System Architect

I was unable to figure anything about Harvesting Experience by the time the weekend rolled around—other than how randomly it gave experience. It wasn’t for lack of trying, either. I’d gained a handful of experience from it every day, but I was no closer to understanding the mechanics behind it than I had been when I first unlocked it.

Saturday morning was unseasonably warm—hot, even. The big bonus Mom’s place had over Dad’s—not counting the all-important air-conditioning—was that the neighborhood had an indoor pool. Mom suggested we go over there to get out of the heat and do something active for the day. I heartily agreed. While it wouldn’t help me get any of my quests done, it was a good and relaxing break—something I really needed.

I got changed into swim trunks and splashed into the warm water of the pool. The moment I started to swim, a notification chime let me know I’d done something worthy of experience.

Milestone: Swam 1 meter

Exp Gained: 1

Treading water in the deep end gave a similar result.

Milestone: Treaded Water for 1 second

Exp Gained: 1

I just had to laugh. It was yet another way for the system I’d been saddled with to mess with me. During time I’d set aside to just let go and be a child—just relax and enjoy myself—the chime was there to haunt me. There wasn’t anything I could do about it, so I took the free experience and played around in the pool for nearly two hours. Between both milestones, I ended up with 22 extra experience.

It took the rest of the day to complete the quests I’d otherwise ignored. On the plus side, the weekend meant extra time to get those things done—which really meant more time to procrastinate on not doing the quests for as long as possible.

At the beginning, it had been easy to chase experience and quests. Even now, the targets to spend experience on were fairly close together. In spite of that, I was starting to feel myself lagging a little. It had been nearly a month since I went back in time and I'd been working myself ragged the entire time. Even when I tried to take a break, the system found a way to drag me back.

There were new and interesting paths to follow to be sure. Just figuring out the intricacies of harvesting and the others was going to take a lot of time and effort. That would be enough to keep my interest for a time. The issue would come as soon as I'd figured it out and it stopped being fun. At some point it was going to become a chore. I could keep that up for some time but eventually I was going to burn out. When that happened, humanity was screwed.

I shook my head. I needed to be better than that. Burnout was real, yes, but I had also learned over my several decades of life on how to combat it. I knew what I enjoyed doing. Even if it would be difficult with everything going on, I needed to set some time aside for myself. Although I'd still need to accomplish my quests every day, I could choose where I did all of that. Maybe not at the moment, but as soon as I finished school, that would be something I'd be able to do if I played my cards right. With my mind settled for the moment, I pushed onwards to complete my quests for the day.

Sunday, I got a daily quest that required both swimming activities that had gained me experience the day before. If that kept happening, I feared there would be less experience for me to gather. What if I found out skydiving gave experience but then was on a hike to explore or something… would I just have to give up many of the quests I had available to me because I would be unable to complete them? This had already happened with pull-ups… but now with swimming too. It was a problem. Maybe after restarting I would have to be more careful about what I did so that I would be able to maximize the available experience every day.

I did my best to complete the swimming one before Mom had to drop me off at Dad’s in the afternoon. The other quests were relatively easy and I took care of them. Once at Dad’s, I had a great opportunity to do some testing with harvesting in the back yard and knotweed grove. The back yard was the primary reason I got Harvesting Experience before anything else, after all.

I brought a notebook outside with me along with some tools Dad lent me. It wasn’t anything fancy, but I hoped to gather at least some data to help me piece together how it all worked.

The first thing I wanted to do was to keep my testing as consistent as possible. In order to do that, I picked a stand of freshly growing knotweed as opposed to the stiff dead ones from the previous year. I specifically chose that cluster of knotweed because they all looked similar in terms of height and vivacity.

The first set of tests I did was focused on the how of harvesting. Did it matter how carefully I harvested the knotweed? Was a sharp rock just as good as a knife or maybe a saw?

I marked down every time I got experience—and how much—on a table based on the method I used to chop down the knotweed as well as the tool. It turned out that the more care I gave to my efforts, the more I was rewarded—to a point. Once I did the task as well as could be expected, it didn’t matter what tool I used or how quickly I went.

The next set of tests were focused on the what of harvesting. Did what I harvest from the knotweed plant matter or was the act of harvesting simply enough?

To that end, I took notes of what happened with each different harvesting product—the leaves, the stems, the main body, a single section, and a single section without the nodes. What product I aimed for mattered. The more useful the product, the more experience I got out of it—the leaves and stems gave practically nothing while the others gave varying amounts. Additionally, the better cleaned up and perfect the product, the more I got out of it.

I wasn’t sure whether the reason why the stems and leaves gave much less was because they were abundant, because they were insignificant, or because I viewed them as not useful. That wasn’t something I could easily test with the materials at hand, so I moved on to the final set of tests: quality. Did the quality of the starting material affect the experience gained?

