Homesteading in a fantasy world

The evening went by quite fast and while we were all moving back to the farm, I thought over all that I had learned. I was completely correct about gambling and when I am losing and everyone else is winning people speak their minds a lot easier.

One thing that almost made me want to break the table was the mistake I made with my adventuring class. I didn’t need to get to level 25 but to 35 to get the two abilities from the skill. Which of course made perfect sense. The beginner took 5 levels then the basic 10 levels and I needed another 20 to level up the regular one.

How could I have made that mistake I have no idea I guess I just didn’t think about the basic and it requiring 10 levels as well. It’s not the worst thing it would just take a lot longer and I need to dive further into this skill to truly level it up without constantly getting my body hurt and having to heal it over time.

The positive thing about the adventuring class that I have is that my thinking was correct and turns out the 35-level requirement for the first skill is quite standard for high-level paths.

But the most interesting piece of information I was able to get was that you can combine abilities and even skills although that was done a lot less often. Thankfully at the table, there was someone as ignorant as me as he didn't understand why someone would want to combine them and thankfully someone explained.

It was to get those broad abilities like my armour enhancement. Not only are those a lot more versatile it turns out the more you can add the stronger they can get but you can also learn from the ability itself to make it stronger, so overall they are a lot better.

I had some good overall abilities already, but I had many different weapon abilities and I wondered if I could possibly combine them all. I also figured out another positive by myself that I have been wondering about for a while now.

It’s the pool so to speak where the abilities and traits are being pulled from. It was quite basic when you think about it. If there are no weak abilities to pull from then all that is left are the strong ones so you will most likely get a choice to strengthen one of your abilities and 2 other choices that are a lot stronger or have weird/useful effects.

We also got a better idea of when the training will happen. We were invited to the village to participate if we could on Monday and Wednesday and then on Friday, my apprentices were supposed to gather in front of the dungeon in the early morning.

Apparently, they were going to do some more teaching and training before they go in and after. I was told that the first training was very basic, but I still want to join and see if I was missing anything important and I was also curious about how they trained in this world.

The next day I taught my apprentices a bit more about forging so they could make their own armour pieces. This way I will have a lot more free time and wouldn’t have to worry about making them time-consuming pieces. And with that, the Sunday finished and it was time for returning to the village and the next day get some training under our belts.

I was extremely glad that I decided to join although the training itself was basic for this world's adventuring it still had a lot of required information about the world itself and how it worked.

Most of it I have already figured out and here they didn’t sprout the kingdom's propaganda but laid out everything properly. I did learn more about specialization. It basically helps someone when they have reached the end of their class upgrades which can happen at any point and those are actually quite useful, although the teacher emphasized that it was always better to progress to a higher rarity of class rather than taking a specialization.

But what the specialization did was a lot more amazing than I ever thought. If you would think about the world being normal and the system giving you control of this world in the form of abilities, then the abilities you get from specialization were the strongest form of that control.

The rarer your class the higher your level will be and when you take the specialization the crazier abilities are available to you. Sometimes you get even more things that bend the world to your will.

While a rare class specialization if it was a top tier one might be able to destroy a building in a single punch then an epic one could destroy a small village and a legendary one a capital city and turns out that there is a rarity beyond legendary.

Mythic and with that you can take your class level all the way up to 160 but when one of the younger boys asked what was beyond that the teacher told. “Get to that point and find out.” Quite an interesting answer.

When I learned this, I wondered if I could get any of my classes to the legendary tier so I can get them to a max level of 80. Currently, I didn’t think that I will be able to get past that but who knows? Getting to max 80 will also take quite a long time as I also learned the rarer the class the more you would need to gain a class level but I already knew that.

There was also some basic weapon training and for that, I was quite thankful for as I was actually worse than Arthur although my stats and instincts help me quite a lot. In a real fight, I would of course wipe the floor with him.

I finished off the day in the dungeon clearing out every monster and studying from the core. Finally, I got level-ups in all my classes.

