After three days of no sleeping. The sofa where Alexanders parents and him slept for the night felt better than most beds.
Sleeping in wolf form brought Alexander back to not being as depressed as before.
He silently got up and got to his own room.
Today he would only chill and look up stuff of the forum.
Ordering the thousands of articles by most viewed and talked about, Alexander began reading while laid his bed.
Alexander was surprised that no Magic related topic were in the top ten articles.
Only at place 15 was a video where someone flung a huge blue fireball at some spiders and turned them to ash.
From the posts and race descriptions beside the names of the players, Alexander could guess that most if not all of the comments came from human players.
The top 50 articles talked about events in the game. Politics were heavily discussed between the different kingdoms.
Some laws benefited sales greatly for people of different countries.
With a few ongoing wars around the world, the players had many things to do.
Not at all were they finding out about the truth.
Here and there were speculations that the ai of the game was to advanced and not feasible by todays standards, but many comments only ridiculed the poster and thought he was being jealous.
The more interesting thing happened when Alex specifically searched for abilities.
From here he could gather dangerous people who were dumb enough to post about their abilities.
As most abilities were of the passive category, Alex could ignore the "Improved magic talent" ones.
There were many minor stat buffs.
He felt really good about the abilities section until he found a post with the title.
"Speed Calculation 1 is behaving weird. Need help."
That was one hell of a dangerous ability. Being only level 1 might not be noticeable in our world, but certainly at higher levels it would be.
This one lucky player was a born mage.
Magic was mostly about intrinsic hard work, control over mana and the often times overlooked calculations of what your magic should be able to do.
To cast a fireball was easy. To cast a fireball that was exactly 4000 degrees hot and spread evenly around a surface while not exploding was different.
The amount of calculation you had to do in an instant would be learned over a long time, but for beginners, to grasp the theory being it was hard.
Speed Calculation would prove to be useful in that way. To not have to worry about the calculation part and focus on what the magic should be able to do, could easily decide the outcome of a battle.
The only good thing was, that this specific person was not very intelligent and decide to walk the path of a swordsman.
Here came his problems with Speed Calculation. He could see the trajectories of enemy attacks even before they actually attacked.
Oftentimes he would be confused what slashes were real and which he only calculated.
His brain could not differentiate at the level he was at.
Thank god that this moron was a swordsman. He would undoubtedly be one of the best swordsman in this and the other world, but he would do less damage than with large scale magic.
Just imagining that he could cast high level magic faster than most mages that were higher level than him made Alexander shiver.
The rest of the posts about abilities were mostly about general questions considering the term.
Many who did not possess natura abilities wondered about how to acquire them.
Theories were the only cool thing in this section that remained.
Alexander himself had no idea how to get those abilities.
His own abilities were partially acquired through certain actions he made in his life or simply came as the result of other things needing to just "work".
As a soul he was naturally able to change his form into any shape he wanted.
Change at Will was the direct result of that.
Ethereal Form was also soul related. It's just something that souls are supposed to do.
Bottomless Pit however was something he acquired through the action of just eating too much in his wolf form and as he kept on eating and eating, he somehow got this.
Abilities could be summarized to be either concepts that just should be, as well as directly correlated effects that were somehow linked to other skills or habits.
Things that were normal for humans would not be considered an ability for the race.
In theory, if trees somehow got to move around they will get a correlating ability that reflects that.
So unnatural things that were not the norm would be made into abilities.
The theories made sense for Alexander.
For a few hours after that he read through the history of the world that a few players collected and compiled into a big text document. It followed the entire timeline and even filled some gaps that the history books of one kingdom missed.
Only by reading all of it, the players were able to compile it into one.
Covering wars, changes of lands, epics, fairytales. Everything was included in this compendium.
Especially fairytales were taken seriously. This was a fantasy world where those fairytales could have really happened.
As Alex so far had no knowledge of the world because he interacted with only a few residents so far, he found this to be very interesting.
Getting stronger was his main priority. But he also saw that he had some leeway as the majority of players were still under level 5.
As a level 7 with a lot of kill quests, left he felt better.
After Alexanders depressive outburst the day before, his parents left him alone for the majority of the day. He needed the space for himself and not be bothered with useless theories about magic.
Elly learned of his serious problems from her parents and was not happy about that.
The only one that was allowed to deceive her brother and get on his nerves was herself.
But she also knew that she was powerless against the goddess for now.
