The death clones nodded placidly, leaving Dominic amazed. How had they interpreted his orders to mean such a thing? It seemed less like an interpretation and more like initiative.
Dominic glanced at the two death clones and sighed. "Well, I have nothing to say but to keep doing what you did. If there is ever a situation here that offers a choice of actions that suit me better than what I actually choose, you can take them."
Dominic did not, for one second, think he was the smartest or most cunning bloke. The choices his two death clones made were very clever and thoroughly maximized their advantages by slowly heading out to tackle all nearby foes in the area, thereby clearing a zone of safety around Dominic while also empowering him.
That was proactive, unlike Dominic who had mostly been reactive up until this point. However, after a deep sleep, he had calmed down and accepted the current situation, so he also believed he would start making proactive decisions in order to secure his safety in this Death Game.
First things first, he needed to assess how much progress his death clones had brought him over this period of time through their hard work over the night.
[Participant Name: Dominic Addison
World: Gaia
Talent: Death Clones (A Grade - 2 Clones)
Potency: 2.8
Vitality: 0.6
Acuity: 1.5
Available Points: 4
Soul Points: 200/600.]
Dominic felt like he was rich. While 4 points might not seem like much, Dominic knew - and personally felt - the value of each and every single point. Adding one point was like adding a whole new layer of quality to himself.
As such, it was exceedingly crucial to decide where he would allocate these points. As seen from his choice of strength before, it gave him and his death clones the ability to fight weaker monsters with some level of ease as long as the situation was right.
However, with even more strength, Dominic could target more dangerous beasts to fill up his ever-increasing soul points bar that needed more and more with each revolution to grant a single point.
There was also nothing that said allocated points could be redistributed because this was not a video game. Someone with 10 points of strength and 4 points of vitality might reallocate it to be 7 points in each field, but his body had already been permanently modified to display the power of 10 strength.
Would those changes be reverted, and how could that be possible without the host dying or suffering excruciating pain that killed them?
Dominic considered each field. Potency would give him more ability to take down foes and hunt beasts, which would give him more soul points, enabling him to increase strength again and form a virtuous cycle.
Vitality would fix his poor stamina and weak body to prevent easy death, but then, wouldn't that be detrimental to his talent, which required him to die to get stronger?
Acuity was a good choice because it would increase his thinking speed and calculative ability. It would not turn him from a soldier into a great strategist, but it would lay the foundation for him to walk the road from soldier to strategist much easier.
Also, Dominic had an uncanny feeling that Acuity seemed to be related to his talent somewhat. It might be that his connection with his death clones would be strengthened by increasing his Acuity so that they could go farther and communicate better.
Because right now, Dominic knew too little about his death clones. How far had they gone yesterday? How much damage did they sustain before collapsing? Could they regenerate?
Dominic straightforwardly spent his first point on Acuity, just to see what value it brought, as well as what prospective changes would occur. Immediately, the young man screamed and clutched his head, falling to the ground.
Immediately, the two death clones stepped back, giving him space to thrash and roll about on the floor as blood leaked from his ears, eyes, and nose while he gripped his scalp.
For Dominic, it felt like someone had opened his scalp and was carving lines into his soft brain using a scalding-hot mental pen. The analogy was pretty apt since his brain was undergoing a great change right now.
More neural pathways were being forged into his brain, almost doubling the already existing pathways in size and number. Those that were there before were being expanded to two times their size, and new ones were made in parallel, one to go and one to come back.
When the process stopped, Dominic panted for breath on the floor with fear and shock in his eyes. He immediately felt the difference as memories that he could not access before flooded his conscious mind with more detail and vividness than he had ever felt, especially those from his infancy and young childhood.
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His thoughts were clearer and moved faster than ever before with exceptional clarity, no longer being rapidly dashing little mice in a cage that one struggled to catch but easily capturable - as well as observable - even in their great speed.
Dominic came to a sudden realization. Acuity was likely the most important attribute he had to focus on, because the benefits it granted were too voluminous to speak of. However, it was precisely because of his increased thinking capacity that he realized that he could not focus everything on Acuity.
He immediately put a point into Vitality, and Dominic felt a surge of heat throughout his body. He coughed violently and rushed from his bedroom to the bathroom, sitting on the toilet as black and red sludge was painfully and forcibly expelled from his mouth, his urethra, and his anus.
Dominic felt terrible as he expelled this waste, and his entire body swayed. Flakes of skin peeled off from him, revealing new skin and various conditions that had externally seemed to resolve themselves.
Eventually, he quickly flushed the toilet and covered his nose as the sludge he excreted smelled terrible. He quickly got his death clones to come in and clean it up since they did not have any qualms, while he himself immediately took a bath and cleaned himself up thoroughly.
