Blake glanced at his collection of weapons. The addition of stone had made his weapons truly dangerous. Previously his wooden tools had only been slightly better than wooden clubs, he had been unable to sharpen them to any useful degree.

  With stone, he could now make blades with properly sharpened edges. The edges didn’t hold well and of course, metal would be better but with his superhuman strength behind them, they could break skin with ease. He had tested this on his own body as part of his physical resiliency training.

  Variations of knives and spears were his primary tools of choice but he also made some attempts at swords and one strange weapon he called stone claws. The stone claws were not practical or of much use but it had been a fun experiment.

  To make the stone claws, Blake had started by making a wristband in a similar manner as he had done to make the leather belt. Once he had done that he had glued on blades of stone to align between his knuckles. Each blade was a ‘claw’ that could in theory be used to cut something.

  The claws were too loose to damage anything without being pressed back and even if they were Blake couldn’t make them too sharp or risk cutting himself. It was still an enjoyable few days of experimenting.

  The swords were impractical for a completely different reason. They were too heavy. For the knives and spears the stone blades were at most the size of his hand but for the swords they were multiple feet long. His supernatural strength was enough to swing them about but he couldn’t move them with any finesse making them nothing more than a vanity weapon.

  Despite the clear downsides he had made more than ten of them of different shapes and sizes. Stone swords might not work well with his current strength but he was getting stronger by the day, or every few days at this point with the exercise cooldown. Even if his physical strength was to stop progressing there would come a time when he had access to metal and could make proper swords.

  The skills gained from making a variety of swords would only reinforce his swordsmanship for the future. With that in mind, he had made some swords made of wood as well using a stone knife to properly carve them out. Not just swords either but all his weapons and tools had gotten improved wooden versions.

  Blake might not have planned to use wooden spears anymore but by refining his existing designs with a proper knife to carve them he was able to upgrade his spear skills further with only a little more work.

  Adding stone blades to his weapons was not the end of his upgrades, however. Whenever he got a new rabbicorn corpse Blake had been burning whatever he couldn’t use in his fire to help clean up the campsite. Everything was able to be burned to ash, including the bones, with one exception, the horns.

  For whatever reason the horns had never burned in the fire and when removed from the pit the next day, Blake found that the horns were untarnished. The tips were still sharp enough to pierce his skin with ease despite his resilience training. It was the perfect material for a spearhead.

  The horns were a foot long making them unsuitable for a knife and too short for a sword. A spear on the other hand was perfect since he could adjust the total height of the spear by just changing the handle length.

  Blake went through many of his river stones sharpening the edges so that it could be used for slashing as much as stabbing but it had been worth it. The horns were capable of holding a much sharper edge for far longer than stone could. It had taken a week to make one spear from a horn so he had only made two but the benefits from his Talent were immense.

  With the one creation, Blake’s skill with the spear had more than doubled. This was after it had already doubled following the creation of his first stone spear. It was hard to get an exact reading on how skilled he was at the spear without other spearman to compare himself to but Blake estimated that he was now on the level of someone who had been practicing under the tutelage of a master for 6 to 12 months.

  The increase was so big that Blake was tempted to try and make a knife out of one of the horns but that would require breaking a horn in half which he imagined to be a time-consuming process to get right. On top of the time it would take to sharpen the edges into a proper blade, he didn’t believe he would have time before he left on his expedition.

  One thing that the jump in his spearmanship had shown Blake was that despite constant effort on his part to synchronize his mind with his body by running his obstacle course it was not enough. His body had long surpassed normal limits but he wasn’t using anywhere near its full capacity. The only time he brought his strength to bare was when crafting with stone tools. Smacking stones together was an easy way to use his full strength.

  Meanwhile his movements through the obstacle course had become rote with little improvement. He was in no danger of tripping over himself but he wasn’t speeding up to the degree he thought he should be. His knowledge of spearmanship had also shown him that his combat movement was lacking.

  Blake’s Talent taught him how to stab and slash with his spear but it also informed him that there was more to fighting than just how well you could apply your weapon to your enemy’s face. He had to be able to move while staying aware of his surroundings and his opponent’s movements.

  He wasn’t completely helpless when it came to combat movement. A good attack and/or block with the spear required a strong stance but moving around mid-battle to get in an attack was completely missing from his knowledge base. Blake only knew that he did need to learn it to maximize the effect of his spearmanship.

  The obstacle course helped to a degree. It taught him parkour and constant use let him stay consistent with his movements but until he could take advantage of all his strength and speed in every movement combat would be him making perfect attacks followed by minutes of frantic movement trying to get into position for another attack.

