A Sky Full of Tropes [Reincarnated Psychic Child LitRPG]

Once Jade gets the boss chest open, we return to the surface to identify and distribute our loot and let the others know we cleared the dungeon. My companions are laughing and celebrating all the way out. The four skeletons trail along after us, quite chill and also celebrating.

"Hey guys!" Anise exclaims upon seeing us. "How'd it go? Uh, you know you've got skeletons following you?"

"It's okay," I say. "I freed them from a Necromancer. I'm just gonna take them over to the inn."

"What was that light you used against the vampire?" Melody wonders. "It had a weird intensity to it I've never seen before, even close to a skymote core."

"Sunlight," I say. "I guess you could think of it as special magic light that vampires are particularly vulnerable to."

"Aether core light doesn't emit ultraviolet, I don't think," Basalt says. "It goes from violet to near-infrared. I need to learn that Invocation (Sunbeam) skill, myself. It would be really useful when living in caves. Think about if I could get Hebron's grape cave set up with a few windows shining sunlight for even just a few hours a day."

"Right now, I can only keep it going for less than a minute," I say. "But I'm sure we can figure out a way to make it sustainable."

"Invocation (Sunbeam)?" Amethyst says. "Oh man, I need to get to Elite soon so I can learn that myself."

"Drake, have you identified the loot?" Jade asks.

In addition to the curse skull and the spooky pumpkin seed, we got a bone sword, a chunk of arcane heartwood, a bat-shaped boomerang, and an aspect stone currently attuned to the concept of 'bat'. Tiny illusions of bats swirl around it, each of them manifesting for half a second, flapping once, and vanishing.

I'd tried making use of the last aspect stone I had, but at Basic rank, it was not terribly useful. I couldn't even make a toy fly with it. This one, however, is Elite ranked. I could probably use [Imbue Item] to re-attune it to something other than bats.

"Hemlock, do you want to keep the skull?" I ask. "I could attach it to a staff for you."

"I can't go walking around town carrying a staff with a skull on it," Hemlock says. "You might think it's 'cool' or whatever, but people who aren't adventurers or Corwens would absolutely judge me for it."

"You don't need to carry it around all the time," I say. "You can keep it aside for dungeon runs or if we need to curse some pirates who are shooting at us or something. But if you'd prefer the batarang, you're welcome to that instead."

"No, that thing looks useless," Hemlock says. "Might as well keep it for the spawner. I'll take the skull."

"Who wants the pumpkin seed?" Rowan wonders. "It's not much of a snack, so it would be hard to split."

"It might be more useful to plant somewhere," I say. "You'd probably get giant magic pumpkins out of it. And the heartwood and aspect stone aren't that useful to non-crafters, but I can craft you guys something with them if you want."

(I wonder if I could imbue the pumpkin seed with the concept of a carriage and have [Plant Control] grow a pumpkin carriage? Nah, that would be silly. Gourds are no sensible means of transportation. I will have a flying tree with spider silk in its branches instead.)

"I'll let you know if I have any ideas," Jade says. "My new mist skills have been working out great, but I'll need something to complement them."

"Come with me," I say to the group of skeletons. "The Sleepy Raven Inn is this way."

"Does it get many customers?" asks the Skeletal Waitress.

"It gets regular exterminators and delivery boys," I say. "But its only occupant with fewer than eight legs hasn't seemed very interested in running a kitchen."

The woods are dark and quiet. The glowing yellow eyes are now absent from the bushes they normally peer out of.

"I searched the inn thoroughly but couldn't figure out how to get upstairs," Melody says. "The spiders kinda creeped me out. I was about ready to try climbing in that window I could see from the outside when I saw the others fly up."

I lead the skeletons to the inn, and my companions trail along, not wanting to miss whatever's going on here. The briars that usually block the path have already been moved out of the way when Melody came through.

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The ghost meets us in the common room, being visible for a change and everything.

"Estelle!" I say cheerfully. "Good of you to come out and say hi."

"I might as well, seeing as the Bard was making no progress in finding me and you've brought extra guests," Estelle says.

"Meet my new friends," I say, gesturing to the skeletons, who wave awkwardly with their bare bony fingers.

"Unbound undead, with noncombat classes," Estelle observes. "Why did you bring them here?"

"Because this is an inn, isn't it?" I ask.

"This is an inn that has not functioned as an inn in over six hundred years," Estelle says. "And there is little point in it doing so when Corwen's guest house is so close."

"Ah, come on, don't you want some company?"

Despite not needing to breathe, Estelle lets out a heavy sigh. "I suppose."