Eventually, Dominic crept back into his bedroom and sat down, feeling his changed body. It felt more like he had lost 10 pounds of weight at once, which was not far from the truth.
Within his body, deposits that included fat as well as some indigestible substances along with piled-up waste material had gathered in various vessels, organs, and channels. These were the majority of what made the black sludge, along with other conditions and problems that lingered within him to this day.
When Dominic increased his Potency, it did nothing for his health, obviously. His round belly and lame physique had been refined into a muscular and 'sexy' one, sure, but that was only for the application of strength and speed.
The actual fat in his body had not disappeared; it had just clumped together in any free spot. So you could say that if Dominic focused only on a Potency build with poor Vitality, he would eventually become worse for wear rather than stronger.
Dominic allocated his final two points into Potency, and he immediately felt the changes again. His body became even tighter and more compact, making him look like the protagonist an adventure series that he had watched in the past.
However, more than that, Dominic felt that he had finally started to morph into something inhuman. His muscles were refined; the previous proteins used to make them could not exert the amount of force he possessed, so they were replaced by something new that allowed him to exert this power while maintaining a general human configuration.
In other words, Dominic could finally feel the initial boundary of becoming superhuman, surpassing the limits of sense, as well as known science.
[Participant Name: Dominic Addison
World: Gaia
Talent: Death Clones (A Grade - 2 Clones)
Potency: 2.8 -> 4.8
Vitality: 0.6 -> 1.6
Acuity: 1.5 -> 2.5
Available Points: 0
Soul Points: 200/600.]
Well, it made sense. He was now just under 5 times as strong and fast as the average peak human. It was still a matter of configuring his body's resources when it was 2 point or 3 points, but 4 points and above were no longer in the range of maximizing what was already there.
Dominic could feel it, almost spiritually, that if he crossed 5 points in any field, he would fully break away from the norm and enter the ranks of superhuman. This intrigued and excited him because not only would it guarantee his safety in this Death Game, but it was a male's natural disposition to desire and seek martial power.
Dominic glanced at his death clones and saw that they hadn't changed much physically. He also doubted they would ever change physically in response to his stat growth because their forms were not based on the same matter that made up his body, so they did not follow the same rules.
If anything, their trapezoid-shaped red eyes glowed a bit brighter due to the increased intelligence. After all, they inherited 50% of Dominic's current stats, so they would have 2.4 Potency, 0.8 Vitality, and 1.25 Acuity.
Such stats were pretty good since the death clones could be used freely. Dominic looked at the time on his phone and saw that it was only 9 am in the morning, and his stomach began to rumble after all the changes he had undergone.
Immediately, he rushed to the kitchen and boiled up some cup ramen impatiently. In the end, he finished it without feeling even slightly full and ended up clearing five more before he finally felt partially sated.
Dominic stood before the trash can, staring at the five cups with a solemn look. He had guessed that this might happen at some point, but it was quite startling for it to begin on the second day of the apocalypse.
Due to his growing strength and increased capabilities, he needed more energy than before in order to sustain his body's functions. This was actually normal and would only get more intense as he grew stronger.
The problem was that, putting aside his stores of food, even the packaged food in a warehouse would not last him a year if his stats grew to double digits, then triple digits, and so on.
With technology and production cut off, there would be no way to innovate a food pill that could provide endless energy for people with high stat distribution. Or maybe that might change as humanity grew stronger and reclaimed ownership of the planet?
However, could a functional society be created when everyone was a competitor in a life-and-death game? Could trust really be established?
Dominic did not think so. He would be better off raising his Acuity and learning advanced science himself to design his own needs from scratch rather than waiting for somebody else to do it and promote it to him.
With that in mind, Dominic dressed casually and then armed himself with a pistol that he holstered on his waist. He then took a backpack and placed two pistols in it for his two death clones before recalling them into his body.
Without much hesitation, he exited his house and walked on the pavement towards the entrance of this suburban estate where the convenience store was located. He planned to raid it while it was still easily accessible and secure the non-perishable goods in his house for the future.
But why go like this? Walking in the open was stupid; taking so few weapons was even stupider, and not having his death clones out scouting the surrounding buildings in the area around him was the height of foolishness.
Well, Dominic knew this. However, as you might have guessed, with his increased Acuity, the young man understood the need to increase the number of death clones he had, so he had to provoke death to get them.
While one could easily open their mouth and say that it was easier to sit at home then drink poison or shoot himself with the gun in his bag, it actually wasn't. Besides, it was more efficient to achieve three objectives at once: to kill monsters for soul points, raid supplies for the house, and possibly die to receive death clones on this trek.