Alex crawled out of the water on his hands and knees - he didn't want to put any weight on his wounded leg. He was drenched, in pain, hungry, and mad as hell, though he was almost as mad at himself for being careless as he was at the murder chickens.
Deciding to focus on his body's immediate demands, he slowly made his way over to the hut with the remains of his dried meat. He had to stop crawling and sit up to reach the door, after which he propelled himself forward on his butt, scooting along the floor with his one good arm and good leg to where he had the food.
Grabbing the food off the rack, he bit into it like a starving animal, stopping only after he'd devoured a full 3 pounds of dried deer. Next he scooted back outside, over to his firewood pile, and grabbed one appropriately sized branch, as long as his chest height - Alex needed a crutch.
Before he began working on creating his crutch, he began practicing his water control like the training freak that he was, his mana having fully recovered. Finishing his practice, he began using his dagger to lop off the smaller offshoot branches of the stick he was holding. Finally, he returned to the top of the branch, with its characteristic Y shape, and shortened the split on the Y so that it wouldn't be unwieldy.
Deciding to test it out, he used his good leg in combination with the stick to prop himself up from a sitting position to standing. Next he tried hobbling around, but it seemed the stick was a little too long. He carefully sat back down, and continued working on the stick, whittling the end down until it was an appropriate length.
'I've got a crutch, so now I need to figure out how to feed myself while I heal.'
'I only have enough food for maybe another day.'
Alex glanced at the river with disdain.
'I really hate fish.'
Limping back to one of the nearby houses using his crutch, he returned with a spear. Prepping to get back into the river, Alex slowly began the painstaking process of removing his wet clothes, after which he draped them over some nearby rocks. He stared at the remains of his clothes mournfully, for a solid minute. Between his now numerous fights with the murder chicken, his run in with the deer, his misadventure in the river, and his falls during his runs, his clothes were more hole than fabric.
Were it not for Alex's improved vitality stat, he would have been brutally sunburned many times over, fortunately, it seemed to completely eliminate the issue - at least at these UV levels.
Alex gave up trying to find a solution to his clothing problem, and slowly lowered himself into the water, careful of his wounded leg. He then deposited his crutch on the riverside and grabbed his spear, and then guided himself into the middle of the river towards a large boulder protruding from the water, where he pulled himself up and sat.
The challenge presented to him was thus, first he needed to improve his water sight, and be able to use it to cover a wide enough area that he had a decent warning when fish approached.
Second, because he was wounded and couldn't stand unaided in the shallows of the river, his balance and ability to generate force were substantially weakened. To compensate, he would need to use his water control to both improve the motion of his spear, as well as to slow the movement of any fish he wanted to capture.
He began with the second part of his training first, seeing as he had completely replenished his mana. His training protocol would start simple, he needed to be able to reverse the flow of the water in the river, and do so effortlessly and quickly.
Alex reached out with his sense and probed a section of the river, he focused, feeling the flow of the water. Turbulent and angry, the water was almost alive to his senses. He issued a command to the water and visualized what he wanted to occur.
'Reverse.'
A jet of water slowly formed under his command, running the opposite direction, creating a turbulent scar across the surface of the river. He tried lowering the power, but found it difficult, as his jet of water was in constant contact with the existing current, making control quite difficult. After only a second or two, he felt his mana almost bottom out.
His ability to actually work with existing currents was very poor, and he still had insufficient practice with his water control. He was able to pull out still water and play with it in the air, but calmly interacting with turbulent waters was a different story. He'd done it moderately well when he was drifting downstream earlier, but there was a big difference between making minor shifts to a current, and reversing or stopping the flow entirely.
Alex's grip tightened on his spear, his knuckles turning white, and his anger boiled over.
'Nothing is working.'
'I'm completely helpless against the demon bear, I don't even know why it didn't eat me earlier.'
'Trapping creatures is apparently lethal, hunting just ends with me ending up beaten near to death by a single deer.'
'At this rate I'm not going to be able to fish.'
'Doesn't help that my leg still hurts like hell'
Being something of a perfectionist, Alex wasn't taking his half victory well. Without an outlet, he just quietly fumed, and slapped the water with his spear.
With nothing better to do, Alex began trying to integrate his water sensing along with his other senses - he was trying to aim for near subconscious levels of control. Keeping his eyes glued to one of the rocks at the bottom of the riverbed, he started using his senses to probe the area around the rock.
