101: Upgrades, people, Upgrades!

It was like being forced into a specific diet for days and days on end, never without rest or variation. For a professional athlete, it was only to be expected, but for a normal person, it would constantly strain their nerves, often turning to God at one point or another for aid.

That was how bad Aidan had it when he went through the period of weakness. There wasn’t just a sense of physical liberation, but a spiritual freedom he hadn’t expected. He would’ve likened it to being under the constraint of the binding contract, but this was done under his own decision, rather than being forced to be put under someone else’s authority.

So once he was free of his physical limitations, he really let loose, decimating the monster populace within the forest. He didn’t go too far, though with his current flying speed and ease of movement, it was easy enough to travel several hundreds miles and return easily enough. He didn’t risk using his Teleport spell, only reserving that for emergencies and daily contact with Yin back in Forontia. He was still doing it every day, ensuring that all was fine within the city.

It wasn’t at all surprising that Forontia was being managed quite well under Yin, though it did surprise Aidan a little bit. Considering her former status as a slave, he figured she didn’t have much knowledge of leading a city, but perhaps she hid quite a lot of competency beneath her long years, something that she clearly didn’t show as easily. Perhaps she did it out of habit to avoid being treated as a high-priority slave, only meant to be given to higher-class individuals for more than just her rare High Elf race.

Either way, Forontia was running smoothly with the newly found Red Corner flourishing in ways Aidan wasn’t quite sure how to feel. The women that his group had saved around a week ago were doing well, not working as entertainers but as important personnel managing the numbers. Their skills from their travels as part of merchant caravans saw them through, making them valuable assets to both Yin and to Nina as a whole.

Back at the dungeon, Aidan pretty much swept through the area with precision, cleaning up the monsters one by one in a slow but steady progress to increase his experience yield. He worried whether hunting monsters below his level for experience gain would’ve been detrimental to his growth or something, but so far he hadn’t found anything wrong with doing so. At least, he didn’t feel that way as a spirit.

Since meeting with that friendly spirit who sold him his boots, he was starting to stay in contact with his own race, something that felt like activating another feature of the system just like how he would do for his magic and skills. However, there wasn’t an obvious menu for his race, but only bits and pieces like trying to study the undertones of magic for his friends. One thing was certain–he had a way of gaining experience points only he could feel.

Killing monsters was fine, as well as killing humans. He could point out the obvious fact that targeting children, or those who couldn’t defend themselves, was out of the question. He wouldn’t quite say that he would be punished by the system or anything, but it would just give him an icky feeling, so he supposed that was natural.

What made him pause was when he considered targeting creatures less than level 5. Anything beyond level 5 was considered okay, though the lower it was, the worse the efficiency for gaining experience. Anything under level 5 was considered borderline illegal, at least to his emotions as a spirit.

So even if he faced monsters that were considered a threat to most people from his old world, if they were level 5 or less, he wouldn’t kill them, unless of course they targeted him. Strangely enough, that was fair game.

He kept exploring these feelings, understanding more about the specifics of experience gain as he slaughtered monsters left and right. It got to the point where he left most of the killing to his floating self-controlled swords, returning to his early days of gaining experience while managing the former Raining Treasures store back in Forontia.

As the hours crawled, the sun soon began glaring over the horizon, with Aidan looking up to the sky and taking in a big whiff, assaulted by the corpse that lay beside him from his latest kill.

“Yeah, that was a mistake,” Aidan coughed loudly, not really caring whether any monster could hear him. There wasn’t even anything living around him to worry about.

From his estimates, he had killed over 400 monsters around his vicinity, with the spawning rate of monsters suddenly appearing in the dungeon still keeping up. It got to the point where he just stopped bothering to pick up their materials and just left them there, having more than enough resource balls to make up for whatever machinations Nina had for him. He even made some experiments with his Craft spell, wishing to keep increasing his rank but to no avail.

He was going to need some pretty rare or expensive materials to work with over the long term in order to increase his Craft rank any higher. He also knew that his imagination was running extremely thin, only making up decent enchantments. He tried making enchantments based on the spatial affinity he once did for his Vast-Distance Container, but without any material that used any form of space affinity, it was borderline impossible.

