He sat with that thought for a moment, turning the numbers over in his head, watching the way the late afternoon light caught the surface of the basin, and then a question occurred to him that he hadn’t actually asked yet, despite how obviously important it was.
"Zara," he called her.
"How much do attributes actually increase per level? For anyone, not just me. Does it stay the same amount every level, or does it change as someone gets stronger, the way some things start small and snowball?"
Zara settled more comfortably onto the stone, the question apparently substantial enough that she wanted to actually think about her answer rather than toss something off quickly the way she might with something lighter.
"Every level gives you plus one in each attribute automatically," she said.
"That’s the baseline, the thing that happens whether you do anything or not, whether you train like a maniac or spend the whole level sitting around eating sweets. On top of that you get five free attribute points you can put wherever you want, and five special points for bloodline/class/class related unlocks. That’s the standard progression, the same at every level, at least as far as anyone’s actually measured it. Nobody’s found a point where it scales differently, and believe me, people have looked."
Alex turned that over. "So at level ten, theoretically, someone who put everything into one stat could have fifty extra points stacked on top of their base attribute."
"Theoretically, yes, though nobody’s foolish enough to dump everything into a single attribute that early. You’d be strong in one direction and embarrassingly fragile in every other one, the kind of fighter who wins exactly one fight and then dies horribly in the second." She took a sip from her own water, considering.
"Most people spread it out. A little strength, a little vitality, a little of whatever their fighting style actually needs to function without leaving an obvious hole an enemy can walk right through."
"What’s normal, then?" Alex asked.
"Baseline. If I hadn’t done any of this today, if I were just an ordinary five year old in this world, what would my stats actually look like, no system, no training, just existing?"
"For a grown adult, eighteen or so, fully developed, the average sits around eight to ten in each attribute. That’s just a body doing what bodies do without any training or system involvement at all, the kind of number you’d get from someone who’s never picked up a weapon in their life." Zara considered it further, tapping a finger against her cup.
"For a child under ten, you’re looking at something more like five to seven, depending on how the kid’s grown up, how much they’ve moved around, eaten well, all of it. It caps out around ten for humans without any system enhancement. Ten’s the wall. After that you need levels, or training that actually counts for something, which is apparently what you just spent an entire day doing while most kids your age were napping. But training the body doesn’t increase attributes, and even when it does for some people, the gains are so small and slow that they eventually reach a limit, and the limit is very small. That’s why most people prefer leveling up instead of increasing their attributes naturally."
Alex did the math without meaning to, the calculation arriving almost automatically, the way it always did when he had numbers to work with.
’If baseline for someone my age is five to seven, and I started at ten across most of my attributes, that’s already an advantage before any of today happened.’ He looked down at his hands, still slightly red from the cold plunge, the skin tight and raw in places.
’And now I’m adding training gains on top of that baseline. If I keep doing this, consistently, every day, the gap between me and anyone my age, anyone my rank, is just going to keep widening. Not because I’m naturally gifted. Because I’m the only one stupid enough, or motivated enough, to do ten separate training exercises in a single afternoon at five years old, and nobody’s going to be able to catch up to a head start like that without doing the exact same thing.’
"You’re doing the math," Zara said, watching his face with the particular focus of someone reading a book she’d already half memorized.
"I can see you doing the math."
"I’m doing the math," he admitted.
"And?"
"And I think if I keep this up, I’ll have a real advantage against anyone of the same rank, eventually. Not an unfair one. Just a consistent one. The kind that compounds, the kind that doesn’t look like much on any single day but adds up to something enormous given enough days." He looked up at her, meeting her eyes directly.
"That’s worth ten exhausting exercises in one day. I’d do it again tomorrow even if you told me it wasn’t worth it, because the math says otherwise and the math doesn’t care about my feelings on the subject."
Zara opened her mouth to respond, something that looked like it might have been agreement, or possibly a warning about overdoing it again, when Alex flinched.
A small, sharp spike of pain lanced through his head, like someone had pressed a needle directly into his skull and was now slowly twisting it.
He pressed two fingers to his temple, breath catching in his throat.
[ Warning ! Low on Mana ! ]
"Aspect’s mana hungry," he muttered, already reaching inward to shut off the activation he’d been quietly running all day.
The pain receded immediately, but it didn’t vanish entirely, a low dull throb left behind in its place like an unwelcome houseguest.
"I had it running this whole time. Through everything. I didn’t realize how much it was costing me until just now."
"You ran your Aspect continuously through ten separate exercises and didn’t think to mention that to me?"
Zara’s voice had an edge now, somewhere between exasperation and genuine alarm, the kind of edge that meant she was already mentally drafting the lecture she was going to give him.
"I wanted the data," Alex said simply.
"If the Aspect’s going to learn anything from what I do, it needs to be watching while I do it. That only works if it’s actually active the whole time, not switched on for the easy parts and off for the parts that might actually cost something."
Zara stared at him for a long moment, the particular stare of someone recalculating exactly how much supervision this child actually required, and arriving at a number significantly higher than she’d started with this morning.
"The pain’s mana exhaustion," she said finally.
"Your body’s telling you it’s run dry and your Aspect kept drawing from an empty well anyway, like a stubborn farmer refusing to admit there’s no more water down there. You need to recover before you do anything else today, no arguing about it."
"I know," Alex said.
"I was already heading there."
He stood, legs still faintly unsteady, and walked toward the mana formation set into the far corner of the clearing, the one the construction crew had built into the ground itself, faint lines of inlaid stone catching the afternoon light like veins of something quietly alive.