When morning ca, I felt less exhausted, so I finally started going over the Achievent rewards we had gotten while rescuing Felix. There were quite a few of them, and a few of them made scratch my head in puzzlent, because they had so rather interesting implications.
The first System ssages were fairly normal.
Slaughter: Kill a Human who has consud and absorbed an Ability potion
Achievent 300
Sadly, since I had been too busy teleporting around bullets and lightning bolts, I hadn’t killed the ability user with water. So I didn’t get an ability from it. But ultimately, it wasn’t that big of a deal. My raw combat ability in this world was already quite high, and losing a skill wasn’t the end of the world. If another ability user attacked us in the future, I would just need to rember to use extinguish next ti. And if no other ability users attacked us in the future, I would just accept that I wasn’t getting a Skill from an ability-user and move on.
Slaughter: Kill a human with no ability for the fifth ti
Achievent 100
The fact that I had killed five people didn’t surprise . I had been teleporting around a lot of bullets, and I had at least tried to aim for lethal attacks when I had the option. Sallia and I had probably both gotten the most kills last night.
I was a bit surprised to see that I hadn’t reached the next breakpoint for killing humans. The next Achievent reward was one I had already eyeballed during the fight, to confirm my kill.
Slaughter: Kill ‘Aplos.’
Achievent 450
Unlike my earlier kills, this kill had been done entirely using my alteration essence, thrown into the biggest extinguish I could muster up. Sallia and Anise had also contributed heavily to killing the creature, but I had done the most damage overall. I did suddenly realize that all of us had been focusing on other stuff, and hadn’t had ti to go over our System notifications. If Anise was lucky, she might have gotten a keyword ability out of fighting Aplos. I would ask her later, once she was more likely to be awake.
But I had gotten a ability from Aplos, which was nice.
Endless Hunger of the Ocean has devoured Aplos for the first ti. New Skill created.
Mirror of the Mind’s Eye:
Your body begins to take on characteristics based on other people’s understanding of you. (This may be sowhat controlled).
This Ability allows you to detect what other people think about you, so long as they are within a certain distance, and then choose up to one enhancent or new ability based on that impression. This understanding of you will also potentially influence your personality sowhat, although the higher your [Willpower], the weaker this interference will be.
This ability or enhancent cannot exceed the equivalent of a [Basic] Grade enhancent or Ability from the Market. (Up to 15 points in Stats or one basic-grade new ability).
The ability to take on new characteristics, depending on what other people thought of , was… odd. I thought back to the fight with Aplos.
HAD the creature gained new abilities based on my understanding of it?
Now that I thought about it, Aplos had used illusions to attack us, and before then, I had suspected that the creature was a master of illusions. After all, the soldiers who had seen use illusion magic had imdiately assud Aplos had escaped. Perhaps my belief had directly granted Aplos the dangerous attack it had used against us. Which made feel a little bad. Even if it hadn’t been intentional, one of my thoughts might have gotten my friends hurt. Luckily, nobody had died last night, or I would have felt incredibly guilty.
Aplos had also had a weakness to manifestation essence, at least when we tried using manifestation essence attacks against it. Which made wonder if Aplos also copied weaknesses when using people’s expectations to get new abilities. If so, my version of the ability didn’t have that glaring weakness, which was nice. Normally, {Endless Hunger of the Ocean} only created weaker copies of abilities I encountered, but it might also try to remove harmful components as well. It was sothing to think about.
Since the ability could be deleted if I felt it was influencing my personality too much, I added the ability into {Endless Hunger of the Ocean}’s second skill slot, and felt a wave of new, bizarre sensations. I could feel several strings of ideas about , primarily coming from five different sources.
The first three sources of ‘belief’ about were from my friends, and before I could respond to the sensation of my new skill activating, they pressed firmly into my mind, like a weight settling on to my thoughts. It was almost like it was a weight that had always been close to , and I had simply been unaware of it until now.
The closest and strongest impression was from Felix, and his image of was pretty close to how I thought of myself. But so parts of my personality were magnified in his eyes. Felix seed to have an especially strong impression of my drive to improve, possibly because I was the strongest advocate of ‘do interesting things, even if it might get us killed’ within the group. Due to my own reflections on myself and my emotions over the past few months, I was pretty sure that my actions were driven by fear instead of confidence and drive to improve, but Felix wasn’t intimately aware with every single one of my thoughts and emotions, even though I did talk with my friends about my feelings from ti to ti.
Anise, had a slightly different impression of . I could feel her impression of as if it were a warm, fuzzy blanket, or a hug. Anise’s strongest impression of seed to be from the stories I had told her in our previous world, about our ti in the ocean world. And she also seed to pay a lot of attention to my attempts to take care of the group. Her strongest impression of was of a warm-hearted healer.
I had a strong feeling that tapping into Anise’s understanding of would give so sort of passive skill that boosted my healing abilities, and it might also change my personality a bit to make more empathetic and warm-hearted.
Sallia’s impression of was closest to my own impression of myself. She felt that I was a soone who focused on my friends and ‘found family’ a lot, and had a very strong desire to ‘protect’ my friends and keep them safe whenever I felt they were threatened. This created a slightly odd split in Sallia’s impression of , since she felt that I could be extrely dangerous when I felt that my friends were threatened. This impression would likely give so sort of boost to extinguish, since Sallia had a particularly strong impression of that ability and how it tied into my fighting style.
