08 - Older Brother

When Olivia left the room, a notification appeared in front of me.

[New Skill Unlocked]

[Hearth Voice Lv1

Effect: When you sing something that resonates with your heart, the likelihood of the listener's heart resonating with your song increases by 1%, this value is doubled for targets who have experienced something similar to the song's lyrics, in addition to doubling the effect of resonance with the lyrics.]

Looking at the effect of this Skill, Olivia probably fell into the effect of this Skill, and from her reaction, it also doubled the effect of the music's resonance with her...

Reminding myself of how fragile she was with so many tears in her eyes, the little anger I had felt towards her the last few days for how she was acting evaporated.

I know her actions weren't good at all, but I could see that this was possibly her way of defending herself, for her to cry like that, her arrogant and narcissistic facade was hiding a very broken heart very well.

But my music opened up that defense and left that fragile, broken heart exposed.

Stopping my cell phone from recording, I left it to edit this song later, now I had to go help Olivia.

Using my shirt sleeve to dry my tears, I slowly walked towards her room, while looking around to make sure she was nowhere to be found.

When I arrived in front of her room, my mother was there, holding a basket of clothes with one arm while raising her other arm to knock on the door.

But her raised hand never touched the door, remaining there for at least 30 seconds until I decided to intervene.

"Let me talk to her…" I said in a low voice, scaring her a little, but when she saw me, and especially, when she saw my red eyes, her doubts arose.

"What happened, Noah? I think I saw her crying…" She asked worriedly.

Shaking my head, I know the last thing she'll want to do right now is talk to my mother, but their relationship is something I can help them slowly deal with in the future.

Taking out my cell phone, I found the recording of the song I just made and handed it to her.

"She heard me singing a song I wrote… listen to this and I think you'll understand."

Taking my mother's cell phone, the confusion on her face was clear, but she trusted me and left with my cell phone in her hand as she went to her room to listen to the music.

-Knock Knock-

I knocked on her bedroom door, while leaning against the door to try to hear something inside.

Her room was silent for a few seconds, until I heard a question.

"Did you give her the recording of the song to listen to?"

In her voice, I could hear a kind of fear and anticipation.

"Yes, it will be good if she understands what the lyrics mean." I said in a low voice.

The room was silent for a few more seconds, until I heard the sound of the door unlocking and someone running into the room.

Slowly opening the door, I saw Olivia crawling under the bed covers while covering her head, probably very embarrassed.

"Why did you give this to her?! What am I going to do?" She asked with a little fear.

Sitting down next to her on the bed, I reached my hand out to where her head was and lightly started stroking it.

"You know this is for the best, even if it's hard to deal with it head on, but if she knows that what she does is hurting you, she'll be able to get better, right?" I said in the calmest voice I could muster.

She was silent for a few more seconds, until she suddenly asked. "Since when?"

"What?" I was confused.

"Since when have you been watching me write this song?" She asked with a slightly offended tone of voice, but it was good news that she hadn't shied away from my hand that was stroking her head.

"I wasn't watching you to write a song, it was just that this week I put together the pieces of what was happening and I didn't know what to do with it… to try and start something I decided to put it into a song." I tried to explain with the first thing that came to my mind.

With her silence, maybe that worked?

"Do you think I'm wrong?" She asked in a low voice, with an uncertain tone.

"It depends." I responded immediately, making her a little offended and confused.

As she tried to wriggle away from my hand, she asked irritably. "What did I do wrong?"

Laughing at how she was squirming on the bed to avoid my hand, like an offended kitten, I responded. "I know it was a way for you to defend yourself, but it hurt me a little the way you were treating me, and I think Ethan has been feeling this too for a while now, since he was a little scared to play with you ."

Hearing this, Olivia, who was squirming to avoid my hand on the bed, froze.

"I'm sorry…" She said in a low voice after thinking for a bit. "But do you think I was wrong in how I was dealing with her?"

Taking advantage of her stopping, I started stroking her head again.

"A little." I said.

"Even the way she treats me?" She asked offended.

"That's why I said you're a little wrong. I can give you reason to be angry about everything that's happened, but there are better ways to deal with her than to provoke her further. Even if her means aren't the best, in her mind she is doing the best she can so that nothing bad happens to you..." I said calmly so she doesn't feel like this is an affront.

"You even force me to learn that stupid violin?!" She asked angrily. "Her music saw that, she didn't make me learn because it would be good for me, but because it was something she wanted to do!"

Hearing her outburst, I just continued stroking her in silence for a few seconds.

"Did she ever tell you why she wanted you to learn the violin?" I asked.

