With my Blessing of [Greater Elder Dragon Emperor], ostensibly a more advanced form of [Dragoon], abundant choices remained open to for spending my Experience Points. All my Skills were clustered together in individual webs, which is to say, thematically related groupings, that, provided I could daisy-chain one to the next, allowed to acquire all manner of tools needed to make my way through life. So were revealed, even if their descriptions were vague. Others remained visible in how they connected, but I could not tell for certain what they were or did. The rest remained in a fog on the outskirts of the web, only becoming visible as I drew close with unlocked Skills. Therein remained the fear that I would dance all around so incredibly powerful ability, never knowing it existed because I never scouted in its direction by purchasing cheap Skills.
However, no concrete numbers existed to guide . If my Experience Points were a bucket of water, then Skills were cups of various sizes. I could only guess how much water I had used from the bucket and how many cups I could fill before my reserves ran dry. Perhaps such vexing conditions were ant to help balance the scales with the humanoids who couldn't choose their Skills. Certainly, they could behave in a manner that was likely to unlock the desired Skills, but it was still a roll of the dice for them.
My Skills were divided into different webs, as I had covered earlier. Before eating the Count's heart, I had [Age], [Deeds], [Hoard], [Survival], [Social], and [Harvesting]. A great multitude of notifications jockeyed for my attention, each outlining my various accomplishnts as of late. That little perk ca as a result of a Skill, [Secretary of the Skill Webs], which only existed to help highlight the changes of my Skill webs. Otherwise, I would have to look it over thoroughly and compare it to what I rembered, which certainly had beco too cumberso a challenge to manage on my own. Just the opportunity cost of sitting around trying to see what had changed cost more in unearned Experience Points than what it had cost to purchase, so I don't regret purchasing it, but I still think it was bullshit that I had to in the first place.
However, I witnessed [Flight Managent] break off from [Age]. This included skills to deal with Traits and their acquisition, eggs, making baby dragons, managing kobolds, and so logistical and housekeeping Skills to keep my children in line. Hold on a minute, what were egg Skills doing here? I'm a boy dragon, not a girl, so sothing was fishy. [Basic Egg Creation] allowed to create eggs, so clearly I remained ignorant of sothing.
"Um, Nanu."
"Yes, my Emperor," she replied as she remained happily perched in my lap.
"I am a man, yet I can create eggs. Is that… normal?"
She laughed a little, not to mock , but at the innocence of it all. "Most certainly, my Emperor," she answered with mirth still gripping her words. "Gender is a social construct, but as to your sex as male or female, that is also a construct as a dragon and subject to your whims as you age. I myself was male in my 300's. It was fun for a while, but I prefer to stay female. In your draconic form, you may notice you don't have the important bits to make such a distinction. Fear not, for you do not lay eggs, you just sort of… teleport them into existence next to you when they are ready. Eggs are your most precious resource, for you can only create them so fast, and everything from the smallest of whelps to the biggest of Kings requires an egg, even if they are Dragon Consorts.
"You will want a hearty amount of egg Skills, as well as ones to make your children age faster and learn quicker. Trait collection is also a priority, perhaps more so than the Skills you will need to build your road. Getting your flight up and running quickly cannot be stressed enough, for they will be your strongest and most loyal allies in the years to co."
Feeling reassured that I was not so freak of nature, I used my [Skill Planner] to earmark those kinds of Skills. It would let keep track of what Skills I wanted and how their costs compared to my budget without actually taking them on the spot. Many were the Skills that I wanted, but even with the bounty of Experience Points I had earned, not everything could be acquired.
Skills tend to be progressive in nature, where a new Skill replaces an old, doing the sa job but better. In a sense, if soone makes a big sword, you make armor to block it. When they make an even bigger sword, you make even better armor to block it. As such, many Skills offered specialization to accomplish specific tasks or counter specific Abilities used by an adversary. For instance, I had many Skills tagged with Stealth, aning they all enhanced my ability to be sneaky. Typically, Skills tagged with Detection were ant to counter Stealth, and since Detection dealt specifically with countering Stealth, for equivalent expenditures of Experience Points, they were more powerful in scale and scope than Stealth. Ergo, if you want to be really good at sothing, you need to go all in, for soone who dabbles in countering it will still beat you if you do not specialize.