I recoiled as I felt those impressions push into my mind.
I wasn’t sure if I was comfortable seeing the way my friends thought about . Those thoughts were theirs. I had kind of thought that Aplos’s ability would require a lot more people to ‘believe’ a certain thing about , and so I had mostly been expecting to tap into the impression the soldiers had of us from last night. The idea of spying on my friend’s thoughts made uncomfortable, and I was honestly tempted to delete the skill on the spot. I nearly did, but I held myself back right before I scrapped it.
I decided that I would talk with my friends about exactly what my skill did and ask for their thoughts, first, because if I deleted the skill, it would still weaken our group a bit. And I wasn’t entirely sure if deleting the skill was the ‘right’ choice. But my friends absolutely deserved to know that I had accidentally seen a bit more than I ant to, and ask them what they wanted to do about it. And if they were okay with keeping the ability, I would consider it. But spying on their thoughts without them knowing felt like a scummy thing to do, so I wanted to at least apologize to them first and ask for their opinion before I proceeded.
Then, I looked into the other two sources of ‘impressions’ floating around.
The fourth source of impressions seed to co from Old Mo. It was a bit more distant to , and felt less… ‘real,’ in a strange way. Perhaps it was because Old Mo didn’t know as well, and so he had a less distinct impression of than the people I had spent decades with. Now that I knew that my ability spied on people’s thoughts about , I did my best to shut out his thoughts before I accidentally peeked at them. Old Mo had been nothing but kind to so far, and he deserved his ntal privacy as well.
Then, I focused on the fifth source of ‘impressions.’ This was the only one I had been expecting to see, and also the reason I still thought this skill had so potential. I could feel my mind tapping into the impression the soldiers had of . This would tell what the soldiers, and thus the governnt, thought about us, and would give our group more information to work with in the future. And it could potentially give new abilities that I might find valuable as well.
The fifth source of impressions felt like a variety of opinions clashing and colliding with each other, but they still at least sowhat similar to each other in nature.
I could make out the impression the soldiers had, of sobody who was cold nearly faceless. It almost felt like, instead of a normal four year old girl, the soldiers we had attacked last night thought of as a faceless assassin and force of destruction.
They seed very afraid of . Their impression of didn’t really feel like ‘’ at all. Which was probably fair. My friends and I knew that we had attacked the facility entirely because Felix was imprisoned there, but the soldiers who had survived the battle probably saw us as infiltrators from another nation or sothing, there to ruin their sketchy research facility. That wasn’t sothing I had originally thought about, but when I talked with everyone else later, I would also ntion how the soldiers thought about us. I didn’t mind reinforcing their belief that we were from another nation, in order to make it harder to track us down.
After that, I did my best to shut off the sensations coming from my new ability. I didn’t want to think too much about my new ability until I had so ti to talk with my friends about it. I was still half-tempted to just delete it entirely, honestly.
Then, I continued scanning through my notifications. There were no more kill Achievents, but there were a few interesting Wealth and Influence ones.
Wealth: Own five Ancient Lightning Bolts
Achievent 250
Ancient? I had thought that the people of the facility had been raiding the multiverse or sothing. If the lightning bolts were ancient… that might imply sothing very interesting about the history of this world.
Or it could be totally wrong. Yet another thing to bring up with my friends later.
Wealth: Own 1 kilogram of Alkulsteel
Achievent 100
I suspected the ‘Alkulsteel’ was the material the swords had been made of. I had no idea what Alkulsteel was, but apparently, it was a valuable material, if it had triggered wealth Achievent for stealing it.
I would give it to Felix and see what he could make of it. If the swords had no magical properties but were made of so neat alchemical material or sothing, I wouldn’t really know what to do with it, but Felix might figure out a use for them.
Finally, the most interesting System ssage of all.
Influence: Cripple the Vernian attempts to study ancient artifacts and rescue project ‘Felix’. (Moderate Impact on this event).
Achievent 2,400
I had gotten a pretty sizeable amount of Achievent for rescuing Felix and stealing a bunch of weird artifacts. Though, if what we had stolen were ancient, hard to replace artifacts, perhaps we had accomplished a lot more than I thought we had by stealing everything we encountered. I didn’t know how hard it was to find more ancient artifacts, but I was pretty sure we had gotten almost the sa amount of Achievent for looting the base as we had for contributing to the battle to keep the islands alive in our first life. I recalled getting around 3,600 Achievent from the battle for the survival of the islands, and my contribution had been destroying two boats by luring the sea monster to attack them. For stealing a big chunk of a research base to give 66% of the rewards felt a little absurd to . I decided to think more about that later.
All of my Achievent earnings combined totaled up to 3,600 Achievent. With the 1,322 Achievent I had previously had, I now had 4,922 Achievent. Not bad for one night of work, although it had been a bit risky at so points.
A few monts later, as I was reading through my System notifications, I heard Felix stir from my closet.
I quickly ran out the bedroom, and confird that my mother had already left the house. I started making a quick breakfast for Felix out of so of the supplies I had squirreled away in my backpack. I still needed to deal with all of the stuff we had swiped last night, and sell the potions I had… borrowed, and do a million other things. But first, I needed to help Felix change up his face a little bit, check if my other friends were awake, and talk about all of the things I had learned and my accidental peeping on their thoughts.
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