks, “What’s porn?”

Everything goes silent, and Min-Jae blushes, looking around for help.

“Oh, that’s right,” Dennis says. “What is porn, Min-Jae?”

“Yeah, what is it?” Aaron joins in.

I mentally salute Min-Jae’s poor brother for the horrors he’s endured. That sort of thing can scar a person for life.

While they continue that conversation, I just sit there, petting Biscuit until he drifts off to sleep.

Eventually, the evening comes to an end, and everyone goes their separate ways, mostly returning to training. Maya, Myrra, Lily, and Tess head to the sparring stone circle outside. Sophie trains with the twins and also spends time working with Izzy and Noodle.

A few hours later, as I’m sitting on my bed, focusing on my own training, I get a notification.

Your skill [Bone Knitting] has evolved into [Knitting]

[Bone Knitting - lvl 39 > Knitting - lvl 24]

I reread the new name a few times, feeling utterly defeated, and then lie down and close my eyes.

Fuck.

***

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