"[Storage] and [Auto Loot] are upgradeable. For the latter, upgrading it will broaden the type of item selected. So, it’s monster cores at first. Then it’ll go to monster materials, like tusks, fangs, nails, hides, and scales. Then it’ll start to include humanoids capable of using SP, so you can yank their shit without worrying about it when you kill them. At the same time, the range will increase by a bunch. Wanna know how to do it?” 

We were walking out of the forest and back into the road while Tilde answered my questions. The hot sun had dried me off, and I felt confident. When Tilde spoke, I focused solely on listening to her because I needed to learn how to use these new abilities she initialized for me. “I kinda need to,” I replied. 

“Think of my skills as muscles. The more you train it, the stronger it gets.  The skill marked ‘?????????? ??’ will unlock when you’re more accustomed to the system. Spoiler alert: it’s the heart and soul of [Hermes Trismegistus]. And I mean that literally.” 

Tilde then said it was time to look at the mini-map located to my upper right. I saw a white triangle that indicated me, but there were two green dots. Those were Sekh and Tilde, my allies. When focusing, I could zoom in and out, but the further I went, the blacker everything became because I hadn’t been there. 

But I discovered I was in the country of Dirge, which was nice to know.

Unfortunately, [Map] did not come with a function to scan the surrounding areas. Well, that wasn’t entirely the truth. There was a scanning feature constantly happening, but it had a range of about 20 feet from where I was standing.  

After a few minutes of walking, we ran into another boar sitting off to the side of the road. It showed up on the map as a white dot because it had no reason to help or harm me. 

Using [Analysis] on it gave me a detailed report of the monster, including its name, its level, and if it had any skills, of which it didn’t because it was Lv. 1. A little button allowed me to place a waypoint, which was a blue beam of light. It pretty much appeared from nowhere and marked the Lesser Forest Boar.  It was tall enough to pierce through the clouds, shimmering so clearly as to be seen from anywhere. To share it with Sekh, I just had to think about it. 

“I’ve never encountered anything like that before,” she said, gasping. I gazed to the right of my map and noticed the time, which was 11:31. It wasn’t that interesting, but what blew my mind was when I opened the map and zoomed out as far as I could. The countries on the two continents I saw were clearly outlined and defined. And on the far left one, there was a little bit filled in, which must’ve been where Meruria summoned me, but that was it. On the eastern continent, the westernmost country had a little icon indicating me. Dirge was oddly shaped, and it shared a border with two others. 

When I said the map reminded me of a satellite feed popular web mapping services used, Tilde snickered and told me to press a button I had missed. When I did, it was literally like I was staring down at myself from above. I jerked my head up to stare down—to stare up— at myself, and it was so similar to what an out-of-body experience would feel like. 

The me I saw followed all my movements. With the other map mode, everything was like a standard paper map. Green would mark grass and trees, blue for oceans, lakes, and ponds, and deep brown for mountains. But satellite mode brought reality to it. When I spoke my astonishment, I heard myself twice. Because sound could transfer. And that made it even more powerful. 

This satellite mode, true to what Tilde said, did not make me a stronger fighter. It would make me a smarter one, though. Using this mode caused a lot of strain after a small headache automatically reverted map the back to the basic mode. 

I searched Ria upon Tilde’s instruction, but nothing popped up because I hadn’t been there. “Well, if we keep following the road, we’ll come to it. The good thing about major landmarks is that you don’t have to get super close. I think the range is something like a mile or two. ‘New Location: Ria’ or something like that will pop up in your activity log.” 

I turned back to the lone boar sitting still to test [Storage] and [Auto Loot]. The blue waypoint still dangled over the beast, who had no idea it was about to die. I tried to see how many I could have. But after finding out 60 wasn’t the limit, I had to remove them. 

It was like I was staring at an orgasm of colors.  

It was almost sickening. 

