Exploration- Chapter 31

Still planning on 2 more chapters today.

Chapter 31- In for a Penny…

With that the three of us went up to the room that Selena and I shared. The conversation had to start with an explanation about what training Samvek and I had done. I gave her more details than I had with the entire group and she asked insightful questions.

“Samvek has my approval to continue helping with your training. He clearly has a knack for it, but I don’t want you to forget that you can lean on me for that as well.”

“We’re still learning what this relationship means, but I would never want you to think that you aren’t a part of my life.”

She put her hand on my arm. “I don’t want to come across as being jealous. Frankly, I’m not a fan of all these new emotions, but setting that aside, I do have things to teach you that Samvek won’t know. The resources that were poured into my own training were intense.”

As she was speaking a notification popped up.

Draconic Dust: processing 2% >> 3%

The processing of the remains of a dead dragon goddess seems to be interacting with your Primordial Aspect. It is still sealed, but further analysis will be required to show the impact.

I immediately shared the notification and that shifted the conversation a bit. Finally, Selena said, “There’s a bunch of stuff on your stat sheet that we should talk about. In fact, a part of me feels like every morning before you go out, that we should sit down and remind you about things you need to work on.”

Samvek nodded. “That was a big part of the training that I had intended. This awakening of a Hell System class in me ended up taking up too much of the time, but there is much that Silas has which he isn’t use to its full potential.”

“Now that’s something we can both agree about. Just going off of the last time that I looked at his full status sheet there is your Potentiality, the primordial aspect, your ability to make pioneers, your affinities, you Hell class, the cultivation core, Psi, working on getting the rest of your abilities and spells to legendary tier, and that’s just off the top of my head.”

“What do you mean about Potentiality. I thought that just was. It isn’t something that I can work with.”

Selena grimaced and shifted her head from side to side. “Yes, technically that’s true, but I believe that you need to move forward with your eyes wide open. Right now you have a 5% chance of shifting events in your favor. You were talking about how you need to stop taking all your success for granted and I still agree with that, but the more I talked about you with Fara this morning the more I realized that much of this is just the result of your Potentiality.”

“Five percent doesn’t seem like enough to give me all the good things I’ve gotten.”

“And that’s just another thing that I can teach you about it. Much of this is just theory because supposedly even the ascendants don’t fully understand the full scope of what Potentiality can do and if the gods do then they’re being silent.”

Samvek leaned in. Clearly he was interested to hear what she had to say and if nothing else that told me that I needed to pay attention.

“Remember that Potentiality is constantly at work. How many choices do you think you make per day, thousand upon thousands if you break it down to the simplest choices. Then how many choices do other people around you make which might interact with you without their even meaning for them too. Add to that the natural world and how it holds sway over many of the circumstances in our lives. Your Potentiality comes into play with all of that. You’ll never even see more than a fraction of how it has shaped your path.

“But the theory is that the more important an event the more likely Potentiality is to affect it. My tutor called it Potentiality concentration. I don’t know if that’s really an accurate description, but you have to admit that it seems to work like that for you.”

I nodded. “I think I’m following you, but I still don’t know what I can do to make that work for me.”

“Exactly, you don’t know. You just always test it in battle and often it works out for you which seems to support the concentration theory. But what if your intent shapes it? What if you could cause it to focus only on the issues you wanted to affect, but in turn your odds would go up dramatically for those choices. You’d do that even if it would mean that you’d get worse reactions on more mundane events.”

Samvek seemed excited now. “So you’re saying that we need to test this and see if he can actively influence outcomes.”

“Well we know that he can. We’ve seen it happen too many times to doubt that. How many times has he called upon being an Architect to influence things in his favor. I’ve practically lost count and each time the outcome has been ridiculous. I know I’ve certainly never been able to tell the system that I didn’t agree with any of the choices it gave me and instead wanted to combine them all. My point though is, what if part of those successes isn’t just being an architect but also his potentiality.”

I thought about what she said and stayed quite while Selena and Samvek discussed potential ways to test it out and then even strayed into talking about methods they might use to train it.

While I listened, I got the next notification.

Potentiality: +5.03%/5.42% >> 5.04%/5.69%

Selena groaned when I told her. “So just thinking about it altered your potentiality… You are so broken, but I love it. Don’t read too much into it, we still need to test it more.”

“And that’s hardly the only thing. When we were fighting the Order he repeatedly used force constructs despite gaining a new Psi ability that does the same thing.”

