6 Acquiring Skills

As it turned out, I was right to give myself more time to work on skills compared to the time I had allotted myself for arts. Even my plan to attain a few basic skills like Magic Sense and Thought Acceleration proved to be more challenging than I would have anticipated. My main problem was finding a starting point to acquire the skills. Whereas there was a somewhat clear and linear path I would need to progress with arts, things were much less clear with skills.

Of course, I knew I would somehow have to boost my thought process to attain Thought Acceleration since it was the first skill I decided to go for, but there was no clear way for me to do this. The best I could think of was meditating and somehow trying to force my brain to work faster. However, that was much easier said than done. I spent weeks sitting and trying out different techniques I thought up to try and increase my processing speed. To my great annoyance, that turned out to be a massive waste of time.

I was forced to think outside the box and start exploring different avenues to solve my problem. This led me to consider trying to learn and use a form of self-hypnosis through mental magic to try and force my brain to work faster, but I quickly dismissed that idea since it was terrible. There were certainly uses for self-hypnosis, but I couldn't force my brain to do something it didn't know how to do just by using hypnosis.

Eventually, the plan I landed on was to try and force my reflexes and quick mental reaction speed to improve by having my attendants randomly throw things at me at any time of day and in any place. I felt this idea was fairly stupid, but after days of consideration, I felt that it would be a start, at least while I brainstormed better ideas. So, I gave my attendants some acorns and told them to throw them at me randomly as part of a 'training exercise' my father had assigned to me. 

Evoking my father's name was enough to break through their deeply entrenched stigma not to harm me since I am a High Elf and they are normal elves, and we began the training. At first, I got hit almost every time they threw things at me since I was purposely not putting my guard up, which would ruin the whole point of the exercise. However, over time I slowly started to improve, noticing that this was actually a good excersie for training in general, not just to gain Thought Acceleration.

While the training served to increase my reaction speed and battle awareness to a lesser degree, it didn't do much else. Luckily, seeing the fact that this training most likely wouldn't yield satisfactory results early on, I also began to employ a more direct method to improve my mental processing speed. I found that flooding my mind with mana resulted in a small boost to my mental processing speed, so I worked to develop a spell to enhance this effect. 

Since raw mana already gave a small boost, it only took me around a day to fashion a spell that boosted my mind by a factor of ten. When activated there was an odd feeling of sluggishness as time seemed to slow around me. My body was not excluded from this effect, only my mind. I was ecstatic to find that the spell had worked, so to train my mind and hopefully unlock the skill, I tried to use the spell as often as possible to let my mind adapt and adjust. 

What I didn't anticipate was the splitting headaches and torrential nosebleeds that would result from the overuse of the spell at the beginning. However, they slowed as the months passed, and I was better able to handle the effects of the spell on my mind. Once I reached the point of having virtually no side effects from the spell, I suddenly heard an emotionless voice emanating from within my mind. I quickly recognized it as The Voice of the World from Tensura, so I stopped where I stood, dropping everything I was doing and listening.

[Skill: Thought Acceleration acquired]

I grinned foolishly, causing the people around me in the forest to give me some odd looks. I had been out walking the perimeter of the spirit tree when the announcement was made to me. Since nobody else could hear the voice, all they saw was me pause for a few seconds, then grin like an idiot. However, other people's thoughts of me were the furthest thing from my mind at that moment. 

I quickly slipped in and out of accelerated thought instantaneously with only a brief mental activation. I then tried to stack the buff to my enhanced thoughts by layering my spell over my new skill, but that didn't work, so I abandoned the spell then and there since it had now become obsolete. 

. . .

A while later, I sat in bed, considering what skill to go for next and then what Unique Skill to try to assemble through its component Extra Skills. Even as I began to ponder what to acquire next, I already knew it had to be Magic Sense since it was just such a handy skill in almost any situation. It would make it so that nobody could ever sneak up on me and would give me 360-degree vision. After deciding on Magic Sense, I considered Unique Skills with only a few subskills to aim for afterward.

Immediately, skills like Degenerate, Creator, and Usurper came to mind since they all have two subskills and are incredibly useful. The problem was that for all three, there was basically no way for me to gain any of the subskills since they were all hundreds of times more complicated than Thought Acceleration. There was practically a 0% chance that I could gain any of these skills in a timely manner. However, as I thought of Usurper, the other Unique Skill of its owner, Hinata Sakaguchi, came to mind: Mathematician.

As soon as I thought of Mathematician, I decided to go for it. While it had three subskills, those being Analytical Appraisal, Predictive Calculation, and Thought Acceleration, I already had one of them and I felt the other two were doable. With the remaining three skills I wanted to acquire with the rest of my time before heading to Orario decided, I got to work. 

. . .

Magic Sense proved to be much easier to gain than Thought Acceleration since being a High Elf already gave me a bit of inherent sensitivity to magic. I couldn't exactly see magic, but I could roughly feel its presence in an area which proved to be much simpler to work off of than going in blind. Plus, with the spirit tree being so close there was a area full of constantly fluxtuating mana to train my sensing capabilities in. So, I made it part of my daily routine to head to the base of the tree and meditate.

After a month I was able to make out the mana within the air in detail, then from there it didn't take much longer to officially gain Magic Sense from the Voice of the World. As soon as the Extra Skill was etched into my mind, Thought Acceleration was automatically activated to help mitigate the massive load of information being directly plugged in to my mind. That was the reason I decided to get Thought Acceleration before Magic Sense, to help deal with all the data being input into my mind.

With that skill acquired and the first of my three years passed by, that gave me two years to gain two skills. Luckily, Analytical Appraisal and Predective Calculation could be trained alongside my swordsmanship when I sparred against my father's guards. Of course, I could also train Analytical Appraisal by looking at anyone and trying to disect them mentally to determine who strong they are and how much magic they contain. However, it was most convienet to train them both while sparring. 

Continuing the streak of me being pleasantly surprised by things I found Predictive Calculation to be fairly easy to gain since it was already engrained into me when fighting to try and predict the opponent and the outcomes of my own moves. So, the skill naturally came to me over the course of the year through sparring, surprising me, since I thought it would be the harder of the two to acquire. As it turned out Analytical Appraisal was a required a more involved process.

I eventually went beyond just practicing judging the guards in the castle and my father, by sitting along a common path through the forest and mentally judging and accessing every Elf that walked by me. It took until near the end of the second year, but I eventually got all the components to form the Unique Skill Mathematician, yet I didn't have anything to form the component parts into the greater skill at this time.

All I could do was sigh and hope that maybe the act of gaining a falna from a god and having their divine energy pumped into me could somehow fuse the skills together. Speaking of gaining a falna, I felt it was time to start my journey and head to Orario.