How could a level 17 fire elemental harm a god.
Even though her brother was under leveled by her standards, he would have a great chance of beating her.
Just his flying ability made her worry. He was essentially a flying car. Plus, now he could use divine magic. She did not want to know the feeling of divine water on her skin.
Agreeing with her parents, Elly also left Alex alone for the day.
She was just sad that she did not get to cuddle him again.
The evening was uneventful for Alexander. He let his mind wander over the information he gathered today. Not being forced into fighting or some other dumb reason to continue made him feel relaxed.
The day before he felt pretty depressed about his situation. The only good thing was that it could be much worse.
Even without the help of the goddess, he would have at least been a Soulwalker.
His path may differ from what he had now but in both cases, he could have fun.
His future path was not written for him. Everything could be decided by his own influence over the situations he would get himself into.
One situation he would commit to was scheduled for the next day.
He already had a good way to get into contact with the gods.
To discuss with them how he should deal with the abilities that the players possessed would be crucial for his own mind.
Would he be openly declaring martial law against the use of those abilities to harm others, or would he silently approaching the topic and get rid of bad apples in the system.
The track record for the gods in the last two millennium was not great. They mostly did not seem to care much about the well being of the race in general.
Inventions that would only harm the entire world were allowed to be researched.
Deadly intercontinental weaponry was hard to deal with.
If now people could attain the power of nuclear weapons, a disaster would come.
With this steadfast resolution to continue searching for his own way, Alexander went to bed.
He needed to be mentally fit for the next day.
---
Woken up by the early sun, Alexander got up and had breakfast with his parents.
By the way both cocked, they would surely become lazy in the long run.
Mage hand was the best friend of my parents.
Everything moved along to their magic and they would remotely flip pancakes and prepare juice.
Alexanders father even took a bunch of berries out of his void storage to make the juice.
The taste was exotic. These berries were nowhere to be found on our planet. Surely, they would taste different from everything that we had made in our world regarding juice.
His father could, if he got his hands on the seeds of these berries, create an environment where they would grow fast and then sell them in our world.
He would surely make a huge profit.
Both parents asked Alexander constantly if he was feeling better now and how he would go on now.
Alex was the only one of the family that would constantly do something different than grind for levels.
His sister being the complete opposite was already 15 levels higher than her brother.
Without even completing any quests. She just found a few dungeons and cleared them till there was not a single enemy standing anymore.
She was already joking about how she could get an ability called inferno or something of that sort.
For now she was looking for a way that elemental creatures could get the appearance of humans.
In many fairytales this was possible. She just needed to find out how.
Getting stronger was her main goal, the human form was the thing with the second highest priority.
After Alex and his family were finished with breakfast, he made his way to a window and after saying that he would be back in a while, he flew out with Ethereal Form.
In the other world, he could just fly around like he wanted. In his own world that was impossible.
The entire airspace was being monitored to a tee, naturally that included the heights where Alexander would fly at.
His comfort zone was not possible in the normal seraphim form.
Either he would have to use Ethereal Form or just fly around as a soul.
Normal humans were not being able to see souls, so he stuck with that.
Closing in on his destination, he slowed down.
A large multi-level building which covered many sectors people needed it to, stretched its uninviting appearance out in front of him.
The last time he was there when he broke one of his legs while falling down the stairs.
It was the central hospital of the city Alexander lived in.
Alexander hated that place.
He was forced to stay there for a week without anything to do. Boredom quickly got to him but he could not move as he was fixed in his bed.
Watching dumb shows on the small tv in the room may be considered a good day if he was doing it voluntarily.
But in a hospital, even that became mundane and boring.
Being forced to watch the same channel for a week was excruciatingly difficult.
Keeping it simple, he hated this place.
Still, this could be a good way of getting into contact with the gods.
The only thing that the gods did apparently, was taking souls to heaven.
Entering the most horrid place of a hospital, the intensive care unit, Alexander felt the agony of everyone there.
All the pain and suffering felt heavy for him.
He was now an angel with a divine spark. Naturally, these feelings of wanting to help those people were on his mind.
But with all the suffering that was happening every second in the world, he had no chance of succeeding.
The thirteenth room of the ICU was feeling especially heavy. The patient had a very weak life force.
Even though the machines told nothing to the doctors, Alexander could see the life force slowly fading away in the patient.
Now he had to witness a horrible thing. This patient was slowly dying.
He was weak. But he could still speak a few words.