The sun was still up when Agi opened his eyes again. Finding himself alive, he felt relief more than any sort of joy or triumph. He got down from the tree he was still in to take a look at his surroundings.
He quickly picked up the familiar scent of death which he has come to recognize by now, and soon enough, he stumbled upon five corpses, probably the very same ones that had tried to kill him right before.
This had obviously been done by his secret helper, and though a bit creepy, he greatly appreciated it.
In fact, after receiving so much help, he wanted to go and meet face to face again to try and communicate. If it could morph into a human, who knows maybe Agi could even teach it like one.
Before doing anything, Agi also noticed the strange state his body seemed to be in. It wasn't tattered like it was supposed to be when he fell unconscious after just escaping his death, quite the opposite actually, it was intact, no flesh wounds, no pain in the bones or muscles, no soreness, no bad stomach, only some small scars here and there. Unless he was taken care of by trained medical staff in a well equipped hospital for weeks no such things should have happened, and safe to say, seeing where he was, such a thing was pretty unlikely, therefore, he decided to check the only possible culprit for this: the system.
Before his status window even opened, he was welcomed with a shower of little individual panels that seemed to be like notifications, they said:
< You have grasped the concept of Conatus >
< You have gained new mods >
< You have gotten two new achievements >
< You have levelled up >
He had a slight memory of having seen these before passing out, and not wasting any time, he summoned every single hand gesture and mental commands to make it spit out the details about whatever this all meant:
< The concept of conatus coined by the philosopher Spinoza on earth is used to describe the "effort that each thing makes to persevere in its being", or in simpler terms, each thing's will to live and keep on living. It has multiple differently worded equivalents in the world, and its acquisition conditions are especially difficult because you need to have a perfect theoretical and practical understanding of it.
This concept passively increases your power to act, and tremendously increases your body's adaptability in all and every kind of situation, often allowing the body to gain new mods depending on the surrounding environment and get varying amounts of stat points gain to help with survival >
< Your extension attribute has gained the following mods thanks your conatus concept (note mods can scale up):
Energy conservation, rapid healing, poison resistance, adaptive digestive system, longer sleep requirement, and higher calories intake need. >
< You have gained an achievement for having grasped a concept entirely on your own, for that, you gain one level up. >
< You have gained an achievement for being the first person to fully grasp the concept of Conatus and all its implications, for that, you gain one stat point for every main statistical category you possess (in your case: 7) >
< You have levelled up to level one, for that, you gain 1 free stat point. >
Agi didn't even know what to think about all of this information, apparently just by surviving the current situation he had done something worthy of being recognized by the system, and now he even had some weird centuries old concept he had just wanted to forget all about for so long that came to belong to him or something.
If he were to believe everything these messages said though, practically, it was a major upgrade if he wanted to return to the earth he knew alive, and though he didn't really want to believe the fact that he had gained some magical regeneration power, some kind of poison resistance and a stronger stomach, he couldn't really explain why he would be perfectly healthy and so hungry at the same time.
On the other hand he also felt like had gained some kind of new sense, it was very strange, his brain was receiving some unknown information, which didn't come from any of the five senses, and when he tried to pinpoint it, he couldn't quite find where it came from kind of like a very specific itch you want to get rid of but every time, you seem to scratch exactly right next to it, a very unsatisfying feeling in any case, and so to investigate further, he opened his status window:
[---------------------------------]
Status sheet:
- Name: Agi Rosenzweig
- Level: 1 (requirements for next level: 0/2 arbitrary unit).
- System class: Unavailable
- Class: none
- System achievements: unavailable
- Achievements: 2
- Attributes:
???: 8 free stat points (note that without the system contract, you will have to find a way to discover this attribute and add the stat points all on your own)
Extension (body):
Statistics:
Height: 1.93 meters
Weight: 95 kilograms
Bodyfat percentage: 4.2%
Strength: 0.8
Dexterity: 1
Constitution: 1
Perception: 1
Thought (mind):
Memory: 1
Intuition: 1
Processing speed: 1
Consciousness, reason and rationality: present
- Concepts: 1
[---------------------------------]
He had lost some weight and strength since last time he checked, which isn't such a surprise after seeing what he went through, but the main thing to take away from this is the new attribute he had just been made aware of.
He now had reasons to believe that this uncomfortable sensation came from this new attribute or rather, the stat points that were within it.
This all felt very surreal, and his senses could very much be tricked by Descartes deceptive god, but even then he wasn't in a situation to ponder upon what could be known and what couldn't, he was still in a very precarious position, and right now, all he could do was follow his intuition, which told him that what was in there would be very vital for his survival in the future.
And so he did something he hadn't done in a very long time, sit down comfortably, and put every inch of focus into figuring out what this thing was.
The time this took was unknown, in that strange focused flow state, he had still found it incredibly difficult to pinpoint exactly where this new attribute was, and even more so that it wasn't anywhere physical, or mental for that sake, and all he could rely on to try and find it was that new semblance of a sense which he had to learn how to use from scratch, as a newborn would learn how to walk.
