LIGHTNOVELONLINE Chapter 5 - There is no One Beryl Limit
Malwine felt like an idiot. Her outrage was still justified, but it might have taken her a bit too long to realize she technically had an out, at least with regards to the attributes under 10.
More levels.
It certainly helped that she’d previously wanted to get more Skills anyway.
You have gained [Home Sweet Home]
Home is where the heart is, and probably—hopefully—a safe space where you can hide from all your problems. Even if you have to run to get away from there. Up to once per day, you may return to a room of your choice within the location you deem your home at the cost of half your remaining [Integrity]. Wards and dimensional barriers may prevent this Skill from activating.
Trait: None
Aspect: [Homeward Roads]. You retain an awareness of the path home at all times.
[Home Sweet Home] defaults to max level 50 but may never evolve!
You have gained [Unpacifiable]
Ignorance is a leading cause of death according to wherever you pull statistics out of, and you know better than to let yourself be caught unawares. You are always acutely aware of any noticeable threats to your wellbeing, including anything that could trigger a negative status effect.
Trait: None
Aspect: [Implacable]. Your physical needs require less frequent attention, and you may burn [Integrity] to sustain yourself. You may choose to half the natural decay of your [Integrity], at the cost of only being able to restore it via rest until the next time it returns to its maximum value.
[Unpacifiable] defaults to max level 50 but may never evolve!
You have reached Level 24 [Banked levels: 20]!
Glad to see whatever writes these descriptions still loves me.
[Home Sweet Home] and its [Homeward Roads] Aspect just felt perhaps like the most outright magical Skills available to her outside the
She wanted to kick herself for not grabbing [Unpacifiable] sooner, however, even if she couldn’t have known it would be this specific. The moment she got it, alarm bells started ringing in her head, pointing at the curse. Her discovery of the curse had practically been a coincidence, when this could have revealed it to her directly from the start.
Same outcome, though.
[Implacable] gave her a tidbit of information she was glad for as well. It seemed [Integrity] was some sort of rest-based stat, and no wonder it would be all but full after some form of stasis. She couldn’t quite grasp exactly how reduced the needs of her body were, but she understood intrinsically that while [Implacable] could keep her alive without food or water if need be, it would be something akin to hibernation—the cost on [Integrity] was not one she could pay without constant sleep as she was.
Hopefully, someone would come check on her or something before it came to that.
Malwine’s attention returned to the buff she’d ignored earlier, justifiably distracted by the threatening red text of the curse on her Status Effects.
She flinched all over again as she reread it.
[Recently Exited Stasis]
Stemming from dismissed [Stasis]
Temporal delays on growth gradually return to normal. Physical needs frozen until buff expires. No longer drawing power from [Relentless Mana Well].
Remaining: 10 hours
With a name like that…
She was starting to view that -99% in an entirely different light. It was an absurd penalty for a baby born with attributes at 10.
But what would it mean for someone with Skill names like that?
I need to meet my mother.
Yet another thing for the list she could only vaguely keep track of. [Cool Head on Your Shoulders] better earn its keep…
It did nothing of the sort, being as unrelated to the task at hand as it was.
Unassigned: 5004
She’d confirmed each level seemed to net her exactly 500 unassigned points—a frankly ridiculous amount, and far more than she’d probably need were she not cursed. But what mattered was reaching that baseline threshold.
Her attributes soared as quickly as they were brought low.
[Integrity]
977 / 982
[Toll]
0 / 1138
Strength
1120 (-99%)
Speed
1120 (-99%)
Endurance
1120 (-99%)
Dexterity
1120 (-99%)
Stamina
1120 (-99%)
Resilience
1120 (-99%)
Perception
1120 (-99%)
Charisma
1120 (-99%)
Adaptation
1120 (-99%)
Luck
1120 (-99%)
Circulation
1120 (-99%)
Presence
1120 (-99%)
…
[Integrity]
977 / 982
[Toll]
0 / 29
Strength
11
Speed
11
Endurance
11
Dexterity
11
Stamina
11
Resilience
11
Perception
11
Charisma
11
Adaptation
11
Luck
11
Circulation
11
Presence
11
What a fucking annoyance.
Still, pushing them all past 10 lessened the tension on her. [Implacable] still warned her, but the intensity had lessened, so there had been some truth to that instinct.