Things like Stealth and Detection are usually referred to as disciplines, and they were not to be confused with schools of magic, such as Fire or Nature, for Stealth was 'what' you wanted to do and Fire was 'how' you wanted to do it, generally speaking. With Light, I could bend physical light around , and while not perfect, I would be practically invisible if motionless and viewed at a distance. With Nature, my skin could change its color pattern, much like chaleons are said to do, to blend in with my background. Both operated under different principles but accomplished the sa goal.
Skills for Stealth and Detection both made the shortlist, as well as Skills for Observation. Not to be confused with Detection, Observation Skills dealt with things like my [Observers] and [Overseers]. Spectrums of light, thermal radiation, gravity, displacent of air, and the like were all ways to spot soone, so having Skills to notice the fine details of those things usually fell under Detection, whereas being able to view places remotely or see things far away as if they were up close tended to fall under Observation. It may seem like a distinction without difference, but so Skills specifically call out others with the proper disciplines or schools on them. Things do get wonky though when you start using both at the sa ti, but there are Skills even for that.
With my safety mostly being trusted to Nanu, I would not need to enhance my Skills for combat too much. I mostly picked up passive Skills that didn't require any activation or thinking, ones that would make tougher, stronger, faster, and all that jazz. If I could endure a beating, possess the speed and stamina to run away from a threat, and just generally be slippery enough that a foe could not catch , then I could buy enough ti for help to show up. It may be seen as cowardly, but my pride cos more from results than the techniques I use to achieve them.
Most of my Combat Skills ca from [Age] and [Survival]. I looked for the cheapest ones, but nothing too flashy jumped out at . Still, about 15 percent of my Experience Points went into shoring up my weaknesses. [Deeds] could not be purchased at all, and while I had a few new ones from killing dragons and eating one's heart, they mostly granted small advantages in dealing with dragons, whether it be in detection, diplomacy, or combat. [Hoard] offered a good number of Skills, but I didn't qualify for many of them. After looking them over, it seems I would need to beco a collector of things other than coins if I wanted to advance much. I made a note to give it a try. Perhaps if I collected enough cool cups and mugs, I could get sothing for that.
[Survival], [Social], and [Harvesting] were where the lion's share of my Experience Points would be spent. Most of my Skills related to Enchanting, Illusions, Constructs, and Crafting were still stuck in [Survival]. If only I had known what the world wanted from to make those disciplines create their own webs, I would have focused on knocking those out by that point. Each would be needed to keep up with demand for all the specialty widgets I would require in building my roads. Or put another way, [Survival] offered the basic version of those Skills, but the more advanced ones would need to co from their specialized Skill webs.
Quartz is by far the most common crystal around, and fortunately, it is well suited to the types of runes and enchantnts I need to maintain roads. Like, you wouldn't use it in a necklace to block an incoming fireball, but it does wonders for preventing a harsh rainfall from flooding the ground under your roads. Hand-in-hand with quartz cos obsidian. Made of practically the sa stuff, obsidian would be my end-all-be-all building material if I had my way. However, heating up rock, separating out the bits you don't want, and cooling it back down just right to make it, is challenging, expensive on mana, and ti-consuming. And so, for both of these, I aid for the proverbial holy-grail in my Skill web: [Basic Thermal Bottle].
