While the IGS solution for clearing nests worked, the division of the loot stage ended up being more complicated than it should have. And it all had to do with one event objective.
Find 10 rare resources: 1 000 000 EP
Not every nest had those rare resources, but the sharing of benefits was a big subject for when there was one.
The basic worth of a rare resource was 1 000 000 EP, or 100 stat points. And it was only the basic worth because there existed a superior and extremely wanted rare resource: A rank upgrade crystal.
An entity had a tier and an avatar had a rank. Nothing had ever hinted at their avatar’s rank being able to be increased, the basic rank was the rank their “critically defective” dimension’s evaluation had given them after all.
Even the wiki had clearly said that a rank was something given by the Compensation Law itself, and increasing it wasn’t something everyone thought possible.
Their avatar would disappear when they became tier 2 anyway, right? Even an announcement had clearly hinted at that, right?
But no, things were never so simple, and in the Deep Void Dimension, rare resources able to increase this rank existed.
Only a hundred and some have been discovered after billions and billions of avatars cleared nests every day, but the reward was worth it, even if useless for the long-term future.
The rank of an avatar decided how much of its capacity was transmitted.
Those hundred and some upgraded avatars now transmitted 20% of their capacity at the “advanced rank”, so as long as they didn’t encounter someone who had integrated with their avatar, they were simply a lot stronger than others.
Experts said that upgrading one’s rank shouldn’t be the right way, it should just be an extremely lucky thing. It was even a question if those rank upgrade crystals were natives to the Deep Void Dimension or not, which could explain their rarity.
…
Rune was once again assaulting the nest with 6 other people, they were doing what they could within their own limits and killed one monster after the other.
He was now faster in killing them than before, and that was because his yield of EP had exploded. While retreating, he had used fine energy manipulation energy threads to take a big amount of untouched monster cores with him.
With his affinity of 500, he could control up to dozens of energy threads without pushing it, and as a result, he had absorbed 104 cores, worth 1 157 096 EP in total, ultimately maxing his energy regeneration stat once he invested everything.
Avatar (Basic Rank) (Tier 1)
EP: 13 052
Stats Total: 4 437
Health: 500
Health Regeneration: 500
Strength: 500
Cohesion: 500
Energy: 237
Energy Regeneration: 500
Purity: 200
Affinity: 500
Momentum: 500
Perception: 500
For 2 days straight, the group of 7 had continued cleaning the nest bit by bit, and now they were already at their last assault with the majority of the whales having already been killed.
Rune continued to gather and absorb cores at every retreat, so he was fast approaching the limit of tier 1, and he knew that.
Approaching a charging whale, he used 200 energy in a super reinforced punch. It was his most deadly technique, and after the 3rd assault, he only started using variations of this punch and delay tactics.
From the people gathered here, he clearly was the most powerful, but Rune knew that he often got hit and wasn’t bulldozing his way through.
The situation was very clear for him, when he took a hit he estimated to be worth around 100 health, he had to retreat.
Some situations still made him hesitate though. Was it more worth it to kill the monster and tank an additional 5 seconds of energy beams after a big hit? Or was regenerating everything and coming back later the right answer? Only, in that case, the whale would also have regenerated by the time he regenerated to full himself.
The more he battled, the more reality advocated that regenerating all of one’s health every minute was far from enough. By using a fully transmitted 200 energy reinforced punch, he could empty the health of any unprotected tier 1 in close to one hit.
Against such an horrifying fundamental, Rune considered it fortunate that it could also be used for defense and blocks, they had all experienced it in the camp.
For defense-oriented fundamentals though, and he had kept thinking about it for a long time now, the energy armor spell seemed to possess a lot more potential than it showed.
It was really annoying that gaining more efficiency for energy needed so much practice for every fundamental.
As he had deactivated his galaxy wings spell to cut his energy costs as much as possible, he could kill a monster whale every 2 minutes or so.
The battle ultimately ended up with their side's overwhelming victory, and to celebrate, the group of 7 was finally given full access to the nest to see if vegetation life was here or if rare resources were present.
Vegetation was one of the easier event objectives, so it didn’t turn into an extraordinary celebration when someone sent on the nest forum that they found living vegetation.
