Chapter 153: Day 334 – Realizations, A Long Climb

Naran and I were walking ahead of our little group heading out to get someone another Radiant Beam skill, killing monsters in our path. It was quite relaxing killing level 2 monsters I already knew about. Very low stress.

“You seem surprisingly low stress about the everything recently, also heard you are looking to opening up negative energy sensing, and summoning to people,” Naran said.

“I had a realization, which put everything in perspective,” I replied and killed a boar with a mental Acid Shot.

“What realization?” Naran asked. I smiled slightly before answering.

“I can win.” The truth was simple yet profound.

“You can win? Huh. That simple, is it?”

“It is. If the Ritualist with all his head start can’t kill me, I am not too worried about other people. He got a lot of advantages starting and his insight into crystals and summoning is impressive. Perhaps beyond impressive with how much he pulls out of his butt,” I said.

“You really aren’t worried?” I smiled even more at that. I thought back to my first days in Purgatory. The fear, the worry, the constant panic that gripped me. I had made decisions, and nothing could change them. Now, I had the luxury of strength.

“Naran, the Ritualist is a threat for sure, but an annoyance at best.” I shook my head. “He lost the last fight, which was why he wanted peace. No matter how smart someone is, power is power.” I was confident in my abilities. Confident that I could survive no matter what trap the Ritualist pulled out of his butt.

“I think you might be underestimating him,” Naran said. I couldn’t tell if he was worried or just saying that to just say something.

“Maybe, but I couldn’t kill him. Well, I could, but I didn’t want to waste the time,” I replied. It would take a lot of time and headache, but I could grind him down. But I wasn’t worried about him, I was worried about the next threat and the tower I had found. Still, if I could kill him easily enough I would, but I wouldn’t be wasting days upon days trying to run him to the ground.

“It would have taken a long time. Still, there are the skill users left in Truth and the Ritualist.” I knew which of those Naran wanted to kill more.

“Perhaps they might team up,” I said jokingly.

“You sound hopeful?” Naran asked.

“I am. It is nice when my enemies group together so I can wipe them all out at once. Perhaps Ruth will join them as well.” We continued in silence before I spoke up again.

“I am concerned about heading to Esperanza. I am debating against it,” I finally said.

“Really? You seemed like you wanted to hunt down and kill Ruth. Or at least put pressure on her,” Naran replied.

“I thought on it a bit more. What does it matter if my revenge is today or ten days from now? Revenge should not dictate my movement or plans. Also, I have no doubt she would hear about the bounty and go deeper into hiding. Let her get comfortable and reveal herself, then I will kill her in one move.”

“It is possible. Not as much cover with the zones when grinding level 2 monsters unless she goes into a swamp. Thinking about it?” Naran asked. I let out a long sigh at that.

“The issue is bringing supplies and a cart. I have no doubt it will be incredibly miserable. People underestimate how important a basic level of comfort is needed for grinding. Trying to grind in a swamp or a level 3 area past a swamp is asking for difficulties.”

“Hmm, well we are fairly closed in, and it limits exploration opportunities,” Naran said.

“Other people can explore. That is what the Union is for. No, after we get this skill, I am thinking about going back to those gargoyles and centipedes.”

“Thinking about pushing East past the tower? Seeing a level 4 zone?”

“I can’t make good time against the black eagles that are out there. Too fast and with too much maneuverability. We are at a wall in terms of getting past level 3 zones.” I let out a long sigh. The grinding curve had become a lot more real.

“What are you thinking for stats? A 1,000 across the board?” Naran asked. The risk was insane if I didn’t raise up all my stats. I didn’t want to poke a level 4 monster any time soon.

“At least that at the minimum, to think about taking on a level 4 zone easily. Not like we can just calculate the optimal point to switch over, so better safe than sorry. Also supplies and getting there. It just feels weird how much stat points cost to city upgrades. It makes me think that the next level of upgrades is going to be rage inducing.”

“In the millions and tens of millions then. What is the stat cost?” Naran knew I had worked out all the costs for stat points. I looked around, the main group was too far back to overhear.

“At 1,400, and with another stat unlock with a store upgrade, figure I need 10,000 stat points to feel comfortable, so 8,600 more. A bit less than 250 million points to get there.” The ugly fact of stat cost increases finally showed itself.

“That is brutal.” After that, how far would I have to climb? It was tempting to invest everything in a single stat, but I wasn’t comfortable skating the edge of disaster. Who knew what ability the next super monster would have, only the Almighty System.

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“It is only going to get worse. With monsters giving less points. Insanely frustrating,” I replied.

“That is going to take forever to climb up. You weren’t joking when you talked about things in cultivation terms.” The power of math to extrapolate the grind.

“I am hoping there is something to mitigate the scaling, but I am not holding my breath. The trajectory of so many things is clear, but terrible.” We continued walking in silence after that.

Naran killed a boar or pig, I couldn’t decide what the giant piggy type monsters were, and we kept walking in silence for a bit. Probably pigs, but they had hair. What was the difference between a boar and a pig besides one being domesticated?

