The next day, Derek was woken by Tanja, who’d clearly forgotten that lower-Level people still needed sleep. So did she, actually, but only for a mere second or so per day.

  Apparently, she’d grabbed some PR guy or press liaison or the like from Akashic academy to help with the plan she’d outlined yesterday.

  And, in the end, designing the press release was a matter of not even thirty minutes.

  Someone else might have wanted the public acclaim and talk about their achievement themselves … but Derek was fully on board with plan “send everyone to go bother the academies.”

  Though he did insist that it would the both The Tower and Seoul Academy who’d announce that one of their alumni had achieved what many had considered impossible, while the actual information he’d provided on the legendary starter [Classes] he hadn’t picked was being disseminated through the usual channels for such things.

  Once all that was said and done, Derek also wound up borrowing a summoning room and killing a handful of monsters he summoned himself to bring himself up to Level 10. When it came to challenging himself and fighting exotic critters, he could do that later. For right now, XP was all that mattered, so he decided to simply massacre some more Slate Golems until he hit the XP cap for them, he’d never need to fight them for any other reason, so there was no reason to go at them full-bore right now.

  And it was enough.

  So … time to go on a spending spree! Seeing as he had a legendary [Class], each [Skill] cost 5 points, and he’d gotten a total of thirty-five [Skill] points between the up-front reward for picking a [Class] and the three points per Level.

  That should have bought him seven [Skills], but with his Bloodline having gobbled up eleven of those, he could only afford to buy a grand total of four. Which ones were available, then?

  Now, which of these were the most broken?

  Derek quickly began to look through them in turn, and started mentally cataloging them.

  [Mentor Radar] was the first he dismissed. It was powerful, in fact, it was an ability of the same kind your average shounen anime protagonist had, as it let you quickly and easily find people who could teach you what you needed to know … but this was the modern world. People who could teach advertised, and those who didn’t want to could and maybe even would splatter him across the pavement if he pushed things.

  Also, he could access to all the teachers he wanted.

  [Head Start], meanwhile, essentially dumped a huge amount of knowledge into his head every time he started to study something, granting him a, well, head start into any field of study he stepped into. Useful, overpowered, and, in the grand scheme of things, overshadowed by the fact that he had enough time to learn whatever he wanted.

  Had this been the middle of the desperation of the [System’s] early days, it would have been an instant pick.

  Nowadays, not quite …

  [Mental Library], meanwhile, allowed him to “scan” any book that came within range and stick it into said library to read at his leisure. Overpowered if he were to wander around secret libraries or the like, but he wouldn’t.

  Also, e-readers existed. Also also … public libraries, academy libraries, Isaac’s libary of scientific stuff, and Viktoria’s shelves of grimoires.

  It was still a functionally unblockable information theft ability, equally at home in a studying build as it was in an espionage one, but how often was important information worth stealing put on paper anywhere he could reach? And, more importantly, did he want to go that route?

  Nah …

  Then there was the oddly named [WWTD?], which was short for “what would they do?” with the “they” in question being his “mentors.”

  In essence, it let him ask the [System] for advice, except it would give advice as though it were one of his mentors. Except Derek wasn’t quite sure he’d had any specific mentors in the way the [Skill] defined them, so that one was one more candidate for the discard pile.

  Which left him with the six [Skills] that made this choice painful.

  [Free Tuition], despite the name, involved paying mentors, by way of passively generating suitable renumeration, though the [Skill’s] description was seventy-five percent “do not fucking abuse this [Skill], here’s why trying won’t work but even so, don’t you fucking dare.”

  Eyeroll.

  Here was the thing: considering what constituted, adequte renumeration for an S-Ranker, uninflated, without favoritism, still made this a money-printing machine if either of the twins were willing to help, except it could create more than just money, but also rare reagents and the like, not to mentiont that it would let him hire truly excellent mentors which money would be insufficient to sway, thereby unlocking an entire universe of potential tutors.

  Also, Derek had to admit that the thought of being able to at least partially pay his own way was very tempting.

  Up first was [Knowledge Conversion], his very first must-pick. Long story short, it let him pretty directly turn book learning into street smarts. Strong under normal circumstances, overpowered when combined with the enhanced learning abilities that the creatively named [Lightspeed Learning] provided, which was why that [Skill] was the other must-pick. Also, that particular [Skill] turned the stuff he studied into General [Skills], which he could then raise through further study until they gained threshold bonuses and gave him actual supernatural abilities related to what he’d studied.