  To advance his movement training Blake decided to go full Indiana Jones and add traps to his obstacle course. One of his first traps was swinging blades. Twisting twine together to make rope, Blake attached stone blades to the end of these ropes. The ropes were then tied to tree branches above and between his obstacles so that the blades could swing back and forth.

  The blade pendulums could not maintain their momentum for too long so he set up a board that he had to pull on as he passed that would release the ropes and start them swinging. The swinging blades added an element of randomness to the course forcing Blake to pay attention to his actions.

  This one trap saw Blake begin to noticeably improve again. Part of this was the skill boost from his Talent. This was the first creation he had made that moved on its own which gave him a new set of information he had not had before on kinematics. He had already known intellectually how kinematics worked from high school science but the Talent made that knowledge much more ingrained.

  While the knowledge of kinematics was mostly incomplete since the pendulums were so simple it did make Blake better at predicting movement. On top of that was the skill bonus from the creation. He had noticed that while tools and weapons provided skills on how to use them, training materials gave a boost to the skills they were meant to develop.

  He still got information on how to utilize training materials but since there was so little to do with them besides train that component was mostly inconsequential. The skill that the swinging blades provided Blake was increased observation.

  This was the first skill he had gotten that did not come with any muscle memory. Instead, Blake found it easier to take notice of his surroundings and pick out small details. As a first creation and a simple one at that, the skill did not improve things much but there was one unexpected benefit.

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  The increased observation applied to more than his physical senses. After finishing the swinging knives Blake found it easier to locate the mental barrier while meditating. This helped convince him that he wasn’t hallucinating, there was something going on there that he needed to understand better.

  It was this improvement that actually led him to recategorize the sensation from a barrier to a chain. Hoping to better understand the phenomena Blake tried to come up with other crafts that might improve his skill at observation.

  One attempt had been a bow and arrow. It turned out that twine was not a flexible material and was a truly useless bowstring. The wooden part of the bow at least looked nice. In the same vein, Blake made javelins.

  The javelins were the same as the spear except without the intent to slash. His best javelin was actually an unmodified rabbicorn horn attached to a wooden handle. Making javelins did not provide an immediate benefit but upgrading the training course to accommodate them did.

  The first addition was more swinging ropes except this time they did not cross the course. Instead, they ran parallel to the course and had small wooden targets attached. Along the edge of some of the platforms, Blake had stuck javelins into the ground that he had to grab and throw at the targets.

  It was a difficult exercise that saw him quickly having to improve his aim. The new addition to his course improved his observation skills but not as much as the swinging ropes did at first.

  The skills required to successfully hit the targets might be different from dodging knives but Blake’s Talent was first and foremost a crafting Talent. Since the principles involved in the crafting process were so similar there was little improvement. It was more the pendulum’s relation to the training course being different that saw no improvement at all.

  Wanting to push his observation skills further Blake added another twist to the course. Instead of sticking the javelins in the ground to grab as he ran by he attached them to even more ropes.

  The javelins came swinging in and he had to grab them from the air before tossing them at the targets. He did this all while moving. There was a much bigger jump in his observation skills after this addon.

  In theory, the basis of the craft was the same as his previous two obstacles. It was just another pendulum with something on the end. In practice designing the swinging javelins was much harder. The placement was much more important when he had to be able to track the weapons and grab them from the air.

  If Blake placed the javelins in the wrong place it could make it impossible to maintain a steady flow through the course. The training course was first and foremost for improving his ability to move so adding an obstacle that made him stop defeated the purpose.

  It took multiple tries before Blake got the javelins placed just right so he could grab them while moving and didn’t have to wait for them to be within arms reach. The many different factors that went into creating the obstacle provided Blake with the insight his Talent needed to boost his observation skills much further.

  It was following this upgrade that Blake’s understanding of the mental sensation evolved to how he saw it now. It was not one chain but many. The specifics of each chain still eluded him but it was becoming clearer by the day.

  He had even noticed that the warmth of supernatural growth was improving him in some way while he meditated. It was confusing to Blake as unlike all the other growth he experienced the warmth was not applied to his body or mind. Something else was being improved but he didn’t know what, just that the warmth was being applied somewhere that was still intimately him.

  Following his upgrade to the training course Blake’s biggest problem was integrating his various skills together into a cohesive combat style. He had seen experts fighting before, combat was a popular elective in modern schools, but he didn’t understand everything that went into it.

  Connecting movement with spearmanship with observation wasn’t easy. Blake needed either consistent combat to help force everything together or a teacher who could show him the way. His Talent was of no help with this since he didn’t have a way to create training equipment for it.

