Chapter 5 “lvl ups and mana appraisal”

Doglia5

Sorry about the long time between posts I had to do yard work for 6 hours a couple days straight and then a lady from our church had a water leak so I assisted my dad, my brother, and another member for about a cumulative 20 hours to replace her floor, cabinets, sink, and reinforce the building’s trusses (her house is very old). We also need to replace her refrigerator, stove, and washing machine (the fridge is very old, the stove hasn’t worked for years, and while her washing machine does work her daughter’s (who has five children) doesn’t) so I’ll probably be absent again. 

This is a long one so if you don’t want to read it it's in a spoiler

Spoiler

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I also had the agony of trying to math out dyslexic writers exponential experience to lvl up system and because they never give us the exponent I did it by hand and got 1.04 with a base of 100 but when you math that up to lvl 11 you get about 3949 EXP (when you round down every time) which is a good 734 EXP more than dyslexic’s lvl 11 requirement of 3215 but the other methods I used were either massively above his requirement (my first model gave a requirement of 13,000~ EXP to reach lvl 11), when I try a smaller exponent it doesn’t go high enough, and when I tried to make the exponent scale with lvl I got almost 250 EXP as the requirement for lvl 3 instead of 120 EXP. So as I said earlier, take my math with a grain of salt. I'll use my exponent as a general guide and knock down the exp requirement when it seems too high. Seriously though, what were his exponents?

I just did some more mathing and it will take 3,111,005,608 total EXP to reach the fourth talent point. After talent point 1 or 2 the exp number will seriously become irrelevant. *sigh* I wanted my math to be accurate but after seeing that number and realizing how I would have to build towards it I think all the numbers are just going to become fudged after a certain point. I will however try to make sure that when our protagonist wins fights that are “unwinnable” via level or tier it will make sense. (in the most part I think it will be because the vast majority of the first 3 talent points worth of levels will come from general skills so our protagonist will have excessively high stats in comparison to those who rose their level with killing or crafting exp.)

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Here’s my shorthand for the math ignore the later decimal points I couldn't be bothered to manually round it down.

Spoiler

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base=100	100^1.04	rounded down each time		lvl 11 = 3949 EXP
EXP to lvl
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24	25	26	27	28	29	30	31	32	33	34	35	36	37	38	39	40	41
100	120	145	177	218	270	338	427	544	700	910	1195	1587	2131	2896	3984	5550	7835	11215	16285	24000	36000	54771.4957	84741.62443	133419.914	213909.2093	349493.1449	582339.445	990337.5736	1720341.186	3055196.658	5551888.521	10332808.17	19714560.57	38599225.03	77632170.51	160562232.4	341876409.2	750280914.6	1699154442	3975961490
5144
EXP to talent points		1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
		3039	56627	4245880.593	3111005608
origional EXP in sleep is for the weak as of Chapter 3: Nighttime Adventures
50	12	15	30	34	25	7	9	4	12	3	2	4	4	2
1275	78	120	465	595	325	28	45	10	78	6	3	10	10	3
3051	EXP to next lvl: 164
total EXP to lvl 11: 3215

Sorry that it pasted nasty

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Soooo yeah.

My new status screen was rather surprising.

What jumped out the most was that I was level 12. Woohoo! What came next was that despite having no skills that boost it my charisma, deception, artistry, magic, and growth all have 120 points despite the fact that when I had no skills they were at 0. This directly implies that leveling up raises all stats by 20. 

Next most important was the talent point. That sounded very important. Unfortunately there is no description for what those do so I think I’ll hold onto it until I find a good use.

Oh well, now I have the slog of applying my newfound manacellerator to the rest of my mana flows. I followed my biology with my central flows being xylem (hugging outer wall) style and my outer edges being phloem style (central line).

Luckily my efforts do not go unrewarded.

[ General Skill: Sense Mana has reached lvl 61-70 Rewards +10 Mana, +10 Magic, + 715 EXP ]

[ General Skill: Control Mana has reached lvl 61-70 Rewards +10 Mana, +10 Magic, + 715 EXP ]

Now that I’ve fixed my inner flows and leveled up my ability to sense and control mana I should be able to properly improve my growth by using my manipulation and my prior growth method (the one I used to ensure my water source).

