Lord S’fashkchlil took a deep, raspy breath as he laid in his bed, stewing in his misery. It was all that depths-shunned Outsider’s fault.
Soralash had found the human, half-dead and collapsed on the side of the Highroad, and brought him in along with her normal suite of Surface goods and news. From there, the Outsider- a true Outsider, or so he had thought- had been brought before him, but spoke no tongue he knew, and so was passed along to Rashin, with the idea they might be able ...
2021-05-07 15:07:21 +0000 UTC
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Hey all! Just a reminder that this will be the last chapter for a week, as I am in the depths of my last-ever Finals Week and will be graduating next Saturday. In other words, I'm not going to have much time to write.
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Congratulations! For attempting to peel back the intricacies of the System, you have unlocked the System Scholar Path!
Level Up!
Flexibility Level 15→16
Walking Level 28...
2021-05-06 16:08:47 +0000 UTC
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As a reminder to everyone, Chapter 35 will be the last chapter put out before my week-long break, so then future weeks can be nicely split and it's easier for me to remember who's supposed to get what chapter each day.
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“Just for the record,” Edwin hedged, “I’m not going to just do everything you suggest. I know you think that more skills is better, but I’ve had luck evolving my skills so far and I kind of want to keep doing that.”
“Do you insi...
2021-05-05 15:59:01 +0000 UTC
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In the end, it took about an hour for Lefi to successfully bungle his way through enough of the underground corridors to find where his gear had been kept. One he had found the pile of his belongings, though, it still took another ten minutes for him to actually gear up properly, putting on a seemingly endless array of pouches and accessories. There were even two magical objects that Edwin spotted among the pile, one a short sword whose hilt held a glowing ruby and the other a seemin...
2021-05-04 15:59:01 +0000 UTC
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Just a reminder that my break will start this Friday. I had a typo on the poll because I apparently can't add, but my graduation week is next week, so there will be a little over a week between the release of chapters 35 and 36.
Also, because it's finals, chapters may be a little on the shorter side this week, depending on how much time I'm able to devote to this.
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The interior of the… what was the right word? It was clearly a multifunctional complex, but Tara ha...
2021-05-03 16:00:08 +0000 UTC
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Vinstead didn’t look much like a proper fantasy city, in Edwin’s clearly expert opinion. While they were waiting to enter the gates, he took the chance to look around at the nearby buildings. They seemed mostly uniform in architectural style, with four posts driven into the ground serving as the corners of the mostly single-floor buildings, with the walls made of cobblestones stacked so closely together there wasn’t even room for mortar between them. The roofs were mostly either wooden ...
2021-04-30 05:42:45 +0000 UTC
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Tara rose, her full suit of armor materializing around her. It took longer than dematerializing the armor and wasn’t as fast as the silver walls had been in her fight against the bandits, but it was unmistakably the same Skill. Actually, Edwin could test that! He quickly targeted the rapidly-forming armor with an Infused Almanac, Armor conjured by a skill of some sort, can be used for magical wall formation too. Identifying the armor once it had finished appearing gave the same res...
2021-04-29 16:01:02 +0000 UTC
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At her declaration, Edwin immediately started panicking. He just escaped captivity, he didn’t want to go back into any other kind of forced working situation! No. He would run into the woods and take his chances in the wilds before he let that happen to him again. Even still, he did not want to be on any kind of Empire watchlist, no thank you! Sensing his distress, Tara immediately made a placating motion with her hands- some things transcended planets, it seemed.
“Calm yourself. I ...
2021-04-28 16:01:02 +0000 UTC
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So, due to a frankly overwhelming number of responses on RoyalRoad that want me to take Saturday/Sunday off, despite the surprising popularity of Wednesday/Friday here, I will indeed be taking weekends off in the future.
The purpose of this poll, however, is to determine how you want me to deal with a week off I will need to take in the near future. As I am a Senior, about to graduate college, I will simply not be able to write the week of the 10th-14th of May, tw...
2021-04-28 05:09:58 +0000 UTC
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As soon as the fight was over, Edwin started scrambling down from the top of the wagon. It had only been a minute or two at most, Aerfa would probably still be alive and he might even be able to save her if he acted quickly… However, as soon as he hit the ground, the knight spun around, bloody blade still in hand, pointing it at him. The knight- he was close enough now to see he was a Silver Blade- started to say something, but Edwin hastily raised his hands to show he was unarmed and blurt...