I aimed Reina’s gun and fired while jogging ahead, watching the white dot turn red when the first bullet struck it. My arms remained in something similar to a stance used to hold a teacup, except my left hand was cupping the pistol’s grip. This stance provided more support to handle the recoil. Two head shots weren’t enough to kill it, so I asked Tilde. “In this world, the materials used in crafting a weapon influences how much damage it does. Using better quality metals and finer firesalts—ah, that’s the equivalent of gunpowder in this world—matters a lot as well. Remember, the more you assimilate monsters that carry dexterous traits, the more damage your bullets are going to do. Like, to put it into numbers, you’re dealing like 30 damage right now. After assimilating 1,000 flying bat monsters or Elven archers, you’ll end up doing like 3,583 with the same gun. But if a gun has {Mana Link}, the damage depends on the strength of your mana, so you'd want to assimilate mages and magical beings,” Tilde said as Sekh ran to finish off the wounded beast.  

“But once I’m stronger...” 

“Yep! Right now, using a standard gun with regular ammo is the way to go. It’s easier said than done because firearms are not popular. Even if you can find one, good luck getting the bullets for a reasonable price if you can't make them. Don’t use Scorpion’s Bite more than you must because that’s just asking to get robbed.” 

I nodded and looked to the lower left of my vision. My activity log notified me of the automatic gathering of cores and their placement in [Storage], which was accessed with a new button added to my Status Menu and heads-up display. I went ahead and stashed my spear in there as well. I took off my left glove and transfigured my hand while walking to the corpse, watching it take the head of the beast that was my penis about 15 minutes ago. Controlling it felt so natural. 

But it was time to experiment.  

Sekh shuffled her eyes to my new hand and happily clapped. “I knew you’d get the hang of it! Does it feel weird?” she asked me with a smile.  

“Surprisingly no. I see a percentage bar, though: 9% out of 10%. That must be my current limit for transforming. And that yellow bar was drained by a chunk when I transfigured. It’s slowly draining right now.” I turned the head around and stared into its dead eyes. After focusing, I made them blink. The next test was to make it squeal, and that took about half a minute. After that, it panted like a dog and stuck its fat tongue out. Tilde explained that transfiguring required an initial cost, then a steady supply of biomass to maintain it. 

I was surprised to find myself enjoying this, smiling as I practiced using the boar head hand. After a few short seconds, I found myself growing noticeably hungrier than before when the yellow bar dipped below 50%. 

It wasn’t like using a hand puppet. Despite being connected to my wrist, I could see out of its eyes. It was like staring into a world of monochrome. I started getting a headache as my mind was trying to comprehend the two different types of vision and different senses at the same time. Sekh put a hand on my shoulder to keep me steady. “I’m fine… Just…trying to get used to it…” 

It seemed I could use assimilate while transfigured, so I did just that.  The sharp teeth ripped through the tough sinew and chewy fat, and the taste and texture of bone, blood, and meat drowned the boar’s tongue in so much crimson. When I ate my fill, my hunger was sated, and both my mana and biomass were refilled. 

Guess this means I’m a bonafide monster… That’s fine. Whatever I need to kill Meruria and those fucking traitors.  

I looked at my boar head hand. 

How did the meat reach my stomach in the first place? There’s nowhere for the food to travel, but it disappears when the boar head “swallows”.  …Do I actually care? No, I don’t think I do. 

“The fuck are you doing?” Tilde asked.

“I’m done eating,” I replied, walking away.  

She angrily pointed to the half-finished meal and shook her head. “Finish your plate. You can’t leave any evidence behind that would suggest the presence of a chimera. Come, listen to your super cute instructor and eat.” 

“Ah… That makes sense,” I said, using my boar head hand to swallow the rest. It was fine if it became bloodied because it disappeared when I canceled my transfiguration. I was left with a pristine, dark-grey hand that betrayed my true form. But since I left the very first boar behind, I marked it on my map and ran back with Sekh and Tilde.  

Most of my other skills seemed to be rather easily explainable except one, so I asked about [Artificer’s Arsenal]. 