When he neared the living vegetation, he became able to see a light pale green ether emanate from a piece of… Grass? It was only a small patch hidden in a particular place, surrounded and camouflaged by the smoky gray ether of the whale, like grass amidst ash.
He always had his sphere color sense activated, and the vegetation was truly grass, green grass as if it came straight from his home backyard where he spared with his little brothers and sisters.
‘Far from the most imaginative Ether Law.’
Rune hadn’t expected anything though, so he ended up neither disappointed nor happy.
Find living ether vegetation life: 1 000 000 EP (COMPLETE) (Claim?)
Claiming his due reward, he prepared himself for the last moment in his life where he wasn’t a peak tier 1 having reached 500 in all of his 10 stats.
In the end no one found a rare resource in this nest, so the 7 just went on their own way, 2 without even saying goodbye. As for Rune, after this final assault, he had gathered the monster cores.
‘Did they already complete the 10 000 monster cores objective? Weird.’
Thinking about this fact, he hypothesized that maybe those who left had forgotten that one of the event objectives was gathering, or at least touching, 10 000 monster cores.
The reality was, only 4 others helped him gather them to advance their own monster cores gathering event objective.
They had done a total of 6 assaults, and discounting the first one, he successfully gathered an additional 542 cores, with 124 on the last one they just finished.
With all those, he gained 5 882 868 EP. Just from the gain of the last assault however, he could have already maxed his stats, so now he had an EP overflow.
Once he added to that the 1 000 000 EP reward from the Deep Void Initiation event, he was now a rich young human.
‘The maximum EP that can be stored is 100 million, stupid farmer heroes obsessed with EP.’
Thinking about this information he found onboard, he felt both dismayed and thankful that people had pushed farming so far.
There was a limit to how much EP you could invest into your stats, so with nowhere to use them once that part of your life was done, all the additional EP you gained would start gathering dust.
And heroes who had too good of a farming ground had pushed their farming so far that they discovered there was a limit to how much EP your ether sould could contain.
‘The end of tier 1…’
Rune looked at his status again, what he had just achieved was very important to optimize his time.
Now he’d only have to touch the monster cores and not absorb them, he could use all his time to fight, travel, complete the other event objectives, and train his different fundamentals.
‘I wonder if there’s really a deeper meaning in the event’s objectives…’
The compensation law, the law that had created the events due to them living in a critically defective dimension.
Many people had wondered if there was a deeper meaning to the events, some objectives seemed a bit stupid after all. Why was finding living vegetation relevant and worth a million EP?
‘Anyway, the events are what allowed me to get a head start, so I’ll just follow them until the end. That way I’ll be able to start my personal journey as soon as possible…’
Finishing his rumination, he brought up his avatar status.
Avatar (Basic Rank) (Tier 1)
EP: 1 265 920
Stats Total: 5 000
Health: 500
Health Regeneration: 500
Strength: 500
Cohesion: 500
Energy: 500
Energy Regeneration: 500
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Purity: 500
Affinity: 500
Momentum: 500
Perception: 500
‘I can do a world-punch every minute now, hehehe… I think it’s time for me to focus on my defense from now on. I’ll grind my energy compression fundamental efficiency so much no monsters will be able to do anything against me. Sounds about right.’
With his stats having reached their peaks, Rune’s mentality subtly changed. His perfect fighting style concept was one belonging to the marathon-style after all.
And what better than being an invincible cockroach to embody a perfect marathon-style? He wanted to be able to outlast everything in terms of survivability.
It was just a single step of his plan for his Deep Void Dimension’s adventure though, soon, probably, the Ether Law would give an announcement that could change his theoretical energy compression efficiency grind.
And the biggest brains of the IGS had also predicted that the fundamentals masteries window to be around the corner, the way to tier 2 would be opened systemically then.
‘Even if there’s no window… I’ll just have to continue training and at some point, I’ll attain it.’
Now that he was freed from the task of absorbing resources and reached his maximum potential stats-wise, he really felt freed from an invisible burden.
