The clock was already ticking while Albert stared at the hole in the wall.
Before punching a wall to death, however, there was another thing he wanted to try. Namely, his short-range teleportation. Within five meters, the skill description said, and in strict line of sight. There was nothing stopping him from crossing to the other side once the hole was big enough to see, right?
Wrong. The… Potential exploit was quickly proved to be non-functional. If Albert could not fit, then he could not teleport.
The system was graceful enough to update the teleportation skill description to match this new bit of information.
TELEPORTATION 3
· You can teleport to any location visited after unlocking magic or within close line of sight. Requires full concentration. Momentum is conserved. Line of sight teleportation will not work through obstacles or tight passages.
· You can teleport outside of range once per hour, after a windup time of 2 minutes spent in total stillness. Momentum is not conserved.
· Short-range teleportation under 5 meters will not require the use of the Map.
This being said, all he could do was barrel through the thin wall using his whole body as a battering ram, making use of his shield to absorb a part of the damage in exchange for a reduced amount of time he could spend outside. And as the wall exploded outwards Albert was immediately blasted with magic thicker than he could have ever imagined, even with his previous experience of the magic passing through the hole. He also realized something else: he was not on the slope of a mountain like he thought he was.
Rather, it was the mountain that was no ordinary mountain. Because he could see it, in the distance, the vertical drop into nothingness that either meant he was on a very high plateau, or—
Quest: Daily Challenge – The guy wants to see Affinities Complete!
· Reach the outside.
· Reward: Affinity Status Screen. Usurp upgrade: Usurp will now always steal a small amount of affinity.
He teleported back to safety.
Skill level up!
USURP 2
· You can steal skills from incapacitated or recently deceased entities. Activating the skill will initiate a destructive scan, leaving nothing behind.
· Usurp will always steal a small amount of affinity from the target.
Affinity status screen unlocked.
Albert wasted no time. There was a new section in his status screen. One that concerned the newly discovered affinities:
AFFINITIES
Affinities define how magic and skills work. High affinities provide bonuses, while low affinities preclude the use of some branches of magic altogether. Note: all the skills that have numbers display the correct value as it is after affinity calculations. Not all skills are affected by affinities. Only known affinities are shown.
· [F+] Void: magic will have backlash such as headaches, vertigo, and nausea.
· [F+] Psionic: magic will have severe backlash due to the nature of the field, including brain damage.
· [D-] Fire: magic is slightly weakened.
· [D-] Earth: magic is slightly weakened.
· [D] Body: magic is unaffected.
· [D] Space: magic is unaffected.
· [D] Time: magic is unaffected.
· [D+] Mind: your stronger-than-average mind is more suited to magic, but the cost is a propensity to fixate on trivialities.
· [B-] Mana: all things related to raw magic are vastly easier to perform and are more effective. Knowledge comes more naturally and intuitively.
Another addition to his system was that now all his skills had been reordered and given their appropriate affinity in their title.
While the system did not specify numbers other than a generic letter qualifier for each affinity, making it hard to tell for sure, it made sense to assume that usurping the same monster multiple times would yield diminishing returns just like it did with the mana pool.
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It was also strange that there was no section related to his affinity with nature, despite being an elf and having already experienced the effects. He suspected it was because he had no skills that used it, and therefore the system did not mark it, but the effects of having the affinity set to very high by his race were there nonetheless. He only needed to think about his intuitive connection with nature, wherever nature happened to be. Coincidentally, the plants in the cave did not count as nature as far as his elven senses went.
Albert waited until he felt he had rested for long enough. Being outside even for a short amount of time had been very taxing on his body and mind, making him feel dizzy and making him question his life choices. It was all in the name of completing quests, he knew, which in turn was all in the name of getting stronger so he could defend Earth when he came back.
Would he do it even if the future of his planet was not at stake? Probably yes.
The fact that the survival of the planet was actually at stake, however, made it even easier to rationalize his attitude, which would be seen as masochistic and weirdly post-capitalistic, at least in a way, otherwise. Gathering personal power, hoarding it without a limit to how much he was willing to pay to have more. Yeah.
Anyway. Despite the pain and struggle, he still wanted to go back out. He needed to know what lied at the end of the land he could see, confirm whether he really was on a floating island like his brain automatically assumed when he saw the vertical drop leading nowhere beside more storm clouds.
(This also went to show how he was indeed prone to fixations, like his affinity status claimed. Not that he was aware of it, since he could always argue that he was gathering important information.)
