Chapter 289: Day 627 – Dungeon Rush

I left Purgatory late in the evening. The dungeon I wanted was only open at night. So, I would show up there with a bit of time to spare. It would be a long day tomorrow, but I had a route that would take me around Esperanza, picking up all the dungeons in level 2 zones, of which there were eight. Then I would clear another two dungeons to the East of Neo Brasilia for a total of ten skill point upgrades.

I had talked to Clarissa about my conversation and exchange of pointers with the Divine Empress’s Envoy. There was nothing she could do to make things go faster unless I took a personal hand. I had decided against that. The first priority was to clear nine dungeons and upgrade Acid Shot as much as possible to get both gestureless and the silent upgrades back.

Then I would need to clear another twelve dungeons to upgrade my other two skills Air Burst and Aqua Sphere. I needed to make them gestureless. I wasn’t sure if it would take one or two upgrades, but it needed to happen.

It would be painful how much slower my grinding would be. But I couldn’t afford to be caught with my pants down with unupgraded skills. It was too big a risk. Since I needed to clear the tower and beat level 5 monsters, this would go hand in hand with that goal as well.

I needed 570 stat points to bring Absorption up to a total 1,000 stat points, which was the bare minimum. The Astrologer had recommended 2,000 in that stat and 5,000 in Spirit. That meant 2,570 more stat points to each the amount he suggested.

That meant I needed between 23.2 million and 117.5 million points to get to 570 or 2,570 stat points respectively. The real headache was that I would go from earning around 2.2 million points per day to 0.6 million points per day.

That would change getting 2,570 stat points from 54 days to 196 days. The thought was physically painful. The more I thought about this as I ran for the dungeon I was going to clear, the more I didn’t like it. I couldn’t sacrifice my grinding speed, but I could easily die in combat if I didn’t upgrade my skills. The mental math showed it was a bad idea.

Well, I needed to clear 21 dungeons total to bring up all three of my skills to ten upgrades at level 3. I could use the ten I had planned, to upgrade both Air Burst and Aqua Sphere. Those two skills didn’t impact my grinding speed.

Air Burst was the most critical since it was my primary evasion and survival skill. That would take six upgrades to max out. Acid Shot could take another three before the fifth upgrade and the cost increase. Then Aqua Sphere would get the last upgrade.

I let out a sigh of relief. That was a much better plan. After doing the mental math, it was just too much of a slowdown on my grinding speed to increase the cost of Acid Shot. I needed to hold off upgrading that skill for as long as possible. Once I did, my grind speed would take a huge nosedive.

I couldn’t afford all that time. I had two deadlines now. The first was when the Divine Empress would finally show her face and try to murder everyone. The second was the ascent up the tower to free the Astrologer from the 49th floor. I needed as many stat points as possible before that happened to attempt to reverse the situation when I came face to face with him.

Once the city was upgraded, I needed to look into gearing up. Hopefully the type chart would be fully figured out by then and I could plan ahead for the exact gear I needed. Level 5 gear was probably not going to be possible in the timeframe I had.

I would have to settle for level 4 gear. I wanted something that would resist physical attacks and energy for my outer armor. I was thinking metal, reform, or glass types. Perhaps all three, since enchantments could stack. I wasn’t sure about the power scaling or the implications. More testing that needed to be done. The Ritualist had really slowed everything down. For my clothing, I wanted force to mitigate impacts.

There was no item like a mage staff, but the astrolabe design had gotten me thinking about possible designs. It would have been fun to be on the cutting edge of crafting development, but that was being put on hold for the moment to devote everything for the upcoming conflict. There were no crafting crystals to spare. We were short on everything, time, resource, and manpower.

A helmet that could resist sound attacks would be useful. Less likely to have my brain and ears rattled around. I really needed a full chart and then a list of what the results of enchanting an item with each type would be.

The Astrologer had mentioned an axis in his letter. Nature-poison was on the ethereal axis. Ethereal meant not fully there, like a ghost. How did being on a certain axis impact things? I wanted to ask the Astrologer but obviously couldn’t. He was a burnt-out husk, and a deformed thing. I still didn’t know how he was alive. Possibly some energy witchcraft as the good doctor had taken to saying.

I was really annoyed at his incapacitation. I was getting the job of saving his sorry ass, with none of the benefits. I wanted more knowledge bombs dropped on me. A full knowledge train I could get on board and ride of the promised land of knowing everything. The fact that our portion and the Divine Empress’s portion of the Systemic Lands made up half to a third, implied there was a lot more out there somewhere. Where was it? Where were the people?