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[Basic Obisidicrete Production] and [Basic Obsidisteel Production] both were prerequisites that allowed to create obsidicrete and obsidisteel respectively. While I had only read rumors about it in obscure dwarven texts, they remained the desired materials to make almost anything for a building or road. Incredibly durable, easy to enchant for construction purposes, self-healing from wear and tear, able to be colored or textured in just about any way one wants, and easy to shape into any form, they beat out any material one could hope for. Both were also mostly empty space, structured more like a lattice or scaffolding, each with proprietary special substances mixed within (that I won't share even with you, my readers), they made for surprisingly light material. Give enough mana and ti, and I could make a space elevator out of them. I had spent hours fiddling around trying to figure out how to create them, and while I never succeeded, I must have gotten close enough that these Skills unlocked for .
Each Skill was prohibitively expensive, and combined with [Basic Thermal Bottle], a full third of my Skill points were already gone. The [Basic Thermal Bottle] provided the key to all of it. First, materials inside of it levitated into the air. Secondly, thermal energy could not escape, so if one kept pumping heat into it, anything would lt into liquid, turn to gas, or even plasma if you let it. As such, filtering out different materials and sucking the thermal energy out of them as it leaves the bottle in such a way that it maintains whatever structure you want would be the new way of purifying and building my materials. It could not turn lead into gold, but it could turn ore into slag, lead, and gold if that was what comprised the ore. Granted, so chemical reactions are endothermic or exothermic, but a few puffs of fire from my breath attack could provide extra thermal energy when needed. I could put in rock and pull out rock, gravel, sand, glass, or the like as required. It lacked the finesse to make works of art, but it could make suitable blocks, which then could be shaped with other Skills.
I had wanted these Skills for a while now, but I had lacked the Experience Points to purchase them. These made the mandatory list, along with most of my new and admittedly limited in variety [Flight Managent] Skills. Most of the rest of my Skills went towards my dinsional storage options, all manner of Skills in [Harvest], and a few new skills to lead and manage perhaps thousands of people in a large-scale project. The na of the ga was being able to get or do more faster and more efficiently. It costs mana to put things into and to pull things out of non-dinsional storage, so getting those costs down would be a huge boon to how much I could do in a day. Simply put, my physical stamina could easily outpace my mana regeneration if I worked all day, so squeezing out every last drop of efficiency would help to close that gap. Likewise, simply generating more mana and having a larger mana pool would help.
With Skills being earmarked left, right, and center, I did go over budget. Now ca the ti for a thinking cap and math to figure out how to balance things. Because of my growth spurt in [Age], complints of the Count having a big heart, I could maintain my draconic form for an 18 hour stint, with another 6 hours in a day if I were willing to spend mana on it. That ant I could technically be a dragon every hour of the day. Sleep also beca sothing I would only need two hours of every three days, so I could mostly work around the clock, in one capacity or another, if I needed to.
However, considering this would be a marathon and not a sprint, I would need to schedule ti for leadership, leisure, and planning the route. Hopefully, I would not need to plan my schedule to such a degree that even piss breaks were in it, and speaking of, I quickly went back to [Survival] and got that Skill that let just forgo such things from now on. No more lengthy visits to the latrine for , just a casual walk by as my waste gets teleported out of my body and into the chamber pots. That did free up more ti, which then threw off my math, so back to recalculating everything.
From my experience building my first road and my knowledge of the maps of the route and where building materials would co from, I had to consider how much ti I would be spending flying around transporting materials versus ti spent harvesting and refining materials. Fortunately, [Skill Simulator] allowed to do so of that. I still had to plan out what I would want to do, but it could crunch the numbers for and determine how stable my mana regeneration would be. Considering the mountains would provide with material and that the road would be built in their direction, the ti spent in flight would decrease as progress approached the mountain. However, I would also gain so unknown quantity of Experience and personal mastery of my Skills as I drew closer, both of which could make better Skills beco accessible and affordable. I spent about an hour just setting up my first simulation, and the results were… not as good as I had hoped.
