The Strongest Spellblade

“Why did you help her?” I asked Healer Castelle a couple of weeks later. It had been bothering me. I also tried to spread out my questions so my tutors wouldn’t get annoyed. We were finishing up our weekly training session for Soul Sense.

“Who?” he asked.

“Bowmaster Erika?” I asked him.

“There are countless people like her. Adventurers who just couldn’t keep up with the pressure of the dungeon. All reach that point one day, even your mother. Their body isn’t fast enough. Their skills aren’t enough,” he said.

“But she is risking her life,” I replied.

“Like you do every day, with your stubbornness. I give warnings, I am not anyone’s guardian. If people want to be idiots, that is their choice. I just let them know ahead of time,” he explained.

“Why did your skill last longer than Stabilize Soul?” I asked.

“Because it is targeting her body, not her soul. A person’s soul is highly resistant, since your Mana comes from there, it breaks down my skill much more quickly. Like trying to fix a stream compared to a road. The stream is constantly flowing, making things much more difficult. Also, my level is much higher in Stabilize Injury. I used in much more back in the day,” he explained.

“Oh. Do you think she will be okay?” I asked.

“Most likely. Someone who can make it to the 9th layer can easily handle the first two layers of the dungeon. She has the experience to know what she is doing, so she doesn’t get killed along with her granddaughter,” Healer Castelle answered.

I wasn’t so sure. “What were the skills you needed to learn for Stabilize Injury?” I asked.

“Always more questions, ah the joys of youth. If you are interested in healing, then go to the Five Star Institute of Healing. I won’t teach anyone half baked skills outside of the Institute. And before you ask, it is for safety reasons. You learn a couple of skills and then you think you can treat injuries. Then when someone is dying in your hands, and your skills fail, you will blame me,” he said.

“I wouldn’t,” I replied with a shake of my head.

“You would. It is human nature. It is one of the many things covered at the Five Star Institute of Healing. If you truly desire to become a Healer or learn healing focused skills, then go there. But Healing is limited. Far more limited than you can imagine. Strength would have been a better path for me. To shield and protect, not to treat foolishness. But I made my choices long ago,” he said. He got up and left, clearly done with the conversation.

I was truly curious about what had happened to him that made him this way but was too scared to ask. It would be like reopening an old wound. I wasn’t that insensitive to let my curiosity get the better of me, no matter how much I wanted to know.

Getting up, I left our practice room and made my way back to my apartment. I got changed for the night and sat on a cushion to practice Meditation before going to sleep. Just another skill I was squeezing into my packed days of skill leveling.

With all the tutors my father had been getting, each one spent around a week training me, before being replaced by another tutor the following week. There tended to be a morning and afternoon training session. Evenings were either with Damian or once a week with Healer Castelle.

The schedule was incredibly demanding, but it was exactly what I wanted. I felt like I was improving in multiple areas very rapidly. I definitely had a preference for fighting skills, if I had to pick which type of skills I preferred. The book learning was a struggle, and the Eldarin Runes were worse than Eldarin Script.

They had to be incredibly precise both in their construction and several other factors. Damian had tested out my creations, but they had all performed incredibly poorly. He had been offering advice on things I should correct and try to fix for the next runes I made, but it was exhausting trying to understand the complex rules that governed them and putting those rules into practice.

For example, a fire rune, didn’t mean fire. It was the concept of fire, bringing, warmth, heat, and burning. The rune itself looked like three different letters mashed together, with flowing lines of varying thickness.

There was no fundamental runic language, or at least none had been created or discovered so far. The symbols were incredibly complex, with the order of each line being drawn being important. There were countless variations that one could apply to runes. So, while it made it easy to adjust the fire rune to provide more heat rather than burning, the actual symbology was incredibly complex.

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When one channeled Mana into the rune to activate, instead of a heat source they might recieve a blast of fire on their face. That was what made it incredibly slow going learning Eldarin Runes. It wasn’t just learning the runes, but everything about them. And that hadn’t even gotten into their interactions with each other.

I could see their power and imagine how useful they would become in the future. But for now runes were a massive headache to learn. Even with my Mind stat. Everything had come easily before. Sure, it might have been boring, but I had never been challenged mentally like I had with Eldarin Runes. The complexity of the runic language was immense.

Focusing on my Meditation, it was an important foundational skill to help increase the regeneration of Mana later on once the skill progressed to higher tiers. Similar to Sense Mana, it was key for me developing the necessary higher tier skills and being able to level them more quickly.