The only worry remaining was the massive amount of fundamentals to train. Close combat, body control, reinforcement, awareness manipulation, perception sphere manipulation, his momentum manipulation too…
Not forgetting energy compression, grand energy manipulation, and fine energy manipulation…
‘Well… Can I use EP to accelerate… No? I can’t? Well… Penguin?’
Refocusing on his imminent grind, he started thinking more deeply about the energy armor spell.
It was really a very important part of his plan.
…
‘Armor up.’
Rune was preparing himself for another session of masochist training, he had already done “a few” prior to this moment, and they had all ended within 5 minutes without exceptions.
Rune’s ability to block health damage was lackluster at best, and non-existent for true practitioners of the blocking art at worst.
His energy armor, covering his whole body in a common sense bending way, only had an efficiency of 10 energy for 3 damages blocked, 30%. And that was after refining his energy compression fundamental by months of training and fighting with his avatar’s death on the line.
Also, as compressed energy used as defense was less resistant than health, considering it didn’t have the support of the cohesion stat, it could be seen as a very suboptimal use of energy.
Well, in truth, his progress in this fundamental was just slow. He had already tried hundreds of training, searched for tips, trying to know if he was doing something wrong, but he ended up with the same answer.
The energy armor spell was too simple and too fundamental-dependent.
There wasn’t a spell like galaxy wings for the energy armor kind, you couldn’t just pump energy and forcefully increase the efficiency through complexifying the spell matrix.
Not that it would make a lot of difference as even with that method, the galaxy wings spell only reached a forceful 50% energy to acceleration efficiency.
The energy armor spell also didn’t escape the constraint of all currently known spells: It could only go as high as your energy stat was, it didn’t accept any more after reaching that cap.
Spell matrices and energy efficiency, the two balanced each other. A spell matrix was the scientific term for what an energy spell looked like and how it had the effect desired. It more often than not represented a precisely streamlined spell.
To answer to the plaguing energy efficiency problem that all spellcasters hurt themselves at, spell creators kept adding more of both quality and quantity. And the way they did it was by adding energy threads there, an energy twirl around here, and creating an amplification time before launch.
The “basic” version of each spell was the more direct one, it was fast, but it only depended on your own energy efficiency and nothing else to deal damages. It was the purest expression of your mastery of a fundamental.
After that were what spellcasters separated into “variant” versions and “ultimate” versions. The variants still depended on the caster efficiency to deal damage but some effects were added, like a bullet that exploded or a beam that diffused in a larger zone.
Variants were created to have more answers to one situation.
The ultimate version, however, was clear and simple, pump all your energy, attain stupid efficiency by taking a whole minute to prepare it, and launch a spell charged with 500 energy at a forceful 70% efficiency, one-shotting the majority of Deep Void Dimension’s monsters.
‘Energy... It’s just so unstable… I train with it every day, it’s my own energy, birthed from my ether soul after refining ambient ether, why doesn’t it directly have a 100% efficiency?’
One of the reasons the energy armor did not have a more complex version despite its growing demand and even true heroes swearing only on it was that it worked with the simplest application of the simplest energy fundamental: The energy compression fundamental.
‘Let’s just be pummeled some more, it’s too important in my plan to stop its training.’
What some would have forgotten was that Rune was silently ambitious, and he also knew how to manage risk. Not that losing his avatar at this point was really that damaging considering he would just continue his training on the Universe Dimension side.
So his training incorporated those qualities, some kilometers from his position was a nest, its occupants were head-like monsters, they were the legendary ball monster.
The scary thing about them was their “mouth”, as they were just a head of some scary creatures with scary teeth that wouldn’t release you once you were chewed once.
Rune’s training consisted of going against the farthest border guards of this nest, and spectators would call it a 3 against 1 pummeling.
With his regeneration of 500 energy per minute, he pumped out compressed energy armor worth 150 health every minute.
He also trained to block better in the way of the Ether Law, using his health as a shield for his life. Pain had long become something that could be cut off with sufficient awareness training, so Rune of course had decided to cut it off months and months ago when he became able to do it.
There was no benefit to feeling pain when considering the way fighting under the Ether Law operated, his sphere made him understand his situation better than pain could ever do.
As he repeated his training again, he was interrupted by the sound of a notification.
It belonged to the Tireless Group forum.
