A shirtless young man who appeared to have a permanent devilish grin sat outside a small, but very expensive pastry shop which was full to the brim, carefully observing an empty platform, as if waiting for something.
He sat in such a way that he was an inconvenience to anyone that wanted to enter or leave the shop. However, if his scar filled body wasn’t enough of a deterrent, the tattoo that covered his arm was. It made them keep their complaints to themselves, afraid of the young man and the group he belonged to.
Tearing into his pastry, the young man scowled at a passerby, then he laughed at their reaction. Complete horror had taken their gaze, as if they had seen their life flash before their eyes.
“Cowards and weaklings,” he said in a rough tone, loud enough to be heard. Spitting at their feet, he continued eating.
From inside the shop, the cashier wore a worried expression. They found the young man an annoyance and found him to be filthy. But there was nothing that could be done against him, forget his backing, how much damage could the young man do on his own?
“Forgive my friend. He’s really… impatient,” a young and kind looking woman said. She wore loose blue robes and let her long hair flow freely. “Once again, my apologies,” she added, bowing repeatedly.
The long haired and polite young woman made her way out of the shop, apologizing to everyone that was in line waiting for their turn and had to have passed in front of the scary person outside.
Once she reached the shirtless young man, her face twisted. “Hey, you little shit,” the polite young woman said, in a tense manner, making sure she wasn’t heard by others. “Behave or I’ll beat the shit out of you before the tower appears. Try to clear it with only one functioning leg and no tongue. See who understands you,” she added with clear intentions to threaten.
The young pirate’s eyes widened in surprise and amusement. “Cool it, misses prim and proper, I’m not the one who has to keep up appearances,” he said, his devilish grin becoming more pronounced.
Narrowing her eyes, the polite young woman bit into her pastry, feeling herself cool as she fixed her gaze on the belligerent man in front of her. She should already be used to his behavior. For the last year, her family had made several connections with external forces, the pirates being one of them. In an effort to create stronger bonds, she had spent most of the year on their galleon and had gotten close to the captain’s youngest, the person before him.
Knowing that nothing she said would change or affect the man before her, she too began to observe the empty platform before them.
The platform was enormous, but soon, a giant tower will appear out of nowhere, like it always does. With it, the competition will begin.
The proper young woman hadn’t had any hopes of getting far, at least not exceptionally so, but now, now that she wasn’t alone and with such strength at her side, anything was possible.
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From a terrace a woman with hair so white, that it could easily be confused with snow, watched the bickering duo below. Her hearing was so sharp that she could clearly understand every word that was exchanged between the two.
Her eyes gleamed and she even saw the words that hadn’t been exchanged and had only been thought of, remaining in their minds, unshared. A smile crept across her face, a clear sign of amusement at the scene playing out before her.
Snapping her fingers, a servant came forward, bowing in reverence. “How much longer?” she asked, her voice almost a melody.
The servant stood upright and brought forth a strange stone device. The device had strange markings and nothing else. Whatever the servant was reading from the device, was impossible to discern. After a few seconds of observation, the servant answered. “11 days remaining.”
With a nod of satisfaction, she removed her gaze from the bickering duo and returned it to its original position, the empty platform.
From further behind the white-haired woman, sat a young lizardman with dark scales, surrounded by what were clearly powerful people. His eyes, that carried flowing magma, carried a very obvious disinterest in his surroundings. The only thing he had done since his arrival was walk to the seat he was currently on. Everyone else was of little importance.
He also observed the platform, but unlike the others who waited in anticipation, he did so with disinterest. For him, the tower wasn’t an opportunity, it was a merely a formality. The medium through which the multiverse would come to know of his prowess. He let out a sigh, his posture and gaze unaffected.
For cultivators, patience wasn’t a skill, it was a necessity. And as people who had cultivated since they were young, waiting in the same spot for days or even weeks, meant nothing.
Their bodies wouldn’t demand food, it had more than enough energy stored in itself to survive weeks without trouble, some of their peers could even go months without sustenance.
Boredom was a risk, but for people such as them, even breathing was an opportunity for enlightenment. Just the tiniest glimpse into any truth could allow them to break through a wall or even skip over it.
Others could be a distraction, but if they couldn’t even deal with such minor distractions, could they even be called cultivators? Even an empty room could be distracting. It was why they had been tempered to deal with such things.
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Eric Aguilar
Class: Warrior
Mana 120/120
Rank F
Level 19
Experience 0/ 120000
Stats
Vitality 52
Endurance 88
Strength 77
Dexterity 43
Constitution 74
Agility 41
Perception 41
Charisma 24
Intelligence 33
Wisdom 32
Stat Points 0
Skill points 1
Skills +
Concepts –
Titles +
Magic –
Credits 65481
Eric clicked his tongue in annoyance, his frustration having built up over time. The reasons were twofold. First, and most egregious, was the state of his stats. He had spent the extra skill points he earned so quickly that he didn’t even consider how “uneven” his stats would end up looking. Now, none of them ended in a five or a zero and that fact alone made him want to avoid looking at his status screen altogether.