While I was at a bottleneck, I had experienced many bottlenecks with tier 1 skills. It wasn’t something that was overly concerning to me anymore. I would break through when I broke through, not any sooner or later. Trying to force a breakthrough, would only slow down my efforts of getting past the bottleneck of the skill.

Keeping my breathing steady, I let my mind focus on nothingness. Meditation was about clearing one’s mind. As I had been taught, focusing on blackness, the void, or nothingness was the best and most efficient way to practice this skill. My breathing was deep and slow to allow my body to relax more easily and was also a reason why I practiced this skill before going to sleep.

My mind drifted to intrusive thoughts. Why wasn’t there a sleep skill? Or a movement skill? Or a thinking skill? I knew they probably fell into tier 0, but if running used Mana to a small extent, why couldn’t other skills? I put those thoughts to the side and focused on nothingness. Each breath, I let go of everything that was trying to weigh me down and distract me. I needed to focus on this moment.

That was when it came together, with the distracting thoughts leaving, allowing me to focus on absolute nothingness. I had broken through the bottleneck on the Meditation skill as my understanding of the skill deepened and this knowledge was imprinted onto my soul through the skill level.

In the future it would be easier to clear my mind and enter this higher state of Meditation. But leveling up would become more difficult as I had to find other ways to improve the skill. Unlike mental or physical skills, Meditation was incredibly self reflective and depended much more on the person using the skill. Each person approached it slightly differently, even if there were standard training methods.

Most of my training was solitary like this. While others might try and help, I had to understand and learn. Just repeating something over and over wouldn’t gain me a lot of skill levels. Overcoming personal challenges constantly, pushing my skills, and focusing on what I was doing was key to improving. I had no idea how other people could handle improving at a slower speed. I would have gone mad with frustration if I wasn’t improving so quickly. Each and every improvement locking into place, each time one of my skill leveled I felt a sense of satisfaction.

I had gotten better at sensing this level improvements over time. During Meditation it was especially obvious when I broke through. My Soul Sense also twinged slightly when I got the level. Since the knowledge was imprinted on my soul through the skill. Like a colored glass window, altering the color of light that came through it.

The metaphors used to describe how skills and stats worked could get overly convoluted sometimes. But it was a good starting point for visualizing and understanding what exactly was happening. For most people this knowledge wasn’t that important. While nice to know, it didn’t help them.

For me and with how quickly I was progressing, I needed to know everything I could to avoid mistakes in the future. While I hadn’t crossed Meldor’s Threshold, and certain skills were leveling up due to this, it was still incredibly risky. I wanted to be able to understand the risks before being put in such a position again.

Letting out another breath, I slowly got up and stretched a bit. I then walked over to my bed. It was time for sleep. I had pushed for a bit longer with Meditation than I normally would. While I didn’t like wasting time sleeping, it was important for my mind to be well rested in order to learn quickly.

I had been told off by Tutor Damian for staying up late in the past when I had unlocked my status. It would only hurt me in the long run. Getting proper sleep and then putting in time to work on my skills during the day was the fastest way to improve. Like everything else he claimed about skill advancement he had said the College of Advancement had done a study confirming this fact.

It was nice to breakthrough a bottleneck today. That meant today had been a good day for my skill practice. While I had broken through several already, it felt like another small milestone to becoming stronger. And it was something I could mentally track unlike my exact level.

The small improvements to a skill didn’t always correspond to a level upgrade, but the breakthrough on a skill tended to be more obvious, allowing me to pick up on this event. With how things were going I had probably gotten the skill System Sense and Healer Castelle would be livid.

While I hadn’t been trying to purposely get the skill, I knew about it, and its usefulness. I had refrained from checking my reserves constantly and trying to sense them, but sensing skill levels was such second nature and something I couldn’t easily stop myself from doing. Even if I got another skill, I should be fine. I had probably increased my Mind stat by quite a bit already.

And if I did cross Meldor’s Threshold and my soul collapsed, then that would be it. I wasn’t going to put my life on the line foolishly, but I couldn’t be afraid either. That was what going into the dungeon had taught me. If one wanted the power to rise up to a legend, one had to be prepared for their life being at risk. While it might not have been the lesson that Squire Jessica had tried to teach me, it was the one I had come away with. I was never going to become stronger than my mother without taking risks.