"Wren, wake up! You're going to be late for class!"
What? I opened my eyes and sat up. There was a blue transparent window in front of me informing I'd slept in a bed and been healed, but I closed it with a thought. The window informing me of a new quest to go to class I ignored for the moment. I had an adult body again (thank Washu), but it was clearly Asian and stupidly pretty. Also I had a huge bulge in my pants that looked like it'd require me to wear special clothing. I mentally sighed, then reached inward mentally and projected "perks" as if I was still a telepath. That called up the Perks menu, and I shut off all three levels of Endowed and the last two ranks of Shape so I didn't stand out too much. I wasn't going to be worrying about sex while I was here if I could help it. This was going to be a hard Jump, and probably filled with horrible angst. I hated angst. I hated it more than I hated zubats that weren't cooked.
Since Washu had mentioned the gameplay settings, the next thing I did was call up the settings menu and switch to the gameplay settings tab. I switched the entry for automatically entering Instant Dungeons so it would prompt me, made sure that the mental interface was enabled as promised, then read over the description for "Show All the Things," and snorted. While I did occasionally like to number-crunch for maximum benefit, the Gamer ability alone was going to do most of that for me. I didn't need to actually see all the numbers, so I switched it to summary mode.
Closing the settings menu and opening the inventory, I went around and added a few changes of clothes, all the stuff from my Pokémon backpack, my wallet, my laptop, my handheld game system, and all of my games to my inventory. My school supplies went into the now empty backpack, then I unequipped my pyjama pants and threw them in the hamper. Checking the inventory window before I closed it revealed a little over one-hundred million Won, which was the local (grossly inflated) currency. Apparently my unspent PokeDollars had been saved and converted by the inventory system.
I didn't need a shower due to Ever-cleansed, but I went through my normal morning routine anyway. There always the possibility someone would notice I didn't do those things, or that Ever-cleansed didn't apply to my teeth or something. And what barbarian doesn't wash their hands after using the toilet?
Once I was dressed I made my way downstairs to see an empty apartment, despite having heard my mother's voice. That was weird. Was that my alarm or something? Either way I had some stuff to do first. The quest to get to class went to the side of my vision when I ignored it. Grabbing something from the refrigerator to eat, I sat down and methodically consumed whatever it was while going over the new memories I'd acquired when the Jump started. I was confused that there was no headache this time, but that could have been one of the Gamer powers.
My schedule for the day seemed to include several college courses in Computer Science (Data Structures and Algorithms AGAIN!?), which was both funny and annoying. I'd gotten degrees in that particular field twice now, and wasn't eager to do it again. I'd have to switch majors, test out, or drop out of school altogether. I didn't seem to have a job, which was just fine with me considering the perks I'd purchased and the danger I'd soon be in.
A small chime echoed in my mind, accompanied by another quest window popping up in front of me, and I moved it to the side of my vision with the other one. Oh, and there's my mother. Well, my mother for this Jump. She'd come in from a door I hadn't noticed earlier. At least that meant I didn't have an oddly specific alarm. Probably. I should check that.
"That was fast," she commented. "Will you be leaving soon?"
I nodded in the affirmative and she walked away. She was level nine, with the Single Mother title. Her name was a mess of unknown characters for a moment before the written Korean settled into my mind, which was odd but not worrying. Sujin Shin, eh? Guess I was adopted.
"I'll be at the office late again," she called from the laundry room. "We've got a release coming up, so all the quality assurance personnel are doing overtime."
"Alright, Mom. I'll leave you something for dinner unless I end up eating out," I called back. It was still a little strange using my voice after a decade of telepathy and hand gestures, but the new memories were helping to smooth that out. Shaking my head, I cleaned up my dishes and headed out.
The walk to school wasn't a terribly long one, and it gave me time to review the new quests. I'd practiced reading and walking in my first life, and this was only slightly more difficult. I accepted both [Get to Class] and [Continuing Education], and experienced a moment of near-hysterical glee on being reminded that I'd get experience points for doing everyday tasks. Gamer's Skills was awesome. Too bad I probably wouldn't be finishing the second one any time soon. Once I was done with the quest windows I started looking closely at basically everything and everyone I could while I walked. The first skill I remember Han Ji-Han gaining in the comic was [Observe], and skills were created by doing similar things repeatedly or remarkable things once. It only took a few minutes of active effort to create, and it leveled up several times as before I arrived on campus.
