Chapter 82

Shortly after Nathan is taken from me I get an idea. After getting Alfred to bring me a sedated goblin I get to work. First I try to overwhelm his soul by rapidly adding and removing vast amounts of soul energy, but it turns out to be surprisingly resilient. I make some progress but it is slow, and ultimately the goblin’s body dies, making it useless. I refine the soul into a soul stone and ask for a new goblin. This time I try to attack the structure of the soul itself, try to break it down into little more than energy. But a similar problem happens; the goblin forgets how to breathe and suffocates, among other things.

It seems I don’t understand the soul enough to reprogram someone from the base up. But this experiment demonstrated that the soul can be deconstructed and potentially rebuilt, I just need to learn more. I again find myself longing for total seclusion in order to improve myself.

I decide to take a break and head up stairs for some breakfast. To my surprise I find jackline at the dining room table, eating something she had a chef make. I sit down across from her and we have a pleasant conversation, around ten minutes into the conversation she brings up levels.

“I hit level 90 yesterday, now only ten levels till 100. Hey jack, what’s your level?” Jackline

“I have no idea. I don’t have access to my status screen” Jack

“The only way that’s possible is if you have broken the laws of the world, like your rabbit and goblin, but I know for a fact that you have yet to break any of those laws.” Jackline

“It said a while ago that it was under construction and would be for around a year.” Jack

“oh, I know what’s going on here. Excuse me while I go commit deicide.” Jackline

Before I can react she teleports away. I decide to finish my food, some kind of sandwich, and begin to meditate. About half an hour latter I get an announcement.

your status screen has been restored

I pull it up and just stare at it, I have no idea where to even start figuring out what I am looking at. Less than a minute latter Jackline teleports back.

“You’re going to want to change the settings first, change what shows up, the scale of your stats, things like that

It took me about ten seconds to find the settings option. With jackline talking me through it I edit my status window till I am satisfied with what I see.

Jack: Level 36Active Title: KingHealth: 100/100Stamina: 86/86Mana: 22/22Ki: .00001/.00001Soul Energy: 77/77unknown: .0000001/.0000001Strenght: 75.3 (60%)vitality: 100 (20%)Spirit: 52.9 (89%)Constitution: 60.7 (55%)Dexterity: 89.3 (65%)Self Control 45 (89%)Wisdom: 45.1 (79%)Insight: 37 (98%)Sight: 20.3 (70%)Stat points: 100TitlesSkillsRacial dataSettingsLog

The stats here are far from all of them, these are simply the nine highest stats I have, with them scaled at the highest one being equal too 100, same with the resources. I decided to round all of the numbers too the tenth to make it easier on myself. I noticed a couple of interesting stats, most of these top nine are self explanatory, but for the ones like spirit and self control, significantly less so. It turns out that if I focus on one stat a description of it would pop up. Spirit apparently represents my skill in controlling the soul, while self control is much more than reigning in desires, it is control of all aspects of the self. If you get it high enough you can control things like your heart beat and other otherwise uncontrollable aspects of yourself, if you get it really high, like in the thousands compared to where I am at, you can change your species at will, assuming you’re powerful enough to maintain the species.

It seems the percentage beside the number is how much of that stat you are using at the moment, and can be influence by pretty much anything, especially, in my case, poison lingering in my body.

Focusing on skills brings up a list of all of my skills, and I mean all of them, everything from walking, to knife fighting, to dragon riding. It is impossible to scale these skills, meaning level 5 in a skill is the same for everyone. Similar to stats if you get a skill high enough you can do some amazing things, like walk around the world in minutes.

Titles is just a list of all the titles I have collect in my life and their effects, useful yes, but this is easily the most underwhelming part.

Racial data I have already seen.

Settings just let me change around the status screen and decide what notification I want to see. I set it too show me when I level up, obtain a new title, or have a whole number increase in a stat.

Log is interesting. It is a log of everything I have ever done that has had an effect on my status. I don’t read over it for very long, I have more important things to do than reminisce.

Now, stats points are what I am most interested in. I have 100 of them that I can allocate to almost any stat. I decide that I want to use them to improve my power over the soul, so either self control or spirit. Self control would only improve my power over my own soul, and not other people’s. I look over other more minor stats and I don’t find anything that would be more effective for what I want than spirit, so I allocate all 100 points to spirit and receive the following notification.

due to the massive increase in one stat caused by stat points the increase in stat points will happen over the course of a day, this is for your own safety

I guess this means that I can’t use stat points in the future to gain a large boost of power in the middle of a fight.

I decide to spend the majority of that time meditating, using my soul to remove toxins from my body. I feel the power come to me in waves, as soon as I get use to the increase in power it come again. Attempting to observe how the changes occur leads me to believe that it is a type of blessing, meaning the only way to improve it is to level up allocate the stat points.

Everything runs smoothly during this period, no one gets to a point that they need me and nothing happens that requires my attention, it ends up being a rare calm day, something I likely won’t get again for a very long time.

End chapter 82