Acknowledging that he wasn’t ok and that he would need to put in the effort to balance his mental state helped Blake calm down. He was by no means stable but he was no longer despondent. The sun was starting to set by the time he exited his meditation.

  He had been at it for half the day and was proud of himself for going for so long. Meditation had always been difficult for him, more so in his damaged mental state, but he had persevered. While he struggled with fear and panic, not every change to his mind since arriving in the spirit realm was a bad one. He found it easier to focus on himself and push through difficulties. Blake took note that he needed to remind himself that once he had conquered his fears he could only come out better for it.

  It was too late for him to start his herbalism project so instead Blake decided to get a round of exercise done before going to sleep. He hadn’t done anything productive that day so he felt the need to do something before he settled down. While he hadn’t physically exerted himself the mental strain of the day combined with his lack of sleep the night before made him exhausted and his attempt at exercising a slog.

  Blake woke up the next morning not remembering going to sleep. He was in his leaf bed so he had clearly dragged himself there but he wasn’t sure if he had completed his workout or not. On the bright side, he was too tired to dream so he had a wonderful night’s sleep. Glancing at his fire pit he found that there were no smoldering coals.

  He must not have lit a fire the night before. Blake had tried to keep a smoldering fire going at all times as it was easier to maintain a fire than start a new one. It wasn’t too time-consuming a process now that he was stronger and more skilled but combined with the sense of comfort a fire provided him there was no reason to let it go out. For him not to have stoked it the night before he must have collapsed into his bed without a thought in his head.

  Blake spent the morning exercising. He couldn’t help but shake his head at how long it took. He had started as the sun rose and by the time he had finished, it was high in the sky. He had already decided not to worry so much about his physical training until he had better equipment, focusing on maintaining his strength, but he might have to take that a step further and only workout once a day. Maybe even every other day.

  Training complete Blake turned his mind towards herbalism. He knew absolutely nothing about how to approach herbalism and only a basic idea of what could be done. Herbalism was the craft of mixing plants together to create various useful substances. It was not popular as those who had a herbalism Talent wanted to expand their Talent into alchemy which was far more useful and popular.

  While herbalism was focused on the process of caring for and combining plants together, alchemy was a magic discipline that allowed for more powerful and varied effects. Alchemists used ingredients of all sorts, not just plants, and combined them using a combination of traditional and magical methods. However, alchemy required mana which Blake did not have.

  Mana was an energy unlocked by certain Talents to power abilities. Mana was the defining characteristic of magic and the key difference between magical and supernatural abilities. A supernatural ability, such as Blake’s Talent’s ability to enhance the properties of whatever he created, did not require any resources and was often passive in nature. Magical abilities, sometimes called spells, consumed mana in return for more active, powerful effects.

  Blake had heard of people unlocking mana outside of their Talent but it was considered the domain of the rich. It took expensive natural treasures and training to accomplish. A natural treasure was any energy-dense resource found in the spirit realm. The higher the realm the stronger and more common the treasure. In a tier 0 realm, Blake would be lucky to find a natural treasure in the most dangerous location of the realm and its effect could very well be useless to him.

  Of course, if given the opportunity, Blake would unlock mana in a heartbeat. He might not get the special spells that a magic focused Talent provided, and he doubted his Talent would be easy to upgrade given its already massive scope, but many types of crafting utilized mana and he believed that his Talent would synergize well with it even if it ended up not working directly.

  For now, Blake how to make do with mundane crafts. Since he didn’t know anything about herbalism he was going to have to rely heavily on his Talent to learn. He considered it a good stress test of his abilities. Normally discovering and researching a new field of science, magic, what have you, would require meticulous testing and recording of what was happening to narrow down what was happening.

  Research took days, weeks, or years of effort to slowly narrow down the variables of an experiment to determine what was happening and even after a conclusion was reached there was always the chance it was wrong. Research could be as much guesswork and luck as it was logic.

  Blake’s Talent removed the vast majority of that. He had no need for measuring or recording equipment as after trying something his Talent would tell him exactly what happened down to the atomic structure if he focused hard enough. There was no guesswork or inaccurate readings on what was happening leaving him confident in his results.