"No…" She replied a little uncertainly.

"You know, I don't know why either, but according to my logic, if she made you learn the violin, because in the past she missed a great opportunity because she wasn't that good at the violin, do you think that in her view, making you learn that it's for your own good?" I asked in the same tone I used to talk to Ethan.

Listening to my logic, Olivia fell silent as she huddled further under the covers.

I just stood there with her in silence, letting her reflect and calm down a little.

"Thank you…" She said in a very low tone.

"No problem, I'm your older brother, remember? If you need any help, just talk to me." I said as I stood up from her bed, making the hole that was formed by my weight slowly return to what it was before.

"You know…" She popped her head out of the blanket and said as I was leaving the room.

Stopping to look at her, I waited for her to finish what she was going to say.

"I like you more this way…" She said before covering herself again, hiding.

Smiling, I felt something very good in my chest.

Not only was I very happy, since I think this was the first sincere thank you I had heard from someone important to me in both my lives, but I also felt another part of me very happy, probably the little that was left of the other Noah.

When I entered my room, I noticed some drops of water on the floor heading towards my desk, there was my cell phone, and on the floor, I assumed it might have been tears.

Seeing as how she left my cell phone before I got back, she probably doesn't want to talk for now, and I think I've done my part enough, so I just took my cell phone and transferred the music to my computer.

The way I intended to release the music was to keep it in acoustic mode, even giving as much of the impression as possible that this is something homemade.

The image I want is of an Indie musician just starting out, as that will probably be much more appealing to my image.

An Indie musician has much more of the proximity that a musician with a large structure lacks.

Even though I was confident in learning how to edit in a few days enough to make my music sound studio-y, I didn't want that.

'But I could have spent a few hours learning how to edit…' I thought as I looked at the program and didn't quite understand how it worked.

Fortunately with System it was easy to learn with some tutorials on YouTube.

In just one hour I had already leveled up my new Skill to Lv 4.

[Music Edition Lv 4

Effect: +4% ease in understanding and applying concepts in music editing, +4% probability that the public will like your editing.]

In the last few days, this was one of the things I tried to understand about System.

When Skill said there was a +4% chance of someone liking something of mine, that wouldn't make the person completely like my work and become my fan, but it's more like the person recognizing the quality of it.

In the same way that a normal person does not like listening to opera, it is undeniable that an opera singer's voice is very good, even when he is not singing a song that the listener does not like.

Of course, if I can maximize all the skills and make a person like every little detail of the song, the probability of the person really liking the song as a whole is very high, but as long as there is one small thing that the person doesn't like , that will probably be enough for that person to not like the song, even though they like everything else.

But I didn't worry about that, having a good voice, playing well and good lyrics, for social media musicians, is already a huge advantage, and with my Skill [Hearth Voice], this makes my advantage even greater!

With the song finally edited, I thought it best not to post this today.

If I ask Olivia for her opinion on this, she'll probably accept it and it'll seem less like I just chose the song to be successful, right?

So with that aside, I decided to do two arts.

An art that I was selling to Furrys on the internet, which surprisingly had already made my Twipper profile rise to 3 thousand followers in the last few days.

Because demand was high, the art I promised to make today had sold for a whopping $100!

Just like that girl from my school in the other world, I was already able to sell my art for a very high price!

[Digital Illustration Lv 30

By Illustrating Digitally you get better 30% faster and you have a 30% more chance of other people liking your art.]

My Digital Illustration Skill is already at Lv 30, which is fantastic, but I felt something new now.

The time it takes for the Skill to level up has now been increased.

Before I was going up at least 1 level a day, but today I couldn't go up that much.

Looking at the quality of the WereTiger I made, I knew I had reached a very high level in this style of drawing, but I was still miles away from artists who worked making art for games in my previous world, so my theory is that in the Level 30 is as if I had completed the basic level to become competent in this Skill, and from there I will start training to reach a truly professional point.

If I had to decide which would be better according to this theory, it would be that instead of releasing my music now, when my [Sing] and [Guitar] are at level 20 and 24 respectively, I would wait for the two Skills to reach level 30, But there was one thing I considered.

As I want to follow the Indie artist route, starting out as someone who already sings perfectly can hinder me more than help, so having one or two songs recorded before Lv 30 of these Skills will be very good in the long run.

So that's what I decided to do, I recorded Numb with [Sing Lv 20] and I intend to record the next song when it gets to Lv 25.

Looking at the raw file, I knew this song wouldn't be very cool to show my parents before posting, so I just decided to save it and leave it to ask Olivia about posting it tomorrow.

[New Mission Unlocked]