He thought about making up some enchantments based on the monsters he hunted, but neither of them made anything of worth as well. All it did was make an enchantment that would increase damage based on the type of creature slain, some leaning towards beasts and others insect types. While that was an interesting enchantment, compared to the simple magic boosts of extending his blades or creating a wider barrier, they didn’t feel as powerful as they should feel, even though some even broke through to Rare rarity.

He still kept those weapons in hand and placed them into his spatial bag, but he didn’t think he would have to give them to his party for any necessary increase in power.

Still, that didn’t stop him from improving himself further as he looked up the notifications of his recent growth.

Level Up! From Level 51, you became Level 52!

You have gained:

+1 Free Attribute point

+3 Free Stat points

+2 Intelligence

+1 Toughness

+1 Endurance

+1 Speed

+1 Dexterity

+2 Vigor

…..

Level Up! From Level 52, you became Level 53!

You have gained:

+1 Free Attribute point

+3 Free Stat points

+2 Intelligence

+1 Toughness

+1 Endurance

+1 Speed

+1 Dexterity

+2 Vigor

…..

Level Up! From Level 53, you became Level 54!

You have gained:

+1 Free Attribute point

+3 Free Stat points

+2 Intelligence

+1 Toughness

+1 Endurance

+1 Speed

+1 Dexterity

+2 Vigor

…..

Spell Upgraded! Rend (Steel) became Rend (Silver)!

…..

Spell Upgraded! Infuse (Steel) became Infuse (Silver)!

…..

Spell Upgraded! Phase (Iron) became Phase (Steel)!

…..

Skill Upgraded! Sword Proficiency (Bronze) became Sword Proficiency (Iron)!

…..

Ability Upgraded! Split Mind (Iron) became Split Mind (Steel)!

…..

Ability Upgraded! Area Field (Bronze) became Area Field (Iron)!

He made quite a lot of progress in this endeavor. Thanks to that, he received a few titles, one he had expected after some deliberation, and another coming in as a complete surprise.

“Smartass IV”

You raised your Intelligence attribute to 100. You have decided to forgo your mortal mental understanding, instead trying to grasp the beyond no matter the limits.

+4 Intelligence

…..

You have gained a title!

“Silver Surfer”

As you have realized, power doesn’t come in through slaughter alone. One must master themselves in order to survive the incoming waves. For attaining five Silver-ranked powers, you begin your journey through self-study and discipline.

+1 Strength

+1 Intelligence

+1 Agility

+1 Vitality

He should’ve expected it, as it took quite a while for him to gain that many Silver-ranked techniques ever since he was reincarnated here. While he was suspicious of the system using these weird names for titles, particularly this one, he would definitely never refuse to take in the sweet stat points offered to him.

That only made him wonder. Just like how every time he upgraded his stats and gained stat based titles, would he gain more points if he raised his skills beyond Silver? Or would he get another increase on the same if he got more of his powers to Silver rank?

That makes me wanna train up more of my unused powers, but that would take forever and a half. I prefer to at least have decent power when put in a life-or-death situation.

Considering that their other duty while in this dungeon was to destroy the cursed relic that could call upon another of those demonic threats, he needed to specialize further into combat to gain more power from it. For now, he was satisfied with refining more of his combat prowess rather than expanding into the more niche spells and abilities he had.

Going back to his status sheet, in the end, he decided to just keep increasing his Vitality. Now that he got the evidence that the fourth stat title was possible, with his Vitality sitting pretty at 80, it was worth it to try and get that sucker up to 100 to get another decent stat title. With his Intelligence being as high as it is, both Strength and Agility would be able to keep up with a decent Infuse, especially since they were only halfway up to his main stat.

He nodded in satisfaction at that. His build was still skewed towards Intelligence and Vitality, making him one chunky mage (putting aside any fat jokes), but it was decent enough for the future. If he found any equipment that could boost his Strength and Agility, he would definitely add it to his list.

Finally, after all of this business with his internal growth, now came the newfound project he was focusing on. His spiritually made boots, the Earthtrod Leather Boots, worked just as usual for any combat boots necessary for these types of fantasy battles, but something occurred to him ever since he wore them for battle.

It felt like he was more in tune with his magic than before. He wasn’t quite sure how they worked, but there was a resonance between himself and the boots that somehow made him more aware of his own magic, allowing him to see his magic in a different light than before. Following his recent studies of magic from Yin, he believed he managed to upgrade his spells like this all because of his boots.