The day was long and boring, but I did ask each of my instructors about whether or not I could test out of their class. It took quite a lot of convincing for a couple of them, and the rest just said no. I got experience for arriving to my first class and for each time I successfully convinced someone to let me test out of something, which was great. What wasn't so great was that I was stuck in college for at least another semester after this one and I couldn't switch majors this late without having to stay longer. Even if I convinced my remaining instructors to let me test out of their courses I could only do that so many times before I needed more actual class time to graduate. I'd have to talk to a counselor. They might let me do correspondence courses for the rest of the credits. I'd just decided I'd go and see someone the next morning when a prompt popped up in front of me asking if I wanted to enter an Instant Dungeon.
Crap. It had been so long since I read The Gamer that I'd forgotten you could stumble into other people's Instant Dungeons. Not only had I not practiced how to detect, enter, exit, or destroy them: I also hadn't practiced any form of offense, defense, or much of anything else aside from observe. If I'd have stumbled into there it would have been a trial by fire.
I selected no, then surreptitiously glanced around. Everything looked normal, which made sense. The whole point of illusion barriers, instant dungeons, or whatever you wanted to call them was so normal people weren't affected by the mess that was the supernatural community, a.k.a the Abyss. I ducked down an alley and stopped in the shadow of one of the buildings. My shirt was white so I wasn't exactly doing a great job at stealth, but leaning against the wall and pretending to think about something allowed me to repeatedly [Observe] the area until I finally found something.
[By doing something special, you've created a new skill: Stealth!]
[By doing something special, you've created a new skill: Instant Dungeon (Sense)!]
With the second dialog box came a wall of not-color that would have made my brain hurt were it not for all the psychic shenanigans I'd already been involved in. Now that I knew what I was looking for I observed it a few dozen more times just in case, grateful I'd had the forethought to look at the settings. For a moment I also wondered if Video and Sound settings tabs I'd seen had the animation tricks Washu had used on me in the last Jump. Having nothing further to do there, I continued home.
When I got back the apartment I apparently shared with my mother I went about preparing a generic stir-fry from the ingredients in the refrigerator. [Cooking] became a skill while I worked, but started at level one. I'd been very good at cooking in my first life so this kind of annoyed me, until I saw that food cooked using the Gamer ability actually restored hit points and could provide other benefits.
I wasn't actually hungry, but went ahead and ate anyway. Packaging the rest of the stir-fry and putting it in the fridge didn't take long, and washing the dishes afterward got me yet another skill. That was a little ridiculous, but certainly not unexpected given Han Jee-Han got the same skill in the comic. It was a little frustrating I wasn't getting quests for any of this, and I was starting to think it was because there was no one around to give them. Quests might require quest-givers. Who knew?
After dinner I went up to my room. If I was going to stay in this world for ten years, something like thirty seven hundred days, I was going to need offense, defense, healing, buffs, debuffs, stealth, information gathering, anti-information gathering, and a whole host of other things. I hadn't been hungry since I started the Jump, but I'd eaten breakfast and dinner anyway. I also didn't feel tired. That was probably going to save my life at some point. I closed the curtains of my room, opened my inventory, and switched back to pyjamas just in case. Setting my alarm took only a moment, then I crawled into bed and closed my eyes.
I did not sleep. Doing my best to sense the energy around me and in myself, I dropped into a light meditative trance. I may not have kept my psychic powers from the PokéVerse, but I still had a ton of knowledge and knew how to meditate for hours on end. It took a while, but eventually I started to see wisps of light that stayed around, rather than the normal flashes of light behind my eyelids. The longer I meditated the more defined they got, and the more I noticed that most of them were inside me or in my immediate vicinity. That just would not do. If I was letting off excess energy of any kind I'd be more visible to the supernatural.
[By doing something special, you've created a new skill: Mystical Energy (Sense)!]
Plucking the little strands that had escaped my body out of the air wasn't very difficult after years of using my mind to warp reality. Trying to keep them from escaping took considerably more effort. I was able to reduce the amount that was leaking out, and after several hours of effort my body started retaining more of the energy automatically. It wasn't as good as when I concentrated on it, but it definitely helped.
Since my alarm hadn't gone off yet I decided to stop meditating try something different, but I left my eyes closed and tried to remain motionless. Gathering energy into the palm of one hand, I concentrated on creating an Instant Dungeon. Since it was an ability I'd purchased for the Jump it simply worked, but watching it work gave me some idea of HOW it did. The sounds of cars, people, and small animals stopped.