  He would still have to put together all the information he gained and come to a conclusion on how to do something but at that point, it was more of an engineering project than a scientific one. He would need to piece together his knowledge into a cohesive whole on how things worked if he wanted to make the best craft possible.

  To start his adventures in herbalism Blake decided to get some tools ready. His last attempt had shown him the difficulty in preparing his ingredients to be mixed and wanted to head off any potential problems he may have. First, he upgraded where he was going to be mixing and preparing his ingredients.

  Last time he had a shallow indent into a piece of wood that he used to keep his spit and leaves together. This time he took that wood and expanded the indent into a proper bowl shape. It would now work better to hold the water he had collected in combination with ground-up plants.

  In chemistry class, he had often used a mortar and pestle when preparing ingredients. Herbalism was more mystical than scientific but he decided he wanted the same tools. The wooden bowl, if a carved-out circle in a log could be called that, was his mortar. Now he just had to make a pestle to help grind the leaves, roots, flowers, and stems of plants into a more powdery substance to make mixing it easier.

  To make the pestle Blake found a short stubby stick. He used a rough stone to strip it of its bark before he began to shape the end into a rounded knob. He removed the bark so that there were fewer contaminants in his herbalism experiments. He had to admit it was kind of a joke considering how many other sources of random contaminants there were in his makeshift setup but he felt that a piece of bark falling into his mix was too easy to prevent not to do so.

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  Tools complete Blake received a burst of insight on how best to utilize them to grind down his ingredients. They were low quality with lots of irregular surface area on both mortar and pestle which would make using them difficult and tedious but it would do for now. With the skill that his Talent had given him, he would be able to avoid the worst of the burs by being careful about where and how he pressed down with the pestle.

  The first ingredient Blake prepared for his first experiment was some of the leaves from the surrounding trees. They were the easiest ingredient to come across for him, a close second being the grass of his glade, so he felt it would be best if he knew what he could do with them as soon as possible. Using his mortar and he ground them up until they were a fine, well not powder, his tools were crappy for that, but tiny pieces. None were bigger than a centimeter and many were smaller than that.

  Since he didn’t want bigger pieces if he could help it, it took Blake a long while to prepare his leaves. It was past noon and his exercise cooldown had reset. He didn’t worry about the workout but he did hope that the grass would be easier to prepare. It did start smaller after all.

  It took just as long. Apparently, starting smaller didn’t help much when trying to keep the volume of ingredients prepared about the same. He just had to do more grass to match the amount of leaves.

  Once he had finished preparing the grass he was too excited to prepare any more ingredients for the moment. He wanted to run at least one test before the day ended and if he spent time on another ingredient that wouldn’t happen.

  For this first test, all he was going to do was going to do was mix some of the ground-up leaves and grass together with some water. Blake looked back and forth at his log full of water and his mortar. Now, how was he going to transfer the water? The piece of wood he used as a mortar was too big to be dipped into the log and the log was too large and heavy to tip over a little to pour the water into the mortar.

  In the end, he had to spend time to break off one end of the block of wood holding his mortar. He was careful not to break any part of the wood that surrounded the indent that was his mortar but it was stressful work. Blake was ok with this kind of stress. There was no fear of a horn up his butt with this kind of stress.

  Even with the wood block smaller it still didn’t fit fully in the water container but he could get a corner in and get a small amount of water. Enough that he could begin his experiments. Once he had water he added the leaves and grass. He had prepared enough of each for multiple trials so he only took a small pinch of each.

  Using his pestle Blake ground and mixed the ingredients into a green goopy paste. He couldn’t help but compare the result to a giant booger. Before he began to mix the ingredients, he had spent some time coming up with the ‘goal’ that he would focus on for the purposes of his Talent. He decided that his focus would be on the idea of it being a salve without being any more specific.

  When he had been experimenting with his Talent a few days ago he had discovered that how he perceived things mattered more than the actual result. When he had thought of his shiv as a spear his Talent had classified it as a spear, if an unusual one. His hope with this herbalism experiment was that by classifying his goal as a salve that did something, every experiment he did would fall under one umbrella so that he wouldn’t have to run the same experiment multiple times with different focuses to make sure it had no effect.

