I had been grinding for around three days now. It may be more, but I couldn’t be sure. My phone was long dead, and unfortunately, a lucky warrior managed to nail my watch, so I was timeless here in the dark. I was wearing it on the outside of my right gauntlet, so in hindsight, it was probably only a matter of time before it was destroyed. The only way I could keep track of the days was with my age on my skill sheet, but that didn’t mean much considering that it only ticked up every 24 hours, and around 3:00 in the afternoon.

My training was going incredibly well. I had reached the max for sword techniques quite a while ago, but unlike claw techniques, it didn’t immediately get added into my two beginner arts. Instead it evolved.

I had been working at leveling the new skill for quite some time, but it was immensely difficult to do. Like my two beginner arts, beginner swordsmanship relied on mastery. It gave techniques, but it didn’t automatically cram them into your brain. Luckily, they were techniques I could master while fighting whereas my beginner arts were a bit pickier with how they were learned. I had managed to get five levels of beginner art of the blizzard, and seven levels of beginner art of the lightning, evening them both up at level 12. Their abilities had morphed slightly, and the skills and techniques were now mostly focused on mastery of the fundamentals.

In retrospect, I could understand how the abilities worked much more accurately. Each one taught a group of combat forms. Once mastered, you would then be introduced to the next steps in the form. At this point, I had only experienced three different forms for each skill, but they had been successively getting more and more difficult as I worked down the skill progression. I learned very early on that it was easier to go out after gaining a level in the arts and then use it by fighting some, than to work on the skills constantly without that practical experience. The insights gained in combat made the next skill up of the beginner arts come much faster.

Perhaps my favorite realization was that the techniques learned in beginner swordsmanship were very similar to those of my beginner arts. The footwork matched and the stances that you would hold yourself in were common between them. Way of the Storm Martial Artist was a class that was devoted to combat in its purest form. It was all about fighting based on positioning. It didn’t teach how to punch, or how to use your claws. It taught where to punch, how to make that the most effective attack you could, and how to get there in the quickest way possible. That made it particularly good for fighting against monsters. You couldn’t just translate something like Karate to fighting giant wolves, as it was a martial art designed around fighting other people.

The lack of specialization in the art gave it the ability to be used on both people as well as monsters, without favoring one over the other. It was a nuanced change, but as I worked through the martial art, I could see how the lack of specificity would be useful. You wouldn’t want to fight a spider the same way you fight a slime and having a combat style dedicated to only one of those seems like a bad idea.

Regardless, my work was going as planned. Better than planned. I had expected that I would run out of spiders long before I ran out of levels, but there seemed to be an infinite amount of the little bastards. One thing I learned early on was that the monsters on this floor didn’t exactly respawn. Along the ceiling were round spots of orange light. After some investigation, I found that these were tunnels, and they were teeming with spider eggs. I don’t know where the eggs came from, but they all glowed with a slight orange tinge, and as soon as the eggs hatched, they would be replaced like magic. I spent an hour looking out to try and see the moment when the eggs respawned, but I was unsuccessful in the end. The eggs would hatch in the tunnels every couple of hours, so If you didn’t continually cull the spiders, eventually the floor would be completely overrun.

My guess is it was supposed to be a method for limiting the amount of time you could stay on one level, but for me, it just meant I could farm as long as I needed to. I was sleeping only rarely due to the respawn and was starting to get tired. I had yet to cross the chasm as the spiders on this side were more than enough to keep me busy, but it was time to move on and test my new strength on the Skullback Warrior. I could no longer level my skills against the weak spiders, and I had hit a bottleneck in my arts and swordsmanship. I needed a push to move me ahead to allow me to continue my quest for improvement, and I was hoping a rematch against the bigger warrior variety would give me what I needed. I opened my skill page, admiring the improvements I had made over the past three days.

The first thing that happened during my training was all of the damage numbers for physical skills disappeared from the skill sheet just like Luna said they would. I didn’t get any alerts about the next wave she talked about, but I could see that many changes happened in the way the system worked. The errors had disappeared from my identify descriptions, and things looked much cleaner overall.