The methods combined were not only massively more efficient but also much quicker. Using this fusion I should be able to drive my taproot down to the water table! I know there is one because my current water source is an underground tributary which naturally drains into underground aquifers. I dug away pleased by the speed and penetration increase from my growth stat and eventually bursting into an open space down below. My design, despite the lack of stone to anchor cilia into, worked even in the open “air”. After a few more meters of “air” the tip of my tap root hits water! It took a full 60 meters of growth through the aquifer to anchor to the stone base. Now even if the tributary runs out of water I won’t!

With my water problems solved for the foreseeable future I begin my root expansion. Well not really. This expansion is purely the spread of roots within the immediate one meter radius of my seed. And even then the majority of the roots are purely cilia aside from a few larger ones where I plan to put my later primary roots. After ensuring some more basic nutrients I begin my efforts to finally sprout, not germinate, germination is when roots grow and I’m already far past that!

I’ve optimized for my roots to grow but not for my sprout so I’ll have to experiment again. I started with twitching. The flexing of my protostem pushes some more dirt and brings it upright but not into sunlight. I then try the mana drag method to have a point of comparison. Still wildly inefficient! Now for the precircuiting method I skip the groove, spiral, basic, and upgraded manacellerator tunnel designs and jump immediately to my nature sci fi combo. For my protostem I find that using the xylem style as the center and the phloem style as the outer is the most efficient method. 

Then essentially copy pasting my design up to expand my stem I break through into the dark of night. The dark of night? I don’t know why but for some reason I expected my triumphal arrival to the surface to bring me blessed sunlight. Oh well. Now that I know I won’t be able to taste the sun for an indeterminable amount of time I can use this night time to practice with mana again! 

Now I begin my attempts to control my mana outside of my body. My root and stem growth attempts don’t count as I was just extending my previous circuits, not any real external manipulation. So now I take a portion of my mana and try to draw a sweep of mana outside of myself. And a beautiful arc is what I achieve. Sparkling, light blue stars flow around my stem.

And then my eyes open as I realize just what I was missing. My mana sight to this point was purely internal with just a tiny amount of space around myself allowing me to identify soil contents. Now it spread my eyelids and I could see the mana flowing in the air around me, saturating the soil, the plant life, the tiny insects flitting all about, and the boar munching on a truffle 20 some odd meters away. 

This was sight! Real true sight! 

My excitement soon faded however. What was there to really describe? Grass all around, a tree over there, couple mushrooms over there, more trees, more mushrooms, a couple shrubs of different sorts (different leaf shapes), couple squirrels, birds nesting in branches, and the only large animal being the boar snacking on a couple of truffles. WOOOOoooooooooooooo…………. Forest, Yayyyyyyyyyy.

I would only be interested in this stuff if I could tell what it is. Cool the bird has blue feathers but does that matter to me? I don’t know its species name, I don’t know its flight speed, I don’t know if it eats baby trees. So what does it matter to me?

Now I need to find a way to inspect things. The system I’ve seen so far is pretty solidly based on Sword Star Realms. Especially given that I “ascended” from beating the final boss of that game. Sure there are some changes but that’s to be expected given that this is the “real” world and not a game. So talent points, something to assumably buff the residents of your world, make sense. I also have altered stat categories. This too makes sense because I’m a tree not a human. Why should a tree have a strength stat? Or stamina, agility, reflexes. or finesse stats? I don’t have muscles, I don’t have nerves, I can’t move aside from growing. But something ubiquitous and marked in lore is that every living thing can gain the appraisal skill. So going off of the logic that this world shares features with Sword Star Realms I should also be able to gain the appraisal skill.

So how should I do that? From what I’ve seen so far all of my growth has either been because I willed it, wiggling, or because I used mana. And mana has been good to me today! I already tried flowing my mana over stuff, when I made the arc of mana I swathed over some grass, so that’s not it. 

Well appraisal and inspect are pretty ubiquitous in game worlds and both usually require someone to observe something. And to observe something is to change it, thanks high school chemistry! So the next logical step is to push my mana into something and then pull it out to see if a change occurred. And it did!

The mana pulled out had the shape of the grain of dirt I pushed it into!

[ General Skill: Mana Appraisal has gained lvl 1 Rewards +1 Wisdom, +1 Magic, +1 EXP ]