By the time Skye entered ground 8, few people were already present. Skye started stretching his muscles and so did others, in anticipation that today will be a repeat of yesterday, a gruelling and an intense exercise.
As the time approached 8 in the morning, more and more people started coming to the ground, almost like a flood of people rushing into a mall on Black Friday. At sharp 8 Captain Stonewall came into the ground and stood in front of everyone.
A few dozen people could not make it in time and the punishment they got terrified everyone. Captain Stonewall took out a baton stick seemingly out of nowhere and started beating them up mercilessly, without leaving a single inch of space on their body
The mysterious thing about his beating was that you could feel intense pain at the places where he beat you, but there was no wound nor mark on the outside, all the damage was being done inside the body and it felt like someone was directly hitting your bones.
To the people who could see them, they looked normal, but the pain was so intense that they collapsed on the ground twitching unconsciously. Even though they could not see the wounds on the body, but by hearing their gut wrenching screams they made, one could definitely imagine the pain they were going through.
Captain Stonewall beat them up until they collapsed, and later some palace workers came out with stretchers to carry them back for healing. Seeing all this Skye thought "compared to today's punishment, yesterday's seems very light."
Once things got back to normal, as everyone expected the captain ordered them to exercise. They did the same routine from yesterday, again for 3 hours, whereupon Skye again collapsed a little above an hour. There were a couple more people than yesterday who could still stand after 3 hours, clearly showing that people have gotten stronger. Seeing them, a small fire relighted inside Skye, urging him to do better and rise to the top.
After their morning exercise it was almost afternoon and they were all dismissed, tiredly Skye went back again to his room to take some rest. When he opened his room door, there was a small pamphlet on the floor with his name written on top. Thinking somebody must have slid it under his door, he picked it up to look closely.
It was a time table for his activities for the coming month. From tomorrow, every morning for 3 hours there was exercise, then lunch and basic classes in the afternoon, then sparring matches in the evening and dinner just after. It was the same every day, even the weekends.
He felt exhausted and just wanted to take some rest, he didn't have much desire for lunch, so he skipped it. He flopped on the couch and just before he was about to sleep, he remembered what happened in the morning. He quickly opened his status screen and checked all his stat values.
* Name: Skye
* Title: None
* Passive Skills: Accretion
* Active Skills: --
* Strength 4.11
* Stamina 3.61
* Speed 5.21
* Wisdom 13.11
* Intelligence 18.31
* Soul Strength 1.61
Remembering all his stat points, he used his skill Accretion and immediately the Divine energy around him was slowly sucked into his body. From the pores of his skin, it went in to his blood stream and circulated to every cell in his body, nourishing him with the rich energy.
He felt a very pleasant feeling, and he slowly immersed himself in this feeling. The more he concentrated on the feeling, the faster the Divine energy was sucked in to his body. The speed increased little by little and after it reached a certain point it did not increase again.
Skye felt that if he continued like this, then he could be back to normal again in just an hour, and so he did. After an hour he stopped it when he realized his body was completely back to normal again.
Checking his life force value, it did decrease by 1 and when he checked his status screen, he saw that each of his stat has increased. And by 0.01!
* Name: Skye
* Title: None
* Passive Skills: Accretion
* Active Skills: --
* Strength 4.12
* Stamina 3.62
* Speed 5.22
* Wisdom 13.12
* Intelligence 18.32
* Soul Strength 1.62
Feeling happy about his discovery his mind started spinning with ideas. "If I get 0.06 stat points for 1 life force point, then wouldn't I get 21.9 total stat points with a full year worth of life force?"
"Assuming that a perfectly normal young man my age has a base stat point of 10 in each stat, then wouldn't I be more powerful than anyone of the chosen if I just continuously expend my life force?" Skye was extremely happy thinking like this.
He suddenly started laughing with a weird rhythm, like an alarm tone
" HAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHA"
It was the characteristic laugh of one of his favourite villain's 'Mandark from Dexter's Laboratory'. He laughs like this whenever he comes up with ideas about cheating in games.
But he suddenly felt something wrong. " It shouldn't be so simple, just like me others also got their own skills. What if one of them is a stronger skill than mine? wouldn't that mean my skill is not so OP anymore?" Skye thought.
Remembering that there was a book titled 'Skills and their classification, for dummies', Skye immediately opened it and sat on his couch to start reading. Fortunately he did not have anything to do today afternoon and evening. The official timetable starts from tomorrow, so he could stay in his room till he gets hungry.
Reading the book Skye found out, that the skills are briefly distributed into 4 different categories according to their significance and occurrence.
Stat Skills:
These are the most common and least valuable skills among the 4, about 70 % of the chosen have skills under this category. Skills of this category directly affect the stat values of any single one of the 5 stats, except soul strength. Rarely someone gets a skill which affects 2 or more stats and in the entire recorded history only 1 person ever got a skill which directly affected 4 stats. And without exception, all of these skills have temporary effects.
Physical Skills:
About 20% of the chosen have skills under this category. Physical skills directly affect either the whole body or a few parts. Like sharper senses, or skin hardening etc. Skills of this type also have temporary affects, with a few of the rare types having permanent affects.
Magic Skills:
About 9 % of the chosen have skills under this category. Magic skills affect the control over elements like fire, wind, water, ice, earth, metal, lightning, thunder, light & darkness, space & time etc. Within magic skills also there are common skills and rare skills, with the rarest being skill which controls space and time.
Soul Skills:
Only about 1% of the chosen have Soul skills. These skills directly affect others soul and controls others of weaker soul strength. Stat skills which increase the soul strength are also placed under this category. Very little information is available on these skills.
Reading a few more chapters Skye closed the book and sat there thinking. "Since my skill also affects stats then it would be under the stat category. But it clearly states in the book that all stat skills are temporary buffs, then why does my stat skill have permanent effect?"
"If I really have an extremely rare stat skill, then I should never reveal it to anyone. As Captain Stonewall said, if I don't have the strength to protect myself, then I would be an ideal target to anybody who wants to get stronger by killing. With my current strength, I should be as low key as possible and increase my strength my as quickly and as inconspicuously as possible. "
Pondering about ideas to conceal his strength, he spent a lot of time theorizing and looking up into the book for more information. Suppressing his growing hunger, he read the entire book again, from the beginning but this time more carefully, sifting through all the information in it. He sat and pondered for the entire night up-to 3 in the early morning.
As he didn't have lunch nor dinner, he got very tired and fell asleep on the couch with the book still in his hands. He woke up just a few minutes before 8 and when he saw the time, he got panicked thinking about the punishment from Captain Stonewall.
Without getting freshened up, he quickly grabbed the timetable and ran as fast as he could towards ground 8.
He did not have much energy left so he couldn't run as fast, coupled with the fact that the palace was very huge, by the time Skye got to ground 8, there were already a few people who were getting beaten up by the captain.
The captain saw him and Skye felt clouds of death looming over his head, as if the captain was a grim reaper and today is the day the captain claimed his life.
Looking at Skye who came so late Captain Stonewall got extremely angry, with a frown on his face he gestured Skye to come near him. Skye immediately knelt down apologizing, but the captain heard none of it.
He beat everyone who was late with a baton stick, until they collapsed. But he beat Skye even after he collapsed, just to put fear in the hearts of people who were watching, and his methods were very effective.
Everyone silently swore in their hearts, no matter what to never be late again.
When all this was done, few palace workers came and carried away Skye and the other collapsed people on stretchers.