Blake yelled out in frustration. His latest attempt at a salve had failed once again. He had been working on his herbalism experiments for three days now with little to show for it. He had been combining plants in various combinations with the ingredients prepared in different ways. Some he ground down as he had done with the tree leaves and grass, others he juiced for whatever liquid he had.

  The closest he had gotten to a salve that could be considered useful was when he had pulped a plant that looked like aloe and combined it with the tuber of a strange plant he had found growing at the base of some of the trees. He was confident he could cook the tuber if he had a way to boil water but for now, its only use was his herbalism experiments.

  Combining the two with a hint of water created a substance that excited the cells of an organism in some way but Blake was missing a key ingredient to direct that energy into increased healing. Or poison. At this point, he would accept poison as at least it meant he had a working reaction.

  Blake needed a break from his experiments. Over the last few days, he had been working out once in the morning but had otherwise been completely devoted to his research. His mind was more steady now and having a goal helped leaving him with more energy in the day now that he could sleep.

  Stepping back from his latest attempt at a salve Blake turned towards another project he had been thinking about; An obstacle course. He had discovered while traveling to the river that his strength had increased too fast to maintain control of. He had never been the most coordinated person but it had only become worse despite his growing awareness of his own body.

  Blake wanted to create an obstacle course to train his control over his own body. Exercise and physical exertion in general helped connect the mind to the body to increase the awareness of your own strength but the enhanced growth of the spirit realm threw this effect out of balance. He needed to increase the mind-body connection without increasing his strength for a time.

  He didn’t have much to work with so the course was going to be rather basic. To start he dragged logs and large stones to act as hurdles to jump over. He positioned them so that for some he could jump between them. This meant he had to decide to jump over or on top of each obstacle at speed.

  Between some of the hurdles were tree branches that he could swing on to get his arms involved in the practice. Blake was starting to get excited by the training course now and took it a step further. Using one of the largest fallen logs he had he set it vertically so that he wouldn’t be able to jump over it.

  Instead, Blake used a small stone to carve a target into it. Now as he ran past it he could practice with his spear by attacking it at speed. While his Talent provided him with the muscle memory and instincts to use the spear it did not provide help to combine it with other skills such as the parkour he was trying to develop.

  Course construction complete Blake looked around proud at the simple but hopefully effective creation of his. He was surprised when his Talent suddenly activated. He hadn’t even noticed when he had fallen into the focused trance needed for his Talent while working on the training course. It had quickly become a habit to do so after so many days of creating a variety of objects.

  Blake’s Talent gave him the muscle memory to overcome each obstacle. He had a good idea of how to swing using the tree branches to get between two hurdles and how to best optimize a running jump. His jack slackened. Did he not have to use the course for it to provide full benefits because of his Talent? Even his skill with the spear had improved with the inclusion of the target dummy.

  Excited to see how effective his Talent had been at training him to use the course Blake quickly shot off to run through the course. He quickly learned when he tripped over the second hurdle that his Talent did not make him an immediate expert at parkour. He had the muscle memory and subconscious knowledge of someone who had run the course a hundred times but since he didn’t consciously know and understand what he could do he couldn’t bring his skill to bare.

  This was a weakness in his Talent-gained knowledge that Blake hadn’t even realized was there. So far he had only ever used tools after gaining the skill in them and they were always simple enough that he would have figured out most of what they had taught him on his own within a short period of time. There was no reason to spend time and explore everything his Talent had taught him for those.

  The only skill he had been constantly working to expand but had never used was that of the spear. He had been constantly refining and iterating on his spear design since he had arrived in the spirit realm but had never used it in an actual badly.

  He had incorrectly assumed that when the time came he would be able to use it with ease. After all, the first skill he had gained was how to use a bed which he had no problems with. It was only now that he thought about it that he realized that he had never needed to understand the skill consciously because it was only ever applicable while asleep when the subconscious mind was fully in control.

  Very concerned about his lack of control over his skills, especially with the spear, Blake walked over to the training dummy, spear in hand. Standing in front of it he gripped the spear with two hands and stabbed at it. He hadn’t even begun the motion before he knew it was wrong.

  Taking a moment to analyze the feeling his muscle memory and instincts were telling him, he adjusted his stance slightly before trying again. And again. And again. It took five times before he felt that he was standing correctly before he stabbed forward. He still felt there was so much wrong with the motion but was having trouble picking out what.

  He worked on the single simple stab motion for ten minutes before stepping back to reassess what he was doing. He was making steady progress but he felt there was something fundamentally wrong with his approach.

  If there was one thing Blake had learned about his Talent, and himself for that matter, it was that focused, intentional thought could make all the difference. In other words, he needed to meditate. Sitting on the grass Blake closed his eyes as he focused on his last attempt to stab the target. He let all extraneous thoughts go and let his attention narrow to a single simple motion.

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  It still took him a bit of time to fully fall into this state but it was much quicker than ever before after all the practice he had gained. It was funny to Blake that one of the most impactful factors that sped up the process for him was that he no longer cared how long it took. No longer being able to tell the exact time, or being on a strict schedule, made him feel more relaxed and free.

  Who cared if it took him a day, two days, or even a week to fall into meditation? There was nothing waiting on him, no appointment he had to keep. He could sit there for all eternity for all it mattered.