Level up homesteader

homesteader is now level 17

strength +4

dexterity +4

vitality +4

endurance +2

empathy +2

intelligence +2

Level up true archer

true archer is now level 15

strength +5

dexterity +5

vitality +3

perception +4

Level up heroic soldier

heroic soldier is now level 15

strength +5

dexterity +3

vitality +4

constitution +4

presence +2

The next day's first half we spent logging and after that, we just started doing things that we wanted to do. I focused on understanding my body skill more and truly dived into it. The skill affected everything about my body and the higher it got the more control over my body I got so that I can start to change things.

With that I could help boost my recovery or if needed pump myself full of adrenaline to give me the edge in a dangerous situation if needed. But most of all it helps me understand my traits better and how to truly bring out their strengths.

The main philosophy behind this skill was that the body is the foundation that holds up everything else and the stronger it is the better you can support the things you get from the system.

The next day the most important thing I learned was how to combine abilities and skills. It wasn’t that difficult, but it took a lot of willpower and visualization of what you wanted.

There was a possibility that you could fuck up and lose a lot when you combined abilities like for example me trying to combined charged throw with razor-sharp blade I could lose their ability to put dangerous amounts of energy into the throw making it overall a lot weaker ability.

They also cautioned about combining skills as that could cause a lot more problems and especially because you could only get one ability even if you had the chance of it being a better one.

This day I also spent time with Bert learning more about the wider world and the magic systems in it. This world had six continents that are populated and known, well technically 7 but the north pole is completely covered in ice similar to our Antarctica.

We lived in the central continent that’s higher up and almost touching the ice of the north which is just called the ice wasteland. The continent we are on is called The Green because goblins originate from here. Apparently, the rest of the continents and species mounted a full-scale invasion two millennia back to clear out this place from the huge amount of goblin hordes and claim land here.

To the east is the continent that’s called Verlum which is mostly forest and steppes although they seem to have a good number of mountains as well, but every continent seemed to have them. It's the place where most of the beast kin originate from.

To the West is the continent of Albereny the home place of the elves. To the South are two continents that are quite close to each other and separated by huge amounts of islands. Both humans and dwarves call those their homeland.

If you look at it on the map the southern continents are in a narrow horizontal line that is longer than Eurasia and the three continents above it, in vertical lines spaced evenly almost as tall as Africa but also a lot narrower forming almost a W. It's all connected by what's called the shallow sea that connects all the continents.

Everything is quite close up leaving a lot of free oceans to the east and west that no one has been able to traverse and survive as the monsters out there can swallow a ship in a single gulp.

They know that there must be some land out there because from the east when there are big storms sometimes dragons can land on the continents bringing destruction wherever they go. Sometimes the west has the same problem, but it happens a lot less often. Truly dangerous dragons are quite a rare occurrence.

It turns out that there is another form of magic here. One is mana-based, one is energy-based and the third one these holy-based. They form a rock, paper, scissors triangle. Where mana triumphs over energy, energy triumphs over holy power and holy power triumphs over mana.

The holy power is quite rare as there is no holy power in this world nor are there gods, but the power seems to come from someplace else and slowly over time it has become a lot more abundant.

Holy power is extremely powerful but limited in its versatility and has lots of rules and limitations. Mana-based is the most versatile only requiring somatic and verbal components to make spells happen while energy-based needs somatic, verbal and components. Holy-based only needs verbal.

The energy-based magic needs components to help mimic what mana can achieve on its own. It’s sort of like mana being a universal tool that the person can use to get anything they dream done but with energy, you would need a catalyst in form of components that have certain properties to help achieve the same effect.

Basically, energy magic is derived from mana magic although with all three systems everything is thrown out when the system itself takes over. You could have an ability that you just use whatever source of power you posess and cast something without having to do anything else.

Just point your finger if you want even that would be optional and blast as many fireballs as you can from your tank of chosen fuel, energy, mana or holy power. But getting those system abilities is hard and you can't get them by just casting continuously. It’s something you would need to get the usual way.