[By doing something special, you've created a new skill: Mystical Energy (Gather)!]
[By doing something special, you've created a new skill: Mystical Energy (Efficiency)!]
Next, I gathered energy into my palm and concentrated on unmaking the Instant Dungeon. I didn't want to just break it, I wanted to unmake it in the most efficient way possible: by reversing what I'd observed while creating it. I flinched when the entire thing crumbled around me, bombarding my new energy sense with unfamiliar sensations. That wasn't going to work for me.
[By doing something special, you've created a new skill: Instant Dungeon (Destroy)!]
I spent the rest of the night creating and unmaking Instant Dungeons, trying to do it faster and faster each time. I got used to the sensations pretty quickly, but I knew this would be an invaluable skill in the future so I kept going. About an hour before my alarm went off I figured out that I didn't have to use a palm to gather the energy, and started using other body parts. My forehead and my stomach both worked, as did each of my toes. I was pretty bored, so I opened an eye and checked on the clock. It was light out, but I still had an hour before I was supposed to be up. Also there were a ton of pop-up windows waiting for me to indicate that the [Instant Dungeon] skills had leveled up.
New skills for sensing energy, energy efficiency, and gathering energy were pretty close to what I was hoping I'd accomplish. The [Instant Dungeon (Create)] and [Instant Dungeon (Destroy)] skills were the real prize, though. I could now create Instant Dungeons that were empty or ones that had any combination of zombies, ghosts, and ogres. Best of all: creating Instant Dungeons didn't cost any mana, and would eventually lead to time-dilated areas where I would experience more time inside them than would pass outside. I was going to enjoy this, but first I was going to sleep until the alarm went off. Just because I could.
Waking up instantly was my new normal. I hurriedly turned off my alarm and closed the dialog indicating I'd slept in a bed and been fully healed. It was redundant since I hadn't lost any health before I went to bed, but it was still nice to know my powers were working. When I finished my morning routine and got downstairs I found that the leftover stir-fry had been eaten, but the container was in the sink. Either I'd missed her arrival or Mom had gotten home sometime in the hour or so I actually slept. That was depressing.
Mentally checking the date and discovering that it was a Tuesday was almost as depressing as my mother being so over-worked on a Monday. She must have been functioning on caffeine alone, so I set the pot to brew and made breakfast for two before putting the extra in the refrigerator. The dishes were washed and the coffee put in a thermos before I had a sudden thought. Would making coffee count as cooking for the purpose of my skill? One observe later and I was a bit stunned.
My [Cooking] skill (at level one) indicated that eating or drinking something I'd prepared would restore HP (health) and possibly have other benefits. The thermos of coffee I'd prepared for my mother restored ten HP and five points of MP (mana). I'd found my first healing item, and it was a drink I couldn't stand. Maybe it was different in this life? I got the now-clean coffee pot out and started another pot brewing, keeping a careful eye on the time. I had classes every weekday, and didn't want to be late.
The sound of a thump from upstairs indicated that either my mother's alarm had gone off or she'd smelled the coffee. Ten minutes later she was downstairs and eyeing the slowly-filling pot hungrily while she ate the breakfast I'd left out for myself. Seeing that she was distracted I took the food I'd set aside for her out of the fridge and ate it myself, then watched as she went through an entire pot of coffee before I could finish.
The effect was hilarious. While I'd seen my first mother go from walking dead to semi-human after a couple of cups of coffee, this was more like walking dead to chipper extrovert in one pot. I wasn't sure how much of the effect was the actual caffeine and how much was the recovery aspect my preparation added to it, but Mom actually gave me a big hug and wished me luck at class before going to shower and get ready for work.
Had I just accidentally reinforced the Big Home, All Alone drawback by enabling her to work more? Was I doomed to spend the next year only seeing her in the morning? A part of me hoped that was the case for her safety, but another smaller part of me wanted to see her more.
I spent the next month attending classes during the day, coming home to an empty house, mostly coming up with a sensible system for using magic and re-learning telekinesis. I had a list of abilities I wanted, and I was determined to learn as many of them as possible before I was discovered. Sometimes Mom would get back at a reasonable hour, but even then she often left to do other things without even talking to me. The only time we consistently interacted was when I made coffee. My [Dishwashing] skill evolved into [Chores] when after I added sweeping, dusting, laundry, and a few other things to the list.