Feeling the flow of the water slip past the rock, Alex nodded his head, satisfied. He then started trying to widen the area he was sensing, trying to cover more ground around the rock. Spreading out his senses around the rock, he began feeling out the other pebbles along the riverbed - he could feel the algae growing on them, he could feel the porosity of the rocks, the surface rough and grating.
He kept expanding his sense region until he covered around a one foot radius within which he could sense everything that was happening. At this point, he felt a splitting headache rush through his temples, there was simply too much information for him to take in, he'd have to build up a tolerance.
Feeling dejected, Alex opened his system interface.
[Honor System]
[Name: Alex]
[Existence Tier: 1]
[Ability: Water Control]
[Ability points: 0]
[Mana: 72/(65->72)]
[Soul Force: 1512->1750]
[Strength: 2]
[Endurance: 15]
[Dexterity: 0]
[Vitality: 25]
[Resilience: 0]
[Cognition: 0]
[Perception: 25]
[Available stat points: 7]
He then put 3 of his stat points in cognition, and waited, his hope was that this would let him deal with the overflow of information. This time, the resulting changes were drastic, beginning with a warm sensation that started at his chest, and then slowly spreading out down along his neural pathways, eventually reaching his brain. A warm sensation greeted him, slowly escalating until he felt his sense of balance give out, and the world began spinning and waving.
This continued for another 10 minutes, during which Alex clung to the rock for dear life. If he fell into the water like this, he was reasonably confident that he'd drown before he could manage to get a decent handle on his water control.
As the changes slowly subsided Alex was greeted by a new vision of the world. At first, everything appeared the same, but as he continued observing his surroundings he noticed some minute differences. Everything that moved seemed crisper, and almost slower - interesting, Alex contemplated on it for a minute, and came to the conclusion that someone had turned the FPS up on life.
He'd glance off into the distance and noted that it took substantially less time for his eyes to adjust, and as he flicked his eyes around his surroundings, he found he was quickly able to take in more information.
Testing out his water senses again, he focused on a rock, and found the flow of water slower, easier to discern. The chaotic turbulence of water colliding with stone became more manageable to perceive, and he felt he could better sense the path of the flow. Again, he extended his search range as much as possible, spreading across the rocks on the riverbed, but to his dismay the radius only extended marginally farther than before.
'How is it that this yielded almost no improvement?
I increased my cognition stat by 3 points, but my radius of coverage only increased by 10, maybe 15%.'
Visualizing his area of coverage again Alex fell deep into thought.
'What is my issue? It seems to be information overload.'
'Assuming increasing my cognition by 30% improved the amount of data I could process by 30%, then you'd expect the radius I could cover to also increase by 30% right?'
'Is the amount of information coming in not proportional to the radius?'
Alex paused, trying to create an analogy in his head. If the amount of information was like pixels, and each unit of space occupied a single pixel then, the amount of information should be proportional to the area covered by the shape.
'So then my calculations should be based on the area my sense is covering, and I'm dealing with the area of a circle.'
'High school geometry never quite goes away.'
'What I'd give for some pie.'
Armed with his new theory, he then decided he'd try directly manipulating the shape of his sense. Instead of creating a circle on the riverbed dense with his sense, he'd spread it thin. He started by flattening his sense into a ring, with no ability to sense in the middle, and keeping the thickness of the ring quite small. He spread his sense wider and wider, and he quickly realized he'd covered a 15m radius.
While Alex was quite pleased with this progress, he knew it wasn't good enough, as a two dimensional ring on the riverbed would be absolutely useless. He then started creating a lattice like net, and created a sphere with his sense, hollow in the middle, with only thin strands of sense covering its surface.
He then expanded it, and was quite happy when he managed to cover a 1m radius before he was once again met with a splitting headache. Stopping for a moment, he smiled at his success. Within his 1m radius, he could generate a pretty clear picture of everything moving into and out of his radius, and formulate a decent picture of those things touching his sense.
Alex wasn't done yet though, following his analogy of pixels, he stopped trying to create continuous strands of sense, and he began populating his sphere with small dots of sense. He didn't need to see every micrometer of those things in contact with his sense, he could spread the senses far out settling for significantly reduced resolution.
Rather than a hollow netted sphere he created a pincushion, his sense now resembled a sphere filled with sparsely populated pixels. Alex then expanded his sphere comfortably to a 3m radius, where he smiled.
'I can feel everything going on within this range, it's definitely good enough for fishing.'
Alex had already noted various fish passing through his sense, and he smiled gleefully.
'Can't hide from me, suckers.'