Felix once again found himself outside the once castle, now university standing next to Noah.
"You upgraded again? I just walked in the door, now I'm here."
"Yeah, I was feeling guilty about the castle upgrade… it was the highest rarity. Now though, it was all worth it." Felix turned around and gestured at the University. "Welcome to the University."
"A university? How does that work? Who is qualified to teach?"
"Great questions… I have no idea. Hopefully it works out though, because I may have spent all of the town's credits on it."
Looking at the building, not much had changed. The buildings surrounding the main building had grown slightly, likely to support classrooms or workshops. The materials making up the buildings included more marble. There were also training grounds and sparring areas in the courtyard. Finally, the logo on the banners now had a graduation cap on the Castle.
Not bad. Alright, now to make sure I don't have to teach a class, because I did not even think of that possibility.
Felix jogged, which was ridiculously fast because he forgot about his set bonus active, into the University. The bottom floor was now narrower, still many meters wide, with rooms lining either wall. Walking up to the second floor, the banquet hall was replaced with more rooms all over the floor. The next floor was once again, a bunch of rooms, though these were much bigger than the previous floor's rooms, judging from the spacing between the doors. The last floor held multiple picnic tables scattered around the room that could hold up to three people on a side.
Where the hell is the throne?
Felix opened his map hoping to find the layout of the University. He found the throne on the map in the top room of the highest tower. He navigated to and opened the door leading to the bottom of the tower and ran up the stairs which, even with his improved endurance, winded him. He made it to the top of the stairs which ended at a simple wooden door. Looking down, the center of the spiral staircase was empty and falling would certainly be deadly, at least right now without casting Feather Fall. He opened the door and entered a large office.
The office was bigger than Felix was expecting, about 10 meters across. The room was circular with book shelves lining the back half of the walls. There was a sitting area with two couches and a coffee table right in front of the book shelves. On the other side of the room lay a large wooden desk with a comfortable lookin leather chair behind it. The wall behind the desk was completely empty. The room had only one large window across from where Felix stood at the door and between the book shelves and the desk.
Felix walked over and sat at the desk before opening the management screen. He flipped through and found a dizzying amount of new screens. He opened the more notable screens, starting with the upgrade screen.
Major University Town Upgrade
Your town has not met the requirements to be upgraded to Minor City (Tier 4).
Requirements:
Population of 12500+ [5014 | 40%]
50%+ of population at profession level 25+ [13% | 46%]
15,000 total profession levels gained since choosing upgrade path [2 | 0%]
Leader Level 50+ [26 | 52%]
25,000,000 Tutorial Credits (Consumed) [156,250 | 1%]
Holy shit, that is a lot. Seems like it could be doable but not any time soon. It's using my race level? That's annoying. Also, the 46% is misleading, as the population grows, that number will likely go down. The only way we can manage that tutorial credits requirement is if we get an injection of credits into the economy sometime soon. I think I remember reading that you can sell things to the marketplace and The System will buy them, maybe that's the answer. On to the next screen.
Major University Town: Minor Upgrades
As a special function of the University upgrade path, specific minor upgrades can be researched for a cost in credits. Upgrades are tailored to the current upgrade path. Some minor upgrades may unlock other minor or major upgrade options in the future.
Upgrades:
Cheaper System led classes.
Lower System tax rate on Auction and Marketplace goods.
More profession course options
More specific course options
Buy specific System led class or profession courses
More esoteric subject matter in System run courses
Lower course required material costs
Next, Felix set the permissions to allow Noah to purchase minor upgrades, with approval, and to allow others to do the same. With that handled, he opened the course purchase screen.
Major University Town: Courses
As a special function of the University upgrade path, specific courses can be bought and made available.
Courses:
Siege Offence
Siege Defence
Intermediate Alchemy
Intermediate Commerce
Intermediate Trade
Intermediate Construction
Construction: Decorative
Construction: Functional
…
Felix scrolled through a lot of courses but he wasn't sure what the town needed so he just added Noah to the permissions and let it go. He wanted to check out the library and courses that were available, but he doubted any of them would help him.