[Integrity] hadn’t dropped even once—likely because of Beryl’s buff on her, because of whatever she did to place Malwine in stasis. It was clearly a value that could decay, but between the buff and perhaps [Implacable], something told her that if she didn’t spend it, for the time being it would last her awhile.
Malwine was also now stumped about [Integrity] in general. How was she to increase its maximum value, if no attributes affected it so far? She guessed it might have started at 1,000, if her age affected it as precisely as it did [Toll], but [Toll] was clearly affected by Circulation as well. Perhaps she had not reached a correct milestone, though 1,120 on each attribute felt as ridiculous as the -99% did.
…Please don’t tell me it only ever drops, thanks. I very much intend to make it past 80 this time around too. Unlike Rupert, whoever that was.
A part of her wanted to kill time until whatever happened next, be it finally getting a visitor or, well… anything. Malwine wasn’t privy to the details of however [Unpacifiable] worked, but she wanted to think that if shifting her focus were a threat, she’d probably know it before anything grave happened.
Staring up—she was growing convinced the entirety of her surroundings had to have been summoned from wood or something—Malwine blinked rapidly. She could hardly make anything out, though it was still dark. The only thing remotely close to a way to track time at her disposal was the stasis buff, but it didn’t specify minutes. Still 10 hours…
Her thoughts bounced back to the remaining Skills. [Learning by Reading] and [Remote Reading] sounded like a great way to kill time, but she had no guarantee she’d understand this world’s language, or languages. There was probably magic for that, but she didn’t know it. Well, I am a child. Someone will probably teach me.
The silence and isolation, this darkness, gnawed at her again. Someone should come. Right?
I was in stasis… What if no one’s coming?!
Malwine struggled to push back that rising panic, not wanting to find out what hyperventilating in a body this small would be like. It smoothed over with surprising haste, [Cool Head on Your Shoulders] kicking in.
Huh. So that’s the sort of thing that triggers it? Glad I picked that Skill up after all.
Besides, [Unpacifiable] isn’t actually yelling anything about child abandonment… At least not yet.
The next set—[Once and Forever] and [Mana Reclaimer]—promised the sort of adventure she’d have dreamed of in her past life. Yet what would she do now, as an infant? It didn’t help that the
Malwine refused to acknowledge the existence of [Nosy Old Lady] even if [Purpose] had a promising name.
That left [Situational Autopilot] and [True Autopilot]. She wanted to say it sounded almost social in a way, though she didn’t recall getting the same impression from [Close to my Chest], despite it being on the same category.
She turned back to that description. With how it spoke of people using the
That conclusion would take a lot of assumptions, not to mention it might be almost too good to be true. Her attention soon shifted to [Reveal Nothing]’s description—it spoke of a core stage.
Fourth Stage of the Early Esse. That was a core stage.
This is a cultivation world… Cultivation-adjacent?
Her elation slipped into confusion.
Wait, why am I in the fourth stage of something then? I’m 18 months old?! Perhaps it had been related to stasis? She’d only showed up at this age, as far as she knew. And the method she picked for moving into this new world discarded the possibility of her having died while in stasis, as far as she understood.
Was she passively growing in some way? That was the only explanation she could think of.
Malwine recalled there seemed to be some overlap between cultivation—a genre she’d perused for normal reasons, of course—and isekai, but it still seemed somewhat bizarre to her. If she tried to think too much into it, she’d get lost in internal debates as to how she hadn’t stumbled upon the genre sooner—at least then she would have a better frame of reference there.
Treating the system like a game of sorts still seemed like the best of approaches, though she had to be careful. Just an ambiguously Germanic world with cultivation. I’ve played more confusing things.
She shook her tiny head. She couldn’t expect similarities with anything as far as the world itself went, even if the naming conventions looked familiar to her. There were absolutely no guarantees her fractured experience would matter at all, which did make her feel slightly less annoyed at the blatant gaps in her knowledge.
Cultivation, however, she could navigate… to an extent. Her foggy memories told her there was a lot of variation there. And this world seemed to use mana, so there was that…
Closing her eyes and letting out a breath, Malwine added another Skill to her growing list of redeemed ones.