“Okay, so it goes like this. Let’s say you take two rocks and bash them together until you have a stone knife. You can register the knife in the arsenal, and it will never degrade or dull. If it breaks, it comes right back. If you manage to improve this knife by making it sharper, you can overwrite the current knife with the new one. And it’s not limited to just a knife. Things like pickaxes, scoops, and molds for making ingots. Even something as simple as homemade coal can be registered, and they would forever burn without any sign of stopping. That would pair well with a stove, right? Maybe a furnace? But once something is registered, it cannot be used to cause any sort of harm or damage.  Speaking of that, use [Nature’s Workshop] to make something,” Tilde said. I did what she said, but... 

Nothing happened. The screen from before, the one with a list of craftable items, refused to appear.  

Tilde mentioned that the race-exclusive boons were erased when [Artificer’s Arsenal] was initiated. If I wanted to make Sekh another mace, I’d have to do it all by hand with the knowledge given to me by the skill. Sure, that was annoying, but I wasn’t upset. Making something one time and never worrying about it breaking? That was totally worth it. Ah, but there was a catch. 

I couldn’t just buy or steal tools and store them in the arsenal.  Like, I could buy the materials and tools used to make a pickaxe, and as long as I made the final product, it was storable, and therefore, infinite. 

I then asked how dangerous it was around here. Tilde replied it was peaceful since Ria was considered a haven for newbies who wanted to get a jump start on leveling. With a steady supply of adventurers coming and going at nearly all hours of the day, any bandits were swiftly dealt with.  

“Adventurers?” I questionably asked.  

“Yep! The guild is…” Tilde lived up to her role as my instructor and lectured me on what Meruria failed to teach. As she did, I followed her advice and picked up some stones, intending on using Yaekira’s daggers to roughly shape them into a knife.  

---

In short, the guild was where you accepted quests. These could range from killing a certain number of monsters, bringing back an item, or escorting a person from location A to location B. Since there was an office in the smallest villages and the biggest cities, there was always one around. The guild had ranks from ‘I’ to ‘S’. 

Next were titles, and they came from everything. Some gave bonuses when equipped. For example, equipping [Boar Slayer (I)] gave the user extra damage against boar-type enemies, but my 0-Star curse would not allow that to help me. Sekh could use them, so it was in our best interest to gain as many as possible because some skills required certain titles before you could buy them with SP.

Tilde then spoke about the three tiers of what she called ‘end game’ gear. As in, the most powerful equipment in the world. 

Exalted Armaments was a fancy word to describe equipment or skills that required specific non-Lord titles to be usable. Often, you needed to have something like [Hero] or [Dark Champion]. 

There were Royal Armaments that required royal blood or a title like [King] or [Queen] to wield some skills or weapons without consequence. For all intents and purposes, they belonged to the category of Exalted Armaments.  

The equipment could be forged, though it was an involved and difficult process. The skills, on the other hand, were very rare drops from dangerous dungeons in the form of a Skill Orb. Once a Skill Orb was used, its empty vessel could extract a skill from someone else. These orbs, along with the other Exalted Armaments, were passed down as family heirlooms. But a Skill Orb was not infinite. Eventually, it would shatter, and another orb needed to be found or created, which was not easy. 

Lord Armaments were much of the same as Exalted Armaments, but it required a Lord-related title to be used without suffering the consequences. The acquisition of equipment or skill was different. When a person became a Holy or Dark Lord, the released energy always amassed itself into a skill. But if the energy was potent, it could manifest into either a weapon or piece of armor that only improved upon their strength.  As for how to become one? You needed to reach the cap of Lv. 99 and max out either [Holy Infusion] or [Dark Infusion]. Seemed simple enough, but at a certain point, it took months or literal years to increase your level unless you fought monsters way above your paygrade. And those two skills required either a lot of training since Holy Mana and Dark Mana were the strongest types of mana. Oh, and you couldn't cheat and use SP, either.

