I think I’ve broken Nicholas. And Sarran too, by the looks of it. Both men are blank-faced – not in the same sense of controlling emotions that they had earlier, but more like they’re a computer that’s just gone all blue screen of death. Error, error, cannot compute. I feel my lips quirking up a little, and force them down to a more neutral position. It won’t do to offend my host by laughing at his shock.

  I have to admit that his amazement is quite flattering to my ego, though. That he’d actually been hoping that I’d got above level ten alone is startling – and here I thought I’d be behind the trend due to needing to collect Energy for getting here in the first place. I might have reached level thirty if I hadn’t needed to do that.

  “How…at level twenty-five, you should only have two hundred and seventy points in your attributes at most. And that’s only if you manually increased every attribute to twenty before levelling up even once. But you have…how many?”

  I pull up my status screen again and count them.

  “Three hundred and seventy-nine attribute points,” I answer. I’m met once more with blank shock. The lights are on but no one’s at home. “That’s also a good thing, right?” I prompt, pretty sure of the answer but wanting to jog the two men out of their current state.

  Nicholas seems to shake himself and then breaks out in a peal of laughter that I can hear has a hysterical edge to it. I eye him carefully – I don’t think it would go over very well if I shock him out of his hysterics by slapping him.

  Fortunately, I don’t have to take drastic measures – Sarran does instead. His fingers tighten on the back of Nicholas’ chair until we all hear a cracking sound like a gunshot. We all turn to stare at him. Pink rises in his cheeks as he quickly loosens his fingers and tucks his hands behind his back, the furtive movement and rueful look on his face reminding me of a naughty schoolboy who’s been caught red-handed. It doesn’t take long for his face to return to a neutral expression, but the brief interlude has sobered the lord up.

  “Good? Yes, very good,” Nicholas tells me, nothing but honesty in his face. “Though I would love to know how you gained more than a hundred more points than you should have.”

  “Well,” I start, wondering how much to say. Many of those are because I learned how to give myself stat points, either manually by manipulating Energy or through facing challenges in my soul space. I’m not sure I want to reveal that capability yet, though. Without knowing how common or not it might be, I’m not keen on giving up one of my aces. “I got several achievements,” I say instead. “Several of them awarded stat points or percentage increases to my stats.” I figure that should be safe enough to reveal – hopefully achievements are common enough to be an acceptable explanation.

  “Several achievements, he says,” repeats Nicholas disbelievingly, exchanging a glance with Sarran. “Plural. As if they are given out like party favours.”

  “He was on a different world, my lord,” Sarran reminds him. “Perhaps the requirements for achievements were different there.”

  “True,” Nicholas responds thoughtfully, returning his attention to me, his gaze pensive. I expect him to ask about what my achievements were – and wonder what I will say to him in response. I don’t particularly want to reveal them – that feels like more information than I should divulge to someone who is, arguably, a stranger. Plus, if he knows the achievements I got and they’re common enough that the normal rewards are public knowledge, he’d quickly be able to tell that achievement rewards are not the source of my greater stat point total. And I don’t really want to reveal the boon I got from Kalanthia which gave my Willpower such a boost in the beginning – that feels too personal to us to tell him in our first conversation. Doing my best to figure out a polite way of refusing, I’m taken by surprise when he doesn’t ask about that at all.

  “You have a hundred and thirty points in Willpower; if you don’t mind divulging your other attributes and the points you have assigned to those, I would appreciate it.” I hesitate for a long moment. Perhaps he recognises why I’m hesitating as he continues speaking. “I will need to know such things to engage the right kind of trainers, as well as to look for the right kind of equipment for you. I don’t know what weapon you use, but a weapon designed to be used by someone with forty in Strength is not the same weapon as someone with sixty in Strength should use. Similarly, equipment that gives you space to store extra mana units tends to require certain levels of Intelligence depending on how big its storage capacity is.”

  I suppose that makes sense.

  “Well, all my physical stats are in the forties with Strength being the highest at forty-seven, Constitution being in the middle at forty-four, and Dexterity being the lowest at forty.” Nicholas nods slowly. The shock seems to be wearing off. “I’ve mentioned Willpower already. Otherwise, Wisdom is at fifty-five and Intelligence is at sixty-two.”

  Nicholas nods again, though I think I see incredulity flash across his face.

  “At level twenty-five? Monstrous,” I hear him say, but I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t supposed to – it’s said under his breath with a mixture of awe and excitement.

  “And your Skills, how are those? Or did you spend your entire time finding Energy to fuel your incredible amount of growth in such a short time?”

  I can’t help but laugh at his assumptions. I’m not going to tell him about the Pure Energy stream, though. Not until I know more about this world, at least.

  “Oh, I got a few of those.”

  Nicholas tilts his head curiously to one side.

  “How many? Class and non-Class, that is.”

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  “Class Skills, I have seven,” I tell him, not counting the derivative Skills since they only advance at the speed of my base Skills. “And non-Class Skills…I have twenty-two.”

  “Twenty-two?!” I think I’ve broken Nicholas again. This time Sarran doesn’t seem so shocked, though I’m unsure whether it’s that he’s just decided not to engage properly with the conversation, or whether he’s now expecting anything. Perhaps even if I announced that I’d turned the sky purple he’d just accept it with the same equanimity that he’s showing now. “Did you even sleep?” Nicholas demands when he finds his tongue again. I can’t help but chuckle this time, his amazement too amusing not to. Fortunately, I think he’s too busy questioning my achievements to take offence. “How did you…. What did you…?” He shakes his head sharply. “No, let us not waste time on that now. What are your highest level Skills? Are they your Class Skills?”

