Blake looked down at his newest spear with a smile on his face. Sticking the wood in the fire ended up being a very useful for sharpening the point. The heat of the fire made the wood condense as the moisture that was in it evaporated. This made it harder and sharper than he could have done otherwise. Sharpening wood against random stones did not lend itself to well-sharpened tools.

  There was a downside. Two actually. The wood was more brittle than it would be without the fire treatment. This was an acceptable tradeoff to Blake as his main concern was dealing the initial damage. He had lots of spears that he was using as defensive spikes and they were not too difficult to make. His Talent also reinforced any spear he made to a limited degree.

  The other downside to Blake was that he now had to go through all the wooden tools and spikes he had made in the last few days to give them fire treatment. It would be annoying but worth it. He also found that his Talent gave him a small upgrade to his use of spears after creating a fire-treated spear. Since it wasn’t a direct upgrade he wondered if it wasn’t so much the overall quality of what he made but his understanding and variations he had made with his crafting.

  That would make more sense as it would be hard for there to be an objective ‘best’ version of a spear. What would that look like? Was a longer handle better? Was he supposed to make them better for throwing? No, to Blake the idea that it was based on the variation and effectiveness of the traits that a spear possessed. That meant creating spears for different purposes would give him the best return for his skill at crafting.

  While working on upgrading his wooden tools Blake pondered on his Talent further. If variations of a craft helped upgrade his skill at using an object as well as his Talent’s ability to reinforce it then where did it end? At what point did a variation of an object become something unique upon itself?

  His spears for example were originally the exact same as his shivs but with a longer handle. He had since changed the tip slightly so there were sharpened edges rather than just coming to a point but that didn’t mean there wasn’t crossover. The only thing he could think of that separated the two enough to be different crafts was his perception.

  When first testing out his Talent Blake had already proven that he needed to focus on what he was doing and the idealized version of his goal for his Talent to work. When he had thought of a spear as a hammer during the crafting process the skill knowledge he had gained had been related to his idea of what a hammer could do.

  So did that mean he could enhance his skills with a spear further by creating a shiv and seeing it as a spear? Could he trick his Talent into upgrading multiple skills by creating the same object multiple times with a different ideal object in mind?

  Blake hadn’t finished upgrading all the spears yet but he was eager to test out his new theory. He hadn’t been excited to use his Talent since the first rabbicorn attack and had been using it with mechanical efficiency to give himself a sense of safety but a spark of the excitement he had when first arriving in the spirit realm burned in him.

  To start he created a new spear with a focus on it being a shiv. All he was creating was a shiv with a long handle. This was not a spear. He had to remind himself a few times that it was not a spear as he could feel his Talent begin to shift in the wrong direction.

  He didn’t know when he had become so aware of his Talent but it was useful. It wasn’t so clear that he could pinpoint exactly what it was doing or even what exact image it was using for his craft but it was more like proprioception, the innate sense most living creatures have of where their body is in relation to itself. It was vague but still a real and useful sense.

  Once his elongated shiv was complete Blake was ecstatic to find that he was right. By focusing on this new creation as just a variation of a shiv his skill at using a shiv had increased. He hadn’t tested it yet but given what he knew about his Talent he felt it was safe to assume that the reinforcement that his Talent provided to his creations had also improved for shivs.

  Blake quickly moved on to a shiv-shaped spear. He thought of it as a pocket spear meant for quick stabs and slashes when a larger spear failed. Just as with the elongated shiv, the pocket spear gave him an increase in his skill with a spear.

  By this point, Blake believed to be on the level of someone who had trained under a master for a couple of weeks. That wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things but he knew instinctually that he had no innate flaws with spearmanship which was why he had the idea of being trained under a master. He wasn’t developing any bad habits with his skills.

  Something else he had noticed as his skills advanced was how it interacted with the crafting information component of his Talent. As he learned to move with the spear he also became more reliant on knowing his weapon intimately. He was still a beginner so it didn’t change much beyond his comfort with it but he felt that would change as he advanced. Everything from the weight to the texture contributed to how well he could use a spear and he knew everything about his craft perfectly.

  Blake was starting to realize that viewing his Talent as four different abilities was a limited point of view. So far he thought of his Talent as three components; the information on the crafting process/result, the skill in using whatever he created, the warmth that he believed to be an improvement directly to his body in some way, and the reinforcement of whatever he crafted so long as he had made the same type of item before.

  Blake had now seen the skill and information components enhance each other in two different ways. The first was what he had just discovered, that his skill with something was reliant on how well he knew his tools/weapons. The other way was something he had discovered when he created his first tool meant for crafting. Knowing how to use a crafting tool enhanced how well he could make something which combined with the knowledge of the exact results of his actions made him a better crafter in a compounding loop of improvement.

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  Since the skill and information components worked so well together Blake guessed that the body improvement also fed into this in some way. His best guess was that the warmth of improvement was related to the muscle memory he gained with the skill increases. Perhaps it was increasing his nervous system for more exacting movements? He had never been too interested in human anatomy his focus always being more on monsters and what parts of their bodies were valuable.

