[Longstrider] seemed to blur the landscape as Shayma walked toward the river. Between that and [Endurance] she could probably make it there in one trip, since her Longstrider walk was a bit faster than normal running as far as I could tell. She`d taken the knight`s leathers, though it didn`t seem too magical to me since it didn`t resize to fit her and was a bit large.

　　Her visit had reminded me how lax I`d grown in trying to break the system. Or maybe that was another way cores tended to go off the rails. Without human contact, did they just blur into vagueness?

　　[Wisdom] advances to 4.

　　If I were to play host to however-many refugees from whatever was going on, little cottages and falling rocks weren`t going to be enough. I didn`t have a list of things to investigate, exactly, but I had some ideas and I had something else to watch than the grass growing on my farms. One of which I really should have thought of earlier.

　　[Relocate] didn`t absorb what it moved. That was obvious because it could move the core. A black cocoon surrounded what I was trying to move and another grew where it would go, and at some point they both withered away to reveal the change. So I tested it by Relocating some sensory organs to see if I could spot and, most importantly, control how it worked. I was hoping that I could use it to move things more quickly, since it could take minutes or even hours, if I wanted to shift something large. I hadn`t tried whole rooms, but that could be days. Not very useful for surprising people.Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

　　I watched, waited, caught the faint flicker as a sensor organ flicked from one point to another. Then back again. Back, forth, and then I tried to pull the organ back to the first spot before the cocoons opened, pushing it back along whatever link there was. Then I was surprised.

　　[Spatial Manipulation] unlocked.

　　Oh wow. That was quite nearly as fantastic as the Companion branch. Nearly.

　　As with a lot of skills, all it did was unlock a new category for me to put experience into. It didn`t start out with much - [Compression], [Expansion], and [Link]. But the mana costs were an order of magnitude greater than what I could sustain right now. I had been prepared to pour some portion of the enormous pool of stockpiled experience I had into that, because, damn, Spatial Manipulation. But I wasn`t anywhere near being able to do anything with it.

　　Well, I had to expand anyway. I put some of the spare experience into my Roots and started digging space.