It took another year before Ansie, Felix, and Sallia got their own feats. Sallia got a feat that gave her a proper 'sixth sense' while she was in combat. According to her, she took it partially out of hope it would strengthen her, and partially out of curiosity. Sallia already had exceptional senses and skill in close quarters combat, but there were still some things that she couldn't detect with her regular senses - even if Sallia could usually control the battlefield anyway through sheer skill as a swordsman. However, after a few practice fights with her parents, Sallia discovered that her new Feat, when combined with her ability to create force-field type shields and boost her stats at will, could make her dozens of times safer and stronger when she relied on it appropriately.

Sallia's words were shocking for me - not just because her new feat was good, but because Sallia's parents were fully willing to engage in practice fights with their three year old daughter. This felt totally absurd to me, since I was used to the common sense of other dimensions, where three year olds were basically expected to eat, cry, and hug their parents. However, the existence of the System in this world seemed to have an even greater impact on culture than I had expected. Children mentally matured much faster than I was used to, and parents were also more than happy to help their children train for combat or train to level up and enhance their spark.

Once I heard that, Anise and I also started engaging more with our own parents for training purposes. My father was more than happy to set up big targets made of fire and help me practice my ice manipulation, and he was also happy to give me pointers about mana manipulation and combat. Most of those pointers weren't that useful to me, since I was far older than my father and I had fought in plenty of battles on my own - but occasionally he still offered a nugget of useful insight that let me improve my mana manipulation. Anise had similar results with her own parents, especially since she didn't get a Feat that needed much in the way of training. Her Feat reduced the mana cost for creating fire from scratch by about 20%. This was quite a notable boost, since one of the biggest bottlenecks on Anise's fire creation was the cost of creating fire from nothing. Even more importantly, this Feat applied to all of Anise's spells - including the ones she had learned from outside of this dimension. This meant that Anise's fire-based spells immediately got a huge upgrade, and also became cheaper and easier to constantly use for training purposes. This, in turn, also meant that Anise's newest ability addition, which let her 'level up' her skills via Achievement input and constant practice, was getting even more use than we had anticipated, since Anise could use 20% more magic during training before she ran out of mana and had to rest. It was a massive boost that far exceeded what I had expected from this world's local System.

Felix's feat was the least impressive, since he didn't get any great options for his level 10 feat. His feat gave him an instinctive understanding of how best to physically shape wood in order to get a desirable result, without weakening the material. This wasn't a huge boost - though, on the bright side, it did work on the splinter of universal tree wood. According to Felix, his current plan was to see if he could stack a bunch of wood-carving sparks together and see if he could get six or seven similar feats before carving the splinter, in order to get a crazy powerful result.

The town continued to travel onwards for several months. We stopped twice more, but both stops, the monsters were a bit too strong for me to sneak in any kills, even with my spatial sight and extinguish. Their life force was significant enough to trying to kill a monster on my own was simply too difficult. Even so, I managed to sneak in a few assists, since I figured I might as well grab a bit of Achievement from the side.

Slaughter: Assist in killing a tundra Rhino, Assist in killing a frost serpent

Influence: Assist in defense of the town (X2)

Achievement +500, Achievement + 600, Achievement +300

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The two assists, as well as the influence Achievement, gave me a total of 1400 Achievement. Combined with the 400 Achievement I had gotten from my last four levels, my Achievement total had gone from 128,924 Achievement to 130,724 Achievement.

I had originally expected to level up from my participation in these battles, but that didn't quite work out as planned. From my lack of rewards after both fights, as well as listening in on a few conversations, I learned that sparks were not distributed the same way that Achievement was.

Achievement was typically distributed to people based on two things: who contributed the most to the fight, and who contributed at least a little bit to the fight. As long as someone helped a fight, they would always get a certain amount of Achievement, at least in the Market's System. The levels from this world's local System was different - it focused on the last hit. Furthermore, one couldn't just poke an already-dying monster in order to get some spark, which I discovered during the fight with the frost serpents. One needed to hit a certain minimum threshold of contribution to the fight - otherwise, the last hit would give nothing, and the monster's spark would be completely wasted.

I shared this information with my friends the moment I got it. I had wasted two opportunities for growth, but it wasn't that big of a deal - through my own regular training I was still growing stronger. I got five levels just through practicing ice magic.

Power: You have levelled up (X5)

Achievement +500

This brought my Achievement from 130,724 to 131,224. Before reaching level 10, I had distributed all of my stat points to [Vitality] in order to make up for the fact that I was a bit fragile and squishy by this world's standards. After level 10, I decided to focus on [Mana] instead. After all, my mana pool was a strict bottleneck on how long I could train every day. Ice magic, or other forms of magic, also stood a good chance of being useful if I took it back to the Market - and based on previous worlds, I already knew that whenever I hit certain thresholds for skill proficiency, the Market would give me a chance to bring that skill back. Increasing my practice time each day was the best way to secure more power when we returned. Sadly, despite my months of diligent training, I had yet to reach the threshold for tier 1 in my skill. I was getting close, but I would probably need another few months or perhaps another year to actually reach the next level.

However, after about a year and a few months of wandering, as usual, our town started to slow down. I had gotten used to these sudden starts and stops by now - anytime our Ember got tired, it would sit down and 'take a nap,' during which time our town was left to fend for itself. The Ember tried to find resource-rich areas to stop in, and gave our town ample time to recuperate in between each stop… but sometimes these stops were communicated well in advance with the [Priest]. Other times, they weren't, and we found ourselves stopping with little warning.

I took note of this stop for a very different reason, though. As usual, after we stopped, I started using my spatial sight to scout out our surroundings. I wanted to at least harvest a bit of extra Achievement, and if possible, I also wanted to harvest a few levels from the nearby monsters. However, when I looked at the nearest tribe of monsters, the life force of each monster was notably weaker than the last two groups of monsters we had seen. Furthermore, the monsters were moving fast, and all of them were flying. When I saw a group of fasting moving, fragile fliers, my lips curled into a grin.

The four of us had already confirmed that our training speeds weren't too different - two months of training typically gave us about one level. I got levels slightly slower, since I was higher level, but the difference wasn't very significant. In other words, if I told my father that I was level 15, and not level 10, it would definitely seem very strange unless I could find a good 'source' for these levels.

A group of fragile, fast-moving fliers was perfect for making my levels seem legitimate. If things went well, I might even get a few more real levels, and push myself from level 15 to level 20. It was finally time to launder my levels, and see what happened when I got my second Spark.

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