As a test, I took similarly sized knotweed shoots from this season and from last year as well as ones that were of different sizes. I made sure that I had one hardened and dead one that matched a live one in terms of size. There were a few that still stood which looked to me like they had been around at least a couple of years. I added those to the test as well.

Quality mattered. A lot. The biggest live and year old knotweed shoots gave the most experience. That number went down proportionally with the size of the shoot in question. When it came to testing age, it was even worse. The very old knotweed barely gave anything at all!

The test got me thinking back to the leaves and stems. I had to add another possibility to the list for testing. Maybe they were counted as lower quality than the main plant for some reason. The experience numbers were similar enough when comparing stems to similarly size small knotweed shoots that the hypothesis was worth pursuing further.

When I had exhausted my experimentation with the knotweed, I began to think about what else I could harvest. Outside of plants and mushrooms, there was the Earth itself—rock, ore, sand, clay, and many other materials. I had no idea if Dad had any tools for that, but I wanted to at least test how that worked.

Sadly, that needed to wait for another day. Long shadows covered the ground as I went inside to clean up and eat before I went to bed. I was proud of myself. Not only had I gotten a somewhat good handle on what gave experience, but I’d also gained a good amount for my efforts. Knowing what I knew now, I’d be able to get a lot more in the future even if there was still a lot I didn’t yet understand—like how growing my own plants from seed would affect the experience gained.

Come Thursday after school, I finally ticked over enough experience for the next feature. A big chunk of that had come from completing one of the monthly quests.

Feature Unlocked: Exploration Experience

Current Exp: 239

Like Harvesting Experience before it, I would need to figure out how Exploration Experience worked before I could exploit it. Based on the description, visiting new places and discovering more about those locations would be my primary way to get experience. If I learned anything from Harvesting Experience, it was that careful effort was important. I was also fairly sure that knowledge and understanding of what I found was also a positive. If, for example, I found an ore that I could determine as containing iron, that discovery would be worth more than if I found an ore of some type I couldn’t identify.

I went to the backyard as I did every day after school while at Dad’s. I spent time in the knotweed patch harvesting experience and knotweed. While I did that task, I was granted a small amount of experience for exploration. I thought it might have something to do with the discovery of the knotweed, but it also could have been for covering enough new ground.

To test my ideas out, I took a walk down to the gravel beach by the river at the far end of the property. I got just one experience point for my efforts walking there and five once my feet touched the rounded stones of the shoreline. I picked up some of the rocks and checked them over. I was no expert, but I did see some quartz and river glass amongst them. That was enough for another point, but that was where the notifications ended.

On a whim, I walked back and went inside to grab my laptop. I took it to the edge of the wifi signal and used it to look up soil classifications. I wasn’t able to do all the test—there were far more I couldn’t do than what I could—but I was at least able to determine the soil composition both of the lawn and the knotweed grove. Each of those discoveries netted me five experience.

I smiled. There might not be a ton of things to uncover at Dad’s house or at Mom’s, but I would figure out all the things I could look for so that when I had the chance to really explore, I would be ready to milk as much out of it as I could. I told Dad about my discoveries, but he didn’t give much more than a distracted reply. He liked nature, but the actual science of it wasn’t really his thing. Maybe when I got Combat Experience he could take me hunting. I brought up the idea—since unlocking it was only a few weeks away—and got a ‘hmm’ that I interpreted as a maybe.

As I was about to go upstairs after dinner, Dad handed me his phone.

“Eddy?” I heard Mom’s voice ask.

“Yeah?” I answered.

“I spoke to the community college about getting you signed up—“

“Mhm.”

“—and they want you to come in to do some placement testing next week. What day works best for you?”

“I’m guessing the weekend is out of the question?”

“It has to be during the week.”

“Um… I have no preference, really. Whatever works with your schedule.”

“I won’t be picking you up,” Mom said. “Grandpa Joe is going to get you Tuesday after school and bring you to the place. I’ll give him your documents—birth certificate, passport, all of that stuff.”

“Ok, Mom,” I replied.

I was looking forward to talking with Grandpa Joe. The emails we’d sent back and forth didn’t cover much and an in-person meeting was something I’d been wanting since he gave me the laptop.

“Love you, Eddie. I’ll see you Sunday.”

“Love you too, Mom.”

I hung up the phone and passed it back to Dad. His eyebrow was raised.

“College,” I said.

He nodded. I gave him a hug and went up to my room for the night. Before I fell asleep, I checked the notification I’d gotten the second Mom told me about the placement exam.

Excel in the Placement Exam

Qualify for college level math

Qualify for college level English

Qualify for college level science

Qualify for college level history

Success: 100 Exp for each subject passed

Failure: 100 Exp applied to monster strength for each subject failed

Expires: N/A