You have gained [Once and Forever]
No action is ever truly irrelevant, and nothing ever wants to be truly forgotten. Likelihood of Affinities lost to precursors reemerging greatly increased. You may claim Skills and Traits from any you may have right to inherit from, providing they are too long gone for resurrection and your desired Skill/Trait has not already passed on to somebody else.
Trait: None
Aspect: [Mana Reclaimer]. If you can prove within reason that someone you could inherit an Affinity for a Mana Source from possessed a specific Mana Source, you may make the Affinity your own. Affinities from famous ancestors of a rarity higher than
[Once and Forever] defaults to max level 50 but may never evolve!
You have reached Level 29 [Banked levels: 15]!
Well, that’s fucking useless.
Oh, Malwine could see how this would be great for someone like her. It was beyond enticing—to build a power set while also getting to find out more about those who came before her? That would be wonderful.
But she wouldn’t be able to get anything done right now, would she? Not as she was.
The system had given her good Skills for her preferences, that much was certain. Simply, nothing was useful to her right now.
On a hunch, Malwine refocused on [Once and Forever]. The mention of resurrection being possible didn’t surprise her, but she might have jumped to conclusions on the rest. It said ‘from any you may have right to inherit from’, which—to her—meant that naturally, she’d have to know who she was getting it from, as well as what the Skill or Trait would be.
But having reread the Skill description now… It didn’t actually say that.
Could she just… pull Skills out of thin air? Well, not thin air, but it felt as far-fetched as that.
That sounded about as broken as having thousands of attributes as a technically centenarian baby, and she loved it.
Malwine leaned into the Skill, treating it as a button to press yet also as an impulse. She focused on the concept of a father, pulling, and—
(❗) Error: Disinherited.
YOU… She really needed to get working on that hypothetical notebook, if only to quench the overwhelming need to write ‘fight dad’ on that ever-growing to-do list. Would a normalish family have been so much to ask for on this second life?
Knowing her life started with an inherited curse did nothing to subdue her annoyance. It was also forcing her to confront something she’d been pushing to the back of her mind. For real, what if… none of her experience mattered? Not just as a possibility, but as a fact.
These Skills seemed tailored to who she’d been, but that didn’t change the fact that this was a new world. She had no clue how inheritance rules would work in the first place, with this system, let alone what the norm was for family ties.
At least this Skill does work.
Malwine braced herself and focused on Beryl next, this idea of using the Skill all but a lifeline to her, adrift as she felt.
(❗) Error: Target living.
So Mom is alive.
She hadn’t even actually expected Beryl to be dead, eldritch -99% curse aside, but it was still a relief. And a concern. Where was her mother, then? Where was anyone?
[Recently Exited Stasis] still had 9 hours on it. I’m fishing for reasons to panic, I just have to… wait.
As far as Malwine knew, she was human. Her status said as much. And regardless of what social norms were, even with magic thrown into the mix, humans probably worked the same way in any world.
Beryl must have had a father and a mother. Obviously.
(❗) Error: Target living.
(❗) Error: Target too recently deceased (136 months).
Oh. That gave her something to work with, at least as far as outlining what to expect. It was somewhat similar, actually, to how she’d started out in her first life, when she tried to find her own parents then. The details were foggy, but she’d had some idea as to who they’d been, enough that DNA bridged the gap easily enough. It was a half-aunt, I think?
It was in equal parts frustrating at amusing that she had an easier time recalling being chased across a server by one underleveled guy who just seemed intent on getting slammed away by her shields, than she could recall the exact events with which she once honed her craft.
She wouldn’t have the same tools, but even the system so far seemed perfectly capable of giving her information, if only through [Once and Forever] failing. Being given reasons for each failure was a boon, even if the Skill wasn’t getting her anything.
If only it gave me names, but that’s too much to ask for, isn’t it…
Next, Malwine tried to reach for whatever might be above those mysterious grandparents. If all of her paternal side was locked to her, then she might as well be researching the pedigree of Beryl alone.
Well, if poking the system via a Skill counts as research.
(❗) Error: Parent unknown to child.
(❗) Error: Parent unknown to child.
(❗) Error: Ineligible.
Target deceased (501 months). Resurrection eligibility expired (2 months).