“Excuse me for trying to be sure we were both safe. My mastery of that ability is far greater than a psionic constructs. It’s not like I wasn’t using Psi though, Precognition was active the entire battle. But we should also speak about your Psi levels and how we can recharge you.”

This led to a discussion about the Psi ability I’d been able to grant Samvek. I could tell that Selena was a bit jealous, but she kept it to herself. She was still connected to me as a Pioneer and had my vow of marriage. Samvek revealed that his Psi pool was only 500 but that it had grown to 505 during the battle, although it was empty now. I checked and mine was up to 4400 now and had fully regenerated.

“Let me see if I can fill your reserves up.”

I focused my mind on Samvek and went first to the part where I felt Psi inside of me and then connected to the spot within Samvek. Just like that I was able to push 505 points of Psi into him. “That was easy, and I seem to be regenerating a couple hundred points every minute based on how it’s going up.”

Selena asked, “Do you think that you can give me a Psi ability?”

I shrugged. “Honestly, I’m not sure. Given peace and quiet, I think I can replicate what I did with Samvek, but I get the feeling that I won’t be able to grant another Hell Class. The question is who else do I give the connections to other systems to. I’ve already passed my bloodline on to you so we know that all three of us will be able to reach ascendant tier. But, if one person is going to get a boost from the Divided Realms, and the others from the Fey and Dragon systems, then I need to shore up my own connections to them. At least with the Hell System, I had an actual class.”

She seemed to accept my answer for now. “Just so you know we really do need to find time for training. All those things I mentioned are important. You have that temporal mana crystal and an affinity for it. That isn’t something you can pass up. You’ve see how powerful it makes Lana.”

I nodded. “I’m a bit worried that Unmoored in Time will mess with it, but I agree it’s worth exploring and you’re right about my abilities and spells. For the longest time they were ahead of my class core, even to the point that it strained my soul at times. But now my class core is legendary tier and the majority of my spells are Epic or Rare tier with only three legendary- Long Range Teleport, Stable Portal, and Terran Rail Gun. Those all started at that tier.

“My abilities are a bit better off. I have 12 abilities if you don’t count the Forerunner abilities and 5 of those are epic, 6 are legendary tier with the final one being ascendant.”

“The fact that you have an ascendant tier ability is…,” Selena’s voice faded off as she shook her head, “but as impressive as that is, you need to get them all to legendary and if we are following your regular pattern at least a couple more need to reach ascendant.”

“Okay, I agree that we need to spend some time training. That’s a given, but what we need to be talking about is what you think about helping Tad.”

Samvek and Selena exchanged a look before she said, “We’re following you. That isn’t just for show. Yes, we’ll train you, but let’s not kid ourselves, you are the one in front. You’re the one who gets stuff done. And that’s saying a lot considering who we are, but neither of us is a Forerunner. I think you called it MC energy before.”

I chuckled. “Right, but maybe you have an opinion about whether we should agree to fight their enemies with them or if we should focus on the power-level training approach or the crafting first.”

“If you fight them then we’re with you, as for the others, I think it’s a mistake to make it one or the other. If they really can make a dungeon, then we should work on seeing if Tad can awaken his other people and then work on getting levels with them. To my mind that should come first. Golems sound useful and I know that it’s something you’ve wanted to work on for a while, but even my uncle always realized that people are our best resources. We need to put the focus there.”

I glanced and Samvek and he only nodded in agreement. “Last thing we should talk about is what you were up to this morning. You said you were talking with Fara?”

“Just girl talk… sorry, I kinda wanted to say that after watching all those movies. We were feeling each other out. She is as committed to Tad as I am to you but it’s not romantic. She thinks of him as a younger brother and is panicked that she isn’t strong enough to help him. We got along as well as too people from different universes who are inherently distrustful ever could. I’d like to see her have the strength to protect Tad or at least to watch his back. I get how she was feeling.”

Her message came through. “Okay, so dungeon first, then we try to see if we can replicate the awakening.”

Samvek spoke then. “About that, they said that it takes ascendant energy, but the amount of power that was channeled through Tad didn’t seem like it was a match for any of the ascendants I’ve dealt with. It was a lot and would stretch any of us to our capacity and maybe beyond, but together we should be able to match that.”

Selena said, “Unless there’s something unique about the energy required…”

I cut her off without meaning to, the words just came out before I could stop them. “All energy is the same, just in different flavors or at different frequencies if you will.”

“That’s not exactly what I was taught, but I’m curious to see if you can prove it.” The expression on her face had a strange emotional intensity that I wasn’t sure exactly how to read.

“No time like the present, I guess.”