Chapter 5: 5. Sticky Mess

The trio and Petra went out of the safe room, they weren’t present when Vulpinus explained his role here. Marla gave them a run-down of the story, and tried to incite them to join her and Chris, as his underlings.

The trio seemed interested and went to chat with him, it didn’t take long for them to come back. He must have scared them off with his conditions for cooperation, and they didn’t trust him without a proof of his competence.

Petra laughed audibly and left before Marla even finished her passionate speech, she went towards the stall to have a conversation with the Humanoid fox.

“Assuming that everything she told me is true, it seems that the tutorial is just rigged. A tutorial would be more beginner-friendly.” she said “You’re still hiding something, aren’t you?”.

Well, she had a point. Vulpinus cared for his personal wealth, unless he was forced to give something for free then he would sell it for as high as he could. That’s the kind of guy he was.

“Thank you, lady. Your explanation saved me some time!” He tried to act high spirited but the disappointment was visible in his eyes. “I was instructed to give the hosts a map that shows the location of the nearest dungeon, you’ll have a system window explaining all the important details when you arrive there.” He then took out ten rolled up papers from his bag of holding.

I really need a bag of holding, but I’ll get one from the fairies soon enough if all things go well, I thought as he distributed the maps. I stepped forward to take my copy of the map from him and opened it up. It was roughly drawn with the safe room marked with a back dot and the dungeon marked with a red one, it also had an arrow that indicated the direction of north.

Zhou Ming asked the stall owner for general directions, the latter just pointed towards a certain direction saying that it was ‘where north is’, but he suggested they buy a compass for more accurate results.

I pretended to focus on the map and then occasionally look at the surrounding wilderness. So, the dungeon is in the same location as the one I remember, I thought. We were in the middle of what seemed to be a jungle. It had many large trees, most of them were at least twenty meters tall. The safe room looked like a large black cube from the outside, clearly it was bigger on the inside.

The sun was still high in the sky, causing the appearance of many interconnected shadows. It’s perfect for my shadow assimilation skill.

“Status window” I said, I had to check my newly gained skills and test something out.

I looked at the screen that came up and started thinking.

 

Sigh, my mana only regenerated eleven points after about twenty minutes in the safe room.

In order to find out how MAG interacted with my mana capacity and its regeneration rate, I tried to allocate stat points to that stat one by one.

Each time I added a point to my MAG stat, the time required to regenerate a single mana point decreased by 5 seconds. The mana capacity still didn’t change till the stat reached 20, which caused my mana capacity to double.

It seems that my mana capacity changes depending on milestones in the MAG stat.

After some thinking, I dumped the remaining two points in AGI, bringing it to 12.

I also noted that the EXP needed to reach level 2 is the same as what my old common class needed. I wonder if classes of all grades had similar growth rates? I decided that I would ask people with uncommon and epic classes to find out when I have time. I had more pressing things to do now.

“Show me descriptions for [Zoom], [Shut-Down], [Shadow Assimilation] and [Light Steps]” I said, everyone started staring at my general direction. They must be thinking that I’m weird for talking to the system when it could respond to thoughts. What could I do after living a lifetime with a system that misunderstood my intentions!

I remembered some disasters that the system caused me in my past, but I decided to just check the four system notices that appeared side by side.

[Zoom]: (common)	Active
Uses mana to teleport the user to a place within his line of sight or that he visited before Laziness is a virtue; Sloth is a sin! -Mana Cost (50) -Range (Within sight / Unlimited if visited previously) -Cooldown (30 Minutes)

 

[Shut-Down]: (Legendary)	Active
Avoiding problems till they come back to bite you in the ass, that’s the kind of person that you are. -Nullifies all the pain felt by the user for a set duration of time (Mana Usage : N/A) (Duration : 5 seconds) (1 day cooldown)

 

[Light Steps]: (Epic)

Passive

Every place is within your reach! you could enter a bank, steal everything and the owner would be none the wiser. Didn’t your mother teach you that stealing is wrong? Pathetic. -Nullifies all the sound generated by the user’s footsteps. -Enables the user to nimbly navigate through all kinds of terrains. -Increases the maximum movement speed (1% increase per 1 point in AGI) -Improves the Host’s control over his body (1% increase per 1 point in DEX) (This skill doesn’t use Mana)

 

 

[Shadow Assimilation]: (Epic)

Active

Shadows are your friends! As long as you have physical contact with a shadow, you’ll completely disappear out of sight. One day, someone with a high-level detection skill will find and punish you! -Hides the host’s presence from regular sight and lesser detection skills when he’s in contact with a shadow (Lesser detection skills are: -Common with a level inferior or equal to 3x this skill’s level -Uncommon with a level inferior or equal to 2x this skill’s level -Epic with a level inferior or equal to this skill’s level -Legendary with a level inferior or equal to half this skill’s level -[…]) (Mana Usage: N/A) (Cooldown: N/A) -Enables the Host to teleport from one shadow to another, within 10 meters range (Mana Usage: N/A) (Cooldown: 10 seconds)

 

This system is making snide comments more frequently than ever, I thought. Well, never mind.