The most important changes to my skills were to electroreceptivity and storm fists. Both skills seemed to vanish from my skill sheet when they maxed out, but according to their messages, when they hit the max level, they didn’t vanish at all. Instead, they were both integrated into Storm Command, empowering the magic skill. Now, I could create a cloak of elemental energy over any part of my body using lightning, water, or wind, and use it to attack. I could even extend it over my sword for brief periods, though that was significantly more mana intensive. I also didn’t need to reapply the ability like I did with storm fists. It was consistent and reapplied itself automatically for a reduced cost. The electroreceptivity was extremely powerful as well. I could accurately sense where any spiders were when they were within 20 feet of me and could even sense the electrical signals going from their brains to the limbs, giving me accurate movement information. My hodge-podge skill sheet was condensing into a set of powerful abilities.

More than anything though, the additional status increases were what was making the biggest difference. I put two of my unassigned points into both constitution and strength to round them off to multiples of 10. Each of my attacks was stronger, each of my movements quicker and surer. I had gotten a grand total of 23 more stat points scattered across my abilities and felt much more prepared for the rest of the dungeon. I had massively surpassed the minimum abilities for someone at the start of the second rank, and I felt like I was back in a position to solo adventure without danger to my life. The first rule of questing solo was to always be overprepared. The enemy would make up in quantity what you brought in quality, so you needed power capable to break through that advantage, and enough items to support yourself in a variety of hazardous situations.

Now that I had reached a point where I was satisfied with my progress, it was time to take on my next big challenge; the bridge guardian spider, followed by the second half of the floor. At first, I was concerned that the other side of the bridge would be overpopulated with respawning spiders, but I noticed something that gave me confidence that I could grind here for a while. Across the chasm on the roof of the cavern, there were no orange glowing caves. For some reason, there were no monsters that would respawn there, so I could take my merry time.

I set out, flying directly over the pathway just below the caps of the great mushroom trees. My improved dexterity and agility made high-speed flight control trivial.  I blasted through the air, leaving the Roughcap mushrooms swaying as I passed. Occasionally a spider would fall from the ‘shrooms in surprise, but I had my destination set, and I was ready for a rematch. I knew the grove like the back of my hand and was able to navigate through it with ease.

 I landed on the edge of the circle of mushrooms denoting the small arena of the Skullback Warrior. He stood right at the entry to the bridge, blocking the path, his disgusting eight red eyes watching as I approached. As soon as my foot passed the perimeter of the fungal ring, the great black brute released a bitter hiss, charging at me with the same extreme speed his predecessor possessed. I readied the Hasty Spider Warrior’s Longsword, holding its now-familiar rough-wrapped handle in my right hand, while my left hand prepared a blast of lightning.

The warrior loped towards me, holding its scythe-life forelimbs out on either side set up for a wide-sweeping attack. Biding my time, I waited until the last second. This time, I had no ceiling constraining me, and I would use that advantage. As the warrior’s attack started, I shot into the air flying directly over his back. My left hand released the blast of lightning straight into the eyes of the spider, and I could see a few of them blacken and pop like popcorn kernels. I continued my arc, ending up with my feet on the ground ten feet behind the large spider.

I planted a foot down, building pressure within my muscles. All at once, I released the tension, launching myself rapidly towards the rear of the warrior using the first form of the art of the lightning. My blade targeted the uppermost joint on it’s rear two right legs that had lined up for me, and I had used the techniques of the art of the blizzard to position myself just right so that I could attack the weak point.

I held the sword in one hand in a powerful overhead blow and effortlessly sliced through the two legs, leaving them severed on the floor. Before the nasty green blood could cover me, I had already followed the footwork of the art of the lightning and was 15 feet away from my opponent. It stumbled in place as it tried to regain it’s footing, howling in agony and rage at losing its limbs.

The arachnid faltered as it lost its balance. Because of its oversized forelimbs, it was unable to use it to balance its right side, and it was now immobile, just waiting for me to offer it a killing blow. As the spider struggled to turn and face me, I kept directly behind it, waiting for my chance to strike at the head. After a short while, it fell again, pinning its right blade to the ground beneath its cumbersome body. Now! I jumped onto it’s back while my sword flickered and flared with a combination of wind and lightning attuned mana. Turning the blade to face downward, I pierced the warrior’s head through one of its eye sockets. The bug let out a shriek as the lightning cauterized its brain from the inside, and the wind aggravated the wounds. Tearing the blade out once more, the skullback warrior fell silent.

