“I also want to clarify that your understanding isn’t wrong. It has a lot of truth to it, and actively messing with the conceptual energy within each arrow isn’t a feasible method of fighting. In most cases, having a faster arrow does also mean it will do more damage, just be aware that this isn’t due to some law of physics. It happens because that’s what you believe should happen, and the energy you put into the arrow reflects that. The same is true in all other aspects of battle. What I’m talking about right now is a gross oversimplification of the effect of concepts, but nothing I said is definitively wrong, and it should be enough for now.”
“Got it,” Jake nodded as he considered everything they’d talked about. Concepts were something Jake still had a difficult time fully understanding, even if he knew they were pretty much the bread and butter that made everything work.
Swords relied on the concept of sharpness to cut things, armor on the concept of durability and resilience to block attacks, and hammers on the concept of... smashing stuff to smash stuff. What Jake still struggled with was the entire concept of better understanding a concept to make it stronger.
The Sword Saint was the complete opposite of Jake in this aspect. He had spoken a lot to the old man about concepts, and one of the things he’d learned was that no one could truly explain why something was. The old man could tell Jake that he “deepened his understanding” of the concept of sharpness, but he couldn’t properly put into words what exactly he understood.
No matter what, the effects couldn’t be denied. From Jake’s understanding of things, concepts were one of the fundamental sources of power in the system, alongside stats and energy. When one made an attack, the three most important parts were how many stats one had that affected the skill, how much energy one had poured into it, and how deep conceptual understanding one had of what went into the attack.