They all seemed to be powerful skill for their price, and they should improve nicely when I level them up.

[Shut-Down] in particular should theoretically make a great combo with [It’s fine!], allowing me to regenerate fairly quickly and gain incredible physical strength for a very short time without feeling any of the pain from the scorching fire.

I remembered something that was bugging me ever since I got the new skills, I had to ask the system about it. The system was neutral, but I had the shop feature to cover my needs.

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“Hey system, I would like to pay for some information.” I said, I tried to talk as softly as possible to avoid exposing myself.

Shop window:	[Current points: 215 points]
-What are you looking to buy? [. . .]

 

“I need basic information on the differences between skills of different grades” I said.

Item	Cost
-Custom Information	40 points

 

“Confirm transaction”, I said. There was a short notice saying that it was successful, then this appeared:

-The main difference is in Level Cap
Grade	Level Cap
-Common	10
-Uncommon	20
-Epic	30
-Legendary	50
-The skill level cap can be broken through depending on the circumstances of the Host.
-Skills of higher grades are usually inherently better.

 

Cool, I thought. This was my first time dealing with skills having a higher grade than [Common]. I didn’t expect the difference to be so great. No wonder those people managed to stand at the top of humanity even when they had less levels than people with Uncommon or Common classes.

I felt satisfied with my current knowledge and went on my way through the jungle, I didn’t have enough mana to use [Zoom] so I just ran. I took a different path from the one that many of the others took to avoid dealing with them and to freely use my abilities when I want. The improvement in my raw speed wasn’t that big, but the increase in my overall speed was incredible due to the effects of [Light Steps]. I didn’t pay my surroundings much heed, but I noticed that Petra was tailing me by a distance of 5 meters.

She may be useful if she wants to cooperate, I thought. Though, she’ll most likely try to swindle me like she did in my past life when I asked her for help.

My impression of her was that she was a young adult with great ambition, and a fair amount of intelligence. It’s a shame that her arrogance led her to a pitfall last time.

I didn’t know much about her class, Virtuoso. All I knew was that it was rather strong, but it suffered from its lack of focus; essentially making her an epic jack-of-all-trades.

I didn’t think about her for long; it was my chance to test [Shadow Assimilation]. When I tried to hide my presence, nothing felt different except the fact that my hands and legs seemed a bit blurry to me.

I wonder if Petra sees me right now, I thought. The response came straight away as I stopped hearing her footsteps. She seemed to be searching attentively when I sneaked a look at her. Great!

I wanted to test my new class skills, but I didn’t have enough mana to do so. I’ll just try them inside the dungeon, I thought.

The dungeon was about 10 kilometers away, but the journey took just twenty minutes. I realized that at level 1, I took less time than the world record for this distance. Scary stuff, I thought. The prospects of the system were very enticing for humans, but I guess it balances out with its capacity to end our world.

After moving for a while, two system notices appeared:

[Shadow Assimilation] levelled up x1! It reached level 2.

 

[Light Steps] levelled up x1! It reached level 2.

 

Nice, I wonder how much improvement these levels brought, I thought. I decreased my pace, as something grabbed my attention.

I reached the dungeon’s entrance. it seemed like a shallow hole in the ground with a radius of one meter. Its opening was dark blue in color, but it started getting lighter when I got closer. The shifting blue of common dungeons, I thought, that’s what adventurers called it back then.

I crouched and moved my hand closer to the weird opening. A window appeared as soon as my fingers touched it.

[System notice]

-You discovered a dungeon; you gained 100 tutorial points! -You were the first to discover this dungeon; you gained 200 tutorial points! -You were the first among your group to discover any dungeon; you gained 500 tutorial points!

 

This window quickly disappeared, another one taking its place instantly.

Dungeon (Common)	Creature Variety: Slimes
Requirements: Rank F (Under level 25)	Clears: 0/10
Slimes are one of the most basic mana creatures, even a kid can beat them! Don’t slack around them though, their slimy substance is a potent acid and easily flammable. -These creatures lack HP; their only source of sustenance is mana. -They’re immune to most physical damage, unless the target was their mana core.

 

Those sticky things, they might be tricky.

This was the bombshell that stall owners never talked about in tutorials. From my exchanges with other people in my past life, I found that they deliberately led us to this dungeon. We were under the illusion that it would be easy as the first dungeon, yet the immunity to physical damage made most people desperate.

This was an insidious method to force many people to take loans from them, I thought.

-Would you like to enter? […]

Warning: as there is no one in your immediate surroundings, you’ll enter alone. It’s advised that parties of at least three people enter together.

 

“Confirm entry to this dungeon” I said.

Meh, I thought. Today they’ll realize what a hard counter truly is.

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