Guild Wars

Chapter 1297: Maxed Out Divine Slots!

Within these near eight thousand skills were naturally those at the Common Rank as well as those at the Divine Rank. It usually started with the skills at the earlier numbers while those that came later grew in rank and quality when recorded and then converted.

Once again, since Draco had recorded enough techniques to create his own mega sword sect, he skipped this bit and glanced at the second option, which was the 'Conversion to Skills' option.

Here, the background was the silhouette/outline of a man swinging a blade forward on the left, and on the right was him in the same pose but on the cover of a book, with a directional arrow in between both images.

As expected, this segment had two options as well, the first being 'Convert a Technique into a Skill', and the second was to 'Convert a Technique to a Spell'.

Both options were necessary. Draco was long aware that he could make spellbooks with Scrivening because techniques weren't limited to physical combat only. As he had often told the core members, there would come a day when they could cast spells on their own as techniques.

Now that they had even synchronized their real bodies with the game characters they possessed after the forceful merging when Draco created the space tunnel to Boundless, they could already achieve this in reality if there was Worldly Energy present.

Draco had once considered turning his subjective magic into spellbooks, but that was pointless. It wouldn't form any unique spell, but would rather come out as the typical spells already existing in the database, and the people who learned it from him would not learn Subjective Magic on the side.

There were no benefits, so there was no point.

This part Draco didn't skip. Over the ten years, his avatar had slowly converted many of the recorded techniques into skillbooks to be scrivened, but the conversion time was not instant. In fact, each skill took a set amount of time to convert based on its assessed rank and quality.

Common Rank skills took 3 hours and cost 50 low-grade Aether Crystals to convert.

Uncommon Rank skills took 12 hours and cost 1 medium-grade Aether Crystal to convert.

Rare Rank skills took 24 hours and cost 50 medium-grade Aether Crystals to convert.

Epic Rank skills took 72 hours and cost 1 high-grade Aether Crystal to convert.

Legendary Rank skills took 168 hours and cost 50 high-grade Aether Crystals to convert.

Divine Rank skills took 720 hours and cost 1 top-grade Aether Crystal to convert.

Of course, these numbers were based on whether one was at the Amateur Rank of the Tradeskill. At each success rank of the Tradeskills, this time was reduced across the board by a fixed modifier of 0.75x for the Elite Rank, 0.50x for the Expert Rank, 0.25x for the Master Rank, and Grandmaster was 0.1x.

For example, a Common Rank skill took 3 hours at the Amateur Rank, 2 hours and 15 minutes at the Elite Rank, 1 hour 30 minutes at the Expert Rank, 45 minutes at the Master Rank, and 18 minutes at the Grandmaster Rank.

Unfortunately, the Aether Crystal cost didn't change.

So far, of the near 8000 skills, Draco had converted about 6900 over the past ten years. This was even done based on the fact that one could 'speed up' the timer by paying Aether Crystals on top of the initial conversion fee, which his avatar had splurged on.

So he had a huge library to work on. The rest had all been paid for and were slowly converting. There was no limit to the number of 'queues' when converting, so all eight thousand had been paid for as soon as they were recorded by the avatar and he selectively chose some to speed up, like the Epic and Legendary ones, while he left the various common ones to come as and when.

Draco nodded and switched to the third menu, which was where the real work began.

This was the 'Creation of Skillbook'.

This one was quite simple and amusing, possessing the background of a man bent over a table while writing furiously, his quill almost slashing the paper at his mercy.

There were three choices here. The first was 'Prepare Ink', the second was 'Prepare Paper', and the final was 'Scriven'.

This section handled what everyone expected Scrivening to be about, the actual writing and bookbinding. Naturally, to create a skill from a technique, one required a special type of ink and paper in order for the skill/spellbook to be made.

Thankfully, he had already created huge tankards of ink at various ranks through his avatar, and even some himself during his time in Norma's Treasury. He had nearly 2 million liters of Common Rank ink, 120,000 liters of Uncommon Rank ink, 15,000 Rare Rank ink, 3,500 Epic Rank ink, and only about 980 liters of Legendary Rank ink.

He never made Divine Rank ink because he only qualified to produce Divine materials freely recently, and by that time, he no longer bothered with Scrivener. The good news was that he had learned the materials for them in his initial seclusion to analyze Divine Rank materials en masse.

Likewise, he also had plenty of paper, creating around the same number of sheets per liter of ink. Thanks to this, he significantly reduced his estimated time for taking Scrivener to the Divine Rank since the most time-consuming part was precisely the preparation of these materials.

However, Draco chuckled because it didn't matter whether he had none or millions of this stuff. After all, his Refinement had reached the God Stage, so he could freely replicate up to Divine Rank materials, and the ink as well as the paper were counted as materials.

As such, he took out one each of the paper and ink per Rank and analyzed its contents before putting them away. With a flick of his finger, he could turn any trash-tier material like the sand beneath his feet into Legendary Ink or Legendary Paper.

He even spent some time crafting a set of Divine Paper and Divine Ink so he could analyze it and add it to this database for later.

Enjoy new tales from M V L

Draco then began to Scriven, which was the key aspect of this all.

