Clang! Clang! Clang!

I got used to hearing that sound over the last 5 cycles. Dad apparently decided that it was time for me to learn something outside of housekeeping and started me off with blacksmithing. I heard that my brother started with swordsmanship but I guess he wanted to steer me more towards the crafting path rather than fighter one.

Surprisingly there was a lot more to blacksmithing than I ever thought possible. It wasn’t that I underestimated it since I did watch a lot of reality TV back on earth one of which was Forged in Fire so I knew a little of what to expect but blacksmithing back on Earth and doing it in this village was a lot different.

First of all here we were mostly dependent on mining our own ore and cutting down very specific trees to use for fuel to heat the metal, smelting our own ingots and only then could we finally get to hammering our creations into shape.

This was also the first time I found myself being bad at something I tried in this world. Not in the fact that I didn’t unlock the skills for it but simply because I didn’t have the strength required. There was a reason that people who had jobs that required physical work only took apprentices only after they had moved past the Child trait and were allowed to allocate their stat points.

The upside of me being so much weaker and having the skill was that it made the difficulty of actually getting something done that much higher. One thing I understood in these years of messing with my skills is that the harder and more complex the actions taken the quicker they level up your skills. Other than that I also figured out that getting skills to level up got harder with every level and that you could pretty much only do the same thing over and over to level the skills for each 10 level window, meaning mundane repetitive daily skills got level from 1 to 10 relatively quickly but without any innovation you weren’t going to be seeing level 11 unless you put years more work in the same activity.

Clang! Clang! Clang!

Just a little bit more. I was almost done with this. I was using my dads detail hammer to get any work done as it was the only one I could swing, not that the nails I was making took much detail or care to create.

As I finished the final nail I felt the skill level up again. Even with that not being something all that uncommon for me to level a skill I still felt myself grinning like I always did when my skills levelled up. So I pulled up my stat screen to see the progress I made.

Name : Ajax

Level :10

Experience : 4150/10000

Traits: Child, Divine Witness

Health: 70/70

Mana: 150/210

Stamina :40/180

Vitality : 7.22

Strength :15.36

Endurance : 18.9

Dexterity :16.7

Intellect : 33.84

Wisdom :25.02

Mind : 21.73

Perception : 14.14

Stat Points : 198

Skills : [Meditation Lvl 32][Sense Mana Lvl 31][Expel Mana Lvl 31][Mathematics Lvl 20] [Stealth Lvl 13][Drawing Lvl 30][Athleticism Lvl 31][Running Lvl 20][Reading Lvl 20][Writing Lvl 20][Sprinting Lvl 10][Cooking Lvl 14][Sewing Lvl 10][Cleaning Lvl 10][Haggling Lvl 2][Gardening Lvl 19][Manipulate Mana Lvl 6][Water Aspect Mana Lvl 5][Fire Aspect Mana Lvl 4][Air Aspect Mana Lvl 6][Earth Aspect Mana Lvl 4][Inject Mana Lvl 3][Mana Farming Lvl 2][Axes Lvl 14][Hammers Lvl 10][Mining Lvl 5][Lumberjack Lvl 5][Smelting Lvl 3][Blacksmithing Lvl 3]

My stats looked like I expected them to, the increase in the difficulty of raising them was definitely non linear as I barely got any increases outside of my child buff increases Intellect and wisdom whereas Perception basically doubled. Vitality was the odd one out, I hadn’t yet managed to find a way to get that one to increase at all, I started with 2 got 5 out of my Child trait all I could force was 0.22 and despite it not forcibly increasing I knew the later I got started at doing that the harder it would be.

In terms of my Mana I guess it came down to experimentation, Meditation, Sense Mana, and Expel Mana have barely levelled in the last year whereas they got to 30 pretty quick, that's how I figured out repetitive easy activities using skills were definitely not the way to level them more than their share of the 10 levels. The clearest indicator for this being Axes, I was using a pickaxe to mine and a normal axe to chop trees letting this one level past 10 fairly easy while hammers have been there for the past cycle and a half as I kept making nails.

Playing around barely summoning a drink of water, helping soften the earth to dig, cooling myself down with a breeze and lighting a fire with my mana seems to have helped it with getting to 30 but my most recent breakthrough on that front was instead of just expelling the mana near my small patch of garden and hoping it sticks to my plants I could directly inject the mana into them.

This came with various levels of success, injecting too much and you would kill the plant so it took some trial and error before I got the hang of it and as I did I got the mana farming skill, this year the plants in my garden were looking better than the ones my mother was growing.

The one thing that had me confused was the required experience for level 10, had it followed the pattern so far it should only have cost 8900 instead of 10000 so I was going to be keeping an eye on that to see what else could or would change but maybe it was just a difficulty spike for making it past level 10.

“Dad the nails are finished” I dutifully went to show them to him. I enjoyed blacksmithing and with how much my parents were pushing for me to go more towards the crafter route I most likely would be doing so. Despite this I still kept the amount of skills I had a secret, not that it was hard since how many people would care about the training a 5 year old would do, and not like it showed in the quality of the nails I made that I had gotten the skills, not much you can go wrong with there. So I decided to push my luck a little bit and try to get some more information out of my dad about what the norm was in this world. So after my usual evening run I started as we sat down for dinner I went on a fact finding mission.

“Mom I got a level today” I went about bragging hoping this would open the way for me to ask things related without seeming too obvious. As for why I asked after my usual run, well that was because everybody and their mother in this village had figured out I had a running skill. It wasn’t that hard to put together considering the 5 year old doing laps around the village every day.

“Congratulations Ajax” my mom was ecstatic and my dad seemed proud if a little down, most likely about the fact that I got my level from running and not blacksmithing, yet he also heaped on the praise.

Jonny was taking one of his days off and went to visit his parents and Judy was visiting Alana, the two had gotten along even better after Judy got past her Child trait both had discovered at least a bit of an affinity for trading so they were both taking lessons from mom on that front. This meant that it was only me with my parents tonight.

“What is the usual level for someone my age?” My question seems to take the wind out of their sails, most likely since this is the first time I had brought up levelling and they probably thought I was level 3 at best and didn’t want to upset me.

“Well there is no real set level for kids at your age, as everyone discovers their skills when they get to try out the activity but for the most part, after the Child trait ends all kids are level 4.” She said with a bit of trepidation clearly not wanting to upset me or lie to me either.

“On average kids are level 5, with the stronger ones being level 6 and the lucky ones who discovered their set of skills early being level 7. Nobels manage to get their kinds to level 8 and in extreme cases level 9” my dad said matter of factly as he went back to eating his food thinking nothing more of my question.

“O-Of c-course you shouldn’t be discouraged by that, you are only 5 you have a lot of time to get your levels” he quickly followed it up after receiving a look colder than the arctic from my mother.

But I was too preoccupied to listen to the rest of the conversation. I just found out that even the best of the best nobles didn’t make it to my level in 10 years and I was only 5. And as happy as this made me, it also made me very paranoid and more convinced of the fact that I should not go around revealing my level or skills to anyone. I didn’t want to end up kidnapped or killed over that information. I even felt quite guilty as I got the skill Deception for pumping my parents for information.