Skills, Templates.

Without blinking, Alice ogled those two words silently before picking 'Services' from the list. After the awakening, the girl had discovered a number of tasty options inside,

[Training Chat: 1,500 BP] [Extends the safe zone chat to the rest of the training stage]
[Mobile: 3,000 BP] [Extends chat to Earth devices for the purpose of teamspeak]
[Friend List: 3,000 BP]
[Mental Control: 15,000 BP]

[Full Aptitude Test: 5,000 BP] [Recomended to template users for the purpose of planning the character development]

[Safe Beacon: 1,000 BP +500 BP per purchase] [One-time use, 10 minutes charge. Designates a confined space inside a dungeon as a safe zone. May attract retaliation]

Being defined as a character was fairly offensive, but these services the girl designated as the most important.

"Training chat, one safe beacon."

From a thin air, a grey foot-long bar appeared. It had two arrows pointing at the opposite directions on the ends so Alice got a slight idea of how to make it work.

"Now into the template section."

"Chat?"

A half-transparent window opened in the space before Alice's eyes.

***Scarlet enters the chatroom***

Scarlet: Does teach or Nomad has a rare class?

Hm? No one answered. No one is here, strange. But the thing works!

At least two people had a class the girl hadn't discovered a straight template for. Unless they had introduced themselves as 'I am Witch', 'I am Shaman' while simply omitting the 'apprentice' part, having deemed it useless.

Alice knew what she was thinking about, she would have done exactly that.

"Shop, two standard meals... be they damned. Two, no, three liters of water."

The skill category in the shop was ignored by the girl for it had too big price tags.

> Battle Points: 3,303->1,573

Leaving the safe zone back into the slaughtering house aka the starting dungeon cave full of centipede bodies, Alice was attentively watching the chat. The system service didn't disappoint the girl and persisted bravely.

Phew, she sighed loudly and looked around.

There was no sign of a sword she had lost three days ago around. Yellow blood on the rocks slowly started to burn and the pressure of magic in the cave grew a bit. Alice, not thinking long, sat on the ground where stood, placed the glaive near, the bow with three arrow on her knees.

The first casual breath reaped the girl ten traces of mana, twice the number she would gather in the safe zone. Full of newfound enthusiasm, Alice began a new set of experiments. Long pauses, small pauses, series of short breaths against rare deep ones, breathing with the chest versus using abdomen muscles and so on and so forth.

"Wait, this works?"

Whimmely having changed her pose, Alice suddenly discovered that crossing her legs immediately multiplied the amount of energy she could take in.

"I don't get... oh."

After a look inside, the girl noticed she was able to mess with the paths the energy would circulate through before entering her heart. The position of her hands, how much she relaxed, how straight her back was – everything mattered.

Long story short, Alice naturally came to the lotos position¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_position.

Dumbfounded, the girl fluttered her eyelashes.

"The ancients knew something."

No way this was just a coincidence.

However, further experiments proved her hands were better off touching each other with the fingertips before her none-existing breasts.

From then on, Alice officially concentrated on her meditation as the centipedes were flaming with mana, only a necessary part of her watching the passage into the dungeon.

Blood energy in the girl's heart first rapidly regenerated after the last expenditure and then slowly began to grow. Minutes passed and Alice's blood integration reached 51%. 52%...55%

Mm?

The air had moved unnoticing. No, blue magic haze slowly swirled into a vortex under the ceiling, dividing into two parts.

One was flowing into the save zone above Alice's head and the other into the debts of the dungeon.

They fight for it! Recycling has such a use aswell!

Some local creatures might find this place, was the second thought, but Alice still chose to go and sit in the passage, obstructing the magic flow into the den with her own body, wishing to siphon as much power from the monsters as she could.

56%...57%

Alice amassed more and more blood energy when she heard some clatter ahead.

It took some time for a big ant to reach her place and when the creature did show up from the corner it fell with an arrow deep in its head.

