When Aurus got through the door, he found himself in a new room, extremely different from the previous white ones. The room was much like a cottage full of stuff. He noticed a cauldron in the corner, some herbs on a shelf. Pieces of unfinished and half-enchanted armor and weaponry. Some spell books piled up in a corner and a bunch of other things all around the room.
Automatically, Aurus tried to read the titles of the spell books but he felt unable to focus on them, or anything else in the room really.
This changed when a strange woman appeared in the center of the busy cottage, being the only thing he could properly focus his sight on. The woman wasn’t the prettiest but had green eyes similar to Gaia. She seemed unhealthily pale and had messily cut black hair that only reached her shoulders. She scratched the back of her head with a tired expression while she looked at Aurus, “Yo, welcome to the path of magic I guess. So yeah, around you you can see a bunch of the shit you may be using after the first tutorial. Now, since mages are heavily dependent on talent, I give every mage a hundred talents points to use as they want when they come here. It’s a present from me to y’all.”
After saying this she yawned as she made a casual movement with her hand, Aurus didn’t see anything change but the lady seemed to be reading something mid-air, most likely some type of game screen.
A few seconds after she started reading, her bored expression appeared, then it grew intense and locked onto him.
Despite the intensity of the gaze, Aurus felt a hint of pity within them that he didn’t like. A few seconds after she began staring at him, the lady, who now stood straight and with energy, began speaking.
“I’m afraid to say that it seems that your soul is incomplete, or hurt rather. This’ll have quite a few effects on your being,” she said with a serious expression.
Aurus was clearly surprised by her words “A random event? I must be quite lucky!” he thought but he didn’t say a thing as he simply nodded and she continued speaking.
“Generally when a player dies within Pangea, they will be unable to enter the game for a week to allow their soul to repair itself before they will be allowed in again. But, due to your mangled soul, this won’t be possible in your case.”
“Wait, how do you mean that won’t be possible?” Aurus asked. He thought he was lucky to trigger some kind of random event but this was starting to sound bad.
“Well,” the lady responded “Looking at the severity of the damage, you will only be able to die three times before your soul will get ripped in half entirely. If you die four times within Pangea, I’m afraid the effect will get carried over to your world.”
Aurus swallowed heavily as he realized what the words meant, but then he calmed down as he reminded himself this was just a game. If there was a negative random event, it should have a positive side to it as well.
“Then, are there any positives to having a mangled soul?”
The lady looked at him with pity for a bit before seemingly realizing something and quickly responding, “Well uhh… This is a game so of course there are good things to it! Ehm. You... “ she thought for a full minute before responding, “Oh right! You get three-hundred talent points instead of a hundred, that’s a good benefit… right?” she said, seemingly looking for confirmation with her last words.
“...sure…” Aurus responded with a weird expression on his face as he looked at the woman before him. The game delivered on their NPCs, she sure did seem real. Really pulling stuff out of thin air that is.”
“...right.” the woman said as she refocused herself and looked at Aurus with a little more confidence again. “So, you will have three hundred talent points to use in the following list. Please remember that the rarity of talents does not equal their strength. The fewer points it costs to unlock a talent, the closer you are to getting it. It is possible to get talents later on in a multitude of ways. You could get a number of them early on but then it will be hard to unlock more the natural round or you can get one… a couple that you would normally probably not get.”
After adjusting her words to the unique situation, the woman waved with her hand and a semi-translucent screen appeared in front of Aurus, showing nearly a hundred lines of text.
Every line was divided into several columns. The first column showed the rarity, these raised in the following way, SC, C, UC, R, SR, UR. These were revealed to mean Super common, Common, Uncommon, Rare, Super Rare, and Ultra Rare.
The second column showed the name of the various talents. The final column showed their cost, ranging from 10 to 100.
After asking the unknown lady, Aurus also figured out that one out of a hundred players had the chance to unlock a super rare skill and thus far he was the only one to get the option to unlock an ultra-rare one.
Aurus didn’t let it go over his head though as he believed her when she said that rarity did not equal strength or usefulness. He carefully went over each one of the skills.
A number of the skills in the super common, common, and uncommon categories were for weaponry or martial arts. Some of them such as the ‘sword talent’ (SC), ‘crossbow talent’ (UC), and ‘siege weaponry talent’ (UC) would cost him over eighty points each to unlock while others such as the ‘mace talent’ (UC), ‘bow talent’ (SC), and ‘spear talent’ (C) cost him less than thirty points each.
There were a bunch of other available talents as well though such as ‘Knack for languages’ (R) and ‘Good in Bed (UC) which cost him fifty and ten talent points respectively.
And then, there were the ones that grabbed Aurus’s attention the most. Elemental affinities, this included nearly all of the SR talents and even the UR talent he had available.
Fire and water affinity were some of the common ones costing him ten and thirty each while in the rare tier came the lightning, sand, and snow affinities amongst others.
Aurus looked at the list for a long time, trying to figure out which talents to get, before finally deciding.
He started in the lower-tier ones. Even though he would be a mage, he thought it would be handy to have the ability to learn some different skills if he needed to. He didn’t want to spend too many points here though so he went for the light armor talent and the mace talent, costing him 25 points each. Despite its price, Aurus also decided to get the ‘knack for languages’ talent for fifty points.
In total these three talents already cost him a hundred talent points, everything that other people normally got.
But after these ones he might not use all that much, came the truly big and rare ones. Looking at the SR tier, there were three skills, two of which were elemental affinities that cost fifty points for him to learn. These were ‘Time affinity’ and ‘Space affinity’. Having spent two hundred points already, he turned to the highest tier of rarity where he only had one talent, costing him another fifty, it was called ‘Soul Affinity’ and due to its name and the face he had a harmed soul, Aurus decided to get it. Who knows, he could fix his broken soul with it.
Having bought all of this, Aurus only had fifty talent points left. Despite his lack of knowledge on it, he decided to get the last Super rare skill he had available since it only cost ten points, it was called ‘God of Arrays’. With forty talent points left, Aurus wanted to get some more cheap talents to give him a head start on the rest and he quickly decided on a couple. ‘Fire affinity’ (C) and ‘Sand affinity’ (R) were two of the cheap affinities he went for. Even though sand didn’t seem too useful, the cheap price still caused him to get this one. With the last twenty points, Aurus decided to take another gamble and he went for ‘Amazing metabolism’ (R) which cost him the full amount.
“All right, I believe I’m done,” Aurus said as he looked over the final list of ten talents, he was quite satisfied with them having been able to use thrice the number of talent points compared to a person with a proper soul may just be worth it.
Then again, this was assuming that talents were a big thing and not just a small extra.
The lady with short brown hair barely looked at the talents he picked as she held some pity for the boy, then she explained what would happen next.
“With your talents and head class chosen, you will now be sent to a number of rooms where you have to pick whichever objects you feel represent you best, this will decide the tutorial stages you will enter. In the first tutorial, your specified class will be decided based on your actions. After you spend a month there you will be sent to the second tutorial where your path will be chosen, this will take a week. These two tutorials are of great importance. Good luck.”
Before Aurus could ask any questions, the unknown lady waved her hand and he disappeared from the spot.