"I'm only here until I figure out what I want to do with my afterlife," the Skeletal Busboy says.

"I'm not going to let being dead stop me from advancing my culinary creations!" the Skeletal Chef declares. "Although I may need to figure out a tasting spell..."

"I'm a people person," says the Skeletal Bartender. "So long as I can talk to travelers, I'm happy."

"Can I smack anyone who touches my pelvis without permission?" the Skeletal Waitress asks.

"Please do," I say.

Since Melody still hasn't gotten her music quest advanced, I leave her with Estelle and go to claim one of the inn rooms for the night. This is mostly just an excuse to unwind by practicing some skills, because there's no reason to actually stay here for the night when we can get back to Corwen in minutes with Aunt Savannah along.

I want to practice with Invocation (Sunbeam), though. Right now, it's faint and brief, so I want to level it up as much as I can. I go into one of the inn rooms and clear out the giant spiders first.

I light up the window only to find that my beautiful [Sunbeam] only lasts a few seconds after I stop concentrating on it. Oh well, it's only level 1, and barely put out as much sunlight as you'd get from an overcast day in October in the Pacific Northwest. But the normal amount of sunlight in this setting is "zero" so this is still really cool. Or warm, more specifically. I'm just going to need to use it as often as possible to level it up.

Sunlight is a more difficult concept to keep in existence than just the generic light I used with the rock. The caduceus helps, but the resonance isn't perfect for it. It's bronze, rather than gold, giving only a moderate bonus. And as the symbol of Hermes, not a sun god, it's only adjacent to the concept of sunlight.

The lucky star necklace I gave to Griffin (by which I mean he stole it and I stopped trying to get it back) might be a better match, but still not a perfect one. While I know that the sun was a star, something actually associated with specifically the sun would be a stronger resonance.

Basalt knocks on the frame of the open door. "You busy?"

"Replenishing Inspiration and dumping it into sunbeams, nothing I can't talk during," I say. "I should probably be working on [Sticky Grip] some more, not this flashy stuff. [Sticky Grip] might save my life someday soon, but it's boring. Anyway, what's up?"

"I've just been going over these notes about psychic powers you've been writing," Basalt says. "I think one of the prereqs for [Communication Analysis] is having [Mental Encyclopedia]. I can probably get the skill unlocked, but do we have a way to share it? You know, short of manual file transfers via telepathy. Can we use Hebron as a file server or something?"

"I can find out," I say, and contact Pinion with the question mentally.

[That's a negative,] the gnome replies, and I relay his response to Basalt.

"I suppose we'll need to stick with regular paper books for now," Basalt says. "Ah, well. I'm sure Rosemary will be happy if we can build an amazing library for her. And I'm sure she won't mind editing your rambling into something a normal human soul can understand."

"It's not that bad, is it?" I ask.

"Did you ever try to read a thesis on a field that wasn't your major?" Basalt asks. "You're going to need to write an entire chapter just explaining what 'conceptual resonance' is before you can assume people know what you're talking about."

"Oh... right."

"How much of this is stuff you remember from before and stuff you've figured out just because you're a genius kid prodigy?"

"I don't know," I say. "I have the specific memories blocked off but a lot of this just intuitively makes sense to me. But part of the reason for blocking off memories is to look at things from angles I might have never thought of before."

"Right, and wasn't your 'root' life the guy who invented the system?"

"I try not to think about that," I say. "It doesn't matter, anyway. I don't want to cheat. What would be the fun in that? The world is beautiful. Why not just play the blasted Game?"

Basalt chuckles. "Why not indeed. Still, I expect you're probably going to re-invent magic phones at some point in the near future."

"Whatever stupid things might be said about smart phones, I would stab a monster to see selfies of my grandma stabbing monsters."

Corwen's big book of skills doesn't include many Soul skills. I know our founder, Liz, was competent with Clairvoyance, but the book only gets skills added to it automatically when people die, and she's still alive, over 700 years old, and somewhere out in the Crystalline Heavens fighting reincarnated ruthless dictators or something.

Even I must remember that it took me a while of specifically trying in order to unlock [Aura Sight], the most basic sort of Clairvoyance, and everything slowly built up from there. And I was only able to focus on Clairvoyance because I was a baby and had little else I could do yet. If I'd awoken as a reincarnator at a later age, I probably would have put my mobility to use in learning more adventurous skills first.

It's not inconceivable to get [Aether Sense] or [Psychometry] first, depending on what you were paying attention to. I'm not sure what would make someone unlock [Witness], though. Experience is such a weird thing to look at still. If I never unlocked other psychic powers, all I would see is a soul-tingling glow around someone doing something impressive.