The sun was already fully set when he finally came back to his (usual) senses, and he had barely gotten as far as dipping his toes in the pool, where in order to increase his stat points, he'd have to move it buckets at a time, except buckets weren't put at his disposition for this.
If it were up to him, he'd have kept going but his stomach was currently holding him at gunpoint, so with surprisingly good visibility in the dark, he tried to navigate himself back to the carcass of the cervidae hoping it hadn't completely rotten away.
Since he hadn't gone far at all, the way wasn't particularly hard to find, and still unable to light up a fire, he bet it all on his apparently upgraded digestive system to handle the copious amount of raw meat he was about to devour.
Once his tummy filled and his taste buds destroyed, he got himself back together for the task at hand: trying enhance his body thanks to this new attribute he had only discovered half way.
Plunging back to this metaphysical* plane got easier the more he tried and after a while, he even felt confident in moving some of it, though while trying that, he encountered his next issue: where was he supposed to move it, how was he supposed to transition the mod of one attribute to become the mod of another, this was something extremely abstract to even think about, and Agi was supposed to do it practically.
From what he knew of the spinozian system, one attribute cannot have a direct influence on another, which in the real world was basically just a justification for a sort of psychological explanation of the influence between the body and the mind, also used as an argument to go against Descartes's notion of dualism between the two. Therefore, when facing unknowns such as a third attribute you would technically have to rethink everything from the very axioms themselves.
Having long lost his interest in Spinoza's metaphysics ever since his father's death, he couldn't be bothered to think about such abstract concepts that would serve nothing except bring back memories he didn't really want to go through at this very specific moment.
His only preoccupation was to find a way to transition between this new attribute and his body be it direct or indirect.
He decided to begin with going from his body to the new attribute instead of the other way around for now, since it was closer to what he had been doing in order to find it in the first place, and with a bit of luck, if he did that, he could achieve the other way around too, thus killing two birds with one stone.
For now he believed he had mostly been relying on his attribute of thought to get to this new attribute because every time he put himself in quite a deep meditative state and focused on his thoughts and imagination mostly in order to get to it.
In all practicality, he didn't even know if getting to this new attribute was even possible without picturing it in his mind, and only relying on his five senses, and so he started grinding for it
For hours on end he tried to link his every senses together with it, and he never made any real progress in that direction, and the sun was already up when he finally gave up this meaningless endeavour. He had wanted to make a direct jump between the two attributes as he had initially done with his mind, but that shortcut was impossible to him, he had to take the long way around and try to use his thought to try and make a bridge between the two
But that wouldn't happen before a bit of physical exercise to try and clear his mind from this failed attempt, and after a simple bodyweight workout, he got right back to it.
The first thing he tried was to simply connect one of his senses with the help of his imagination, starting with what he thought would be the simplest, the sense of touch, which was relatively easy to isolate, and the results came... surprisingly fast, he even felt his sense of touch somehow take a very small part of the pool of stat points. After that he did the same for every single one of his senses and sure enough, except for his sense of sight which was remarkably challenging to connect, he ended up having fully increased his perception stat to two, while having equally distributed the sub stat values between all of his senses, and the results were quite literally overwhelming.
So much so that if he wanted to increase this stat more than that, he would probably have to find a way to either restrain some of them somehow, or make it so that his brain could easily take on such an amount of information at once.
He hoped to fix this through the latter with his next enterprise though, as accessing the new attribute through his mind is what he has been doing since the very start.
Both memory and processing speed were very easy to assimilate and didn't put a toll on anything, it was rather the opposite even, as they seemed to work together to greatly alleviate the effect of the strain that his increased sensibility put on his brain, kind of like a gpu and cpu upgrade, and he would have to scale them together in the future.
Intuition on the other hand was a much tougher nut to crack, mostly because he also had to partly rely on it in order to increase it, which was kind of paradoxical, but at the same time an absolute must for such future undertakings. In the end, he solved it more through brute forcing than anything else, and he would definitely try to understand the specific process of how it worked.
He still had four stat point to spend and three categories to try to increase. Of all of them, he decided to tackle dexterity first, as for the most part, reflexes were how fast information could get to your brain and then back to your muscles in order for them to react appropriately, and flexibility would be tougher since it targeted joints and tendons which were a part of his body he didn't really know how to target specifically.
After some trial and error, he managed to shower all of his body in its entirety of this pond of stat point via some strange mental gymnastics that consisted of brute forcing an opening between the two attributes.
Through that he actually managed to increase his constitution instead, but after some controlled and focused repetition of the same process, also managed to target specifically his muscles, joints, tendons, and the nervous system in both his spin and just his brain overall.
He felt an intricate connection between dexterity and processing speed, confirming his original intuition on the subject, and with that he had finally distributed all but the last of his stat points, after only doing that for over two full days.
He didn't even have the time to fully test out just how much of a qualitative upgrade his body got that he felt new system notifications telling him of his most recent achievements.
*not meant philosophically, just literally present beyond physics since it isn't a simple mod of extension