Some Holy and Dark Lords often used an incredible amount of wealth and resources to commission an extremely skilled blacksmith to forge multiple Lord Armaments just for them. However, the process was many times more difficult and strenuous than creating an Exalted Armament, and there was a high chance of failure.  

That was one way. The second was to find a Lord Armament lost away to the world. And the third was to kill a lord and take their gear as their own, which was possible since a Holy Lord could use a Dark Lord’s Lord Armament. Lord Skills could not be found in Skill Orbs hidden deep within dungeons, but they could be inserted into one. 

When someone became a Holy or Dark Lord, if they were especially powerful, the resulting skill or equipment born from their mana would be known as a Divine Armament. Only the absolute strongest equipment and skills held the distinction of ‘Divine.’ Sekh’s mace and [Tyranny Control] belonged to this group. [Chimeric Mastery] and [Wrath, Flames of Inexhaustible Indignation] were members too. Divine Skills did not have levels, so they had to be improved upon manually without the aid of SP.  

Divine Armaments could not be forged, and the skills could not be stored within an orb. In fact, most people even didn’t know of Divine Armaments because they were just so incredibly rare. Even as powerful as they were, Divine Armaments had the same requirements as Lord Armaments. Those that knew about them even theorized there was an evolution beyond becoming a Holy or Dark Lord.

When I asked about [Hermes Trismegistus] and how it was a ‘**** Skill,’ Tilde said I had to be worthy of it before it became revealed.  

Tilde effortlessly switched topics to dungeons. Some had requirements, like needing a certain amount of people in your party, an average level, or even an item to enter. Depending on the size, a group of people would have to take anywhere from a few hours to a few years to complete them, but the multi-year-long dungeons were extremely rare.  

Inside, you could find treasure chests with items respective to the dungeon’s difficulty. They regularly respawned, so it was possible to farm them at the ire of others. Dungeons could have traps to make exploration harder, and each one had a boss at the end. This monster dropped the most loot, but unless it was a raid boss, only one group could fight them at a time. If multiple parties wanted to challenge the boss, they would have to wait outside the boss’s chambers. From here, two things could happen. 

If victorious, the challenging party had time to loot before stepping into the teleportation circle to be warped to the lobby. It was optional since they could always just walk out of the dungeon the way they came in. 

If defeated, the boss’s chambers would open for anyone to come in and remove the corpses. Sekh chimed in and said it wasn’t rare for someone to follow a group to a boss and wished for their death to steal from their corpses. 

Either way, once the boss’s chambers closed, something was going to die. 

I was going to survive. I’d claw myself out of hell if it meant spilling Meruria’s blood. 

But speaking of items, some equipment dropped in the dungeons automatically came with enchantments. And of those, Tilde said some examples were {Flight}, which allowed you to fly, {Aegis}, an almost mystical enchantment that nearly made you immune to all types of damage, and {Mana Regeneration}, an enchantment that increased the rate your mana regenerated. That last bit was self-explanatory, but Tilde said if someone had enough resources, they could get the Lv. 10 version of that enchantment on all their gear, and they could cast magic indefinitely without even a millisecond of rest. 

She wanted me to imagine an assault rifle with {Mana Link} while wearing equipment that basically allowed me to never pull my finger off the trigger. 

That sounds powerful... Just what I need to take down that bitch Holy Lord. 

I had a quick thought about monsters, and Sekh told me about the Ancient Elder Dragons. She had a platoon of them under her control, and she fondly reminisced about the fight since she had to overpower them. They had an average level of 170, just 29 away from the cap. Something virtually impossible to reach because it took so long to level up when you broke the barrier of 99.  Even bringing down one required a hundred warriors of the same level that specialized in killing the winged menaces. 

And Sekh enslaved them all? She was so powerful. 

That segued into monster cores, but I already know about them. But what I didn’t know was that a monster could eat the core of another monster to grow stronger. Tilde referred to this as ‘Bootleg Chimerism,’ and I had to agree.