Which begged the question–if he could find more types of spiritually made equipment like these boots, it was possible he could upgrade his magic further, and more importantly, become that much more competent in using the Path of Harmony. Even though he was having loads of fun using it, and even when he reached up to the rank of Silver in most of his spells, he still felt like he was only scratching the surface of harmony.

When he was teaching wind magic to Haley, and experimenting with lightning magic with Ander, he kept comparing the two with his concept of harmony, only seeing the wide gap that could never be crossed under normal terms. The only other sort of concept that could come close would be the Frozen Flame magic that Miko used, but even then, it closed the gap only a tiny bit.

Rather than actually mastering the concept, Aidan felt like he could only work with the concept, because right now, he could only use the slightest bit of the harmony affinity, with his talent being the only lynchpin connecting him to this overly powerful affinity. He wondered whether that old spirit guy had a deeper connection with harmony, though it felt like he saw it as a way of life rather than just a mere affinity like Aidan saw it.

Hell, he was sure he would piss the guy off if he told him that was how he saw harmony. At least that was what his race was telling him.

He kept considering ways of increasing his Craft spell enough for him to be able to make equipment just like his boots as he flew straight to the hut, where his party were slowly beginning to wake up from their slumber. When they saw him coming in, none of them were surprised that he came back a few levels higher.

“Let me guess,” Nina said. “Your period of weakness is over.”

“Damn straight,” Aidan cheered.

“Awesome!” Haley shouted, raising her hand to give a high five to Aidan. “I’m so happy you’re okay now.”

“Thanks, Haley,” Aidan grinned. Even though it was going to happen, he felt genuine joy from Haley being happy for him.

“That means you can fight the same way as before you faced the Matriarch, right?” Van asked, getting him to nod. He had a smirk on his face as he continued. “Would you mind giving me a spar then? A real spar, no holding back?”

“Ooh, so you want a challenge this early in the morning?” Aidan joked. “Gotta warn you–You might get too tired to keep going like that.”

“I don’t mind. I’ve been wanting to fight you for real, especially when you’re not weakened. It was bad enough that you forced me to fight you while you were crippled, so you owe me this much.”

“True, true,” Aidan nodded. “But to be fair, I’ll be boosting you with Infuse. After all, I’m planning on using all of my swords for this fight.”

Rather than looking hesitant or even scared, Van grinned. “I’m more than fine with that.”

“Can I join too?” Haley raised her hand, surprising the men. “I wanna practice more of my wind magic.”

Aidan tilted his head a few times before nodding. “Sure, but after Van. After that, both of you can fight me putting everything you have. Then, you’ll fight each other. Maybe then that’ll give Van some idea of how to use magic.”

“That means I can kick Van’s ass?” Haley asked hopefully.

“Sure does!”

“Listen, you may have learned some fancy magic, but that won’t mean I’ll be an easy target,” Van said, his pride as an older brother in full force. Haley stuck out her tongue at him, then raised her fist at him.

“Bring it!”

“Mmh… maybe I’ll join in myself,” Nina said, this time stumping all three of them. “I suddenly feel like I’m being kept out. Aidan, you certainly don’t mind me giving some pointers to these two, right?”

“More than pleased,” Aidan answered back. “I’m just happy you’re participating.”

Nina only rolled her eyes at him. “If you keep getting so excited about this, it’ll only make me want to train myself further. Money and reputation only goes so far in this world. I’ll need to increase my levels at some point, and keep refining my abilities.”

Aidan nodded in return. He was lucky that he could just focus entirely on that outside of doing some jobs for Nina. She was the one who was doing most of the legwork in building connections and racking up social points, putting down her path as an Assassin for a long while.

Now that he thought about it, he really wanted her to keep getting stronger as well. It certainly would be easier to protect her if she could keep up.

Huh, it wasn’t even that long ago that she could’ve killed me outright when we first met. If I’m correct, she already upgraded her Class by the time she found me. But now I feel like I can beat her at her own game.

It was clear that Nina wasn’t a combatant by any means, or at least she didn’t prefer it that way. If she was, it would be entirely specialized in a way that would be more suitable for her.

“Then let’s make some breakfast and get some exercise in,” Aidan grinned. “This is gonna be a fun morning.”