"The god did, yes," the [Cleric] replied. "Adonite appears as a male when he appears as a halfling."

"Huh," Otonia grunted through [Belly Speech]. "I probably should have known that."

"Shouldn't you be a little more weirded out about this?" Krateros directed back to the visitor.

"About what?"

"You're talking to two [Otters]. I would think that's weird enough."

The [Cleric] appeared genuinely puzzled. "I have a quest from Adonite. He is not a trickster and I take his work very seriously. And in any event, it is a System-monitored Quest that is now showing as completed. Why would I be weirded out?"

The two [Otters] exchanged looks, then thoughts and a few hand gestures to boot. Turning back to the halfling, "Well, if you wouldn't mind entertaining the question: Where the heck are we?"

The [Cleric] confirmed that the two were far upstream of a river that emptied into the Slane Sea, around which most of the Slanemore continent wrapped around. It was a heavily forested area fifty kilometers in all directions, with only a few isolated villages nearby that engaged in various bushcraft. With that, the [Brillian] bid them goodbye, and the pair were alone again.

<So what do you think the letter and the notification were really about?>

<I'm not sure I want to know. Best guess is that there's chicanery going on in the Pantheon. And I'm not sure I want to get wrapped up in that.>

<True that.>

<Still. We've almost entirely limited ourselves to the System since rebirth. Once we've built up a larger XP pool, we should get in some serious practice with true magic. Make sure there aren't any unexpected side effects.>

<We'll need to balance what we use for true magic with what we invest into leveling.>

<Ugh. Good point.> Otonia rubbed her temples. <This could be rather troublesome.>

<Also, we should get new names. I'm tired of my Status being empty.>

After another complicated and over-exaggerated sex check, Otonia was renamed Cora ◐ and Krateros was renamed Dips ◮, with the System accepting both as their names.

Summer faded into autumn. The pair leveled defending the [Otters'] habitat from common predators: various large snakes, big cats, and the occasional bird of prey. As they did so, they slowly began stretching out their skills with true magic. In so doing, they quickly discovered a few things about XP and the system.

The first was that the Fell standard unit of experience, the hecate, was exactly the same as 1 point of XP. So that kept shit simple.

The second was that they were gaining experience at an atrocious rate compared to Fell. After close observation and experimentation, they found that the experience was being formed within their souls, but was swiftly being drained off, presumably by the System. That at least was consistent with the Fell's telling of history.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

As a close corollary to the second point, it meant that most Fell were gaining twelve to twenty thousand XP per year, around sixteen times what most of the sapient Races under the System gained (present company excluded). This extreme harvest explained in part why the System could tweak the XP multipliers significantly without necessarily being a drain on the XP already in the System: it simply would take less XP.

As a test on this point, they trekked for a few days to find a high level opponent. As with their prior experiences power-leveling, the XP multipliers were so high that, under the System's own accounting, the duo should earn more XP than was actually formed within their own souls. And, indeed, the pair found that the System would actually imbue into them that extra XP.

The third point they found was that once they committed XP to level up, they could no longer draw upon that XP to fuel true magic. Curiously, they had trouble tracking where exactly the XP went for quite a while.

It took until the middle of winter, when the river had partially frosted over, that they found the answer.

Cora ◐ was meditating, closely observing her soul and her experience while fussing about with her Status, when Dips ◮ came to sit across from her. When Cora finally opened her eyes, they were glazed over, staring off into the middle-distance. She leaned over and started staring through the ground, slowly crawling about on her belly, tail nub up in the air. Suddenly, Cora leapt up, jumping onto and pinning down Dips, staring deep into his soul. Dips could just faintly make out the workings of true magic around Cora's eyes, but…

<While this is an interesting position, mind explaining what you're doing?>

<Sorry,> Cora sent absently as she blinked away the magical construct. <I—I don't know where to start.>

<How about the,> Dips made some hand gestures towards his face, <eye thing.>

Cora sighed, as she rolled off of him. <It's a significantly empowered version of the spell I used as a Fell when designing very dense, small-scale enchantments. When we level and spend free attributes, I didn't quite believe that the XP was being expended, at least not directly. The way it faded from sight… was almost like enchantment or spellwork.>

<So why couldn't we see it?>

<Exactly,> Cora began to pace. <The Fell had loosely described the System as an enchantment, but in centuries of living, we had never seen anything like that and, coming back now, we still hadn't see anything. I was throwing shit at a wall to see what stuck. That,> she gestured at her eyes, <was the "look micro-scale" idea.>

<And?>

<It's incredible,> she whispered in awe. <The scale is far, far smaller than anything the Fell ever produced, and anything I envisioned as possible. But that makes it so efficient you could hardly detect any of the expenditure of XP. Across the whole of Ager, it might be significant. But locally? You couldn't notice.>

Krateros pondered that for a moment. <So, the System isn't in us?>

Another sigh. <I don't know. I can barely read it, let alone figure out how all the pieces work together.> She waved a hand at the ground. <The surface enchantments seem to primarily be… conduits or canals for lack of a better explanation. XP and information flows. For example, using [Identify] actually sends a signal from the user to the target, which then returns with the information.>

She waved at her own body. <Then there are enchantments on, well, every living thing. There are two major components. One is hooked into the soul. That seems to be in charge of managing experience and the Status itself. The other part is hooked into the body. As far as I can tell, the bodily enchantment wraps around every single component of our body—every hair, bone and muscle—and supports it. They're not directly strengthened as far as I can tell preliminarily, but like armor acts as a second layer in tandem. Of course, it's not just CON, but as far as I can tell, every of the physical attributes. The metaphysical attributes… I think they might operate directly on the soul itself, but I'm not sure.>

<So, when we level or spend attributes, the experience is spent strengthening this suit of armor which strengthens, enervates, and protects our body parts?>

<Basically.>

<Neat.>

Cora raised an [Otter] eyebrow at that. <Neat?>

<Neat.>

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.