[Instant Dungeon (Create)] was the next skill I abused, and I kept going until I could create a space with ten to one time dilation. Using the extra time from that I meditated constantly, doing my best to master [Mystical Energy (Sense)], [Mystical Energy (Gather)], and [Mystical Energy (Efficiency)]. The first allowed me to more closely monitor the energy both inside and outside my body. That allowed me to more efficiently gather it up, move it, and keep it from escaping. If no energy escaped, I wouldn't be detectable to anyone looking for magic or whatever other energies I used. I was careful to monitor normal people, too. I didn't want to have too little apparent energy and stand out that way. My efforts toward a sensible magic system ended in [Modular Spellcasting and Wards].
It was watching people with my expanded senses that lead me to Han Jee-Han and the Cheon Bu clan. I didn't contact or follow them, but I certainly made note of the places I saw them and what they looked like. Jee-Han was practically radiating energy of a type I'd only ever seen in myself by this point, so he'd probably already learned a lot of the Cheon Bu techniques. I had no idea if he'd encountered Hwan Sung-Ah yet, but I knew he would eventually. She was deathly ill, and her father was one of the most powerful characters in the comic up to the point it was translated into English back home. Hwan Sung-Gon: the Black Devil. A summoner with the ability to absorb souls to add to his own power. If there was anyone I needed to avoid pissing off it was him. And if I could get on his good side? Even better.
Once I'd achieved my goal of ten to one time dilation and gained enough proficiency in [Mystical Energy (Efficiency)] to appear normal I switched over to basic attacks and defenses. Jee-Han had gone the straight mana route with blasts, arrows, and spinning versions of them to increase damage. I went for flexibility and penetrating power by improving my telekinesis to include pyrokinesis, cryokinesis, geokinesis, electrokinesis, and aerokinesis. Since I was able to practice in an environment where the destruction of an entire neighborhood was wiped away when I left, I got pretty good at all of them. My mana and level were both probably ridiculously low for what I was doing, but my regeneration rate with active [Mystical Energy (Gather)] was more than enough to make up for it.
When I could reliably destroy a building or reduce a small area to a smoldering crater with a fifth or less of my mana bar and a pseudo-programmed timer to set off sonic booms, then lift the rubble and fling it away with another half bar I moved on. [Mystical Energy (Gather)] contributed to the creation of the [Mystical Energy (Generator)] when I learned to use mana to generate more. I could either dedicate part of my total pool of MP to producing more of it or spend a little more MP to gain a permanent MP regeneration buff. The latter looked a little flimsy to my [Mystical Energy (Sense)] so I suspected it would be easy to dispel, but it provided invaluable nonetheless. Using it did make me a little more visible since there was more energy for [Mystical Energy (Efficiency)]'s stealth to cover, but so far it had been worth it.
Surveillance and counter-surveillance were next. I poured over [Observe] and my [Mystical Energy (Sense)] until I could got [Far Sight], then tweaked it to receive audio and evolved that into [Scry]. Thankfully I was able to do it without a mirror or other such prop, and was still aware of my surroundings while using it. That last bit made it very disorienting at first, and I knew I'd need a lot more practice if I ever wanted to use it while I was on the move. My final revision to it was to try and make it blend into the ambient energy of the environment, but without testing it against someone else I couldn't be certain it worked. I could [Scry] on places I'd already been or use it as a kind of invisible floating eye to move around and explore new areas, which I'd then be able to [Scry] on directly. I immediately erected a ward against scrying over the house, hoping to delay the inevitable attacks caused by Abyss Gazed Back.
Countering my own technique proved to be far more difficult than creating it, but I think that was at least partially because I was still trying to be scientific about it. After I stopped trying to find something to base the effect on and just pushed concepts into my MP for a while I eventually ended up with an [Anti-Scry] ability that could be used as a cast spell, a maintained spell, or added to a ward. One of my earlier attempts also proved useful: forcefully smoothing out the remaining ambient energy around me didn't counter the [Scry] skill, but it did help me a potentially devastating skill: [Mystical Energy (Void)]. By combining the smoothing effect and [Mystical Energy (Gather)] I created a field around myself where only my own supernatural shenanigans worked. I could extend it a little bit out from my body, but doing so cost me more energy than I got back from the skill.