The Systemic Lands had been around for at least 10 years according to the Astrologer. Well that was technically wrong. It was 10 years since the oldest recorded person. I would have expected at least a scouting airship or something, even if it had a crazy cost and was a monster magnet. We had a calamity, and no one wanted to take a look? Well, I could get that, but still. Send some minions out to check at the least.

Or they could be West of the Divine Empress and had gone nope after meeting her. The East Bastion implied it was the East, but I hadn’t really explored that area and both the Ritualist and Astrologer hadn’t been too keen on sharing.

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It all came down to information. I needed a lot more information. It was really annoying that there was no search engine to look up stuff online. I thought back to when I was a kid, and the internet wasn’t a thing. I just recalled having to look through books. Books were for reading fun stories, not looking up basic information. That was what search engines were made for, basic fact finding.

No wonder why people before the internet believed a lot of things. Once there was the internet, it just sucked all the wonder out of life. Ghosts, yeah nope, have some videos to show it is all made up. Same with magic tricks. It was easy to find out how things were done with reaction videos.

I approached the Dervish Ruin Dungeon I had come across a long time ago at coordinates (-1,-1) on the path to Neo Brasilia. Night fell and the ruined down was filled with mist and monsters. I entered and noticed the mist was pushed quite far from my body. Perhaps an effect of the Aura stat? Another question I would not be able to get a quick answer to.

I cleared the dungeon quickly enough. Even the level 3 super dervishes with their spinning weapons were no match for my Acid Shot. The two skills were Summon Swords and Summon Spears. Like acid shot, they materialized weapons that shot at a target. They weren’t actual summons like the other skills.

I chose to upgrade Acid Shot instead. I had the choice between trajectory, shape, and size. I had gone with size the first time around. It had been good at the time, but now I needed to worry about people dodging. What was the best for PvP was the real question?

Size was good for large targets or groups. I was fighting elites, not the Ritualist and his swarms anymore. Trajectory should allow me to control the skill after it was used. To give it a turn to it, mid-flight. I considered it, but ultimately rejected it for a simple reason.

If they could dodge the initial attack, they would already be putting a lot of space between my attack and themselves. I had good reaction speed, but a high Body stat individual would have an even better reaction time. I needed to stack up my advantages beforehand. I went with shape this time.

“Acid Shot.” I used the skill and could mentally adjust its shape before it fired. Unfortunately, the upgrade only allowed me to change the shape of the acid sphere so much. Like squeezing a balloon, it could only deform so much before I couldn’t push the shape of the skill anymore.

I was hoping when I got the second shape upgrade, I would be able to go much further. I had noted that two upgrades in the same area had much greater impact than a single upgrade. A synergistic stacking effect if you will.

That would have been a great thing to talk to the Astrologer about, but unfortunately, he was not available at the moment. I just had to make the best decisions I could with the information I had. I left the dungeon and ran to the Northeast for the next dungeon.

The salt lake was a lot better than the lake of chunks. It didn’t escape my notice that the weird hole in the Systemic Lands with the chunk of solid energy was to the North of me. The fact that the Envoy had come that far to the East, meant that any boarder was only words on paper.

I shivered despite not being cold. For the first time in a long time I felt the shadow of death hanging over me. Once I got the skill points I would be grinding as quickly as possible. I would have a solid forty days’ worth of grinding. It would be a push, but I could earn about 90 million points in that time period.

It would be just enough for a bit more than 2,000 stat points. I would be very close to the 10,000 stat total point mark at that point and might go over depending on how many more stat points I was able to purchase.

At least a 1,070 stat points was going to go into Absorption to bring it up to 1,500. Body and Mind were going to get the remaining points. Being able to move quickly was too important to PvP. This wasn’t a game where someone could just stand still and dominate everything around them. As much as I would like to have a build style like that, movement was life.

The Envoy had me on too much of a backfoot. I needed to up that key number to closer 1 or higher. How many attacks I could get off before someone closed the distance to me. It was far too risky not to increase my Body stat in a PvP situation.

While Regeneration was tempting to increase my grind speed, I wouldn’t be investing into it for now. I wouldn’t hurt my grind speed, but I couldn’t focus on it. I had the same type of problem in a lot of strategy games. At a certain point you had to switch off from focusing on the economy and focus on military applications.

Even if I liked to max my economy first or do both at the same time. I was trying to do the second by holding off on upgrading Acid Shot, but it was a risky thing not to be fully committing. But I needed those stat points. I would be under the 5,000 Spirit and 2,000 Absorption the Astrologer had suggested, but that was a future problem.

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