Chapter 22: Rainy Days (2)

Seth was spellbound by his new skill, despite his exhaustion! He sat down right then and there wanting to test it!

Seth was enraptured by the tiny pale blue flame emerging from his fingertips, after he concentrated on <Fire Manipulation> It resembled those viral videos of people burning gas or lighter fluid on their clothes without anything happening to them!

The fire was not big, but Seth could feel a certain assertiveness from the small blue flame. It moved more or less as he wished it, like a limb with a small delay!

Although Seth found <Fire Manipulation> in his skill window and the description sounded like an active skill, it was called an "Ability"?

Abilities had not been part of the tutorial so Seth didn't know! Fortunately, it was not hard to find out the difference between an ability and a skill. When Seth concentrated on "Ability" in his skill window a tool tip opened.

To sum it up, the difference between an ability and a skill was that it had aspects of both and active and a passive skill so the resource consumption could fluctuate wildly. Also, it did not consume mana. While active skills consumed mana, abilities used the user's mental strength to work.

At this point Seth did not really know what exactly it meant by mental strength, since there was no bar for it in his status. Of course, he could roughly guess that it had something to with his concentration.

From what he could infer at this point abilities seemed a lot vaguer in general than skills. On the other hand, they had a greater potential or versatility.

Sitting in a dark room filled with all kinds of iron ingots Seth was playing with the small blue flame, watching his jump across his fingertips like an illusionist playing with a coin. After reading many novels and playing lots of games, he had never expected it to feel like this. It was no dead ability to throw around and be cool with like in that one TV-show about bending elements. The little flames felt almost like a warm little fiend.

He sat there for quite a while until-

<Ding! Ability: Fire Manipulation lv.1 had become Fire Manipulation lv.2.>

The notification finally snapped him out of his trance. At this point he felt tired, mentally and physically fatigued.

Looking outside the window nothing had changed. Seth could barely make out anything of the city.

At this point he thought, that maybe he should have left the very first day it started to rain like this. But then what? He had a lot of excuses for not leaving, but in the end, he just wasn't able to decide until it had been too late. Going out in this kind of weather was pretty much suicide at this point.

Seth wasn't really much into voluntary death. All he could do now was to stay here and wait it out.

With this thought he went to sleep.

-Starta-

"What's with this rain!?", Wilton screamed as he rushed into the priest's office.

The hunter had been back to patrolling the edge of the dark woods after reporting the last time. The fence had been fixed, and he was on regular duty when the rain started. It had taken him two whole days to fight his way back to Starta village.

The plains were slowly drowning and the water actually stood up to his waist, when he finally managed to cross the city gate. Inside the village was dry, it was shielded by a bowl-shaped force field that kept the masses of water out!

Wilton had become angrier and angrier on his journey, the worse the weather and terrain got. Nobody had warned HIM about this! He was so upset that he was grabbing the priest's collar, lifting the rotund man off the ground!

"Wilton! Calm down! What happened that enraged you so much?", Simon the Priest of the System held onto the hunter's wrist to try and regain contact with the floor.

"What enraged me? What ENRAGED me?! Maybe the two days I spend wading through the swamp outside to get here? Maybe the fact that I almost drowned and swept into the dark woods when a small rivulet swelled into a raging current in a matter of seconds? Or maybe the fact that you did not tell be about the rain beforehand!? Choose one, all of them are correct!", Wilton roared as he kept shaking the priest with every syllable.

"Wil-ton! Ple-ea-ease sto-op sha-ay-shaking me! Thanks!", Simon said and adjusted his robe after being let of.

"We didn't expect it to come so early, ok? I would have told you to stay in town during your next report.", the priest explained belatedly.

The hunter sighed. He felt a lot better after whirling around the priest, the target of all his recent negative emotions, like a rag doll.

"So?", Wilton asked.

"So what?", Simon looked confused.

"Why are we here when you knew about this rain? The whole plains are flooded. If this keeps going the town will drown too."

Hehe, the priest had a mischievous smile on his face before he sat down at his desk and pulled out the fat folder.

"After torrential rainfalls than can keep going for up to three weeks the plains will be flooded and form a lake. It´s part of the changed climate in this world. It takes about a week for this lake to be drained away. Once it´s gone, these plains will be filled with extremely fertile alluvial deposit. It will be perfect for farming crops! It just came a little early this time. I'm really sorry Wilton."

"So, this will still keep going for more than three weeks?", Wilton looked up to the field that kept water out of the village, "How high will it rise until then...?"

-Deltan-

Seth woke up to the already familiar sound of rain hammering on the roof. He stretched out and went to the kitchen for breakfast. "Rationing" went very well.

He left his suite and went to collect all the iron ingots he had made into his inventory. He did the smelting somewhere else because of the heaps of scrap he had to melt in. Now that everything was turned into neat and convenient ingots, Seth didn't want to leave his home to forge.

Seth set up the complete Spirit Smithy in a dedicated room and stacked all the ingots to the side.

The rain still held him captive, so it was time to use his consolidated resources to finally grind the blacksmith skill.

<Blacksmith> was the main skill of his class, so it was a shame to have it lagging behind!

Seth wanted to try bigger and more complex weapons. Instead of going with quantity like he did at the start, he wanted to try quality this time. He had a hunch that making a diverse array of sophisticated and demanding weapons would get him more experience in the long run.

Even if he failed, he could always just re-smelt the scrap!

Seth´s method was to start off by choosing the blueprint of a weapon and get used to the process of the weapon first. Then proceed by using the free mode to make the weapon and farm experience that way!

Seth wanted to start slow and chose something smaller. It was an axe head made of medium iron. He wanted to save the medium steel for a higher skill level, or maybe even for after the rank up, if possible!

This time, opposite to when he was still at home, he had a lot of wood he had gathered from around the house. Stuff like bedposts and baluster made of thick wood for example.

Like this he could make an item, but also save some of his metal.

Seth started working and meticulously followed the instructions of the system guidance. He forged a rough axe head from a whole ingot and continued with punching a hole for the shaft. After forging it into its more refined final shape came the quenching in the water of Styx.

He still had no idea what exactly changed with it become the water of Styx, but sometimes the water felt warmer and sometimes colder. Maybe it helped raising the chance of the quench succeeding?

The first attempt failed as it developed a crack during the quench. It made him doubt his guess.

Seth still got about 7% skill proficiency from this failed attempt! He saw this as a confirmation that new things would initially give more experience. So, making and mastering the production of various weapons was the right choice.

And this was his new routine from then on. He made several axes under the guidance of the system, from forging the head to shaping the handle. Seth did this until he got the process down and managed to make an axe close to optimum parameters. Then he started over, making axes in Free Mode until he was good enough to get a similar result.

When forging he forgot the world around him and was fully focused on his work and even subconsciously started to manipulate the flame in the forge to help his work.

When Seth had mastered the axe, he had reached <Blacksmith (Beginner) lv.9 (12%)>.

It was already deep in the night when he was satisfied and stopped. Seth had not noticed that he had worked for two days straight, but he had a tremendous hunger and thirst.

For now, he left everything where it was and satisfied his stomachs demand, before falling into a very deep and pleasant sleep.