  “One of them is,” I admit. “Dominate is pretty high.”

  Nicholas sends an obvious look around at my Bound.

  “That isn’t surprising – unlike everything else,” he comments wryly. “What level have you got it to – Journeyman?” he asks with a hopeful note in his voice. I do my best to hide my smile, already anticipating his reaction to its true level.

  “Master,” I answer. “Master four, to be exact.”

  Nicholas chokes and I wonder for a moment if he’s going to faint again – that would be a bit annoying and might make it look like speaking to me is bad for his health. There’s an ominous cracking sound and Sarran actually jerks forwards this time as a piece of the chair comes off in his hand. As before, that breaks the moment and Nicholas turns to eye him with annoyance.

  “Sorry, my lord,” Sarran apologises, though there’s a hint of amusement in his gaze. Nicholas huffs an annoyance, but I don’t think I’m mistaken when I hear some amusement there too.

  “Just get it fixed before you have it brought back in and we’ll say no more about it,” he responds after a moment, and then returns his attention to me. “You have a Skill at Master level. Master four even, because you’re clearly an over-achiever and getting a Skill to Master at all in a single year isn’t enough for you.” He eyes me carefully. “Did you happen to be a tamer of sorts in your previous life?” he asks hopefully, as if that might explain it. And it might, thinking about it – previous knowledge probably does make it easier to go up the ranks in a Skill. As it happens though, I wasn’t.

  “No,” I tell him honestly. “I was more in the business of wrangling people than animals, and ‘dominating’ someone was frowned upon where I came from. Officially, at least,” I add, thinking about how some of the managers believed they should behave with their team.

  Nicholas leans back in his seat, a bit of disappointment on his face.

  “Well, I suppose that will still come in useful,” he responds philosophically. “Wrangling people rather comes with the territory of being a noble, regardless of the Class. It makes achieving Master in a Skill even more impressive, let alone in a single year. Most people take five or six years to do so in a single Skill – and that’s the one they are focussing on all day, every day, generally also with the guidance of a master. Though, of course, the traversing of the first bottleneck at Journeyman nine is something that can only be inspired by a person’s own understanding of their subject, not anyone else’s.”

  I wonder what he’ll say when he realises that I actually have three Skills at Master rank. Perhaps I should give him a bit of time to digest the discoveries so far – I don’t actually want him to have a heart attack. That might be rather inconvenient. Especially since it might land me with a murder charge if whoever it is that’s in charge decided that I was to blame. Though I do have to admit that what he’s saying is a little puzzling – how was it so easy for me to rank my Skills up when people here take five or six years of studying with a master to do so? Is it something about this world in comparison to the other one? Or is it more efficient to be forced to work out everything for myself instead of having the route set out in front of me by someone else? I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

  “What are your other Skills? Would you consider yourself more a fighter or a crafter? And if you are the former, are you more magical, ranged, or melee?”

  I hesitate here – it’s a difficult question.

  “Honestly…I’ve kind of done a bit of everything,” I respond after a bit of thought. “I would say that I’m more magic-based than non-magic based – I’ve got six Shaping Skills and several more that are magic-adjacent or support magic like Rune-Carving, Energy Manipulation, Enchanting, and Alchemy. And then I’ve got several more that use or aid magic like Transformation, Fade, and Meditation. But I’ve tried out several different types of fighting – bow, mace, spear, knife-fighting – and I have some Skills related to those. Otherwise, I’ve picked up a few utility Skills like the three Inspects, Teaching, Management, and Animal Empathy.”

  Nicholas just stares blankly at me again.

  “Well,” he says with an incredulous brightness to his voice. “I don’t even know where to start in that little list. The impossibility that is you somehow managing to learn a single Shaping Skill without having a Class related to it, let alone six of them. Or perhaps the fact that you so blithely reeled off ‘Rune-Carving’, ‘Enchanting’, and ‘Alchemy’ as if any old person could pick those up without a dedicated apprenticeship. Or maybe it’s the fact that you haven’t just chosen one or two weapons to fight with, but have four, and somehow have Skills for them, even though no one ever gets Skills for martial disciplines unless they have been taught by a trainer.”

  “I did have to get an achievement first before I was allowed to start earning the Skills,” I point out ‘helpfully’, probably finding far too much amusement in his expression – the cold neutral mask which he wore at the beginning of the conversation is long-gone. Though my confusion is growing too – especially since it seems that Nicholas has no more answers than I do.

  “Because of course you did,” Nicholas answers blandly. If the barely-audible scoff that comes from Sarran’s general direction is anything to go by, he feels just as incredulous as the lord himself. He gives a disbelieving laugh.

  “Well, I don’t think that there are any questions about your suitability as my heir,” Nicholas tells me honestly. “Either you are immensely lucky, or amazingly talented. Either would be welcome in my House.” He sobers and leans forward to look at me seriously. “If you join my House and work towards its betterment, I promise that I will do my best as your lord to find the right trainers for where you are now, and help you develop to become everything you are capable of being. And I’ll tell you now that with what you’ve revealed to me, that won’t be cheap. Few other Houses would be capable of offering you the same, either because they don’t have the money or because they don’t have the contacts. With all of that in mind – the responsibilities, the resources, the training – will you agree to become my heir?"

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