Becoming Less Shit

John blinked a few more times at how much the sword had gone for. 8k? Jeez… I guess I should get used to that. As he checked his character sheet, he found that it had already been conveniently added to it.

During the rest of the quite brief bus ride, John decided to have a peek at one of the less advanced chemistry books that he had gotten earlier. Flipping through the book, he just decided to stop at a page that caught his eye. He landed on a section dedicated towards… lasers. This was highly surprising, considering the subject of the book itself.

Despite the weirdness of this, John read the short section. He got a few ideas as to how he could customize the plasma extrusion of his pistol. In addition to that, he found a few general tips on experiments, only one was anything near relevant: “Prepare for something to go wrong.”

Initially chuckling at this, John flashed back to the various points that plans of his had gone horribly wrong and involved lots of pain due to lack of backup plans. He wasn’t especially humored at that point and decided to truly take it to heart.

As soon as he glanced upwards, he realized that this was his stop. John gathered his things and got off the bus, ready to make the short trek back home.

John inserted his key into the lock of his house and entered the familiar space where he had lived for a good portion of his life. It felt good to be back, relaxing even. “I’m home!” he shouted into the space towards his mother. Brenda’s reply came back from the living room almost immediately as if she had been waiting for him, “Hey! How was school? Did you have a good time with your friends?”

John moved to the door of the room, “School was… well, school. I had a good time out with my friends; we mainly just talked and did a dungeon together.” This technically wasn’t lying.

Brenda smiled happily at this, “I’m glad that you’re having fun with your friends. Buuuut, I think you know what question I’m already going to ask you.”

Sighing, John replied, “Yes… there was a girl, Faith. She’s new to the school, and we just bumped into each other on accident.” After seeing the hopeful look on his mother's face he hastily added, “However, we’re just friends, if you could call it that. But we both had a good time, so it might become a regular thing.”

While Brenda was most likely disappointed, she showed no external signs of this. “Well, I hope that goes alright. If you need tips on how to talk to her, feel free to ask me.”

“Thank you, and I will,” John said, mentally swearing to never take her up on that offer.

The rest of the conversation mainly devolved into small talk, and before long, John found himself walking up to his room, still clutching the armful of books. As soon as the door was closed, he offloaded them and the ones in his inventory all in one messy pile on his bed.

He promptly sat down in his chair, booting his computer out of sheer habit. As soon as he could, John entered his password and used the address of the website that was still on the card Faith had given him.

After a series of redirections, John found himself already logged in. Alright, now that’s kinda creepy.

Disregarding this due to magical bullshittery once again, John had a bit more of an in depth look into the Auction. There was just an incredible amount of categories; it seemed like they had almost everything someone could even get. From potions to armor to enchanted books, they just had it all. However, one category caught his eye more than the others: “Slaves”; it seemed as if people didn’t care enough to sugar-coat it at all.

Bile rose up inside John’s throat as he read through the constantly changing listings. Names, medical conditions, even sexual experience and more were included. Quite horrified by this, he added “enslavement” to the ever-growing list of things that would either kill him outright or make him wish he was dead.

Why am I so surprised by this? Modern-day slavery is a thing even to this day, horrible as it may be. The Abyss just seems to be more… upfront about this due to the presumable lack of laws. You can’t exactly shove it into the recesses of your mind along with all of your hopes and dreams with something like this existing.

Eventually John got over his morbid fascination, deciding that that was more than enough internet for today. He redirected his attention towards his… barebones set of equipment and skills. To put it plainly, to get better gear without entering a barrier or spending an exorbitant amount of money on armor, he needed to make it himself. But with only five levels in Craft, that just wasn’t happening.

Well, he might as well do something with his newly expanded mana pool. John decided to do some skill grinding. He took out one of the cubes of steel that he had gotten from the valiant sacrifice of the computer case and began to use Craft on it. He envisioned a perfect sphere of chrome, and while it did come out shiny… a perfect sphere was definitely a stretch. It seemed… dented almost on every face, making it more of an icosahedron than anything.

Dissatisfied with this result for obvious reasons, John used Craft once more, hoping for a better result. As the metal rapidly liquified and solidified, it formed into another sphere. While there was definitely an improvement, it certainly wasn’t by much, but at least there was a generally better sphere shape. Upon further inspection for imperfections, he noticed that it seemed noticeably smaller than the abomination of a sphere that he had just made a moment ago.

While he was generally certain of this, he just didn’t have a definite reference to go on, so he took a picture of it with his phone before using Craft once more. Now that he was paying attention to it, it seemed as if it really was actively shrinking in front of his eyes. While this didn’t surprise John in the slightest, due to the many games that practiced this constant thing of banishing a good part of recycled material to the shadow realm, it was just incredibly good to know that this also applied. He would actively have to get some more resources at some point if he ran out doing this method.

About fifty minutes and precisely 5 cubes of steel (the last he had) and 15 cubes of wood later, John had gained two entire levels in Craft, further expanding his knowledge.

Craft has reached level 6!
Craft has reached level 7, Crafting abilities limits enhanced!
Mana Conductance has reached level 6!
Mana Capacitance has reached level 6!

While that wasn’t a whole lot of progress, it was good enough for now. But for his barrier skills on the other hand… those were questionable at a meager level one. However, this would have to wait for his mana to regen.

So John took out his incredibly exciting homework, which mainly consisted of some minor chemistry things, which he happily used as a distraction during the short period his mana took to regenerate completely. After he was done with that, he took some time to reconfigure how his sheets looked; a monotone orange wasn’t exactly aesthetically pleasing.

Once he had found a sheet design that worked and was certain his mana was full, John configured Barrier dive to create a small, non-hostile barrier. While this still cost a decent bit of mana, he could do it about... 10 times; the most time-consuming part would be the mana channeling itself. And so, he raised his hand as if to touch something that wasn’t quite there and began to spam the ability.

The first few times were fairly coherent on the inside and were only filled with minor mistakes, like the slightly off location of furniture or the walls being painted the wrong color, but were generally alright and went by without anything going wrong.

But the ones after that were really just a mistake. John was filled with all sorts of pain, from sudden nausea, a mind splitting headache, to the sudden loss of hearing on his left side preceded by a loud popping sensation. In essence, every inch of his body hurt in ways he thought couldn’t happen...

Due to the lack of concentration intense pain comes with, he was unable to open any barriers even if he wanted to. After what seemed like a few hours, John finally regained enough sense to open his eyes and take a look at the status effect.

Barrier Sickness:
A series of symptoms commonly exhibited by those who rapidly enter and exit rudimentary barriers. This includes but is not limited to: loss of hearing, organ failure, loss of vision, loss of memory, or just about every bad thing you can imagine rapidly displacing your own body inaccurately would do.

And of course, the ever helpful prompt that indicated a skill leveling up.

Barrier Dive has reached level 2!