  That wasn’t necessarily true. He had a year to reach tier 3 so he couldn’t languish forever but even that wasn’t the end of the world for Blake. From what he understood of spirit walking, the term for entering the spirit realm while your body stayed behind, you couldn’t be forced out of it. The body storage facility would be unable to do anything but maintain his body as doing anything to damage his body would cause them lots of trouble for little to no gain.

  Normally staying in the spirit realm to hide from fees and taxes did little as the government had plenty of people in the spirit realm that they could send after people. Killing someone in the spirit realm was the only known way to force someone’s consciousness back into their body as was supposedly quite painful and mentally damaging. In conjunction with the heavy fines that would be levied against the perpetrator, it just wasn’t worth it.

  For Blake things were different. He was not residing in human civilization. He didn’t even have a way to get there at the moment. Because of this, there was no way for him to be arrested and even if he was he had enough of a defense he would at least be safe from spiritual execution. At most he would have ever-increasing fines back on Earth and maybe some jail time for not trying to exit the spirit realm. Of course, he didn’t know how to exit the spirit realm without dying so that was a no-go anyway.

  These were things that Blake had thought through before but for now, his focus was on analyzing his spear technique. It took a bit of time but eventually, it clicked for him and he was able to better access and sort what he had learned from his Talent. It was strange how easy it became all of a sudden, almost as if this was what he was always supposed to do to integrate the skills gained from his Talent.

  Bringing his focus back to the outside world, Blake stood up and repeated his stab at the training dummy. Unlike before he was conscious of his movements and what he needed to do. The first thing, and most difficult thing to recognize, was that his grip on the spear was wrong. Adjusting that he then repeated the stabbing motion again.

  He iterated on his attack for the next half hour as he integrated everything he had learned from his Talent. By the time he was done, it still wasn’t perfect but that was more due to the underdeveloped skill being provided from his Talent rather than unintegrated knowledge.

  Blake repeated the process of meditating and integrating his skill with the spear for many different movements until he felt he had a solid grasp of everything. He then tried to combine the individual movements into a cohesive whole but ran into a problem. He needed a real opponent to provide the correct pressure for it all to work. Attacking a log just didn’t provide the right feedback to make it all work.

  More comfortable with the spear than ever before, Blake moved on to the obstacle course. Just like he had done with the spear he started by separating it into individual movements. He jumped one obstacle at a time, swung on one branch, etc. Only once he understood each part of the course did he work to bring it all together.

  Unlike with the spear, the training course was sufficient to help Blake make his movements merge together. It took three days of effort but he was finally able to sprint through the course every time without fail. He even got his spear skills involved to a degree, attacking the dummy as he ran past.

  It felt like a long time coming to Blake but without his Talent, it would have taken many times longer to accomplish. While most of his focus had been on the obstacle course for the past few days he had not completely stopped his herbalism experiments.

  He was close to a breakthrough and now that he had finished his training with the course he turned his full attention to his research. Two long days of trial and error later he had done it. He had created something using his herbalism skills.

  To his surprise, his first successful creation was not a salve like he had planned. This was actually one of his major delays. His imagined goal when testing things had been to create a salve so he wasn’t getting the right feedback to fully understand what was happening. It was only after gaining a better appreciation for the effect of meditation in conjunction with his Talent that he had gained while training in spearmanship that he had an epiphany and what he was making.

  He had made an adhesive. He had ground up resin and then combined it with pulped aloe-like plant and a couple of other things to create an adhesive that dried within a few minutes. Resin by itself could be considered an adhesive but it wasn’t as strong as his new glue and he didn’t have a way to easily bring it to a liquid-ish state.

  He didn’t have any good storage containers so any adhesive he used had to be able to be liquified after creation since it would harden sitting in his little bowl. For his glue, he was able to grind it back up and mix a little water with it to make it ready to be applied to whatever he needed. From his testing water by itself didn’t remove the glue so he wasn’t worried about getting anything accidently wet and falling apart.

  Now with a way to stick things together he could create more complicated crafts. The first thing Blake thought of was exercise equipment. He had been planning to wait until he figured out how to make things with stone but he no longer had to. By gluing wood together he would be able to create heavy enough objects to exercise with.

  The next morning Blake got right to testing his glue. The simplest test he could think of was gluing a buch of sticks together into a bundle. He quickly ground down and prepared the glue he had made last night since it had hardened overnight. He then took a small stick and used it as an applicator for the glue.

  He didn’t want to get any on his hands as he wasn’t sure he would be able to get it off. Sticking one end of his applicator in the mortar where the glue was he began to use the applicator to, for lack of a better word, pain the glue onto a bigger stick. Once done he quickly stuck another stick on top of it and held them together.

  Not wanting to risk it not working because of something he did he just sat there applying a small amount of pressure for a while. He fell into a medatative state as he did so, clearing his mind. After he felt enough time had passed he opened his eyes and released his hold on the sticks.

  Holding onto them with one hand he swung the sticks around a big smile on his face. It had worked. The two sticks stayed together. Exicitedly, Blake began to glue more sticks onto the bundle. Eventually it reached a point where it was difficult for him to easily lift but he kept adding to it.

  It was only when he struggled to lift the bundle with both arms that he stopped. He had done it. He now had a piece of exercise equipment and could resume his physical training. Soon he would he unstoppable.

  With a grin on his face Blake set to work making everthing else he thought he would need.

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