[NR] Changed Effects - Chapter 650 (Patreon)

Jason can only set aside his questions of why people aren’t better prepared for NeoRealm. For the moment, he needed to test out all his skills and see if the removal of the System threads caused any problems. At least there weren’t too many skills to test, with only 8 at the present moment.

The easiest yet hardest to test came first and required a bit of help from Courtney. After all, to test a resistance skill, you have to be exposed to what you’re supposed to be resisting. Besides, poison and venom resistance seemed like a good place to start as it was very much the kind of skill that would be affected. It was literally handling interactions within his body. The place Jason had just kicked the System out of.

So, after borrowing a small dose of poison and venom from Courtney, it was a quick matter of downing one and injecting the other. Jason did feel he should have specified what kinds he was looking for, but a little late for that, as the paralyzing venom and the itching poison got to work. Though his skill also got to work, if slower.

The best way Jason could describe it was that before, the skill activated instantly and now the skill needed to be triggered. Which made some sense once he thought about it. At the moment, the skill is activated once the body realizes there was a problem, while before the System would activate the skill right away. Jason figured this wouldn’t be too much of a problem and if it really mattered, he could pre-activate the skill on his own.

After that, Jason did a few quick tests. Cultivation is fine, body blast is fine, and for some reason his War Stomp skill actually worked better? Jason can only shrug and move on. Better to be happy about his attack skill getting a boost than dive too deep. After all, the skill itself is way above his head. Just because the locals don’t have all of his knowledge about cultivation, doesn’t mean they don’t have their own knowledge and his teacher was at the peak of NeoRealm.

That left Herb Farming and the three crafting skills. Which would be interesting. Jason had some plans for the crafting skills as they shared something he wanted to work on. First, though, he takes out his portable planter to see what had changed with that.

Nothing. Well, not nothing, but it might as well have been. After all, the skill is an external use passive. The one thing that did change was the System stopped channeling power through him to get the job done. Instead, the melange of power naturally in the atmosphere was drawn in as needed.

Which oddly balanced out how effective the skill is. On one hand, it more readily used Mana and Qi for the plants that needed those and so you would think their growth would be boosted. However, on the other hand, the atmospheric power is less dense and so worked slower. A pure wash, which Jason is half certain was on purpose to keep the skill where it was power wise.

That left testing his crafting skills. Well, manipulating his crafting skills to get an interesting outcome. Jason isn’t particularly attached to the skills themselves and so the chance of losing them doesn’t phase him. Though hopefully, the end result will be an extra skill instead of a lack of a skill. Now was just the best time to try as not only did he have to re-evaluate his skills, but the System likely did as well.

So, to strike while the iron is hot, Jason gathered up a bunch of supplies to craft a special building. This involved stones and large untreated pelts. They didn’t need to be special besides the size though, and so a quick hunting trip got the one and left overs from his floor covered the other.

This was to bring all three skills into a single task. A pelt tent that used stone to make a permanent framework instead of wooden poles or what have you. He had seen nothing like this and it doesn’t really make all that much sense, but there also isn’t a reason it shouldn’t work.

That didn’t matter, though. All Jason cares about was the effect which made using Energy constructs better and the effect that reduced penalty on processing his own materials. So he carved stone and butchered the hides in the process of constructing that strange tent, forcing the materials to work just fine and his Energy tools to work properly.

While this is happening, the changes to the skills became clear. For one, Wilderness Construction now has an actual overlay. In specific, the last effect “Eye for the lay of the land” which originally just made specific areas luminesce. It now is an activated effect that pulled up a blue screen of sorts. Except the screen is completely transparent, barring the edge, and had an overlay.

This made things a lot clearer. Well, it did after he figured it out. There was a good half hour of him fumbling around with various screens and attempted commands before he got it working. Whatever, Jason felt this change is a complete upgrade to how it worked before, as well as opening up a few things that might work this way now as well.

The possibility it presented was so large that Jason paused construction to give it a try. Besides, there was only two that he could remember off the top of his head. A knowledge bonus and a title bonus. And they turned out exceptionally quick to test as he already knew how to bring up the blue screen visualizer thing.

The first brought him back to farming. He had a knowledge bonus, well, and a discovery bonus, that had allowed him to “see” how mature A herb was. Now the visualizer literally went and labeled things with percentages and ranges. It wasn’t all knowing, but certainly useful.

Then there is the title bonus. Core Genius gave him the ability to see how good a spot is for him to cultivate in. That ended up being a color overlay that looked like what you see on a thermal camera. Except this was for how dense the Energy is. Quite useful all around and he was glad he stopped to check it out before he forgot.