2021-04-27 16:01:03 +0000 UTC
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The next two days passed in essentially the same way as the first day. Edwin kept being invited/sent to the front carriage, where Forala would spend the next eight to ten-ish hours talking at him, then it would be dinnertime, with him igniting the fire, followed by bed. Not once did anyone other than Forala and Aerfa speak to him or address him in the slightest, which was honestly fine by him. Fewer people, fewer problems so far as he cared. He didn’t need anyone else. He was an introvert, ...
2021-04-26 16:01:03 +0000 UTC
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Edwin woke to a beam of sunlight worming its way through a miniscule gap between two boards on the side of the wagon and directly onto his closed eyelids. He grumbled and tried to fall back to sleep at first, but the damage had already been done and he was, if not wide awake, awake enough.
As he sat up, Edwin rubbed the sleep from his eyes with a yawn, casting his gaze around to regain his bearings. It was interesting how, even with over twenty levels in Sleeping, there was still time e...
2021-04-25 20:53:43 +0000 UTC
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Edwin found himself milling around awkwardly as the caravan crew started loading up frankly ludicrous amounts of lumber into the wagon train (turns out the covered wagons also had spatial shenanigans going on), feeding stack after stack of milled logs into vehicles which looked shorter than the logs being fed inside, but that was magic for you. It looked really strange, and all he really could do was gawk until Aerfa dropped by to show Edwin where to go, namely the second in the train, appare...
2021-04-25 16:30:29 +0000 UTC
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Edwin jolted awake as the shouting penetrated his unconscious state, yanking him to wakefulness. At first, he panicked, thinking he was about to be attacked or shipped back to Clan Blackstone, but as the initial scare faded and his rational mind asserted itself, he realized it sounded more like celebration than an attack or anything negative. It didn’t rule out the dwarves coming through, though, so he stayed wary as he got up, preemptively wincing as he put weight on his left arm, then rel...
2021-04-24 16:46:37 +0000 UTC
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It took Edwin nearly a week, but he eventually managed to limp his way out of the forest. It hadn’t been easy, not by any stretch of the imagination, but he had done it. Every day, he’d walk as far as he could manage, eat enough food to keep himself going, find a spot to bunker down for the night, clean his bandages and repeat. Whenever he needed water, he’d find a stream to fill his canteen and boil it with either Firestarting or a heating stone, and he had found enough sources that he...
2021-04-24 16:01:10 +0000 UTC
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Level Up!
Seeing Level 15→16
Flexibility Level 11→15
Athletics Level 23→25
Visualization Level 23→24
Alchemy Level 41→43
Mana Infusion Level 53→55
Firestarting Level 23→27
Bomb Throwing Level 1→9
Walking Level 20→21
Survival Level 12→14
2021-04-24 02:02:19 +0000 UTC
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It had seemed like such a good idea at the time. He needed to get away, really fast, from the Citadel, before any sort of pursuit could assemble and apprehend him. All he had left of his armory was a single capsule of slipstone, and since he had a long, constant-incline path ahead of him, the solution seemed obvious. He’d just coat the outside of his lab coat with slipstone and use it for a sled. It was the perfect way to get away from the dwarves really quickly!
Well.
He certai...
2021-04-23 19:19:49 +0000 UTC
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Time seemed to freeze as Edwin’s bag of high explosives clattered to the ground. He spared a panicked glance at the axe-wielding dwarf, who looked at him uncomprehendingly. Freed of some thirty pounds of ammunition, he dove away from the bag as fast as he could.
A moment of clarity made him twist in midair as to not land on his other bag of ammunition. Mostly empty it may be, but having them break open directly against his stomach would not be survivable. Once he was...
2021-04-23 15:41:58 +0000 UTC
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Today was the day.
Edwin had a hard time falling asleep, even when activating his skill, but he managed it eventually, and he woke up well-rested. He didn’t have much of an appetite, but made sure to eat as much breakfast as possible to keep his energy up anyway. He’d taken a bath, shaved, and changed into clean clothes the night before, so he would start this trek into the wilderness off fresh. His boots, as comfortable as ever, were laced up tightly. His backpack was filled to the...
2021-04-22 15:36:54 +0000 UTC
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Hi all!
As probably comes as a surprise to absolutely nobody, I can't quite pull off 7 chapters/week. It just doesn't give me any room for days where I just can't quite get a chapter written, to say nothing of having actual breathing room. That means that I've slowly been eating into my buffer a little bit at a time, to say nothing of the constant need to write another chapter has been having on my creativity. I'm not burning out, I plan to keep writing this story for a long time,...
