Quietly eating his meat skewer, Adam slowly leafed through his Grimoire, coming across a few pages containing interesting information. One page contained these statistics and further explanations of the information on the first two pages.
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Vitality
The energy that represents the body. The greater the vitality of a living organism, the more powerful its body becomes: extraordinary strength, a form of regeneration, great agility. It all depends on the individual and how they use their vitality.
Your vitality: 12.3
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Mind
The stat that represents the spirituality of organisms. The more mind they have, the greater their affinity with the elements, whether it be the ability to connect with different elements, manipulate them, or detect them. The amount of energy that a body can store depends on their mind and vitality.
Your spirit: 16.5
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"Interesting information, but I don't really have anything to compare it to in order to know if it's good or not." Adam said sceptically.
He felt physically healthy and confident that he was in the upper middle range of Earth's population, but in this place it was difficult to say where he stood, his only comparison being a testosterone-boosted rabbit whose place in the food chain was a mystery to him.
And for the mind, even worse, according to his book, he has more mind than vitality, so his strong point is the elements, but he doesn't feel like a super powerful mage at the moment, even if in the long term he can see the value of a golem legion that is growing day after day.
As for the rest of what he understands, guilds are organizations officially recognized by the Gods that can take advantage of various minor bonuses. His faction, Humans, doesn't have much to say except supporting the information that several species are participating in the survival game, which is why there are currently so many survivors. The current event has already been explained by the Emos Gods, and as for the region section, there are just a huge number of them, each with a particularity that makes each region unique, but no further explanation about his current region, even if the name should be an important clue. He didn't feel like playing guessing games at the moment.
...
He stood up abruptly, slapped his cheeks, and took a deep breath to focus. Then he walked a few meters away from his little corner of paradise.
"Come on, Adam, stop daydreaming. This is still a dangerous place where even rabbits are stronger than you, so let's use our strengths and raise an army of golems." He crouched down with his hands on the ground and closed his eyes.
"Rather than expending a lot of energy to create earth, can't I just use the earth that already exists around me?" Breathing slowly and raising his concentration to the maximum, Adam tried to feel the earth elemental energy he had felt when creating Primo, but this time in the ground so he could manipulate it.
After a long time, almost an hour according to Adam's internal clock, several conclusions crossed his mind.
"First hypothesis: the ground contains no elemental earth energy." Convinced of this idea, Adam added, "Not necessarily impossible, since so far it looks like ordinary ground and not some kind of magical super-ground.
"Second hypothesis: I am not skilled enough at energy detection, meaning my mind stat is really weak. Or hypotheses 1 and 2 work together, and the ground in front of me contains so little energy that my weak mind stat prevents me from sensing it." Sighing in disappointment at the lack of answers to these questions, Adam moved on to the last hypothesis.
"And finally, I'm just doing it wrong, and maybe there's a method I don't know about or a necessary skill I don't have to make it work." Scratching his chin, "Or maybe it's a combination of everything or something else I haven't thought of."
Turning his attention to Primo, "You wouldn't know the answer by any chance, buddy?" Primo just stared at Adam silently without saying a word.
"Yeah, you can't talk. I totally forgot." Refocusing on himself, he ignored Primo, who remained slightly behind him like a silent guardian.
Sitting on the ground, thinking about a possible method to solve his problem, Adam had only one idea to try, otherwise it would be a temporary return to the old method.
Reaching out his arms toward the ground in front of him, he concentrated as hard as he could and slowly injected energy into the ground, keeping as much control of it as possible. Once a small amount of energy was there, he tried to shape it into a small cube, imagining it appearing above the ground in front of him.
Breathless, eyes wide open, Adam felt his energy intertwine with the earth, slowly pulling it upward, slowly shaping it into a small cube of earth.
With a big smile, he gently picked up the cube in front of him. "Hahaha! Look at that, Primo, it worked! I'm pretty sure I'd need a lot more energy to create this cube directly in my hand."
Running his other hand over the area of ground where the cube had come from, Adam felt that the earth was less dense, like someone had taken some of it away in this case, him. Applying a little pressure, he felt the earth sink, not much, but enough to confirm that some earth was missing. His conclusion was clear: the energy had gathered some of the earth to give it the shape Adam wanted.
To complete the test, he created a cube with exactly the same amount of energy, but this time only by creating earth with his own energy.
Looking at the two cubes in his hands, Adam smiled broadly. "It's even better than I imagined. The same amount of energy, but twice as small."
...
30 minutes later...
Adam looked at the different shapes of earth in front of him, some larger, some smaller, some extremely dense, some made directly of stone, and the conclusion was clear.
"For the same earth object, manipulating existing earth directly costs half as much energy as simply creating it without help, but takes more time, and for stone, it's even better, costing four times less." He announced, satisfied at his successful experiment.
"It's time to create a golem army worthy of the name," he said with a mocking smile as he stood up.