About 8 hours of work on a good day was what the simulation spit out, which really didn't et the schedule before the end of the world ca a-knockin'. However, I really didn't factor in what my massive army of construction workers and engineers would contribute. If I could leave it to them to clear the path for the road of trees, boulders, dirt, and the like so that I just had a nice trench to fill with the appropriate layers of materials, that would save a lot of ti, effort, and mana. However, that freed up more ti to do resource runs to the mountains, which ant more material faster, which led to more ti spent refining and placing it into location. That actually made less mana efficient, since those tasks were mana-intensive. Clearly, more tweaks would be needed.
The sad reality I had to face was that I had been too greedy with the size of my dinsional storage. Stone and the like were king, not so much for lumber, plants, ores, and other luxuries. Sacrifices were made to slash the budget allocated to those things, and those freed-up Experience Points went to more Skills for mana efficiency and generation for what I would be doing the most. If I relied more on the Skills of my engineers to provide heat for my [Basic Thermal Bottle], I could save a lot of mana. Heck, even just transmogrifying the lumber into charcoal and burning it for heat would be cheaper, if not good for the environnt. However, considering I wouldn't be spilling billions of gallons of oil into the local ecosystem, I considered a few fires inconsequential in the grand sche of things.
Strictly speaking, I didn't need to commit to my bulk purchases of Skills right then and there. I did get the ones I knew I would need and made a plan to go try them out. After experinting with new Skills, interacting with my army of workers to see what they could do, and seeking advice from experts, I would then reevaluate my decisions and go from there. However, there was still that nagging desire to just buy everything I wanted on the spot for imdiate gratification, but that would have been foolish.
Instead, as dawn reared its ugly head with the tentative greetings of a few errant sunbeams promising another day spent cooped up with a bunch of [Paladins] and their mountain of paperwork, I begrudgingly put aside pondering my Skills and began making breakfast. Nanu clung to like a little monkey, her legs wrapped around my waist and her arms around my neck. A little clingy, perhaps, but I had to cut her so slack considering she spent two decades alone and tornted. Besides, it felt kinda nice to be so desired, perhaps suspiciously nice. As I started to root through my raided pantry for ingredients, I wondered if such attention had always made feel good or if one of her Skills influenced . Perhaps even my draconic nature and the associated pride hid the answer to the mystery.
"What in the world are you doing," ca the voice of a slightly groggy Alterez as he approached in the kitchen.
"Making breakfast?" I half-said and half-asked in reply.
"No, just no. Not like that. Here, let do it."
Conceding control of the kitchen to the master, I got out of his way as the [Line Cook] worked wonders I could only dream of. Even with my sharp eyes, at tis it seed like three or four goblin chefs moved about the kitchen, such was his speed in preparing ingredients and cooking up a veritable feast. With that well in hand, I made my way upstairs to rouse Chooka.
Dangling a fancy piece of paperwork in front of her nose, the love of my life sniffed at it while still asleep. Her lips twisting into a disturbing smile, her fingers clutched at the paper, each working to ascertain the mystery that her closed eyes and sleeping brain could not parse. Eventually, Chooka woke to the sight of , with Nanu still clinging onto , prodding her gently.
"Rise and shine, my beautiful and most desired lover. Today is another day of fun and adventure. Would you like to share it with and see where our hearts take us?"
She groaned at my cheesy greeting, but smiled just the sa for how heartwarming it was. To be fair, I was at such an enlightened level of sarcasm that it rang the sa as honest truth. I yanked the blanket off of her, just to be safe so she wouldn't go back to sleep, and with a yelp at the invasion of the cold air, she curled up and hid her head under her pillow.
"Skull. Release seals nine and eight. Permission to use attack plan 'Pouncing Fox' granted. You may engage with extre prejudice," I stated out-loud for Chooka to hear.
"As you wish, my Master," ca Skull's voice from my shadow as she materialized in front of . "It will be my pleasure."
I did not stay to watch the barbaric savagery that would ensue. I made my way to the door as howling laughter announced the arrival of Skulls fingers on Chooka's ribs. Skull could be generous in many ways, but she hoarded rcy covetously. Chooka would submit in ti, and then together we would go forth and conquer the day or sothing dramatic like that.
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