However, here came a problem that had plagued him since back when he first got this Tradeskill. A Scrivener could not pen down a book higher than the equivalent Rank of their own Tradeskill level. This meant that if he was at the Amateur Rank, he could only Scriven Common Rank skillbooks regardless of whether he converted 1 million Divine skills.

This was the main limitation and element of difficulty in this Tradeskill.

Writing also had limitations for skills. Common Rank skills could only have a maximum of 20 sheets of paper, Uncommon Rank skills being 40 sheets of the same rank, Rare Rank skills being 60, Epic Rank skills were 80, and Legendary Rank skills were limited to 100.

Draco went through the process of creating the books themselves, which counted as a material too… so he recorded them. Hmm, it really made his avatar feel like it had overworked itself for nothing, huh?

Since he was currently at the Master Rank of Scrivener, he could create up to Epic skills. As such, he picked out an Epic skill from the original 360 Paragon Sword Skills, Sword Skill 356: Two Swords, No Army.

｢Sword Skill 356: Two Swords, No Army – Active Skill

Rank: Epic

Effect: Infuse the body with Worldly Energy and enhance dexterity and agility to the limit. The user will then cross a distance of up to 300 kilometers in one direction, and all targets in a zone of 1 kilometer will be beheaded when the user appears on the other side.

Note 1: The insta-kill effect only works on enemies below the user's rank.

Note 2: If the enemy is at the same Rank or higher, it does damage based on the user's strength versus the enemy's endurance.

Cooldown: 1 hour.｣

Draco had used this one to deal with the core members of Umbra as a raid boss during the First Inter-Player International Competition. It was a powerful and senseless skill that worked using Draco's speed and dexterity with two swords to 'relieve' all those in the general direction of where he was looking of their troublesome thoughts by removing the source of their thoughts.

Seated at the Ultimate Bench with the Supreme Quill in hand, Draco began the writing process. On that note, the actual work process of Scrivener was not that complex, one just had to follow some "on-screen" prompts.

Basically, it was sort of like a mini-game where the Tradeskill crafter entered an augmented reality environment while being given a 3D guide to follow in writing the book. It was akin to those 'fill in the lines' books that children were given to use.

This was obviously because those who had this Tradeskill were more likely to be combat talents than writing talents, so this 'exception' was made for them. Draco was even willing to bet that the Origin God of Scrivener was a fellow who was initially a Scribe and experienced something that set them on the path of combat, where they realized that their talent was transcendent.

So they merged the two to create this Tradeskill, but since their combat talent surpassed their Scribing talent, the imbalance was carried over to the Tradeskill itself. Whatever the case, it was beneficial to a person like Draco, so he naturally would not complain.

As expected, the more he began to write, the more he began to have his Innate Technique Generator work on a new Scrivener Grandmaster Technique. The technique was foundational and covered every aspect of writing from the ground up, so his speed began to increase after he completed the near 76 pages of Sword Skill 356.

Book after book was produced, all of them various Epic skills. He even went down and started from Common skills of all kinds, from the weaker ones that took a few pages to the best, which reached the limit of 20 pages, then to Uncommon skills that fit the same criteria.

After that came Rare skills and back to Epic skills again, filling his budding writing technique with more detail and fortifying it for subsequent breakthroughs. Admittedly, Control did help with mechanical accuracy, but it actually did not do as much as with other Tradeskills focused on technicality like Blacksmithing, Alchemy, and Magical Engineering.

It was like being a surgeon; having a stable wrist for surgery was not a bonus, it was a necessity. Likewise, to write, you needed a bit of stability and mechanical accuracy even if the thing had 3D prompts to guide you.

Of course, the benefits were there, and the writing technique took form nonetheless. It was not inferior to any writing technique out there and could be ranked in the top among the various Grandmaster techniques.

Upon reaching this point, 3 months of time had passed, and Draco had finally taken Scrivener to the Grandmaster level smoothly after he penned down one of his own custom Legendary skills. This was probably the biggest difficulty of Scrivener as a Legendary Tradeskill compared to Magical Engineering.

For Scrivener, you needed both a Legendary Writing Technique and to create your own custom skill/spell that was of the Legendary Rank. For Magical Engineering, you needed a Legendary Engineering technique and to create a design, but that was significantly less hard.

The usual prompts came up with the usual rewards, but Draco ignored them. Rather, he began to work on getting to the Divine Rank of Scrivener, and with this as a bouncing board, he only needed 6 more months of hard work to achieve this feat.

Now, he stood at the peak of his practice, with four Tradeskills at the Semi-Divine Rank and his Starry Sky Array to make five stacked upgrades.

Not to mention, after all this time, his Refinement had grown again. 9 months was 274 days, which meant 137 Units of Mind Force gained, which meant 13.7% of the Mental Power Cloud consumed, which meant that Draco was only 2.9% away from reaching the Semi-Origin stage of Refinement!

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AN: sorry for the delay in chapters. As was promised before, a solo Draco edge lord arc is starting after this chapter.

It is a bit long, no-nonsense, and all about killing.

A lot of killing.

Be prepared.