Blake stared down at a hole in the ground. It was approximatley three meters across and had two rabbicorns hopping around it. This was the regions rabbicorn den. It was not his first time seeing it, it took less than a week to locate, but this was his first time doing so with the intention of scouting.

  It had been month since first arriving in the medium region. During this time Blake ramped up his training to push his stats as high as possible, as fast as possible. Every day he pushed his training to the limit. This meant a combination of meditation, Strength training, and beating himself up throughout the day.

  Despite the potential dangers, Blake kept a constant state of meditiation going all day long. This left him less aware of his normal senses since despite all his practice it still wasn’t easy, but his Affinity was growing faster than ever before.

  Of all his stats, Constitution was growing the fastest. Unlike with the others, Constitution had three avenues of growth that were only a mild struggle to push to the point of cooldown. He let rabbicorns attack him for physical resilience, ate raw meat left in the sun for days for his immune system, and never stopped moving between sun up and sun down to strain his endurance.

  As his Affinity grew Blake was able to keep better track of his stats and their relative values. Because of this, he knew that his Constitution was nearing its next threshold. It would take only a week or two more to hit it. Unfortuntately the rest of his unlocked stats were at least a month away.

  Blake was debating whether or not to clear the den out before or after his unlocked stats reached the second threshold. On the one hand waiting was the safest course of action. By his estimates the second threshold representive somewhere between a 25 and 50 percent increase.

  It was a struggle to get an exact number of the chains. Strength, which he used to determine stat growth, didn’t seem to start at what he would consider zero. For example, for the Strength stat, the pull the chain applied to Blake only started to decrease after he was able to exert what he would consider supernatural strength.

  This led him to believe that it was based off his natural potential and it was only by breaking the bonds of natural reality that he could ascend. The question was; what were the normal limits of humanity? Without that refrence point he could only make a rough estimate as to the threshold limits.

  The reason Blake was considering attacking the rabbicorns prior to maxing out his stats was because of a discovery, or rather two discoveries, he had made that should have been obvious in hindsight. His Affinity had improved in leaps and bounds, it was a close second to Constitution in terms of growth, and with it came insight into his growth.

  Despite constant meditation Blake still couldn’t identify the remaining stats but he was able to get a much more accurate reading of their growth than before. His unlocked stats were more clear but his mental view of the locked stats was enough for now.

  Of course, this only applied to the two stats he was able to isolate, the remaining body and spirit stats. There were at least two mind stats remaining and Blake was unable to untangle them.

  Constant meditation meant that Blake always had at least a hint of his attention on his stats so he noticed when the stats began to vary what was, at least from his point of view at the time, randomly.

  Part of Blake’s stay in the medium region had been spent marking the borders. He had never marked the borders of any regions except where two low regions met up. This had been a safety precaution that he threw out the window as his confidence in fighting rabbicorns grew. He never spent time in the high and peak regions he found but he marked the medium regions borders with them.

  While doing this he noticed that the speed his locked stats grew dropped when in the low region. Since Blake didn’t know how to train them they were already growing at an infitesimel pace but they became even slower when in the low regions.

  While he could only train past the first threshold while in a medium or higher region that didn’t mean there were no benefits to stats below that threshold. It turned out he could speed up his training by training in a higher region.

  This was the first discovery he made that led Blake to consider attacking the den earlier than he had originally planned. He had all but given up on reaching tier 3 by the time his first year in the spirit realm was done.

  Blake didn’t have a good read on how much time had passed but it had been at least four months and he wouldn’t be surprised if it was passed six. He had only recently figured out a way to ascend and it was too time-consuming to ascend even one realm within a year let alone three. But things were different now.

  A lot of the initial time it had taken to reach the first threshold was do to not having even reached the maximum potential of a natural human. Now that he had done that he believed that training in the next realm could occur much faster.

  On top of that, he had already learned how to make and collect tools and weapons. That would save him a lot of time. He would still want to recraft most of his gear after each realm since Talents got stronger with each tier allowing his passive craft boost to strengthen everything more.

  That would still mean cutting out the first few months of his time in the spirit realm. Blake had experienced large delays in his growth because he had needed to grow strong enough to make stone tools. After making stone tools and having glue moving into using beast parts, specifically rabbicorn horns, had been easy while providing a sizable boost to the strength of his equipment.