He teleported out, again and again. Each time waiting for his ring to recharge before going back out. There was nothing but barren land, no monsters to usurp to lessen the pain. Everything was grey stone, wet and bathed in the purple and electric blue light of the storm. Each step felt like a conquest, like stepping on the moon for the first time in history. Each step was one step closer to finding out.
After an experiment that came to mind, Albert also found out that if he used void armor while outside, he only took damage from the skin and the psionic energies but none from the void energies. The damage compounded quickly over time, becoming unbearable in a matter of minutes, but it was much more than the tiny 30-second window he had. He could make good progress, and with Teleportation he could always return to the farthest point he explored.
Again and again.
Skill level up!
MENTAL FORTRESS 6
· Increased resistance to mind attacks and altered mental states.
· You can recognize illusions and attempts of mental manipulation, and dispel them.
· Increased resistance to transcendental damage.
Skill level up!
PAIN TOLERANCE 6
· You have partial control over your pain perception.
[Strengthening] also helped, making his body tougher and better equipped to resist the physical component of the transcendental (as the new Mental Fortress skill description called it) damage that using a skill like Void Armor inflicted on him. He suspected it was a similar kind of damage, although not quite the same, as the backlash from using psionic skills.
Skill level up!
STRENGTHENING 6
· Strength is increased by 6 times. Power, agility and fine motor functions are improved.
· When the skill is active, your body is 6 times more resistant to damage.
Moments when Albert could actually reason were few and far between. Only when he was resting in the caves could he enjoy full clarity of mind, while when he was outside all he could think about was the pain. Eventually his attitude changed, no longer trying to avoid it but welcoming it. It was transcendental damage, after all. There was no way to protect himself from it barring what the Mental Fortress skill managed to block.
He sometimes wondered why he was doing this. But after many days in this place, he did not know how many but he did know that he slept many times during his stay in the caves, never had he come anywhere close to figuring out how to leave.
The situation was slowly taking its toll, the sensation of stuckness of being stranded here, alone, becoming the sole companion.
During one of his escapades outside, with the edge of the map getting closer but only oh-so-slowly, exposed to so much foreign mana, Albert turned his eye inwards to look at his own magic. How it moved and how it behaved. Creating the foundation of what he would need to finally complete a quest that's been waiting in his status for a long time: the quest to make a cultivation system.
Eventually the edge finally came into view.
He was on a floating island, after all. He could see it, the bottom of it, like mountain peaks but upside down. He turned around. In front of him stood the impossibly tall mountain he had been trapped inside all this time, with its tunnels and its voidlings, with its strange plants that were not real plants.
The Void Armor burned against his skin. By now, it was a familiar kind of pain, although the growing headache and nosebleed of the psionic backlash was something he had still not gotten used to. Soon, he would have to return.
But there was something that caught his interest. He squinted, activating [Perception] to the max, struggling to see through the storm and focusing on a small light in the distance. It was a tiny, blinking beacon at the top of the mountain, close to where he had emerged from the tunnels.
Albert applied Healing Touch to himself before teleporting back to safety. If there was a way out of this place, it had to be connected to the light he saw.
It didn’t take him long to reach said light. He had grown quite used to his system of travel outside, even getting used to the worst parts of it. He was a bit saddened, and somewhat angry at the system, because for all the pain he went through he didn’t get much in return. No increased affinities, no new skills. Barely a single level in a few skills, but not much. [Strengthening] had only grown by a disappointing degree, inching closer to its cap at level 10. He could always split it, evolve it or whatever, but it was extra work he really didn’t feel like doing.
He shook his head. By now, he suspected, it would take something truly exceptional to grow in power. The ‘normal’ way was only going to become slower and slower.
Fortunately, there were a couple of quests that promised him huge spikes in power, and pretty soon at that. He only needed to reach the light.
The closer he got, the stronger the storm became. A stronger storm meant that even the Void Armor became insufficient, especially as the stronger psionic energies manifested as literal lightning blazing in the sky, ionizing the air.
How there even was air in a floating island was a mystery.
The headache only worsened as time went on. The void armor provided no protection against psionic energies this strong. Albert was used, however, to psionic backlash by now. It was much, much milder than what he suffered through when he made the reusable wands for his mother.
Healing Touch, Mental Fortress and its resistance to transcendental damage, and his own ever stronger iron will (someone would call it another fixation of his, but he could really not find anyone who could tell him that on this empty wasteland – he had even stopped talking to himself) allowed him to finally reach the summit.
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