I knew there were quite a few obstacles between me and the procurement of new skills. Meeting the requirements, adapting the Skills for my unique body, finding the experience to pay to unlock them, keeping Lirillin from noticing anything amiss…

Having managed to unlock Power Strike by myself, I thought that I had solutions to all those problems. The solutions might not be easy, or fast, but I was confident that eventually I would succeed.

It was the obstacle that I hadn’t foreseen that was stopping me right now. I was still at the very start of my journey into experimenting with Skills. Because it didn’t matter how capable I was of achieving my goals, if I wasn't able to set any good goals in the first place! I just couldn’t seem to think of a good skill to work towards.

I let out a mental sigh. I had gotten relatively lucky with Power Strike, if I was being honest. Falling into that meditative mindset wasn’t something that came naturally to me, and I had managed to pick an activity that had a good confluence between being generally useful while remaining possible for me to emulate. I had dozens of ideas for Skills, but one after another I found reasons to reject them. Swimming and Rowing Skills seemed straightforward enough when I imagined how a Skill might improve those actions, but they were almost too straightforward. Swimming wasn’t an activity I participated in, it was just a state of being for me. Rowing on the other hand, was something I did. I could envision how a Rowing Skill would let me get more force out of every stroke I took, but I didn’t see how I could make that work in practice.

It reminded me of my high school coach who always demanded 110%. No matter how small that 10% might be in the abstract, in practice I was already giving everything I could. With Skills the System was able to bridge the gap and make the impossible, possible. However, it needed a level of effort from me to do so that I wasn’t sure I could manage to muster up. Rowing and other passive enhancements made their way onto a mental list of Skills that would be nice to have, but would have to wait till I had a better idea of how it all worked.

Other ideas for skills were ruled out for being too ambitious. As useful as water manipulation, telekinesis, or mind controlling the barnacles might be, I lacked any place to start working towards them other than thinking really hard. And given how often in the past few weeks I had been reduced to yelling at things in my mind due to lack of other options I’m pretty sure I would have unlocked some new skills by now if that was all it took. If I had an existing Skill that did something similar I might have held out hopes for altering it or reproducing whatever the Skill did by myself, but as is, I was rapidly building up a pile of Skills that was mentaly labelled ‘revisit later’.

Even the ideas I had for Skills that didn’t immediately sort themselves into either of the previous categories had some issues. More than once I caught myself thinking of a good skill to get, only to realize that it would be useless for me in my current form. While I had hopes of eventually finding ways of working around that, it meant that for now I was rapidly running out of potential Skills to work towards. It took some time, but I eventually stumbled across one idea that was useful for my current situation, was technically possible for me to accomplish but in no way simple, that I understood enough to give it a shot, yet was likely going to need to have System assistance to make the output usable at all.

Sonar. I wasn't sure how exactly my magical sense of hearing worked on a technical level, but the principle of sonar was quite simple and I didn’t think would have any problems working with my nonstandard form of audio reception. Sound waves were sent out through the water. As they bounced back off of objects, a microphone or two picked up the echoes and used that to tell roughly where objects were and how large they were. High end sonar systems had resolutions capable of spotting things on the decimeter scale, or could make out objects miles away. I would be happy if I could see big boats, rocks, and sea monsters before they entered the 15 meter radius of Saltwater Sense.

Sonar wasn’t the only sensory Skill I had thought of, but unlike my other ideas it was an active skill instead of a passive one. I would have to actively create the noise, and then actively listen and process the returns that I got. If it was just me trying to pull it off I would have written the whole idea off as soon as I thought of it. But theSystem was a thing, and I didn’t know how close I needed to get to actualizing the Skill by myself before the System would kick in. I was pretty confident that I could get most of the way there, maybe get lucky just once and have it work, but it wouldn’t be until I finished trying and checked my Screen that I would actually know if I succeeded or not. Even if I failed to unlock a new Skill, I would only have lost some time, and would still walk away with a better idea of how things worked.

Making the sound was easy. I might not have a large range of motion,but I was more than capable of smacking the water with an oar. I mean that quite literally. My first attempt was loud enough that I ended up playing possum for the next half an hour after Lirillin came outside to see what had caused sucha loudsplahs. Only once I was sure that he had gone back to sleep did I resume testing, keeping my test noises to a much more reasonable volume.

The Listening spell on me is weird. It works by magic, not by any physical principles, and seems built around letting me hear instructions given to me by Lirillin or someone else. The spell is naturally very capable about letting me pick out what people are saying,even at distances where they should be too quiet to hear, or where other noises should affect the quality.

It sort of made sense once I actually thought about it for a bit. As much as I treat it as a sense of hearing, it's not. The spell is [Listen]. Even from the moment I came into existence I was using my Spirit attribute to bend the enchantment slightly, forcing it to act according to my expectations. I couldn’t conceive of a world where the only thing I could hear would be people talking, and so the spell naturally expanded to let me pick up ambient noise around me, much like the automation enchantment let me freely move the oars according to my will instead of only in a rowing motion.

Now, with an increased Spirit attribute and a slightly better idea of what was possible, I bent the spell even further. No longer was I limited to picking up noises above the water. It took me a good ten minutes to get used to the change in perspective, but it was as if my entire sense of hearing was submerged. I could still hear the waves crashing on the shore not too far off, but it was deeper, different. The bird squabbles that had persisted at all times of day were reduced to smothered exclamation points of noise by the thick layer of water that separated me from them. And the loud claps of my oars hitting the water between waves? Those were now solid pulses of sound, everything I needed to start figuring out how to make Sonar work.

It wasn’t perfect; regular sonar used either infrasonic or ultrasonic waves and I couldn’t produce or hear those frequencies, but with my crude setup I could at least make out the briefest echo from the sea floor just underneath me. Unravelling that shock of sound into something comprehensible was next to impossible, so I focused my attention on the rest of the process. Every now and then I took a moment to check the level of the tide, keeping track of the time as the night slowly progressed. I always checked my status screen during those brief breaks but the answer was always the same. No results yet.

That ‘yet’ was the only thing that kept me going. What I was doing now wasn’t repeating something I was currently capable of in hopes of getting an improved version, as I had with Power Strike. I was working towards something new, and hoping to use the system to shortcut the process. Of course, there was the possibility that I never would get that shortcut, but that didn’t stop me. Just figuring out how to hear underwater meant this session of experimentation had already shown its value, and I could feel that there were places I could improve my current efforts. I could eventually tweak the Listen enchantment further, or find a better source of noise to use for returns. I could learn how to send out sounds in rapid succession, and use differences between the returns to recreate a speedometer. I could even give up for a while, returning once I had levelled and had new skills and increased attributes to throw at the problem.

Having that breadth of options is what freed me to keep trying. And finally, after a couple nights of practice, I saw something new.

The following skills are currently available to you:

Active Sonar