Limits

The process was harder than I expected but I guessed that all my ideas about new skills were difficult. I set a destination for myself to train on. It was a large tree that seemed very old with the bark starting to fall off. It was easily recognisable and not far away.

I stood in one place and looked at my destination. 'The first step. Finding a route' I thought and looked for a route I could take. I soon found my 1st route and took it. The terrain was a bit rough, I had to decrease my speed in order to stay quiet but it was one of the shortest routes. The route I chose was not in a straight line but quite close to it.

It took me about 11 minutes to reach the destination. I went back to my previous spot and chose a different route. 13 minutes, 11,5 minutes, 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 18 minutes, 14 minutes and so on. I ran back and forward to the same destination about 50 times, each time using a different route. The shortest time I could do it in while staying quiet, was 9 minutes but that was just the speed. I now had to take under consideration my exposure.

I looked at the routes in the same order I took them and checked for exposure. I was looking for stuff that would hide me. The smaller the amount of objects allowing me to hide myself, the worse it was. On the other hand the more objects surrounded me the more hidden I would be. It was a balance between speed and cover.

The 9 minutes route had barely any objects that would hide my presence. The longer paths also had small amounts of objects but I had to examine all of them. I needed information. I needed to know how to judge the terrain and how to predict the best route possible. 'Time and environment' I thought while searching. After examining all the routes I took, I found an optimal one that allowed for more stealth and optimal speed compared to others.

It would take me 15 minutes in order to travel by that route. I though 'Now let's make it 10 minutes'. This was my true reason for calculating a path. I did find the most optimal but even then, I could still optimise it and besides, no one would give me enough time to run 50 times back and forth to find a suitable path. I needed to learn how to calculate that while I'm on the move. In fact, I wanted to do this with all the paths, I just thought it would be easier to start with the most optimal one.

Before I did any more training, I ate the rest of my rations. 'I think I should hunt before anything else. I can always return to this place but I need food in order to stay here' I thought and headed deeper into the forest.

Bizarrely, these parts of the forest weren't that greatly populated with animals. It wasn't easy to find a larger group of let's say wolves or bears. I wondered why but couldn't figure anything out. I searched the forest for really any animal I could find and finally after 40 minutes of walking, running and creeping about, I found a group of deer.

'Not an aggressive animal so they wouldn't attack, I need to kill as many before they run away' I thought and prepared my daggers. "Swoosh! swoosh! swoosh! swoosh!" my daggers flew through the air and struck couple of deer. The rest started to run but I didn't chase after them. '4 of them is enough for me, It should be enough for 2 days, I think' I thought and started butchering the animals.

I decided to take the skins as well. I needed a shelter and I would also need some kind of bed. I could also use the skins as part of my shelter so it was 2 birds with one stone. I planned to stay in the same place that was used as my running field. Finding a new destination and running 50 or more times to examine all the paths, was not something I wanted to do again. I wanted to focus on optimisation and the 50 paths I already took? that was more than enough for the beginning stages of that skill.

Back at the new camp, I set up my shelter using branches, animal skins and leaves. I was well experienced with building those temporary shelters so it didn't take me long. It was already evening, I decided to stop my stealth training and focus on my strength a bit. I did the set of exercises that my father used to do in the past and then moved on to the exercises carried out by dark figure in my dream.

It looked weird but I noticed improvement a while back when I did those sets of exercises. It wasn't just to make a fool out of someone, it really did something for the body. Each set had a different purpose as I found out after studying them more extensively.

The frog jumps that the dark figure carried out in my dream for example. Its purpose was to train legs and jumping ability, of course it worked better with a lot of weight on me but it wasn't possible anymore, I didn't have my bag. Every exercise that the dark figure did in my dream had beneficial effects assigned to it. I trained well into the night and then retired, embracing my dreams as I closed my eyes.

When my eyes opened, I was standing in front of a dark figure that started to talk away. I thought 'Finally, this is what I wanted to see'. I then realised something 'I'm actually happy to see that dream… never thought this would happen'. I studied the language that the dark creature spoke and tried to further increase my knowledge.

I already knew a few words, now I just had to guess what followed them. I listened, then died and so on for 20 times. It was the same amount of cycles every time. I don't know why but I hoped for more. More cycles would allow me more time to study that language.

Although it was repeated only 20 times, I still got something new out of it. The word Peris was sometimes in front of the word Ji and sometimes after it. Ji meant "is" so the word Peris could mean "this" as in "This is" would be Peris Ji. If I were to ask a question, the words would be inverted to make Ji Peris, meaning "Is this?" just like in the human language. 'Now I'm almost certain that this must be some sort of ancient human language or at least language that has same construct as the human language' I thought.

"I don't know where that language comes from and whenever it was spoken by humans or not but I shall name it the Ancient Language". The name fitted because it didn't specify the race that used the language, it was just an ancient language.