chap4

He didn't wake up at sunrise, as a lack of other people really hurt any motivation to be 'up and at them'.

That said, he should have not slept in probably.

Meh, there was literally no one around to care... and this hammock was glorious.

The pillow was... lacking.

But compared to the last few days of sleeping on a slab of uncomfyness, this was glorious.

So he had shelter, clothing, food (Well, fish and a half left, but he knew how to get more now), water, and transportation.

Covered in woven fire fiber (Really more micro-mail, but it was warm and silky), he lazily twisted today's power charge.

He'd been building up two basic trees of powers so far: Healing, and Tools. In this case, solidified fire tools and biological save me healing.

This had been on purpose. Having only one socket meant the more individual powers (weak or strong) he created, the more likely to have the wrong one equipped at an important moment.

But what he needed now didn't nicely fit in with either of his two shards.

Direction.

Following the river was fine, and as long as there were fish left he could do so for a long time. But he needed to find people, places, and things. Both now, and in the future.

He squeezed the charge.

"Search."

The socket showed a spyglass, and what felt like a soft breeze drifted away in all directions.

He frowned. Well... thank goodness he could power up these things. All its potential went into range, not detail... so he could feel lots of 'things', very accurately from here to very far away.

How far? No idea.

What things? A bit of movement confirmed: Trees were included. So... at least trees.

He had just spent a charge on confirming: Yes, there are trees in this forest.

With a sigh he swapped back to 'Slow Recovery', ready to waste a day again.

He would need to either upgrade 'Search' with a filter or with detailed results tomorrow.

As he drifted asleep he idly determined to swap back to 'Fire Manipulation' and catch some more fish later. It would also be good to fill Kaa with some boiled water before leaving the river once searching was strong enough to do anything useful.

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

Kaa's size had tripled, as he was now hollow metal filled with far too much river water.

The process had also caught him 13 fish, whom were still swimming around inside the metal snake.

Obviously, he chose not to sterilize the water yet, as a living food source would last longer.

His throne on top of Kaa now had a cloth awning above giving good shade, and his cushion had been enhanced by filling a series of mesh tubes with water and binding them into something like a tiny water bed.

Whenever he got tired of the constant scenery, he would swap in 'Search', which he had enhanced with a charge pushing for filtering results.

Sadly, he got no results for human, people, or 'thing pretending to be people'. Not in this search range.

But he DID detect 'Roads'. So he was headed to the nearest one.

Roads had to go somewhere, or lead to a place that would have enough evidence to lead him to the next search opportunity.

Still, he was less unhappy about 'Search' now. Turns out the reason it was so close to worthless was due to the sheer RANGE it covered.

He had been traveling at a fairly high speed for hours now, and knew the road was still a ways off.

On a side note, searching for 'closest road' had been enlightening. Whatever else the power did, it was able to detect all the roads, do distance calculation at all points on those roads, and determine which of those points were both closest and belonging to a single road instance.

So like... lots of hidden math.

Thank goodness, he couldn't remember his schooling but he felt high level of vitally important math calculations would be very anxiety inducing.

With a sigh, he idly unwrapped one of his precooked fishes. Cold, and still burned a bit more than desired... still, it was food.

Crunching on it, he idly thought about the future as Kaa burned forward.

'Search' would need to keep enhancing for the near future. The ability to find food, water, shelter, society... yeah, it was a good thing to focus on.

What next though?

Anything basic he had covered with his current power set so far. But if this realm had an advanced society, especially one without magic or powers, then they would likely have fixed various flaws with technology. Even most stories he read WITH magic or powers also had technology, and burning everything would exactly help him disable a camera or hack open a security system.

A frown crossed his face. No, more important than technology, communication.

There was no guarantee that he could speak or read their language.

Strike that, it was almost guaranteed that he COULDN'T.

After all, the stories and movies he had seen and read had foreign languages already, and obviously a writer in his old world (Wherever the hell that was) wouldn't write the main body of their work in a foreign tongue.

Could he add language to 'Slow Recovery'? No, that didn't fit at all. Better than fire or searching, sure, but not by much.

Maybe add 'Rapid Adaptation' to 'Slow Recovery', to both handle the changes in his body while allowing him to learn both customs and languages better?