  Then there was [Skill Fusion], which, once again, did exactly what it said on the tin. It let him fuse learned [Skills], allowing him to quickly grow his knowledge and abilities in a larger field by studying something he’d fused into the overall [Skill].

  It also let him bundle a bunch of [Skills] he’d individually almost never used into one, making it much more realistic that he’d get them to the point where they unlocked threshold bonuses.

  Therefore, it would combo nicely with [Lightspeed Learning] … but there other tempting options.

  In the meanwhile, [Branching Capabilities] was, in many ways, the inverse of [Head Start]. Rather than magically granting him extra knowledge when he started to study, it gave him knowledge in adjacent fields of study as he got closer to mastering the something, which would seriously help him with many things, as well as help him discover new things, ancillary to what he was actually interested in.

  Because in science, knowing that something was there to be discovered was essential for actually learning about said thing.

  And then, finally, there was [Moment of Inspiration], which was very much a “get out of jail free card,” by providing inspiration if he found himself backed into a corner, which the [Skill’s] description claimed to amount to a significant, and permanent, boost to his capabilities. It was also the closest thing to a combat [Skill] the [Class] offered.

  Still, it required him to be in mortal danger and wouldn’t strengthen him directly, merely point out better ways of doing things, which required such ways to exist, without him having already discovered it on his own.

  Now, Derek was in no way under the delusion that he’d be able to figure out every way to use his abilities on his own, but at the same time, could he rely on his own incompetence in this situation?

  He wanted all of them. Hell, he wanted the ones he’d outright dismissed too … but, for obvious reasons, that wouldn’t fly.

  So, pick four [Skills] you can be happy with, greedy guts, Derek told himself.

  Okay … [Knowledge Conversion] was one, obviously, and that meant he’d also grab [Lightspeed Learning]. Which made [Skill Fusion] practically mandatory, as it would seriously help him accumulate threshold bonuses by creating a few [Skills] he’d actually level from a whole bunch of [Skills] that would ordinarily languish in the single digits.

  One choice left … gah!

  Okay, seeing as he had to cut something, [Free Tuition] was out, just out!

  So, [Branching Capabilities] or [Moment of Inspiration]. [Skill] to buff everything the [Class] was about, or an emergency life-saving measure with a guaranteed activation but potentially limited scope.

  Hamstring himself in exchange for protection, or forego said protection to stand tall and stride forward with power and purpose?

  Put like that … it was no longer that hard a choice, not when it came down to a binary choice between two very different spells.

  So Derek made his choices, and there they were.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  The fundamental bedrock of his future power.

  The catalyst that would allow him to weaponize his knowledge.

  The uniter that, now that he thought about it, would also allow him to keep his status sheet overseeable.

  And finally, the piece de resistance, the [Skill] that would let him spread out to cover all of academia and consume it to fuel his own ascension … he decided not to do the supervillain laugh at that thought, because one of his sisters would hear, and they would defintiely never let him live it down.

  Then, Derek also started moving some things around on his Status Screen, diving deeply into settings, setting things up in the best way possible. He couldn’t actually change anything in terms of actual meaning, but he could tweak the way the specific were displayed. It wasn’t like the descriptions were actually all that helpful, and he didn’t need to get hit over the head with a metric ton of information, only some of which he was going to actually need, at any given time.

  For starters, he moved the representation of his Bloodline [Skills] to the actual Bloodline, under the header of the bloodline itself.

  Then, he “unencrypted” the Aspects that lay within the Bloodline to display the actual names of the monsters and their corresponding Skills, the way they would have had he slotted the Aspects normally.

  And finally, while it wouldn’t affect him yet, he modified it to highlight increases, while tweaking the settings so that when [Skills] hit a threshold, they’d display the changes and only the changes, that way, he wouldn’t have to go searching for them and could find his gains far more quickly, though before he got either, he’d have to put in the work.

  Oh, and then he switched the sheet to use entirely Arabic numerals, rather than using the Roman ones for [Skill] Levels.

  Though somehow, removing his middle name wasn’t possible, no matter what he tried.

  All in all, his status sheet was looking great.

  Yeah, that was that.

  Now he just had to actually start using his [Skills].

  ***

  An hour later, Derek was on Mars, on a lounge chair, over a dozen cans of coke and fanta in a cooler on his right, and a pile of books that would have reached up to his waist had he been standing on his left.

  Lots and lots of reading material. He wasn’t entirely sure just why there was so much scientific literature here on fields no one in the family studied, but he guessed that Isaac had just liked to be thorough.

