Homesteading in a fantasy world

While walking back I focused on my energy which has changed a lot with the new traits. It is now completely confirmed that energy storage also added some energy regeneration, otherwise I would have to wait for days for it completely fill up. While the wait is longer now about a day to get it filled it’s still a lot quicker than it should have been.

This amount of energy helped me level up my body skill a lot taking it to 23 still a bit shy of the target of 25 that I will need, but still a good gain. It will be harder to get the 2 more levels needed but I believe it’s only a matter of time.

Next was the quality of my energy, it felt a lot more dense and solid while it was still as easy to move as ever. I no longer needed arrows, I could make them by combining two abilities energy forms and energy arrows. Working together made it as strong as a regular arrow but I could manipulate the tip however I wanted.

That being said if those abilities were to be used on an arrow that arrow would become a lot better than just one made of energy so using physical arrows will still be extremely useful, but I was no longer screwed if I were to run out of them.

The 320-strength trait or the tier 6 strength trait, at first seemed quite the disappointment but I have gotten to do some testing with it, and it might have been one of the greatest things I have gotten.

First of all it helped so much with the recovery of the wounds that would have otherwise taken a lot longer to heal and would have left a lot more lingering injuries. But what I was most interested in was how much better I can now use energy to enhance my body for momentary gains. In battle, this might be the decider of victory or defeat.

This might also be quite useful for everyday improvement as well. I have more control over energy and can guide it to help develop my body. Abilities now work a lot quicker as well and I can pump energy into them faster than ever. Before the body was a barrier, I had to overcome for my abilities to work in the outside world but now that connection was strengthened and a lot quicker.

Then there is the tiny ball of energy inside my energy body. I believe this is the core that one of the traits gave me. The energy inside was of a higher quality than the one outside and if needed I could get it out and use it to supercharge some ability. But it was in an extremely low amount and currently, there was nothing I could do with it. Although it was growing slowly and if I focused on it and tried to help it grow it seemed to expand faster.

What I was now interested in was if I could make a similar core in my physical body and as I walked slowly back to home, I focused on trying to copy the core and make it in my physical body as well.

To my surprise, it was actually not that hard to get it started although it was a lot smaller than the one in my energy body and I’m guessing that it will take a lot longer to grow as in my physical body there was a lot less energy richness.

I was honestly expecting it to take at least until I made it back home or even longer so now I need something else to do and what came to mind was the problem that I noticed during the war.

If someone else had energy sight or some other way of seeing energy I would light up like a christmas tree, especially whenever I was using my abilities. Because of it, I was able to pick out elite goblins easily and even their shamans could not escape my sight.

That’s nothing to speak of the abilities themselves that anyone with eyes will see. If you have the sight, you will be able to get so much more information and I really dislike that. If there is a way for me to disguise my energy it would be extremely useful, even life-saving.

My first idea and hopefully something that might be easier to discover was to make my energy look out of focus so even if they can see that I am using energy they can never pinpoint what I was doing with it. I wish I had someone to work with and to test with or even a mirror, so I could see myself better. But I only had what I had to work with.

The start was the hardest as the energy inside me didn’t exactly know what to do simply because I didn’t know what to do. So, I started testing and changing and moving energy in ways I have never done before hoping to stumble onto a way to do what I want.

It was a struggle at first but later I started to get better at manipulating energy to my will in unusual ways. While I was about halfway back home, I had a breakthrough that seemed to be making viewing my energy fuzzy.

It took me a bit longer to get a better hang of this manipulation. I had to use this specific manipulation on the outside layer of energy so it will obscure the rest that was deeper inside. The problem was that I needed to consciously do this, but I hoped it would become a reflex later on.

Having found the first solution, I was not going to keep training this but trying to find a second one. This one that I discovered currently is perfect for fighting and general use, but it can't obscure my energy too much as you could still see the overall level of it. It’s similar to if you use the flashlight to shine through a hazy glass you could still tell if the flashlight was a more powerful one.

So, the next goal is to somehow mask myself into showing a lower amount of energy. At the start, I honestly had no clue how to begin but for the starting point, I decided to use the silent shot ability. It had expanded to cover the entire motion of a shot instead of before when only the arrow was silent.

The most interesting thing about this ability was that it shined a lot dimmer and with a little bit of work during the war, I was able to get that down so people would not notice it. With that technique, I was able to get my other abilities a lot dimmer as well. Although I have never been able to get them to the same level as silent shot.

Still, it might be a good starting point and for that, I took a small break and did some practice with the ability trying to really understand this one aspect of it. It seemed to be mirroring back the shine and if your cover was good enough you could make it seem that it didn’t shine. But it still did I guess every ability had to.

At this point, I had an interesting idea with my active camouflage ability and trying to meld these two into one. When I emerged from the forest and saw my bridge and had grasped what I needed to do, but still I needed to keep developing what I discovered.

With both of these abilities taught me is to make a covering over my energy and then make it look like whatever I wanted it to look like. I could hide and make myself like anyone else or if I wanted to, I could bluster and make myself look even stronger, but that I will most likely never use.

This was a lot harder to use and required extreme concentration, so why I was still able to function normally I could never fight like this at least not in the near future and most likely even the long term was out of my reach.

For fighting the blurring method would still be the best, but for some stealth or just generally trying to go unnoticed this was perfect. It still needed a lot of training before I could be confident for any length of time to be able to pull off this level of disguise.

I was still deep in thought as I made it to the bridge but as I looked at its raised position my brain stopped working for a bit. How was I going to get to the other side? It was quite late now, it was dark and quite cold with the wind blowing. I do not think that any of my apprentices would be coming outside anymore. Do I jump the river, perhaps yell for them or do I unpack my river crosser?

Honestly, I love the most and was most excited about jumping. I wasn’t wearing any armour so it would be easier and safer. Who am I kidding, no excuse was going to stop me. I so wanted to do this and it would be important to start to get used to my more superhuman side as it was still a lot to accept.

Being so much stronger and overall better than I used to be was weird. I have to unlearn almost 70 years of being just a normal human. So sometimes it’s quite hard to keep track of this all, especially the abilities as some of them sometimes slipped my mind, I need to be better.

So, I backed off a bit, limbered up my body, measure the distance in my head and went for it. The rush of hearing my footsteps echoing in the grass and the surroundings starting to blur was exhilarating. I was soon close to my target and hit it exactly and pushed off as strongly as I could.

Flying through the air felt amazing and there was no fear of me being short and falling into the river, as I jumped with plenty of clearance over the river and landed with a roll to cushion my fall.

Getting up I kind of chuckled to myself as I went to lower the bridge. It didn’t take long until I heard some growling and when I look towards the farmhouse, I saw Freya. When she noticed me, her defensive stance broke apart and she started to run towards me. She looked quite happy to see me and when she finally made it here, I gave her a big hug and scratched her neck as she tried to lick me.

She’s quite happy to see me and I’m quite certain that some of that happiness is that she doesn’t have to deal with her children alone anymore. I am quite certain that my apprentices were helpful, but knowing those troublemakers they overwhelmed my apprentices quite quickly.

I finished lowering down the bridge and got my cart while Freya was beside me looking out towards the forest just in case something might come out of it.

I was quite pleased as we made it closer to the farm that my apprentices had their bows out and were ready to defend. They took longer than I would have liked but in time that will be fixed, at least for Arthur.

I could see the smiles on their faces. I waved to them and that seemed to relax them. The next one to come out was Francis and behind him all the puppies now a lot bigger started to run towards me.