Yeah, if it was a learning power rather than a knowing power, then swapping his socket to a different power wouldn't suddenly make him unable to talk.

Still, the two abilities were not similar enough to really pull that off without some weird stuff possibly happening.

A couple more charges to Search then, so that it would be more reliable. THEN he could craft a 'Learning' shard, that would massively enhance memory retention, advanced intuition and deduction. That would allow him to both understand things more easily and remember those understandings when he stopped using the skill.

With a sigh, he imagined a life where he got the full 10 charges of power every day. Still, something about his current power load out felt more stable, less likely that he would accidentally create a god like persona and began making speeches as he randomly smashed through the multiverse.

Coughing, he pulled out the fish bone. Cooking power. No, better keep it more general, a Crafting power. One that would have good synergy with his fire metal and clothing designs, but allow him to build better housing and so forth as well. Did cooking a meal mean the same as crafting a meal? Would the power go with the flow?

A whole power based on cooking seemed a bit much, really. Then again, one of the few things that held together relationships in both what little past he could remember and in the multitude of stories he had experienced had been food.

Well, that and sex, but that was more due to the type of authors some stories were based on more than personal experience. Everyone wanted love at some level, or at least most did... so when you got to write anything at all, the number of stories that could be summed up as 'I found girl, she like me!' was mountainous.

A wave of his hand brought a mirror from Kaa's neck.

Well... he wasn't ugly. And for the first time, he was starting to really lose that fat content. But... he looked more like one of the crowd than a superhero god.

Damn. It would have been nice to be one of those men that people double check when he walks down the street. Not worth wasting a power on it, not till he was way more powerful.

That... could be a while.

Note: Add DNA optimization to 'Slow Recovery' to prevent ageing later. Getting old would be annoying.

Did he need all those power functions? Nullification seemed wise. He could craft his own stuff, so copying seemed pointless compared to the rest.

Modification was probably more important than nullification actually, since he could change someone's power harmless until everyone decided otherwise without possibly nullifying a friend by accident.

An inward glance at his stardust field. Some testing. Hmm.

Restoring a functionality of the original Power Manipulation shard would require over a thousand charges.

And that was ONLY for the features. Getting more sockets? Not possible. Grafting to his soul was required during the repair process apparently. As mentioned before, going to a new Realm caused enough soul expansion to add more sockets, but nothing else would apparently.

Gaining more Charges? Again, not possible. The Shard had managed to fuse deep inside parts of the conceptual nature belonging to his essence. Normal shards lived on planet sized rocks in other dimensions... his had done some complicated mathematical bull crap to cram itself into his nature. He could only build one charge in a 24 earth hour time-range, period.

It meant these abilities would work in any realm he showed up in, but the power itself couldn't really modify itself anymore. Not without some really insane coincidences and a time-frame over a billion years involved.

Double Note: Immortality + Youth very important. Get within 80 years.

He had vague memories that at least one version of the CYOA had something like 'Special Snowflake' which would make his power untouchable, but hadn't seen it on the broken interface he had to work at.

Still, it looked like he got a boot-leg copy of that skill due to the twisted nature his power had become trying to fix itself.

A 1000 charges to rebuild lost portions of his power... sigh. Let's put that into the 'Come Back Later' category. That was like... 2.7 years. Well, earth years. And that assumed he could even do partial improvements.

Could he store charges? Yes!

A smile broke over his face. A fear he had not acknowledge vanished. When he first got a summary of his ability, he had assumed that, like the original Power Manipulation with Shattered Limiter, if one failed to use all of their 10 charges per day they would be replaced with a new set of 10, losing those potential charges.

But no, while he could only make one charge per day, he could spend one of those charges to create a 'Charge Cluster' power, one that would do nothing but collect and store new charges for later use.

It was such a restrictive power, useful to no one but people in his exact circumstances, that it didn't even need to be socket-ed. It could float around in his head's stardust field, gathering his daily charge for later use.

It could would only be able to store one charge for each power in the stardust field though. He had 3 shards right now, this would be a fourth... so with one equipped, it could hold 3 charges before he began to lose them.

Now if he went into a coma or something for a day or two, there would be no setback! Other than the coma.

Happy with the compromise, he spent the rest of the day humming random songs while his massive train sized snake slowly burned its way toward what was hopefully a busy road.

And also hopefully, some place with better food.