The first thing that Merrick did upon locating a suitable seat near the fire was unbutton his cloak and let it fall off his shoulders and pool around him.

  As nice as the material was, he found that it caused him to sweat a bit more than he’d appreciate when he was active and couldn’t imagine it wouldn’t do the same while sitting in close proximity to a roaring flame.

  It was a good thing that his sweat seemed to slide right off of the slick interior of the cloak or he’d likely end up having to wash it frequently.

  Next, he slowly peeled off his ridiculously colorful snakeskin boots and gently set them down. He pointedly ignored the snickering from the other restless caravan members loitering about and grabbed at his foot to pull it closer to his face.

  Thankfully, in addition to making it easier to observe his pores his actions had the added effect of causing the snickering to stop and motivating others to advert their eyes away from him.

  Nobody wanted to make eye contact with a crazy, lest they get pulled into the whirlpool of madness or illicit a negative response.

  “My pores seem normal, not even slightly enlarged. A closer look is required,” Merrick said as he removed his satchel from his shoulder and started rooting around in it.

  Though he’d forgotten to transfer his notebooks back to the smaller bad, he hadn’t forgotten the magnifying glass he pilfered from the dungeon’s alchemy workshop.

  Specifically, the magnifying glass had never even been removed from the bag during the transfer for fear that the delicate glass would get shattered by the heavier tools in the bag.

  He hadn’t even owned a magnifying glass of his own previously and was excited to play around with a dungeon fabricated version.

  The few people nearby who’d been making a point not to look at Merrick after he snatched his foot toward his face made themselves scarce quickly when he pulled out a tool to get an even closer look.

  The pores on his foot were amplified in his vision several times over, allowing him a far more intimate look at his skin than he’d ever taken before.

  He tried to ignore the gross crud he could see building up from his time in the dungeon with no shoes.

  Obviously, that was where the filth was from, it wasn’t because he hadn’t taken a proper bath in weeks prior. He’d also, obviously, always done his due duty when it came to properly scrubbing his feet.

  He’d never ignore them because ‘they’d just get dirty again since they walk directly on the dirt’ or say that ‘the soap runs down over them anyways; I don’t need to specifically scrub them’.

  That’d be filthy behavior from an uncivilized savage.

  He made a note to be more dutiful in his bathing habits after the caravaning finished.

  Ignoring the clogged pores and other debris, he noticed that there seemed to be little hairs growing out of each and every one of his pores. Considering that they weren’t visible to his naked eyes and he’d never taken a close look at his own feet before, he wondered if that wasn’t normal.

  “Should I ask someone else to let me look at their feet?” Merrick wondered before striking the thought. He didn’t know anyone present well enough for that he didn’t want them to start thinking he was a deviant. Jasmine’s carriage driver might just disappear him during one of his forest night walks.

  Instead, he took a look at the palm of his hands using the magnifying glass and discovered the very same tiny little hairs living in his pores. He was unable to check the top of his foot due to inflexibility, but the back of his hands didn’t show the same hairs in his pores.

  Only the standard hair follicles he’d expect to see growing, with a completely different color, size, and apparent texture were located anywhere but the insides of his hands and bottom of his feet. At least, as far as he could tell.

  Perhaps his face was now covered in micro hair too.

  That’d be nice, especially if it prevented his beard from growing in. He’d love nothing more than to save time shaving every day.

  Merrick feared making a note about his changed status until he was in an area more private with the capability to store his journals away from prying eyes.

  After his experiences with the dungeon kidnapping him and the guards searching for him with the aid of Mary, he worried that he might have painted a target on his back with his freedom of information.

  He’d spent years giving out details about his skill to just about anyone who asked and submitted monthly inquiries for investigations about the various terms that appeared in his [Status Log] with the Scholars’ Guild, just trying to figure out how to utilize his innate skill.

  That habit of transparency had quickly painted a target on his back after he finally figured out how to [Merge] items.

  Merrick blinked slowly as he mulled over the thought.

  It’d taken him less than a day to gather the attention of a Dungeon, or whatever entity managed it, and the Steelhearth Guard.

  “It’s a really good thing I was already planning on skipping town,” he mumbled to himself before internally adding, ‘and didn’t get stuck in that dungeon for any longer than he had’. The latter part of his sentence was far too sensitive to be spoken aloud.

  He’d damn near missed his opportunity to portal out of Steelhearth and he had no desire to figure out why exactly the guards were interested in him.

  With his pores mutation temporarily figured out, in the sense that he’d physically located the mutation but was unable to figure out its function, Merrick moved on to a few of the other new entries in his [Status].

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The new section of Mutations had been what popped out to him the most but there were several other mildly concerning updates to his [Status] that he hadn’t known were really possible.

  The first and foremost was that his Level had increased once more, from 2 to 3.

  It was odd enough that he’d managed to get to Level 2 without ever accepting a Class since the widely accepted doctrine was that one generally needed a Class to begin leveling at all.

  Levels themselves were still technically an unknown, with the ‘Theory of Levels’ being taught in schools and called as such due to its impossibility to prove.

  The theory taught that a ‘Level’ was just how the [Status] quantified one’s ability to impress their will upon reality. A common example would be an Ice Mage and a Fire Mage both trying to establish a domain in the same area.

  The one with a higher Level would almost always be able to eke out a victory over their opponent due to their will being qualitatively stronger. Of course, factors like equipment and even environmental factors could easily change the victor of that competition.

  In a vacuum though, Levels were what mattered for contests of will and works of magic.