  A training dummy made to help spearmanship helped Blake a little but the information he learned was mostly how he had discovered he needed to get better at movement and observation in the first place. Blake really did not want to learn how to fight rabbicorns on the fly but it was looking like that was the only option.

  While waiting to reach the tipping point in his physical training Blake continued to practice his combat. Even if he couldn’t form a cohesive combat style any improvement was better than none. He also started working on a knife using a rabbicorn horn.

  Snapping it in half in a way that didn’t render it useless was just as difficult as he had predicted. His first attempt was just to do exactly that, snap it in half. He lay it between two boulders so that the middle was hanging over nothing. He had then stomped on it to break it in half.

  The whole thing had become a jagged mess that was of no use to Blake. Now he was taking it slow and carving it down the middle using one of his river stones the same way he shaped his stone tools. He just repeatedly hammered down, chipping away at it.

  Finally, after finishing his exercise routine one morning, he felt a shift. He didn’t immediately recognize what had happened since he wasn’t meditating. Blake had never felt the chains without focused meditation before so the fact he could sense anything told him whatever had happened was important.

  He immediately fell to the ground and searched for the chains to identify what happened. At first, nothing seemed different. The chains looked the same to Blake. He couldn’t exactly see them but the feedback he received from them had begun to take on a clearer mental image as time had passed.

  Over half a day of intense focus passed before Blake picked out the difference. One of the chains had changed. Now instead of just pulling him back, it was pushing in equal measure. It wasn’t enough for Blake to escape the chains hold like he had expected but it did loosen the hold they had over him enough for him to sense what they were holding him back from.

  The chains were preventing Blake from ascending. The specifics eluded him but Blake could clearly sense that if he were to break free of the chains he could ascend to the next realm. That threw everything he understood about ascending into question.

  Blake had not known how to ascend but his impression had been that it was a matter of getting to a certain place or maybe defeating a certain monster that was the key to ascending. That had been part of his motivation to go on an expedition in the first place. He was going in search of a way to ascend.

  Ascension was supposed to be what improved your Strength and any training done to improve yourself in a specific tier was just for that tier. The only benefit that could be carried between tiers was if training allowed you to improve your Talent on ascension.

  The idea that training was the way to ascend was alien to Blake. Why wouldn’t they tell students this before reaching the spirit realm? Surely understanding how to train quickly and effectively could only be helpful. Wasn’t their whole thing that everyone needed to reach tier 3?

  Blake couldn’t help but wonder if this was an unknown phenomenon and there were other, easier, ways to ascend. Maybe it was known but was ignored in favor of methods more effective for large groups of people?

  That made sense to him. If there was another way that was quicker and easier but required a group of people it made sense that it was prioritized over the slower method that required personal dedication to achieve. Had he not been forced into it by his circumstances Blake doubted he would ever have trained to the extent he had.

  This method of ascension would also be difficult to discover for the vast majority of people. Not only did it require training that was considered useless to most people but it also required extensive daily meditation. Calling it daily meditation was almost an understatement.

  Blake spent hours each day focused solely on meditating but the nature of his Talent and the long-term isolation led him to be in a state of pseudo-meditation most of the day. It was easier to let time pass him by without paying attention than to feel the passing of each passing second when every day was more of the same.

  There was something else that Blake had almost missed being so focused on the implications of this method of ascension. He had clearly reached a tipping point on one of the chains. The others did not provide the same push forward that this one did.

  Blake had already theorized that the supernatural improvement of the spirit realm could be broken up into distinct categories. He had seen this in the distinct cooldown periods for different kinds of improvement.

  The chain that was now pushing him forward must represent his physical Strength. Blake tried to feel out what the other chains represented.

  Despite his efforts, he couldn’t get a good sense of what they were. Blake couldn’t even tell how many chains there were. What feedback he did get helped him sort the chains into three groups. The first group was the physical. This was the group where the Strength chain lay.

  Blake was mostly confident that both physical resilience and immune system chains also lay in this grouping. Getting feedback from this was a strange sensation. It was more similar to an emotional response than anything concrete.

  The next group Blake would categorize as mental. It brought to mind memories of the improvements triggered by his Talent. At least the ones centered around his brain. Some of his meditation improvements lay with this group as well but most of the warmth for meditation growth was related to the third group.

  The third group was weird. Blake wasn’t sure what to call it but it was definitely tied to the non-physical improvements of meditation. It wasn’t tied to anywhere he could clearly sense he just knew it was there. This grouping was somehow related to that unknown part of him.

  With his breakthrough complete Blake now had a decision to make. Did he still go on his expedition or did he keep training until he could advance?

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