  Blake would also be faster since he would not need to deal with learning to fight in the first place. He would still train and get better at fighting but that could be done directly through combat, killing monsters, and gathering better and better supplies for crafting.

  There was another factor to the higher realms that Blake hadn’t needed to consider since he hadn’t believed he could make it. Higher realms had a time dilation to them. They moved faster than Earth. Time moved the same in tier 0 realms as on Earth but after that, each tier doubled the speed of time.

  For tier 1 realms every 2 minutes there was a minute on Earth. Tier 2 would be 4 and tier 3 would be 8. That meant that even though half his available time had likely passed that wasn’t the whole picture. Blake would have a similar if not more time with each tier he reached.

  All this wouldn’t matter if he didn’t have a way to speed up his stat development. That would be the real limiter to his progression. Even if he could wipe out everything in a realm that didn’t help if he was stuck waiting for his training cooldowns. That’s why discovering that higher-density regions sped up growth was so important.

  There would still be a limit to how fast he could grow but if he could push himself to a peak density zone he could speed up his stat growth many times over. There was now something tangible Blake could do to improve the speed of his ascension. It didn’t stop there.

  Discovering that higher regions improved the speed of stat growth while important for planning the future it did not provide the immediate benefits he was looking for. Blake dedicated himself to finding more and better ways to train his stats. Every action he took was analyzed for potential training. Did his stats grow faster with that movement? Slower?

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  Blake no longer required meditation to sense if his unlocked stats were growing but he was meditating anyway to speed up his Affinity so he noticed even the slightest improvement which was why only a couple days ago he identified another way to increase his stat growth across the board.

  It took longer to identify not because the increased growth was smaller than crossing over to a higher region but because he had to do so while fighting. Blake was constantly working on meditating on some level. He had reached a point where he could keep a steady enough state of mind that he could be considered meditating even while walking and not lose sight of his surroundings.

  Being able to more safely meditate while moving was a major accomplishment for Blake. He had been forced to way saftey and growth before he was able to do that. He didn’t stop there though. It was even more dangerous to try and meditate while fighting but he tried anyway.

  Blake was confident in his ability to face rabbicorns and felt no fear when trying to meditate while doing so. The problem for the longest time wasn’t keeping his focus on the fight while meditating, no he didn’t even reach that point. The struggle for Blake was meditating in the first place.

  Meditation took a level of calm focus that he could not seem to reach while fighting. He had only recently been forzen with fright, unable to think at all at the sight of a rabbicorn so it was understandable but it bugged Blake. Keeping his thoughts and feelings under control while dodging a charging rabbicorn was no easy feat.

  It didn’t help that Blake had found a way to fight multiple rabbicorns at a time and did his best to do so at any opportunity. For the most part, the rabbicorns spread out when not in the den but they did stay closer together the closer to the den you got. Blake used this to gather multiple rabbicorns together before fighting back.

  Fighting multiple rabbicorns at a time was an interesting experience for Blake. He had not started trying to meditate during combat when he first did this so he was fully focused on the fight but he still struggled to keep track of both rabbicorns at a time.

  His goal was to practice dodging and battle field awareness while integrating them with his basic spear skills. During that first fight he only brought two of them together but one still nicked his leg. It was barely a scratch but it was the first injury a rabbicorn had landed on him since the very first one.

  He didn’t even notice it until after the fight but Blake was still almost sent into a panic attack after realizing one had tagged him. His extensive meditation training kicked in and helped him regain control. It was not something he wanted to keep dealing with but at least it had been decent practice for his Will stat.

  Realizing that repeated trauma was the fastest way to increase his Will was not something Blake wanted to acknoledge. Dealing with his arrival in the spirit realm had gotten him to the first threshold but it was hard to say it was worth it.

  Twice more he took damage as Blake practiced taking on multiple rabbicorn at a time. Each time he took on a bigger group was a new experience. He never was able to gather a group larger than five but the pressure from that fight was enough that he felt his skills congeal.

  It was strange. Blake had been in the middle of his first five rabbicorn fights. He was pressed to keep track of everything around him, he was trying to meditate, and he was struggling to find the opportunity to attack. The different skills he had gained from his Talent were fighting against each other, each was an instinct with its own idea of how to react. Then from one moment to the next everything clicked together.