  The only part of his Talent that he didn’t understand, at least in relation to the others, was the object reinforcement. Neither his knowledge of an object nor his skill at using it related to this mysterious reinforcement. He didn’t believe the improvement of his body had anything to do with it either as the actual result didn’t change just its strength. It also wasn’t magic as far as he was aware as that required mana and he could sense nothing of the sort. Magic Talents were supposed to give you an innate awareness of mana and its use but he had no such thing.

  Experiments complete Blake resumed the task of fire-hardening the defensive spikes. Despite their use being different he did make sure to conceptualize them as spears. The skill of using spears was useless for these but his Talent reinforcement of them, no matter how small, was helpful. The sun was setting by the time he finished.

  In no time at all a fire was started and Blake sat down to relax for a moment. Every day he became faster at starting a fire. He was proud of the progress he had made. He only sat down for a few minutes before the itch to do something returned. The combination of growing up in a society where instant gratification was always available and his subconscious fear of an idle mind pushed him to do something.

  Blake realized he hadn’t worked out in a while. Had this been the day before he could have fallen asleep already despite it still being relatively early in the night but he lacked the physical exhaustion to do that now. He immediately got to work, pushing himself until he collapsed. He got two more workouts in before falling asleep. He couldn’t be sure of the time but he suspected it was near midnight.

  The length of his breaks had continued to increase now starting off at an hour and ending around two and a half despite only going a few times. It was strange to Blake since he felt physically fine faster and faster but had the sense that he couldn’t improve until that break time was over.

  The next day he decided he needed to test what was going on with his physical training. Why did he get the sense that he had to wait? His test was quite simple. After working out once, rather than wait until he felt he could train again he only waited until his body recovered before going again. Nothing bad happened while going through his exercise routine but he found that the comforting warmth of his body improving was not there.

  Exhausted after his second workout of the day he also found that since his body didn’t have that warmth to improve itself it took longer for him to feel better. It was like he was exercising back on Earth. He did not like that.

  Blake waited until he felt the exercise would work again before continuing. He was worried when it didn’t come back when he had expected between one and one and a half hours. It took three hours from his second workout before he could go again. He spent the time making extra spears, shivs, skinning knives, and other various tools. He had no use for them at the moment but he also had nothing better to do.

  He was concerned that his baseline wait between exercises had increased so dramatically but found that the break between the third and fourth rounds of the day was only two hours. There must have been a penalty for pushing himself before fully recovering.

  Blake hadn’t spent much time thinking of the future since the rabbicorn attack, not much before that either since coming to the spirit realm, but he was starting to think about how to advance himself. His base defenses were great but they weren’t a long-term solution. He had to leave the area eventually. He had to figure out how to reach tier 3 within a year or he would be heavily fined and have to pay increased taxes until he reached tier 3. Without access to a body storage facility for long-term stay in the spirit realm, he would only be able to work during his sleeping hours.

  So to improve himself enough to be comfortable leaving his little home he needed to plan things out. Having to be careful with when and how much he worked out complicated things. Making things could be very physically demanding. His initial physical improvements had come from his crafting efforts after all. If he wasn’t careful would crafting increase the downtime on exercising?

  Crafting and exercising were really the only two ways he had to improve at the moment. Being physically stronger would let him travel farther faster as well as put more force into every attack from a monster. It was also important if he wanted to keep pushing his crafting. He needed to figure out how to use stone for tools but he lacked the strength to do anything with that at the moment.

  Crafting on the other hand made him more skilled with his tools and weapons. It also provided him with some unknown enhancement to his body. He was pretty confident at this point that it wasn’t strength or endurance. Exercising had given him a good idea of how strong he was as well as where the supernatural warmth gathered when improving his muscles. The warmth from his Talent was more focused on his brain and something else throughout his body. This further reinforced his theory that it was improving his nervous system.

  Blake decided that before falling asleep he needed a training plan. His best bet was to balance crafting and exercise as much as possible but there were problems with that. Crafting only improved him when making something new and there was only so much he could do within a short period of time. Crafting also risked detracting from how much he could exercise.

  On the other hand, more exercise meant more physical which could open up new avenues of crafting speeding that up. If he only did exercise though large chunks of the day would be wasted as he waited between rounds of intense training.

  He needed to experiment and craft something that would not be physically demanding so that he could exercise as often as possible but didn’t waste time being unproductive. Breaks were fine but three hours of doing nothing was not.

  Blake’s mind drifted to the various ideas he had over the last week for things he could make when one stood out to him. When he had first been attacked by a rabbicorn he had been working on a project. A healing salve. He had wanted to be able to make various salves and tinctures to help with the sunburn he had at the time. He idly noted that he no longer had a sunburn despite being in the sun more than before.

  Herbalism was a craft that required little to no physical exercise beyond the initial making of tools. It was going to mostly be experimenting with various plants to see how they reacted together. It would be time-consuming but also good practice at using his Talent to push his crafting skills further without outside support. If he could invent salves from scratch only relying on the information provided by his Talent he would have much more confidence in being self-reliant.

  It was the perfect craft to do while waiting between physical training rounds. Heck, if he could create a healing salve maybe he could decrease the down time between rounds. If only he wasn’t so afraid of leaving his glade.

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