Pov Rafe

The wind was sweeping past me fast as I got closer to the trade wind, letting me accelerate towards the west and a little bit to the north. I was going basically parallel to the trade wind, but unfortunately, I wouldn’t be able to enter it as that would take me in the wrong direction.

I loved my small airship—it was damn well built—but it took a lot of muscle to work the sails, and mana crystals that were full of mana were quite expensive to buy to keep this thing afloat, which was quite unfortunate since I didn't have much funds left.

It has been quite a while since I left the dungeon where I was born. The wealth I brought out should have been enough for me to live a few thousand years, but that was if I had my own small little farm.

I never realized how unfulfilling food was in the wider world, so a surprising amount of coin has simply gone to sustain myself. Fortunately, I have been able to take up some monster-hunting quests, and that meat has been quite fulfilling.

While looking inward, I also saw the new monster patterns I had. At first, I simply called them monster parts or animal parts and stuff like that, but I think a more proper term for them is actually ‘patterns,’ quite similar to what my father had.

For me, they aren’t as detailed, and I go more off of instinct, unlike him, who can also modify them however he wants to. I wonder if I get to diamond rank, would I be able to change them as well? I guess I will need to wait and see.

At least thinking about stuff like that distracts me from the last few years. Climbing the ranks of the Adventurer's Guild to get more access to open-world quests, as they call them, and so I would be able to delve into platinum-rank dungeons was annoying. That last thing is useless to me, especially because of the time sink included with it.

To be able to get access to platinum quests that are out in the world, I need to complete a platinum-ranked dungeon proficiency test. Unfortunately, there are always huge lines to use platinum dungeons, so I just needed to wait in a really expensive city for almost seven months to finally finish that stupid exam.

Thinking about that stupidity made me want to punch something really hard. I took a breath in and out and just enjoyed the wind. "At least all that bullshit is over." It's time to start making myself strong once again, but not by ranking up—that I will do when I return to Father. No, it’s time to get patterns that even Father couldn’t get, at least not yet. That was why I was heading towards the floating ocean; there was one particular creature there that could solve a huge problem of mine.

The problem I have with my transforming is that while I can make myself lighter to quite a big degree, getting more mass is really hard. I could transform into a huge bear, but I would barely weigh twice as much as I currently do, which would still be hundreds of kilos less than a bear of that size should be. I’m also stretching the capability of my flesh, with most of the bear being almost completely empty. That was a real problem that I wanted to solve.

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Now that I have my platinum qualifications, I was actually able to take a quest to go on the seasonal hunting of the island jellyfish. They seemed to be fascinating creatures and quite prized, as their flesh is used to make many high-end potions. The problem is not killing them or finding them; the problem is surviving getting close to them and being fast enough to harvest some flesh before you die from hitting the surface of the water.

My journey was a quiet one as I traveled the skies heading towards my destination. It took me almost five months to make it there, and it was kind of weird to see more and more airships floating in the skies. But eventually, I finally saw one, and they truly were breathtaking.

The island jellyfish were big, some the size of actual floating islands. They were quite high up, higher than any of the actual floating islands. With their tentacles, they catching some type of airborne small creatures that I could only see if I really focused and improved my eyes as best as I could.

It was weird to think about just eating something just because I was breathing in and out. That reminded me, and I quickly took out the mask I was supposed to wear, as these small creatures could be quite deadly if you breathed them in too much, as they could fill your lungs and start eating them. For me, I could simply absorb them for the nutrients they provided.

The island jellyfish looked kind of transparent; I could even see their blood flowing underneath their skin. They had an interesting life cycle, which was one of the reasons I was here. I was hoping that they would have a way for me to make more flesh fast, but if not, there were other options underneath the ocean. But what I was certain of was that I should be able to get their ability to turn themselves lighter or heavier at will.

Their life cycle begins in the water. In fact, the current floating island jellyfish already have billions of small island jellyfish inside of them, in what should be small cocoon-like structures that help them survive their so-called birth.

At the start, they are quite small—so small that it would almost be impossible to see them even with the normal eyes of a platinum rank. Most die from predators at that stage, but the ones that grow big enough to enter adulthood rise from the sea and take to the skies simply by making themselves lighter and using an innate skill to make them float upwards.

It's unfortunate that I couldn’t copy skills, but at least their ability to change mass seems to be innate to their bodies, or at least that’s what the book says. No skill could make them float for the rest of their adult life while they grow so big that you could mistake them for land masses. Even wind could move them because of how light they seemed to be.

Their defensive mechanisms include the poison in their tentacles and the strong electric shocks they can generate on their skin. Yet none of that matters as when they are close to death from old age or wounds; it doesn't matter. They reverse whatever they are doing to make themselves lighter and instead increase their mass even further than should be possible.

They fall from the sky so fast that when they hit the water below, they are turned into red mist and scattered in a wide area. Their offspring, at least most of them, survived that and started the cycle all over again.

So now I’m here, ready to join one of the hunts, to gather as much flesh as possible before it gets too heavy, and just by accident, consume a little bit of that flesh to figure out if I could incorporate its features to increase my mass or lower it even further than I currently can.

If all goes well, the next destination would be the underwater world, as I really would like to gain more abilities to endure pressure as much as possible, and there are some other interesting creatures down there. When that’s done, I should go to the dark ocean and join one of the dragon hunts.

From all the knowledge my father has gathered, they should have one of the best bodies in this world, and I want to mimic that. That was also the reason I couldn’t just simply bail after the first hunt here, as I needed to keep this identity intact and not be hunted by the Guild. Still, I was ready to make that time sacrifice to get my hands on these patterns and perhaps even help further by getting these patterns myself, as they are quite hard to get ahold of.