The eyes half-closed, aloof Alice concentrated on her task. 58%. The percentage was purely notional, and every next was costing more and more wild dungeon magic. Blood energy that was strengthening her body though also grew. Endurance, the girl willed it, not certain what exact steps could be done. Endurance first

When centipedes were mostly gone and three quoters of the girl's heart filled with blood energy, a change occurred. A burning current arose, rushed up and entered her eyes.

"Ah!"

Alice cried out from pulsing searing pain as if someone pushed a pair of heated pins into her brain and then pounded with a hammer. Colors, light, everything disappeared. The girl's hands gripped the bow and arrows, she clenched her teeth, suppressing the scream.

Even the subsidized pain felt like two drops of molten tin in place of pupils. In fear, blinded Alice listened to the dungeon, searched for quakes in the earth, sensed magic in the air.

Power was wriggling in her eyes, remodeling them, tuning them.

Only able to wait, Alice sat still, ready to shoot at any sound and have planned an escape route. Bit by bit, light sprang back in her eyes. First a blurred image, the world soon revealed itself in its pristine form.

"Nothing?"

Surprised and mildly angry, Alice massaged her eyelids, blinked and carefully observed the changes.

There was none.

I foreshadowed going blind as a result of a level up, but... Alice cautiously urged some blood energy into her brand new(?) eyes. No effect.

The girl avoided useless guesses and reignited the motivation to meditate and consume magic energy that between the dungeon and Node #8 was rapidly drying up. A minute later she frowned. Her blood integration slowed down sharply: every thick blood drop required three times more magic energy. Anxiously, the girl drew in as much as she could, but the centipede got digested soon.

77%

The mana returned to its normal level. Sigh, Alice stood up and stretched her limbs.

Chat... hm?

There was a login she'd missed.

Scarlet: Hello.
John: Hey hey hey. Paths ours crossed!

Ehm... that was fast. She typed, no, voiced since the system chat required that, "Seems so?"

John: Come on, I crave a company to talk to
John: my smith training leave me little time to catch up
Scarlet: You can train less.
John: Then I never gonna end it. Ok, lets talk. What's up?

Why the hell not... it's all online. Alice shrugged and talk a bit about her experiences. John seemed a nice guy... less nice after he smugly told her his training had no combat encounters at all. He got a smithy and had to smith things, mostly cold weapons. The system was tiering his results and tier 5 was the goal. For now, he was struck with tier 2.

Meanwhile, level 4 dead ant vanished like smoke, an arrow lonely resting on the floor untouched. Is it because I am inside the dungeon and it's linked to me? The piece of ammo was in good shape, so Alice took it up and found a wall to support her back and relaxed her mind in chatting. She might be also laying in wait for another insect scout.

John: When I made my first sword, I was almost crying, ya know?
John: it was crude and brittle though, got no expo
John: Cannot wait to evolve your class to something better, right? Magic smith'd be good enough for me
John: Templates? damn, for real?

"Aha", "Yes", "That's right". Alice was mostly keeping it simple while John was doing the talking part. She did speak about her dungeon experience a bit though and, after a moment of doubt, about the fact that she could strength herself with magic energy. Omitting the general blood energy and Leviathan parts, naturally.

The system had stated it: templates weren't Alice-exclusive. Since she wasn't the Chosen One, naturally others could use some similar method too.

I need to keep going.

Scarlet: I want to clear the place as much as I can. Will be in chat.
John: Good luck.
John: the way you describe btw...

Alice didn't see the continuation at first. Wanting to spend the rest of her battle points, she had been returning to the safe zone when she noticed.

On the floor in the starting dungeon cave, there were four translucent gems.

[Inferior-tier Magic Core]

Is it... a drop?

Blink, blink. The girl bent her head and wondered in childish delight, Loot! My first loot! Alice hurriedly picked up the closest magic core, or, how she instantly renamed it, magic stone.

John: I know its kinda different setting, but you described wuxia/xianxia cultivation.

"Can you eat it?" Alice asked herself, not the chat. The gem shined in her hand, emitting weak fluctuations of mana. "Bet monsters can."

"..."

"What is cultivation, come again?"