Acid Shot. I killed another one. My mind drifted to the theoretical maximum grind speed I had been working to calculate. If I could grind a level 3 area as quickly as possible, I would need be killing one level 3 monster per minute. That included picking up the crystals myself and rushing about non-stop.

That would be 960 level 3 monsters over the course of 16 hours. Even with Body upgrades, it wasn’t the speed but the pausing to fight monsters, pick up crystals that really ate into the time. I had noted that the higher level zones had less monsters. I had been working out math and monster density.

My initial calculations and thoughts had been way off. I had been thinking that other people were idiots at killing monsters. It was only when I saw the long term tax numbers from Clarissa that I had an epiphany, with my gamer knowledge and a bit of math.

Monster density wasn’t good. A level 1 zone, had about 12 to 15,000 monsters of each type. A level 2 zone had about 7 to 10,000 monsters. A level 3 zone had about 3 to 5,000 monsters. This was excluding dungeons. Another limitation the higher one climbed. At every point the Systemic Lands seemed to want to place resource shortages in my path.

This information had been extrapolated from the tax income and my clear speed of higher-level zones. One would think the count would be much higher. Way back when I first arrived, I had cleared 60 slimes in an hour.

That was astronomical compared to what numbers were coming out of grinders. It wasn’t obvious to me at first. I had thought that people were less capable. It was only after staring at the pitiful tax numbers for a long time and thinking them over, I worked out what was really happening and it wasn’t incompetence or theft.

The simple yet complex answer was that there was dynamic movement going on behind the scenes. The lower counts when I traveled through the zone around Purgatory I had attributed to grinders clearing everything. That was only partially true but didn’t account for my higher initial numbers.

If that was the case, there should have been around 80 to 100,000 monsters of a single type. A massive amount. I had just thought other people were lazy for the longest time, but math proved me wrong. It was easier to blame others, then accept the extent of the problem.

That was one reason why the tax income was so low with people going out and killing monsters compared to what I had been grinding up. There was something happening behind the scenes, out of sight with monster movement.

For whatever reason, the first person leaving the gate had a higher encounter rate. Well not the first person, but a solo person or group that wasn’t being contested in the zone by other groups. Monsters were moving outside my sight in a dynamic way. Moving outside everyone’s sight in a dynamic way that wasn’t completely straight forward.

It was frustrating since I didn’t have a god’s eye view of their movement. That was the nice thing about strategy games, I could see all the movement. It made me think of the map upgrade for the city that was offered in the system store.

The density was quite low in reality, I had just gotten lucky never realizing the issue. I had never really cleared a zone that was being contested by others. That was the danger of assumptions. Thinking low level monsters had static movement paths, or they were just hanging around an area.

But I knew better now. They had dynamic movement paths outside my vision. Level 1 to level 3 monsters didn’t come back to cleared paths, and they moved in front of a person. To intercept them. I mentally thought of the movement as a scared zombie movement. They wanted to get me but were afraid of their fellows dying, so stayed off the area where they were killed.

It was one of the many things I had been working on. My notebook wasn’t just for show. Reading all the reports, tax revenues, and working backwards to figure out the actual density and then determine dynamic movement was the root cause had been a massive headache.

One couldn’t even begin to understand the headache figuring this stuff out took. Sure, it was easy to understand, once it was figured out, but getting to that point took a lot of time. I had time to think things over, really think, and it was what I spent a lot of my free time doing.

Honestly without the breakthrough on the summoning, I would have felt a lot of this kind of thinking was useless. It was good to know, but it didn’t help me. Kind of like knowing the moon causes tides. Sure, it was good to know, but it was only useful in very specific circumstances.

That was the same issue with dynamic movement. The real question was what would a level 4 zone look like? Death had weird behavior, very weird. Would other monsters at its level act weird as well? Would it effect their hidden dynamic movement? What if they didn’t move like scared zombies?

It also raised questions about the death monster. Could it have been a rouge monster that had attacked me based on probability and not related to having 1,000,000 points? There were no easy or simple answers. That was one thing I wasn’t ready to test.

It wasn’t like I could ask Naran either. This wasn’t something one could trust their gut on or get an opinion on. It came down to observations and cold hard math. Even the fakeness of the world was fake. It was enough to drive a person to madness.

The fact that other people weren’t inferior to me but were actually hindering each other was kind of funny in my opinion, like a sad clown. I had missed something obvious for so long that I felt like an idiot. At least it put my mind to rest about what had been bugging me about my early time in the Systemic Lands and Purgatory. It had been a struggle to survive then, worrying about everything.

Something had always seemed off, and I was glad I could put my finger on the issue. This also made it much clearer how important it was to stay ahead of the pack and dominate other cities for their skill points. Skills were the only way to guarantee taking down higher-level monsters.

Sure, stats would help and were needed, but I was becoming frustrated with the sheer cost of every single stat point. Just looking at the math in my notebook made me want to puke blood.

The climb upwards became more and more difficult. At what point was there a stat point cap? Was there a cap? The Almighty System hadn’t felt inclined to insert that answer into my brain.

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