  Going up in Levels was usually associated with growing one’s core skills and capabilities, a swordsman would find that his level increased as he slayed more monsters and perfected his blade craft just as a Cook would see improvements as their foods more efficiently processed monstrous mana into buffs for their customers.

  Without a class, there shouldn’t have been a way to increase one’s level. At least, not without consuming some natural treasure or undergoing some fancy ritual for nobles or another.

  No amount of practice in blades, cooking, or magic should allow that number to go up in his [Status]. A lack of a class meant he had no metaphorical sword to sharpen with his practice.

  Of course, Innate Skills and Innate Abilities had a tendency to break most conventional theories.

  It was something to keep his eye on since he was unable to access any of the classes that had been offered to him in the dungeon. Unless he was offered something of a similar quality or function to [Anima Channeler] he couldn’t really see himself accepting a class anytime soon.

  He also didn’t intend on solo clearing any dungeons any time soon, so he doubted he’d manage to accomplish anything that would qualify him to such a reward.

  Increasing his level in the interim could help for him to resist effects like charisma based influence skills, mental suggestions, and other ailments like side-effects from his potioneering experiments.

  Thinking of [Potioneering], Merrick was pleased to see the skill had increased in level alongside [Quick Math], [Channel Magicka], and his other plant harvest related skills alongside others.

  The most interesting one there was certainly [Channel Magicka] as he certainly hadn’t been channeling his magicka around his body while conducting [Merge]s in the dungeon. He’d been utilizing his invisible resource pool, which he was fairly confident at was Anima by that point. There must have been some level of overlap for it to have triggered a level, perhaps because he didn’t have a [Channel Anima] skill.

  Moving on to the changes to his Innate Ability and the associated Innate skills he observed that his skill had changed names once again.

  ‘v1.2,’ he wrote in his notebook, comfortable that nobody would be able to decipher what it meant.

  Below that he wrote ‘Firewall’ and ‘CJR GB’, which was short for [Conjure Goodberry].

  Like most of his innate ability, the word Firewall meant nothing to Merrick. He knew there was a spell called Flamewall but attempting to access the knowledge that would have been granted alongside a new innate skill yielded him nothing. No wall of fire popped into existence in front of him and no feedback was returned.

  A quick glance at his [Skill Log] showed there were no errors there either. In fact, the entire [Skill Log] seemed to have once again cleared itself out of any messages outside of [Merge] results. All the strange error messages had vanished.

  “Should have written those down,” he complained as he wrote a paraphrased version of what he could remember in shorthand. If he intentionally made his handwriting even more sloppy than normal to add another layer of obfuscation to the journal entry… well, nobody would be able to prove so.

  Merrick moved on to the final modification of his [Status].

  An entry tacked under his Innate Ability but not combined with his Innate Skills.

  He was confused about why his status had elected to organize it so. Doubly so when he considered that it had tacked the new ‘Firewall’ to the innate skills section.

  If anything, the entry should have automatically grouped itself into the Spells category considering the fact that it had the skill prefix of ‘Conjure’ that he was fairly confident was associated with magic.

  Merrick mentally prodded the skill and, unlike with [Firewall], he could feel that there was some level of underlying knowledge that had been granted to him with the skill.

  It felt different than any other spell he’d cast before, utilizing magicka channels that he didn’t even recognize in his own body.

  He allowed his mind to bask in the sensation of the ability as he mentally traced the paths the energy would take if he activated it and was surprised to see that less than 10% of the channels that the ability would utilize were ones that he’d used before.

  Assuming it must just be another idiosyncrasy of innate abilities, Merrick decided to activate the ability while mentally tracing the channels it’d use to research later.

  “Uck!” Merrick was thankful that he was sitting down as he nearly keeled over into the flame from the sudden sensation of energy being sucked out of him.

  Not magicka like he’d assumed, but the same energy that his innate skill [Merge] used.

  A chunk as large as he’d used to do the later merges for the plants back in the dungeon surged out of him and blazed through the unfamiliar channels that he was coming to accept weren’t in fact magicka channels.

  In fact, they weren’t channels at all until the energy blazed through them and carved them into his metaphysical body. The burning sensation was clearly reminiscent of the experience of opening his magicka channels for the first time, if not tens of times more painful.

  Much like learning to cast magic, Merrick assumed that the pain would fade in time as the channels were carved into his spirit.

  He was so absorbed in the painful sensation that he hadn’t realized that the goodberry had conjured directly into his hand. The hand that he reflexively closed into a fist due to channel-carving induced muscle spasms.

  Another sensation shot through his body as he felt energy entering his hand and traveling through his channels toward his core. It was unlike anything he’d ever felt, as if someone were pushing a cold stream up his veins against the current and formed a stark contrast to the flaming sensation of fresh channels being carved into him.

  Unfortunately, whatever he’d just absorbed from the goodberry seemed to be physical and the channels were metaphysical so they did not interact and cancel each other out.

  It was so startling that Merrick dropped the now pulped goodberry and pushed himself away from the fire, attempting to get distance from the flame to try and reduce the overstimulation he was suffering form.

  Naturally, he ended up kicking the freshly conjured and yet supremely squashed goodberry toward the nearby fire as he scrambled backwards.

  The berry went up in flames, releasing a pleasantly strong medicinal smell into the surrounding area as even more potent energy began traveling up through his feet toward his core.

  Merrick curled into a ball and waited for the sensations to fade away as the freezing cold energy traveled past his groin in search of the various organs that processed energies before adding them to his variety of energy pools, letting out a whimper and wishing he’d stayed close to the campfire.