‘Alright, time to do some less physical stuff,’ John decided when he left the house on the fourth day. After three days dominated by fighting and, mostly, getting his ass kicked, he wanted to do something that was relaxing. His plan outlined to get Arcweaver to level 3, but that didn’t have to be done in a hurry. Instead, he could go with another Class in his line-up that would, presumably, not bombard him with combat Challenges.

It was time to grind up Fateweaving.

He breezed through the initial Challenges with ease. The Class asked him to do a lot of precision stuff that required mental fortitude. With John’s tilt towards Mental Stats, that was his area of expertise. Creating barriers with exact measurements, manipulating the environment he created to include houses or other landmarks, rapidly making, destroying and remaking spaces, all of that came naturally to him. The only Challenge he somewhat struggled with was adjusting a barrier after it was made.

Obviously, he wasn’t as great at any of this as Magoi was. The houses he made were fit to be shelters, but they lacked running water and electricity. Highly experienced barrier-makers had their ways to ensure these things, often involving carrying more complex parts inside their dimensional pockets to be integrated, rather than thought up whole cloth. Magoi barely even needed to rely on that. The High Fateweaver didn’t have to gesture to make or close Illusion Barriers either. He was, simply, on a whole different level.

One that John approached through incremental progress at a rate much higher than anyone else in the world could have hoped to. ‘A wish-fulfilment engine… might be a pretty good term for my powers,’ the Gamer recalled the way Gaia had described it before, as he finally reached the sixth level of the Class. Because of the Gestalt Kingdom Quest, he hadn’t gotten any Perks for the levels 4 and 5. A loss that stung but ultimately shouldn’t be too harsh. The powerful Perks of level 6 and upwards were still all there, after all.

“Man, why does my wish-fulfilment engine make me pick between good things,” John grumbled and sat down in the light-filled blackness. He had been doing his Challenges alone for the past hours. Originally, some girls had been with him, but watching him fill the empty spaces beyond the gates of light Magoi put up in the intermediary Illusion Barrier had proved too boring for them to all stay around. Only Aclysia and Beatrice would have been willing to stay, but John had sent them away to get more productive things done, like training with the other girls and cooking.

John forced himself to go through the process of elimination and came to the pretty quick conclusion that Barrier Sense was the best choice. He wasn’t happy with that, but the other two were just incredibly niche. Living Loot served no practical purpose since he wasn’t currently and didn’t intend to become a Tamer build. Conceivably, he could sell the eggs and younglings he got, or enlist them to Fusion’s services in other ways, but that was dependent on many factors outside his control and it wasn’t as if he was wanting for money anyway. Kingdom Explorer would spice up things, but spice alone didn’t make it worth the pick.

Barrier Sense was almost invaluable as a utility. Finding Illusion Barriers usually required coordinates, a learned Fateweaver, determination or sheer dumb luck. With this Perk, that would be reduced to ‘the general area’ for John to find a target. It would increase search speed and even allow him to find barriers out in the wild.

Resigning himself to the best choice, John clicked the button and resumed his Challenge grinding.

It took him the rest of the fourth day and the morning of the fifth to get to Class Level seven. The Challenges remained generally interesting but ramped up in time consumption. Being tasked with recreating specific buildings just from images wasn’t that easy, especially when Gaia demanded even the texture and materials to be accurate. Regardless, he managed.

Again three choices, all of which John wanted. Detail was the first choice to be eliminated, since finding a barrier in the first place sounded more important than to know its category from the outside. That put the match between Distance and Pull Resistance. Having the ability to resist Trap Barriers was, doubtlessly, quite potent. However, it was of limited use. The number of people, gods and other entities that could still muster the power to pull in him was very small. That also was an argument in its favour, since it would be incredibly valuable when it did apply. John usually favoured general usefulness over specific power, so he picked the range.

Reaching Class Level eight was much the same when it came to time-consuming and repetitive tasks. He went a little bit past his schedule to get it done within day five.

The previous reasoning still applied. The bigger the range on the distance sense, the better. Since that particular passive was, apparently, only improved by further Perks and not by general usage, making it more powerful where he could was only sensible.