Smiling, I hopped off the carapace. As the warrior disintegrated into blue particles, I collected the rewards it dropped. This time, though, instead of materials or a weapon, the warrior dropped a large gold coin, which I had yet to see.

So far, I had found 6 different types of coins in three different metals. There were copper, silver, and gold coins, and they each had small and large varieties. Each coin had the same markings, an embellished moon on one side, and a laurel on the other. I could imagine that one would call them ‘moons’ or ‘laurels’, but I think for now I’d just call them coins. If common convention was correct, and I was hoping it was, ten small equaled one large, and ten large equaled the next metal’s small. That would mean that if a small copper was 1, a silver was 100, and gold was 10,000. A large gold would be 100,000, making the skullback warriors immensely valuable to hunt and kill. That being said, in the ruin I raided, I found at least 100 small or large silver, and 20 to 30 small gold, which leads me to believe that they probably weren’t all that expensive. My guess is there was another denomination after gold, probably platinum, and then another one after that, possibly mithril or some other extremely valuable magical metal.

Unfortunately, this was not a good thing. The value of gold was going to decrease, and that meant all old currencies were going to collapse, and collapse hard. The value of any metal that didn’t conduct mana was going to decrease as well, making things infinitely worse. It would take a long time for the manufacturing infrastructure to build itself back up, and that was always the heart of the economy. Right now, it was more lucrative and efficient to be a blacksmith than to own a large factory, and I couldn’t see that changing any time soon as long as people needed magic weapons.

I placed the coin into my now bulging coin pouch. I had lost track of how many of each coin I had long ago. Right now, I only kept large copper and up in the pouch to save space in the pouch and to make sure my most valuable coins were safest. The small copper coins dropped by the drones went right into a pocket in my backpack, and I probably had somewhere near 10 pounds of small copper coins at this point. Hopefully there would be some kind of currency exchange somewhere, but I didn’t have my hopes up. Even if there was a system-based currency exchange, I couldn’t imagine that the sprites running it would be doing their jobs. It seemed like all of the managers of the system were currently experiencing free will for the first time and were probably too busy to do what they were put in place for.

Shaking myself out of my thoughts, I turned towards the deep crevasse. It yawned before me, a constant humid wave exuding from the black depths. The bridge stretched out, extending over the free space. While the abyss was terrifying, the walkway didn’t seem too bad and my instincts weren’t driving me up a wall, though I was sure it was still plenty dangerous, and that there were some traps laid across it somewhere. It was time to see what was in store for me on the other side of the divide, but I needed to survive the crossing first.

Falc0n

If you have any questions or comments, leave them in the discord HERE please. I'm working on getting an editor through Patreon funds, but for now, I'm focusing on editing my stuff more.

Thanks for Reading! If you like my story, leave a rating, review, or favorite!

 

Writing a story while not being a full-time writer is hard! I’m doing what I can to keep things going, but it all depends on whether or not I can make Ideascape at the very least a part-time job. To help finance this, I've decided to set up a Patreon. The Patreon tiers are below. If you want me to continue to write as I go into grad school or the workforce, that's how I'll be able to do it. Euros and Pounds are automatically transferred into USD through Patreon, so you don’t need to worry about currency exchange if that was a concern (I've had people ask before).

 

1$ - Spoilers! For people who just really need to know what happens next. Cliffhanger? Forget it! Now you know!

5$ - Supporters! All advance chapters are unlocked.

10$ - Fan! You must really like Ideascape, and honestly, I'm pretty jazzed about it. Subscribing to this tier means that you can create a character, and I will straight up add them into the story as a background character. If they're really cool and unique, they might become significant in the future. You never know! This is going to be limited based on user response. 

20$ - Superfan! Damn. All benefits from previous tiers. You can choose two characters and have me create a custom side story about them. I'll write anything. 1500 words, unless it’s fun to write, then more probably. Literally anything. Just ask.

35$ - Why! Just why! I will custom make a resin-cast set of D&D dice to your own specifications (currently limited colors available), and then send them to you! You also get the benefits of all other tiers. It might take some time, but I'll do it. For international shipping, other rates may apply, but I'll do what I can do.

50$ - Holy Shit! I will custom make a D&D style mini for you based on your character, 3D print it, paint it by hand, and send it to you. You also get the benefits from all other tiers. For international shipping, other rates may apply, but I'll do what I can do.