If the courses on sale are intermediate, beginner is probably available. Beginner and intermediate caster courses likely are not just handing out a bunch of spells, that would be ridiculous and undermine searching for spells at all. If they don't give spells, why would I bother with them at all?
To be sure, Felix checked the curriculum for the beginner Caster course. The most advanced topic they covered was how to position in your party as a caster. Felix definitely didn't need that.
Felix closed the management screens and opened one of his own.
Open Class Selection.
Class: [E - Common] Fighter- Class: [E - Rare] Assassin- Class: [E - Common] Druid- Class: [E - Common] Ritualist-
No point reading any of those. Hah, Assassin, I use too many daggers it seems. Open Profession Selection
[E - Common] Farmer- [E - Uncommon] City Planner- [E - Uncommon] Enchanter- [E - Rare] Mayor-
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Nothing new it seems. Open Skill Selection.
General: [Speed Walking (Common)- Caster: [Meditation (Common)- Arcane Engineer: [Spell Form Memory (Common)-
Caster: [Bond Familiar (Uncommon) Bond with a creature to gain effects dependent on the creature. The strength of your bond with the creature and the level of the creature affect the strength of the gained effects. Large level differentials could result in a bond breaking entirely. You and the creature will affect each others advancements. This skill is upgradeable.]
Caster: [Summon Familiar (Common) Summon a creature to gain effects dependent on the creature. The strength of your bond with the creature and the level of the creature affect the strength of the gained effects. Large level differentials could result in a bond breaking entirely. You and the creature will affect each others advancements. This skill is upgradeable.]
Caster: [Bond Mount (Uncommon) Bond with a mount to ride them, greatly increasing travel speed. The strength of your bond with the creature and the level of the creature affect it's movement speed when traveling. Personal equipment movement speed modifiers do not affect the speed of a mount. Large level differentials could result in a bond breaking entirely. You and the creature will affect each others advancements. This skill is upgradeable.]
Caster: [Summon Mount (Common) Summon a mount to ride them, greatly increasing travel speed. The strength of your bond with the creature and the level of the creature affect it's movement speed when traveling. Personal equipment movement speed modifiers do not affect the speed of a mount. Large level differentials could result in a bond breaking entirely. You and the creature will affect each others advancements. This skill is upgradeable.]
General: [Scan Literature (Rare) Hold your hand on the surface of a book for 100 seconds, reduced by Intelligence and Perception, increased based on rarity and grade, to scan the entire contents of a book. This skill requires you have some way of memorizing, transcribing or storing the scan of the book. Some books may resist being scanned in this way. Some details, such as those in creeping ink books, auto-updating tomes, and sentient books will be lost. This skill is upgradeable. (Current scan time: 27 seconds)]
Ok those are interesting. Mount is useless, I definitely travel faster without it at E grade. Bond familiar seems interesting. Summoning one is cool, but I really like the idea of finding some creature in the wild naturally bonding with it then forming a bond with it and traveling together. Scan Books is awesome, I can finally fill out my mental library. It was feeling kind of empty up there.
Felix accepted the Bond Familiar and Scan Literature skills. He had already confirmed earlier that he could remove skills at will, which would reset their progress. As soon as he accepted the skills, he knew how to use them, almost instinctually.
Time to plan out what I'm doing next. I want to check out the marketplace and dump some of my garbage off, hopefully The System give me something for it. I can also look for materials and maybe look at leveling my profession, though that may need to wait for a puzzle dungeon. Next I want to go see a world boss in person. I have no intention of fighting it, I just want to see one to get a feel for where I need to be to fight one, eventually. Lastly I want to hit all the dungeons, I should plan out a route to hit the ones I know of so far, hopefully my map is more filled in by then. I also have a spell in mind I want to mess with before I go which might make travel even easier.