  This was something he had noticed about his Talent, specifically the part that gave him information on his craft. No matter what his goal was Blake would receive detailed information on how all components of the craft interacted with each other and how his actions influenced these interactions, however, his intention for the craft influenced what information he got external to the craft directly.

  For example, his leaf bed. The basic information on density, springiness, water retention, and a million other things were all provided no matter what the goal was. Since it was a bed, however, he also got information on how it affected sleep and, more specifically since it was his bed, how it affected his sleep.

  A salve was meant to affect what it was rubbed on and Blake needed to understand what would happen if he wanted to make anything. Rubbing unknown substances on his skin to see what would happen was a good way to get covered in rashes and maybe even poison. That was also an imprecise way to determine what was happening in comparison to his Talent. His Talent didn’t provide as detailed information when it came to external reactions of his crafts but it still gave a good idea.

  Blake wondered if there was a way to make the experiment itself the craft. He decided it wasn’t worth the effort and potential failure at the moment. Better to test one thing at a time.

  So in the end the image of his completed craft Blake focused on was a salve that affected whatever it was rubbed upon. It was hopefully enough to activate his Talent while not pigeonholing the feedback he would receive.

  Leaves and grass-finished mixing Blake took a moment to process what his Talent was telling him. As expected, the combination did absolutely nothing. In fact, despite his best effort, he found that only a small portion of the ingredients had fully mixed. He wasn’t sure if this was due solely to his crappy tools or if most mixtures were only partially successful. If he had the opportunity to use his Talent with better equipment he would know more.

  It would explain why the skills provided by Talents could make such a difference in the effect of crafts even before supernatural and/or magical effects were taken into account. If there was lots of lost power on a scale too small to detect to the naked eye only the enhanced ability of a Talent might be able to overcome that multiplying the efficiency of the craft multiple times over.

  Blake knew that there was a grading scale for how good an item was and was thinking this was what caused such a difference in quality to make such a scale necessary. There were two components to measure an item’s effect; tier and grade. Tier was the tier of the realm the ingredients were taken from. It could also be seen as the energy density of an ingredient.

  Transporting materials between the spirit realm and the physical realm was difficult so most magical items on Earth were instead materials that had been infused with large amounts of energy over time. That was why the government put in so much effort to force people to tier 3. Higher-tier individuals produced more mana that was released from their bodies into Earth’s atmosphere. This mana then passively improved everything on Earth while also providing a clean energy source.

  Blake always found it odd that despite most people never unlocking mana everyone produced it but who was he to question such a thing? Mana was not native to the physical realm so only those who had entered the spirit realm produced it. The energy density of materials were then judged in comparison to materials from the spirit realm to determine what tier they were.

  The grade of an item was the interesting bit. The grade was said to be how much of the materials’ potential a craftsman brought out, which made a lot more sense to Blake now. In other words the stronger the item with the same materials the higher the grade. A high-grade tier 0 item could be many times stronger than a low-grade tier 1 or even tier 2 item.

  Grades went from A to F. There was the potential of S, SS, or even SSS items but that meant surpassing the natural potential of the materials through the use of a Talent in combination with a perfect craft. Blake’s memory got a little fuzzy at this part as he had never been interested in crafting before but he believed that A-grade was considered a perfect craft as it could be accomplished without a Talent although with great difficulty but an S-grade required a Talent.

  He was pretty sure that most A-grade or even B-grade items were made due to Talents enhancing the result of a craft rather than the actual craftsmanship.

  While this was all interesting to note it didn’t matter much to Blake at the moment since he had no one to sell his wares to so there was no need to have his items graded. Perhaps to see how well he was doing it might be useful but he didn’t understand how the grades were determined well enough to grade his own items.

  With his first experiment done Blake decided he was finished for the day. The sun was setting and he needed to get a new fire started soon. Tomorrow he would be able to really get started with herbalism now that his preparations were done.

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