On day six, John spent about an hour trying to properly visualize the next Challenge – to no avail. All of his attempts failed due to the spike of complexity in his target. He knew he could have gotten it eventually if he just kept hacking away at it. However, there was a way to hasten up the learning process.

“So, you want me to help you?” Magoi asked, sipping on his tea. The High Fateweaver’s raptor-skull mask was hanging by its straps from the backrest of the chair. Mabirl’s was sitting on the kitchen counter, the housewife currently occupied with loading the dishes from their breakfast into the dishwasher.

“If you know a way you can,” the Gamer told him. “I just get the feeling that this is something that should be easier if I knew how it’s properly done.”

“Hmmm, well, I can’t really coach you, since I can’t enter the barrier under the intermediary barrier without the two joining.” Magoi stroked the chin of his hairless, scar covered face. “I can try to give you some advice, however. Are we talking about originating creation or additional creation?”

“That would be the difference between creating something with the barrier or after it’s established, right?” John asked, just to be sure. When he got a nod, he answered, “Additional, in this case.”

“And you have to create from a picture?”

“A 3D model with a static viewing distance, to be completely precise.”

“Alright, walk me through your process.”

“First, I visualize the thing I want to create in my head. Then-“

“Okay, stop,” Magoi already had something to correct, “you don’t interface with the barrier first?”

“No, I do that after I have reconstructed the entire 3D model in my head.”

“Reconstructed the entire…” Magoi petered out, sounding more than a little bit baffled. “I’ve lived for a while, but I’m still baffled whenever I see someone that’s too smart to get something done properly. You’re not supposed to reconstruct the entire thing in your head. You’re supposed to reconstruct the entire thing in reality. You interface with the barrier first and then build the thing segment by segment.” The High Fateweaver paused and continued in an amused tone. “We’re closer to artists than to printers.”

“Huh.” John thought about that for a second. His method had worked wonderfully for less complicated buildings, so he hadn’t considered that the thought process in itself may be wrong. He probably would have in another few hours’ time, but Magoi pointing out the proper way of things spared him the time required to discover it. They spent another twenty minutes discussing some other mistakes John made, then the Gamer decided to put the things he had heard into praxis. “Alright, I’ll go apply that.”

“Normally I would say it should take you a couple of weeks to get that mental process down… but you’re not normal,” Magoi joked. “Have a good one, Mister President.”

“It’s really weird when you call me that,” John complained, as he rose from the chair. “Anyway, I owe you.”

“If you wanted to repay us,” Mabirl chimed into the conversation. “Our youngest is going to move here soon. You could help us get her well situated.”

John recalled the third kid of the Magus family. She was a little younger than John, was leaning on the attractive side and had proven to be quite the introvert the one time they had interacted. “I thought she was still studying at the Mountain of Time?” John asked. “Or is she done there now?”

“As it turns out, the headquarters of an organization decays rather quickly if the organization loses power,” Magoi sighed. “The quality of the education is plummeting and so is the funding. I’d rather have her here. I’m confident I can make the Magic Academy provide a more thorough education.”

“And I can make sure that she’s not squandering her talents by playing video games all day,” Mabirl added. “Girl keeps insisting she would rather get into this useless e-sports thing.”

John bit the inside of his cheek to prevent himself from starting a discussion with the housewife. It wasn’t his place to weigh in on these family matters. “I take it she is not going to live with you when she comes here?”

“No, she’ll have her own house. She’s old enough to look after herself,” Magoi said. “It would be easier to pick out a location if you weigh in on the process.”

Magoi himself would get preferential treatment courtesy of who he was. This was, honestly speaking, a flaw in the operation of Fusion. Optimally, no one, not even John himself, should have gotten through the government apparatus quicker than others. In reality, no matter the system, people in power got through quicker than everyone else. This was because nobody would think it necessary to be entirely stringent about the identification process when dealing with public figures and because people were naturally inclined to do a quick and proper job for people that had more influence than them. Nobody wanted to lose their job for pissing off the wrong person.

Taking all of this into account, Magoi would have gotten things sorted quicker than average, but John, who was in charge of the districts in the Hudson Barrier, could resolve it pretty much immediately. All he had to do was agree on a plot of land with Magoi and then sign a transferral contract, giving it to him, his academy or his daughter.