2021-04-22 03:38:48 +0000 UTC
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It took Edwin three days of throwing rocks at the wall whenever he could and five levels in the skill before Edwin’s complete lack of talent was offset by whatever bonus he was receiving from Throwing Weapons and he was able to start juggling. Once he did so, he swiftly confirmed his suspicion that constantly keeping three balls in the air did help him level his Throwing Weapons skill, and the near-constant use of his skill (juggling was fun when you could actually do it!) meant it...
2021-04-21 16:48:32 +0000 UTC
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Edwin fumed in his cell, peeved about his ‘meeting.’ He wasn’t a miracle-worker, he didn’t even know what Blackstone was made of! It was presumably some variant of concrete, but that was still a pretty big assumption. For all he knew, it was magically transmuted water or something. Or cooled magma. It did look vaguely igneous in nature, but Edwin didn’t even know how to begin determining that sort of thing. Actually, it being volcanic in some form would make a lot ...
2021-04-21 02:18:19 +0000 UTC
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Due to the incredible amounts of heat the Infused plaster powder (he needed a better name for his Infused materials) generated during its creation, Edwin wasn’t able to physically get close enough to the reaction to feel where the mana Infused in it went. He knew that it was full of mana before the reaction, and was drastically reduced afterwards. Unless it was somehow absorbed by the powder (could something magical turn into something nonmagical?), that meant it had to be released in the p...
2021-04-20 15:35:09 +0000 UTC
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Edwin was laying on his bed, playing with his latest notification. Sleeping wasn’t his highest-level skill by any measure, but it did have a fairly steady growth, which was appreciated. Maybe it would start to taper off in time, but for the time being, a level every time he slept was so satisfying. Though he had no real way to measure the passage of time, he suspected he was sleeping for around eight hours but getting rest equivalent to ten or twelve. He hadn’t felt this well-res...
2021-04-19 23:11:41 +0000 UTC
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Edwin paced restlessly in his new room. It may not look much like a prison cell, but that was apparently what it was, as the notification he was currently upset with testified.
Congratulations! For being forced into a non-paid working arrangement, you have unlocked the Slave path!
He knew for a fact he was never filling out that path. Still, looking at it was just making him mad, so he dismissed the message and took another look around his cell. Overall, ...
2021-04-19 20:29:03 +0000 UTC
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Edwin and Rashin rambled on for a few more hours, mostly about their respective worlds. Rashin, for his part, seemed quite entranced at the sorts of materials Earth had on hand, especially various types of steel and concrete. He was really, really obsessed with concrete for whatever reason, and kept steering the conversation back to it. Edwin partially understood, but they clearly had something similar enough or Skills were capable of managing a lot of the benefits of the stuff, if t...
2021-04-19 05:12:30 +0000 UTC
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“You speak English?” Edwin blurted out, followed promptly by him choking over his own words and descending into a coughing fit. Smallbeard- Thrandin?- said something in Dwarven, and the librarian stroked the tip of his silver beard.
“Lost stranger, native language of… English, you said?” the last part was directed at Edwin, who managed to pause his coughing long enough to nod.
“Can I get some water?” he croaked out, “Sorry, I haven’t talked much lately.”
...
2021-04-19 04:20:49 +0000 UTC
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Edwin stared. It was such a radical departure from what he had seen the past few days, he had to rub his eyes and check again to ensure he wasn’t hallucinating. Then, he carefully inched his foot onto the... road, hoping it wasn’t trapped or some sort of illusion or harmful in some other crazy way. When he did not, in fact, have his foot immediately bitten off, he stepped out onto the surface fully and nearly collapsed as a wave of comfort and warmth washed over him, accompanied by the bu...
2021-04-19 03:31:50 +0000 UTC
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The storm was still blowing fiercely outside when Edwin came to. He was honestly surprisingly warm for being in the middle of a blizzard, his body heat having been almost entirely trapped inside the tiny space alongside him. It was still quite cold, though, and touching the stone walls of his shelter revealed why, as they sapped away any lingering heat from his already chilled fingertips instantly.
Also, it seemed that his hole was far deeper than he had thought last night. Only two of ...
2021-04-19 03:31:11 +0000 UTC
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Edwin woke up shivering. At some point overnight, it seemed that the cloud cover had returned and, combined with his higher elevation, what would have been a light drizzle was instead a dusting of snow. As he yawned himself awake, he watched his breath steam in the frigid air, being caught by faint eddies and carried away. He blew on his hands, rubbing them together in an effort to restore feeling to his fingers. After briefly trying and failing to breathe fire- because why wouldn’t
2021-04-19 03:29:39 +0000 UTC
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