Chapter Eleven: Trait

< The System has selected a Trait for you! >

< You have gained the Trait: Thermal Resistance >

I blink for a moment at the screen before my body heat drops like I was just thrust into an ice bath.

Gasping for air, I abruptly tumble forward as the chains binding me finally break. Like a fish out of water, I flounder in the hole while my mind tries to catch up with the sharp drop in temperature. The remnants of the metal are near my face so I can see that they are still red-hot, yet strangely I do not feel any warmth from them at all.

I really hate the cold.

I writhe there for almost a full minute before the cold of the night is pushed back once again and I feel the heat of my radiation flow through <Emit> and flood back into the goblin pit. I shakily rise as I feel the hot energy begin to seep into my body again. I hug my arms tightly together and rub my shoulders despite being fully warmed up already. The phantom bite of the cold is just that goddamn horrible.

As I acclimate to the new changes of my Trait, I look back at my notifications and am pleased to have yet another skill. I honestly didn’t expect to get <Infuse> from trying to heat the chain directly, but I won’t complain if the system wants to offer me some freebies. I don’t know if skills should be this easy to get, but I am happy for the added bonus regardless.

What I’m most interested in is my new trait. I feel like the name Thermal Resistance speaks for itself, but I decided to ask anyway.

“Can I get details about my trait?”

Nothing.

“Show information for Thermal Resistance.”

Nothing.

The System Help Desk is once again proven to be useless. Fine then. I’ll do it myself.

I go to pick up one of the still-smoking links but grimace as I finally look at my hands. Perhaps I should be more specific; I mean what remains of my hands. My right hand is severely burned and looks like a bratwurst that was cooked for too long on an open grill. And when it comes to my left hand…

Let’s not talk about my left hand.

Looking around, I find the large loop that used to be my shackle and pick it up with my German sausage appendage. I activate <Infuse> properly for the first time and guide the heat emitting from my mutated mana straight into the shackle. The metal looks to gain a slightly red hue, but the radiation’s flow peters out before I can go any farther. It looks like my attempts to melt the chain earlier took too much of the energy due to my poor technique.

Once again, I find myself sitting at the bottom of the pit. I haven’t run out of the foreign energy until now, so I am unsure just how fast it regenerates. It should be linked to how fast my mana regenerates, but I also have yet to play around with mana enough to run empty.

I look up through the grates and notice that the night is still pitch black. I also check my timer and realize that I still have a few hours before dawn. Snuggling deeper into the pit, I resign myself to a night of practicing <Mana Control> and <Polarize>.

*****

I gain zero levels.

This is unsurprising for <Polarize>, but I am fairly annoyed that <Mana Control> didn’t level even once. Perhaps I was spoiled from the leveling spree I had earlier, but zero levels seems a bit stingy if you ask me.

On the bright side, it’s not like I learned nothing while I was sitting here.

For one, I was able to move mana throughout my body fairly easily. I can also force small spurts of mana out of my skin, but that has basically no utility from what I can tell other than draining my mana pool. It’s still hard for me to sense my mana itself, but since the excess radiation was emptied out for a little while, it became easier to feel the mana. I’m not sure why, but the mana is significantly easier to deal with than the volatile radiation I usually produce, so I try to think of more uses for the malleable energy in my free time.

It’s been a few hours now and the radiation is pouring from me once again through my steady application of <Emit>. I’ve had time to get a feel for how fast the production rate of the radiation is, so I have done my best to match my skill’s output with the production speed. Now I have a steady stream of heat surrounding me which is quite nice in the cool air of the dirt pit, and I don’t have to worry about running out of the thermal radiation.

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