Wait, I had a resurrectable great-grandmother until only 2 months ago? Why didn’t anyone do anything?! If only she’d woken up sooner rather than at 18 months old… Could she have done something? Malwine hadn’t the faintest clue as to how this resurrection thing worked, just that it was possible, and her own experience might not even be a clear reference—she’d been, ahem, isekaid.
There was also the fact that it seemed as though her grandfather didn't know his parents. Depending on how advanced this society was, that could prove to be a massive hurdle. Still, Malwine moved on to the one result that actually allowed her to poke it, that one great-grandmother.
Her heart skipped a beat at the call name before she read the rest.
You may inherit 1 Skill from Beryl Skrībanin.
Classless Skills
[Skipping]
[Sleep Delay]
[Quick Hand]
[Dancing]
[Swift Movement]
[Self-Defense]
[Mathematics]
[Philosophic Concepts]
[Enhanced Memory]
[Mental Defense]
[Clarity]
[Logic Applications]
[Meditation]
[Pray]
[Insight]
[Calligraphy]
[Stamping]
[Séance Hosting]
From [Key Unraveler {Foresight}]
[Universal Notation]
[Verbal Copying]
[Perpetual Signature]
[Clone Manuscript]
[Write Anything]
[Write Anywhere]
Just one?!
After the brief complaint, Malwine stared at the list, almost entranced. She couldn’t help but think they painted quite the picture as to who her great-grandmother might have been. A scribe of sorts? Malwine’s own preconceptions had her expecting any world with ambiguous fantasy tones to carry certain implications—perhaps be old-fashioned, perhaps come with difficulties for her as a girl.
She admittedly hadn’t expected what she saw, and it would have been a pleasant surprise had it not made her come to that realization. With an internal cringe, she started reviewing the Skills themselves. Unlike with her own unredeemed Skills, she had no innate hints as to what they could be.
Wait, the hell’s the difference between Common and Normal rarities?
With her own predetermined Skills all being Unranked, Malwine frankly had no clue as to what rarity even implied. The rarities of her Affinities had been bizarre enough.
Older-Beryl had {Foresight}, Malwine noted. And Classes come up again…
She knew from the whole path-choice thing that Classes existed, but this brought a bit of clarity. Whatever forging Classes meant was presumably per category, and Older-Beryl had only had one Class. That Class came with the bonus knowledge that she apparently also had {Foresight}, though it didn’t say to what tier. Did Mom-Beryl get it from this Beryl? Then why would hers only be Tier-1? The curse?
Focus, Malwine!
Huh. Something about her new name made it easy to yell at herself.
She almost wanted to just ignore lower-rarity Skills for that alone, especially if she only got to choose one.
The annoying part—one of them, anyway—was how so many of the Skills seemed potentially useful, but not immediately useful. [Self-Defense] and [Mental Defense] being Rare was…interesting, though any attempt at garnering societal information from that alone would just be wild guessing.
Seeing so many Skills per category was also quite interesting to Malwine.
Physical things are (duh!), and
It’d started off sounding like a spiritual thing before dipping into [Calligraphy]… and going right back into [Séance Hosting]. Huh, I bet Madama Luisa could have gotten that. Maybe THEN Rupert would have answered my calls. Hope he’s nice and toasty.
Malwine was almost curious as to what Rupert had done for her past self to hate him to a quite literally transcendent degree, but this ambiguity was probably for the best.
Discarding the Commons was her first step. And as much as she'd love [Self Defense] to deal with any future looming threats, as she was she wouldn't get much of a chance to use it, let alone level it. She had to be realistic about which Skills to get on this second life with Skills and levels, after all. With a heavy heart, she also discarded the
For her own sake, Malwine felt she might have to be short-sighted, at least for now. Besides, even as… intriguing as the sheer randomness of
It definitely isn't just that I want a higher-rarity Classed Skill, nope!
Though how a Class named [Key Unraveler] and the {Foresight} Affinity had anything to do with scribe work was beyond her, it didn't seem like a bad Class. Old-Beryl looked quite lucky to Malwine. Still, the first four Skills were clearly oriented towards whatever work she did in life. Same for the last two, but between the Epic rarity and the broad implications, [Write Anything] and [Write Anywhere] were clear winners.
But before choosing one, there was something Malwine wanted to try. She was working on the assumptions that Skills were something she could unlock on her own.
…She just needed to find out how hard that was.