The second reason was the ridiculous increase in required experience for each level. His sense of time was still off, but each time he leveled up, he noticed how much longer it took compared to the level before. It felt like an endless grind, one that only got worse the deeper he went. Through this ordeal he came to one harsh realization.
“I have to do every level up in one go, regardless of how long it takes. Or I risk losing the accumulated energy,” he said with a heavy sigh.
Despite this, through the constant use of Mental Focus, which had leveled up quite a bit, reaching level 16, he had managed to fix his mistakes. He found the best way to cultivate using the technique presented by the manual. Mistakes that he himself made, not the manual.
However, none of the corrections he had done were so great that the time was drastically cut short, nor were the benefits he gained increased in an exponential manner. In fact, he had only managed to increase the total “extra” stats by one, instead of getting five, he now got six with each level up. It was an improvement, but nothing revolutionary.
One of the biggest issues, if not the biggest, was the crack in his core. The skill that allowed him to manipulate the energy in his core, Mana Insight, was not high enough that it allowed him to manipulate the energy as he pleased or contain it in the same space. He pushed the energy to move how he wished, but there was almost always some loss, prolonging his cultivation.
Yet, his biggest issue now wasn’t about stats, control or efficiency. He had hit a wall. It wasn’t a matter of patience or lack of concentration. He did have such problems at the beginning, where the required experience was so great that his concentration broke before he gathered enough of it.
The method, the experience, the patience, concentration, all of it was now perfect, or as perfect as it could be. But whenever that feeling of fulfillment approached, it never arrived. It always felt distant.
Clicking his tongue once more, Eric began to think. “Is it because it’s the evolution level?” he began. “Am I missing something? Maybe a step I don’t know about, or maybe I, myself am missing something. What could it be?”
He mentally revisited the cultivation manual, which he had basically memorized by now, especially with Mental Focus, which basically gave him a photographic memory. His mind kept drifting back to the Star Map—a concept mentioned but never fully explained in the manual.
He still had no idea what it was, at least not a concrete one. The best guess he had was that it was similar to a skill tree in a video game, but he didn’t know how that related to cultivation. Why did it feel so close, so connected to what he was doing, and yet, it remained so hard to grasp.
Ignoring the manual, ignoring the Star Map, he began to ponder about what he knew. What did he read in the web novels he consumed? What did he observe in the webtoons? Could they even help him in this situation?
Little by little an answer was forming in his head. Sadly, it was a solution that wouldn’t help him by itself.
----------
Back in Solace, the people raced, all busy with their own tasks. The urgency that they had carried so many months ago was nowhere to be seen. Now, the people performed their duties as best they could, without fear, confident in the security and stability Solace provided.
Alex watched the people move around, from his now higher vantage point. Thanks to his evolution, he was now taller than before, though still shorter than Connor.
This observation had become part of his daily routine—training, monster patrols, and then street patrols on his way back. As he neared the governance building Stella had acquired from the System, he suddenly stopped. An announcement flashed before him.
----------
Observing the fluctuations and magical signatures, Marcus took careful notes of the energy and mana variance, taking a special interest in the conversion rate between the two.
His dream was to make everything run on mana, but that was still far away. Currently he was working hard to improve his mana to electricity conversion system.
Using the generator that he had visited once before, he made a testing model, the one he was currently observing. From there he, with the help of new and existing citizens, built a working system from which the entire city of Solace got its power.
Suddenly, his concentration was disturbed by an announcement made by the System. Giving it a quick glance, he dismissed it since it was nothing that was relevant to him.
----------
In the southern city’s bordering streets, Anna and her team culled the dungeon monsters that roamed freely. It was an essential task that had to be performed nearly every day. It wasn’t useful for Anna herself, since she wasn’t getting much experience, but it was perfect for training new hopefuls.
As she cut down a flying monster that rarely ventured outside the city’s center, an announcement obscured her vision. As soon she finished reading through half of it, a wide smile appeared on her face.
----------
In her office, moved and firmly cemented within the governance building purchased from the System, Stella observed the overflowing credits that the hub possessed.
Solace Level 8
Store
Management!
Credits 1,750,926
Having long since found a way to customize the System windows, she removed the class option. Ever since her own evolution, she knew that it was no longer useful to her, not really anyway.
It could serve as a reset point, but even that was ridiculously expensive and not guaranteed to work. The warning had said something along the lines of an 89.99% risk of core loss, though the number of nines trailing behind that percentage had been too many for her to count.
As she began to consider what to use the credits for, a new System announcement flashed across her vision, momentarily obscuring the hub screen.
After reading it, she rose from her chair and stepped over to the window. Outside, she saw the entire city pause, all eyes fixed on the same announcement she had just read. Her face remained unreadable, but internally she assessed what this might mean for Solace.