  Derek found himself focusing on starships, specifically, trying to see just how good “not actually magical” could be made.

  See, space was big. Very big. Light moved at nearly three hundred thousand kilometers per second, and even the closest celestial body, the moon, was more an a light second away.

  It was also a vast expanse of overlapping and interlinking gravity fields that all needed to be at least somewhat taken into account when navigating, as orbital mechanics were, to be blunt, really fucking complicated, even when just trying to move from the Earth to the Moon.

  Beyond that, there was also the issue of fighting across such distances. The sheer precision needed to hit even a target immobile relative to you, across anything even remotely resembling realistic combat distances, required precision on a scale that would allow him to poke individual molecules on the terrestrial scale.

  In other words, more maths that were only made all the more complex by the fact that both whatever ship he was on and the targert would doubtlessly be moving, with the weapon platform he might end up controlling also likely rotating in some way, making an already diabolical mathematical problem that much harder …

  Yet with all that being said, it was only maths. Mundane mathematics, that could, in theory, be done purely in one’s head, though that would obviously be beyond most “normal” people’s capabilites, and even outside of most modern humans.

  Therefore, Derek’s plan was to study all related fields, get [Skills] specific for what he needed, and then fuse those into something more general that was all about letting him do the calculations he needed.

  So, mathematics, orbital mechanics, navigation of both the stellar nad terrestiral variety, three different kinds of engineering, and even strategies for mental calculations, which led him down a rabbit hole that ended with him discovering that Adam Riese, a man whom he had believed to be entirely proverbial, was actually the medieval father of much of modern mathematics.

  Then, after that was done, he decided to pivot to learning more space-related things, purely to make sure that they’d wind up coloring the resultant [Skill].

  By the time he felt he was ready, night had fallen, and Derek was mentally debating whether an taking an arctic shower or downing an entire liter of espresso was the superior choice for waking himself up, but he was ready.

  So he threw all the that he had gathered at [Skill Fusion], and the [Skill] he got in exchange was, drumroll please …

  Firstly … the [System] apparently liked puns.

  Secondly, it had worked.

  Thirdly … using the [Skill] gave him a headache after ten minutes of continuous use, as he found out after grabbing his phone and pulling out the practice version of one of the naval academy’s entrance exams, namely, the one meant for people at the second Evolution and above and had applicable [Skills] already.

  Derek rubbed his temples. It might be that the [Skill] was too low-Level, or perhaps his Stats were insufficient for indefinite use, but he had ways to change both of those, and that no doubt temporary issue did absolutely nothing to change the fact that he’d created a [Skill] that let him do maths in his head that would normally require either a computer, specialized [Skills] held by navigators or tactical officers on starships, or a Stats only found in people well above Level 100, who had the raw mental speed to brute force the issue.

  Also, it was entirely possible he’d overdone it, biting off more than he could chew with that exam. And he certainly didn’t have sufficient control over his own body to manually aim weapons across the distances typical in space, so he’d have to use a computer as an intermediary.

  But it had worked.

  A new [Skill], which let him do things that were superhuman in the most literal sense, had been acquired without needing to spend points, or paying someone to teach it to him, though as far as Derek knew, there wasn’t someone actually capable of imparting the specific ability he’d gotten.

  What else could he … that particular train of thought was cut off by an absolutely massive yawn.

  Urgh.

  Yep, whatever his limits were, he’d have to find that out tomorrow …

  ***

  It was around noon the next day that Derek made his next breakthrough, with an orb of light hovering above his right palm. Not one conjured with a [Skill], not one born of an Aspect, but something whose method of creation was spelled out in the book currently open across his knees, pages covered in dense and complex skript.

  A grimoire of magic.

  Derek took a second to think about about whether or not his sisters were within earshot, decided they almost certainly weren’t, and threw his head back to unleas his best mad scientist cackle.

  MWHAHAHAHAHA!

  He could learn spells from books! With his starter [Class], no less.

  Mages normally managed that trick around the second or even third Evolution … however, the magic users in question were typically a decade younger than him.

  But it was still a worthwhile bargain in Derek’s mind, considering all the [Skill] points he wouldn’t have to spend on spells so he could “get a feel for the magic.”

  And he’d even gotten a [Skill] for it.

  So, how many books of magic in here held spells he could actually use?

  How about he spend the next week finding out?

  ***

  Halfway through said week, Derek’s phone rang, and he promptly picked up.

  “Hey Tanja, what’s up?” he asked cheerfully.

  “Isaac’s back,” she said. “And he’s got news.”