Felix got up from his desk and headed down to the marketplace. He ran into Noah, who he had completely forgotten about, on the second floor.
"Oh hey, do you need anything else from me? I gave you permissions to purchase courses and minor upgrades in the University. I set most permissions to request and I also managed to make it so you can request permissions if you happen to need any when I am not here."
"I think that covers everything then, are you leaving right away?"
"No, I am going to go check out the marketplace stock and look at some courses potentially, then I'll head out."
"Mind letting me know when you do head out, just in case I have something else?"
"Sure thing."
Felix squeezed his way into the auction house and market place building, which was currently packed. He waited for an auction house node first, as it may inform his decisions at the marketplace. When he finally managed to get his hand on a node, he was sorely disappointed. The only items on auction right now were random corpses and garbage that people were testing to see if they would sell at all. Similar to the market he had walked through earlier.
Felix waited again, for even longer this time, until he finally managed to get access to a marketplace node. This time, he was much less disappointed. The System was supplying a lot of materials. Wood, stone, metal ingots, herbs, food and even water were being sold. With items that were harder to gather having a higher cost. Felix first found the sell tab and sold all of the corpses, goblin weapons, hats and other garbage. He made a total of 2,275 Tutorial Credits.
Not bad for a bunch of garbage in my inventory.
Next he purchased eight canteens, he thought about rations, but he still had a bunch of goblin rations left and he was eating a lot less after the minor evolution. Next he looked for materials for him to start working on his profession. He didn't find anything. It definitely didn't help that he had no idea was he was looking for. Felix had already checked for an enchanting or magical item engineering course but found nothing like that at the University.
Guess I need to just try puzzle dungeon's at this point. Damn.
Felix left the overcrowded building and headed back to his office in the university. He never made it though, he got distracted and instead headed towards the library. The library was full of books that were almost entirely useless. The books were designed to be introductions and super basic overviews of just about everything. Felix opened his map and walked through the library placing his hand on the books for 27 seconds at a time, one by one.
Not as much of my map as I had hoped was revealed just from other citizen's maps. There is another dungeon and a world boss though. If I then keep heading in that direction, I can hit the town there and see about updating my map from theirs maybe. Ok enough scanning, spell experimentation time, please work the way I hope you will.
Felix memorized his spot in the books, then headed over to the main building and up to the third floor, with the biggest rooms. Earlier, looking at his map, he had seen some of these rooms marked as labs. He chose one and entered. The door had a simple lock on it and seemed like a normal room from the inside. The walls were made of smooth stone bricks, exactly as expected, with no windows.
Seems simple enough.
Felix sat down, entered his mental library and walked to the large desk in the middle.
Hey wait a minute, why do I need to walk around, this is my mind, right?
Felix willed himself onto the second level and instantly appeared there. He almost fell over from disorientation as there was no warning whatsoever. He was simply somewhere else instantly. Felix spent a few minutes getting used to it. He got over his initial disorientation very quickly, then it was just a matter of making it seamless.
Felix stood at the desk in the middle of the room and placed the Mana Shield spell form at the center of the table.
First things first, I want to remove the weird location component that's keeping it right in front of me at all times. Then I can go from there.
The spell form laying in front of Felix was easily the most complicated spell form Felix had ever seen. He got to work dissecting it into as many components as he could identify, then he worked on trying to identify the individual components and what their functions might be. Ultimately it was almost impossible to know what some of them did as he couldn't easily remove them from the spell form or fit them into another.
Comparing the spell form components to those from Mana Bolt resulted in enough similarities for Felix to make educated guesses as to the functions of different components. Unfortunately, guesses were not enough for him to start manipulating the spell forms. He stared at lines he wanted to remove and was unsure if they were just connecting lines, or if they mattered for either component they connected.
I just don't have enough information right now. Guess I just try and hit the dungeons then go from there.
Felix left the room disappointed he hadn't even cast a single spell and checked his map to find Noah. Felix confirmed Noah didn't need him for anything then informed him he was heading out again. . . . . .