In the time that had elapsed since her very first morning, when she had crafted her flint tools, Demi had unlocked a massive number of crafting recipes. Her level had also grown substantially, and she had even advanced her carpentry skill multiple times, apparently due to the fact that she had “built” her farmhouse and the chicken coop. Although she had only tapped a few nails in each time, she seemed to have still received one hundred percent of the experience for building the buildings.
I guess that kind of math makes sense to a goddess, she reflected with amusement.
This world seemed to be primarily skills-based, or so Demi had concluded based on one singular fact.
She already had fifteen pages worth of skills.
Fifteen pages.
And Hollyhope had said she’d be starting out slowly so she could learn to use her abilities without feeling overwhelmed.
I’m not sure about that one, unless we have very different definitions of that word, she thought to herself.
When Demi had first begun paging through her skills, she’d been excited. She was an avid video game player after all, and loved investigating game systems to develop her own unique play-style. But page after page had left her feeling more and more incredulous, until she had finally just closed the window.
I’ll deal with this later, she decided, feeling exhausted.
Some standouts had been Negotiation, which was already at level 7, Persuasion at 8, and Charm, which was at a whopping 9.
Well, that’s certainly flattering, she decided. Since she hadn’t had any way to examine something as esoteric as a status screen in her original world, she had no way of knowing if her remarkable charm belonged to her personally or was simply a product of becoming a goddess.
Still, a ridiculous amount of charm was a very valuable asset, even if it might also be potentially dangerous.
I hope this level of charm doesn’t make some king appear and demand for me to become his concubine, she laughed to herself.
But she was really only half joking. She didn’t want to be hauled off to a harem, and astronomical charm had the potential to trigger such a flag.
That would be super inconvenient, she resolved to herself.
It would also be a little too much like what she had been facing back home.
Still, the high social skills made sense to her. A great deal of time and money had gone into her education. She had been trained in negotiation and diplomacy, and she had easily had as many lessons in being charming as any professional model or idol. She had learned how to dance, how to be graceful, how to hold herself well, and how to walk in a lovely way. She always knew how to put herself at advantage, and it had been drilled into her so often that she now did it unconsciously, without thinking.
As for persuasion, well, she had been practicing it herself from the time she had first started to toddle around and began getting herself into trouble. It was very useful for a girl with a mild penchant for naughtiness, particularly one who enjoyed the company of those with a stricter nature.
Even the music and performance skills made sense. She could play the piano and the violin, after all, and she enjoyed singing.
But when it came to the combat skills, she was simply confused. She had very high skills in ordinary archery, arcane archery, and marksmanship. She had similarly high skill in maces and staves. She had no idea where that had come from. She’d never had any formal weapon training in her life. She also had a solid unarmed hand-to-hand combat skill, which was equally perplexing. She had practiced tai chi as a form of fitness, but it didn’t seem possible that this experience had somehow translated into a 4 in martial arts. Based on what she understood from the tutorials and additional reading, 4 was a high enough skill to become a teacher.
I guess that skill might be the reason I was able to pull off those crazy kung fu moves in the fight with the Leggity-Leg, she pondered. Still, that doesn’t explain where it came from. Was I a kung fu master in a previous life?
But it wasn’t really that surprising that she was already 10 with book weapons.
Demi had never used a book as a weapon, and the thought appalled her because of the damage it might cause to the book, but she had spent so much of her life with a book in her hands that she was more than willing to believe that this experience might somehow translate into weapon mastery.
And she had certainly handled books in the past that were heavy enough to serve as weapons.
But the rest of it—Demi had no idea. Possibly it had just come along with being a goddess.
I guess it’ll be useful if I ever find myself in trouble again, she decided thoughtfully. Although I hope that most of the battling I’ll be doing is with weeds in the garden.
She had no desire for a rematch with anything even remotely resembling the Leggity-Leg.
Wait, she thought, pausing for a moment to stare incredulously. How on earth do I have a 10 in medical? That can’t be from learning first aid and having CPR training.
Like the magic and combat skills, she suspected that it had come along with being a goddess. Hollyhope was the Goddess of Life along with being the Harvest Goddess, and even if Demi had not yet qualified for this title in the estimation of the world system, if they were doubles of one another, then that might go quite a way toward explaining the ludicrous number and level of her skills.
Still, even if she hadn’t the first idea where her medical skill had come from, she did appreciate it. There were an untold number of circumstances where medical knowledge might make the difference between a tragedy and a happy ending.
But most of it, the combat and magic skills in particular, Demi wasn’t ready to deal with. She had been very excited about the opportunity to use magic (because honestly, who wouldn’t be excited about that opportunity? Nobody, agreed the Council of Demi, although one dissenting individual held up a sign that said, “Liars.”)
But nowhere in the mountains of books Hollyhope had left with her was there any reference material even beginning to explain what the large majority of her magic skills did, and how she might begin to use them. She had tried many different approaches, primarily informed by books and anime, but had so far not succeeded.
(Well, she had succeeded in causing Glimmer to laugh. He hadn’t been able to provide her with any more effective solutions, however.)
Not even Elder Ashbark had been much help when she had shared her problem, despite being the most wizardly person she had thus far met.
“That’s beyond me, young lady,” he had confessed.
The critterin apparently had different ways of handling and thinking about magic than humans and elves. They even differed greatly from one another: A fox critterin that could use magic generally did so in a different way than a beaver did. Based on what she had read and on speaking with Elder Ashbark, Demi had come to understand that the magic that the animal peoples used was primarily what they called “knack”-based magic. Certain individuals were born with certain special abilities, and these abilities were called “knacks.” You couldn’t learn a knack if you didn’t have the potential for it to begin with, but you could practice and study the knack to get more proficient at using it. This was the kind of magic Elder Ashbark used himself. In beaver reckoning, he had the knacks for Eabar, Uisge, and Fiodh rune magic, in other words, mud, water, and trees.
Occasionally there would be rare talents among different critterin populations who were what they called “doubly blessed” who could use knack-based magic along with the Ars Magna, the schools of magic that humans had originated. Finella was one such person, in addition to her other talents.
But alas, Finella could not offer Demi much advice about her specific skills, since they were quite a bit different than the beaver girl’s. Finella had not yet studied the Ars Magna under a tutor, so what she understood herself was limited and largely based on feeling her way through it.
“So, you go ‘nyooooym’ to gather the power into yourself, and then you say the words, but you have to understand what they mean. Then you push it out like ‘fsssssssh’ and that’s how magic happens,” she had explained.
Although it had not been useful in furthering her understanding of magic, Demi still felt blessed to have had an adorable beaver girl attempt to teach her how magic worked through onomatopoeia.
Demi decided to push the larger conundrum of magic to the side for the moment, and focus on planting and caring for a garden.
It was hard to escape the common-sense logic that growing crops was surely Harvest Goddess related, and therefore a suitable thing for a Harvest Goddess to try her hand at.
So she had flagged the skills that she generally understood, and guessed would be most likely to be of use to a Harvest Goddess, and sorted everything based on this criteria, so the farming-related ones appeared on the first two pages.
Although I guess by Hollyhope’s logic everything can be Harvest Goddess related so long as I believe it is, Demi thought wryly.