If the housing situation in the Hudson Barrier had been highly constricted at the moment, John would have been cautious about agreeing. With most of the liveable space still empty, any moral questions he had about weighing into the market with such obvious preferential treatment was discarded. “Sure, we can get that sorted,” he assured them. “Just give me a list of locations and we’ll figure it out over some coffee after this grinding session.”

“Good.” Mabirl nodded, the dark-haired older, but nevertheless attractive, woman rolled her shoulders. “Lee will be a handful as ever… We understand that you’ll not flirt with her, yes?” Mabirl liked John, she even liked most of his harem, but she did not want his lifestyle to reflect on her children. She had made that clear in the past.

“No threat from me, I assure you,” he said, raising his hands in surrender. He knew better than to mess with the wishes of Magoi’s wife. There were many better ways to expand his harem, if he even wished to do so. After saying his goodbyes, John went back outside to apply the hints he had been given.

At first, like it so often was when breaking with an old way of doing things, the new way felt incredibly slow and awkward. After about an hour of figuring things out, he got the next Challenge done. From there, things progressed smoothly and with increasing speed. Magoi’s metaphor held true: the Gamer had tried to just print the entire building into existence with mechanical precision. Going about it more like moulding a piece of clay was a much better process. Careless manifestation of things sometimes set him back, but that was fine, overall.

Even greater range sounded useful, but Origin had an entirely different utility that John knew he wanted immediately. Now that he could already sense Illusion Barriers at a considerable range, upping it even more was falling in value. Origin would just smooth things out since it would tell him exactly who he had to point Siena at. Not a situation he thought would arise too often, but with the generalist tool already made to be quite useful, going slightly into the specialized route felt like a valuable detour.

The final Perk took another day to acquire, which was all around the same work as before. In total, it had taken John four days to get Fateweaver from level 3 to 10. A pretty fantastic time, all things considered. Anticipating the rewards, he pushed the button to level the Class one last time.

Greater Greatest Distance was out. Not because a 400% increase in the range was bad by any means, but because the other two had utility far beyond finding the Illusion Barriers. Trace was a potent upgrade of Origin and would definitely allow him to guide Siena towards a high priority target. However, that felt a bit too specialized to come up often. Much like the Trap Barrier resistance, it would be really handy when it came up and a dead Perk otherwise. Location seemed like a sensible middle ground, providing both another range boost and valuable intel before entering the barrier.

Three more windows popped up in front of John and he read them with glee.

This was both incredibly useful and quite niche. If Modification hadn’t come with the limitation that he could only switch between which one was active once a day, this one would have been a fantastic acquisition. Even as it was, he could at least stop worrying about having to put a Mobile Barrier generator into every single one of his cars. ‘Hell, with this, I could actually just run the distance,’ John thought. ‘It removes the necessity to create a new barrier every hundred metres or so.’

This, too, was incredibly useful, but the limitation in the form of its cooldown really limited what John could do with it. ‘I guess I can do one less effective grinding session without Magoi,’ John thought. If he had the Fateweaver Class active, he could achieve a total time dilation of 150%, which would rise to 450% with this Overclock Skill. That was less than half of the ratio Magoi achieved, but it was still a good chunk of additional time. ‘I’ll have to see if I can push that up a bit more before I spend the cooldown.’

‘Of course, it ends with a difficult choice,’ John thought and scratched his chin. High Fateweaver was the natural progression of things and enticing. However, because it was the natural progression, John found himself dismissing that choice. Although it may be unlikely that he found someone just as powerful as Magoi to replace him, whenever the High Fateweaver retired fully, the general service he provided to John could be bought.

Invader and Space Protector were slightly different beasts. The former would assure him he wouldn’t have problems dealing with fortified positions, such as he had encountered in the Five Days War, while the latter would make defending them himself easier. ‘Do I favour offence or defence?’ he asked himself, slowly creeping towards the Invader option.

Then it dawned on him that Space Protector would at the very least up the defences of his Guild Hall. That tipped the balance completely, especially if there was another Class after this that would offer him specialized extras to the Guild Hall. This promised ever good general utilities or a way to increase the functionality of the heart of his guild (along with appeasing Scarlett). He made the choice and checked out the description.