[Longstrider] seemed to blur the landscape as Shayma walked toward the river. Between that and [Endurance] she could probably make it there in one trip, since her Longstrider walk was a bit faster than normal running as far as I could tell. She’d taken the knight’s leathers, and as any self-respecting magical equipment might it had resized itself to fit her.

Her visit had reminded me how lax I’d grown in trying to break the system. Or maybe that was another way cores tended to go off the rails. Without human contact, did they just blur into vagueness?

[Wisdom] advances to 4.

If I were to play host to however-many refugees from whatever was going on, little cottages and falling rocks weren’t going to be enough. I didn’t have a list of things to investigate, exactly, but I had some ideas and I had something else to watch than the grass growing on my farms. One of which I really should have thought of earlier.

[Relocate] didn’t absorb what it moved. That was obvious because it could move the core. A black cocoon surrounded what I was trying to move and another grew where it would go, and at some point they both withered away to reveal the change. So I tested it by Relocating some sensory organs to see if I could spot and, most importantly, control how it worked. I was hoping that I could use it to move things more quickly, since it could take minutes or even hours, if I wanted to shift something large. I hadn’t tried whole rooms, but that could be days. Not very useful for surprising people.

I watched, waited, caught the faint flicker as a sensor organ flicked from one point to another. Then back again. Back, forth, and then I tried to pull the organ back to the first spot before the cocoons opened, pushing it back along whatever link there was. Then I was surprised.

[Spatial Manipulation] unlocked.

Oh wow. That was quite nearly as fantastic as the Companion branch. Nearly.

As with a lot of skills, all it did was unlock a new category for me to put experience into. It didn’t start out with much - [Compression], [Expansion], and [Link]. But the mana costs were an order of magnitude greater than what I could sustain right now. I had been prepared to pour some portion of the enormous pool of stockpiled experience I had into that, because, damn, Spatial Manipulation. But I wasn’t anywhere near being able to do anything with it.

Well, I had to expand anyway. I put some of the spare experience into my Roots and started digging space.