  Where before there had been conflicting signals from his skills now there was a smooth translation from one to another on how to act. Meditation wasn’t a skill from his Talent so working with it was still troublesome but Blake suspected that it was responsible for making everything work together in the first place. He had unlocked a new stat after that after all.

  The stat was related to how smart he was. That wasn’t exactly right but it was the best way to describe it. Blakes mind felt more flexible, like he wouldn’t discount information he was given should it not match his preconcieved ideas. He could hold more ideas in his head at once. It wasn’t true multitasking but being able to compare four or five pieces of information at once instead of two made drawing a conclusion much easier and more accurate.

  He decided to call the stat Alacrity. He could have gone with Intelligence like in many video games but he felt that that had too many conentations that were not accurate. His increased Alacrity did not make him inherintly smarter, it just meant he had the potential to be.

  Since he was already in a medium region Alacrity never stopped improving even after reaching the first threshold. It did slow down by a significant degree. Knowing what the stat was allowed Blake to target its growth by trying to be more intentional in his analysis of things. It wasn’t much but it helped.

  After that fighting groups got easier and he eventually managed to meditate through a whole fight which is when he noticed that his stats jumped after killing an enemy. The diffence was small, maybe a half percent of what was needed to the second threshold but it was another opportunity to speed up his growth.

  To test exactly what was happening he killed a rabbicorn in the low regions and then one in the medium region he was working out of. The strength of the rabbicorn showed a direct correlation to stat growth. He now had a path that allowed him to speed up his stat growth to a theoretically infinite degree, he just needed enough enemies to kill.

  He also sensed it influenced his training cooldowns in some ways but he failed to figure out how. Knowing that killing monsters, especially stronger monsters, provided him with even further growth than just regular training in a higher region was why he decided to attack the rabbicorn den early.

  It wouldn’t be today, he still had preparations to make, but it would be soon. Killing the sub-boss of the region would hopefully provide him a larger boost to his stats. Once he had cleared the den he would create a base around it. If he could keep control of the area he could farm the monsters that spawned there for stats.

  Monster spawn locations were not exactly the same everytime but they would be generally in the same area. Part of his preperations the last month had been marking out where some of them came into existance so that he could optimize his time.

  If he could control the den, the location of many rabbicorn spawns including the sub-boss, he would have a steady stream of enemies to fight. It would speed up his growth and help refine his combat skills. Once it was secured he could then begin working in a high-density region.

  How well he handled the sub-boss would be the determining factor on how long Blake decided to wait before moving on. The sub-boss would be individually stronger than anything in the high density regions, they didn’t have boss type monsters, but monsters in high regions started to hunt in pairs and triplets.

  Once he was comfortable fighting in the high region he could quickly move on to a peak region where he could maximize the speed of his growth. He might not even reach that point before being able to ascend.

  Blake couldn’t tell for certain but he felt that he was close to being able to forcibly ascend. Each stat that reached a threshold provided him with support to push through. He suspected that unlocking the remaining three stats would do it but even getting some of his already unlocked stats to the next threshold might help.

  He had yet to reach the second threshold in any stats so he couldn’t be certain it would provide another bump to the support he got to help ascend but he hoped it did, he was much closer getting his main stats to the second threshold than he was unlocking the last three.

  Before getting to into planning his assualt Blake wrote out what stats he knew about as a reminder. His memory was good enough to never really forget but there was something about writing it out that made it easier to think through.

  Body

  Strength - 6 weeks

  Constitution - 2 weeks

  Unknown(Control?) - Soon

  Mind

  Memory - 3 months

  Alacrity - Unknown

  Unknown(Speed of thought?) - Soon

  Spirit

  Affinity - 3 weeks

  Will - Unknown

  Unknown - Who the heck knows

  He had three unknown stats but had theories for two of them. His attempts at training them suggested he was on the right path. Blake also wrote down how long he thought it would take to reach the next threshold in each stat.

  The third spirit stat was the real mystery to Blake. It had barely budged and he had no hint as to what it could possibly be. The only improvement he had seen it make was from killing monsters and he was almost positive that was more because of a boost provided to all stats rather than something about the nature of the third spirit stat.

  In the end, there was nothing he could do to find out the third stat but hope that increasing his Affinity would help or that he would stumble on its purpose while working towards his other goals.

  For now, it was time to plan out the specifics of his attack on the rabbicorn den.

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