[Tireless Lurker73: Something is happening to the density progress bar!]
Opening the progress bar instantly, Rune saw nothing.
Universe Dimension Ether Density (Deep Void Dimension Opening Basis): +35%
‘It increased a little but I see nothing else.’
But as he kept on looking “around” to maybe see what deserved a notification, he saw the number jump.
Universe Dimension Ether Density (Deep Void Dimension Opening Basis): +36%
‘Oh, that’s rare.’
And soon after this thought.
Universe Dimension Ether Density (Deep Void Dimension Opening Basis): +37%
‘Ok, something is happening.’
Universe Dimension Ether Density (Deep Void Dimension Opening Basis): +38%
He entered his friend group forum and saw that they were already all here and discussing what was happening.
[Adreana: Something is definitely delivering all its ether to our Universe dimension! Did something like a Void Dimension rift break?!]
[Arik: The Ether Law is not giving any announcement, so it should already be computing what’s happening. Maybe it’s just the natural next evolution brought by the increased ether density? An anomaly that appears in the Universe and delivers unimaginable quantities of ether?]
[Utopia: The wiki doesn’t respond anymore, I just tried to add easy info I withheld but it isn’t being added. Arik’s probably right.]
[Nelo: I don’t care, be it 40% or 400%, with our minuscule ether density it’ll still not allow ether monsters to live here.]
[Rune: Very reasonable, I’ll go back to training too, did you reach 50% efficiency with any fundamentals of the energy path Nelo? Or anyone?]
[Nelo: Grand manipulation 55%, from the moment I stopped the camp to now I bombarded monsters without stopping. It’s both thrilling and exhausting.]
[Gar: Fine manipulation 50%, I’m trying things with it but this fundamentam energy mastery is very hard to use by itself, though I can confidently say my energy thread nets are coming together.]
[Rune: I’m at 30% for energy compression, and what the penguin, you spellcasters are masochists… There’s truly no secret?]
[Nelo: For attaining 30%, I welcome you to the new grinding masochists institute, the alternative name of the new energy institute.]
[Adreana: Why did you branch out now? Seems strange coming from you.]
[Rune: I theorized multiple training paths, the path I’m doing now is energy armor, body control, and close combat. I just let monsters hit me while I pummel them without caring about anything and I recreate a 500 energy worth of armor every minute while learning things like how to best block, position myself, resist impact, cancel counterforce… I’m trying all there is to try, I’ll share it later.]
[Utopia: But why did you start it now?]
[Rune: There’s no tier 2 monsters. So what I can do to the monster, peak tier 1 monster can do to me. I saw with my own fist that dealing damage is easier than defending from damage, so in preparation for a true adventure, I need to be perfect at blocking and surviving. I at least want a permanent 500 armor on and dampening the rest by either perfectly blocking or evading.]
[Utopia: I’ll make note of it, keep me updated.]
[Astryde: Very talkative today.]
[Arik: It stopped at +58% and it's not moving anymore.]
Rune focused on the progress bar screen he hadn’t closed.
Universe Dimension Ether Density (Deep Void Dimension Opening Basis): +58%
[Utopia: Who thinks the Ether Law will make an announcement soon?]
[Nelo: Me!]
[Rune: 100%.]
[Arik: Me.]
[Adreana: Third announcement incoming. Obvious.]
[Astryde: Yup, it’s coming.]
[Gar: You’re all too fast, me!]
[Utopia: Let’s wait for the Ether Law to make it then.]
After this conversation, Rune reengaged the head-like monster trio, to be pummeled to misery while pummeling them to misery in turn.
For his dreams of course.
…
And after being pummeled for what Rune estimated to be the 70th time today, he felt satisfied. He had attained 35% energy compression efficiency on the 50th and he blocked better than he ever thought possible.
The Ether Law also seemed to have finished processing everything as Rune heard the notification from every forum he had allowed to send notifications.
Without searching, he saw the prominent forceful announcement, it was the only one that wasn’t on a forum.
It just existed.
Compensation Law Quota Announcement
Progress bar “Universe Dimension Ether Density (Deep Void Dimension Opening Basis): +58%” will be updated to “Universe Dimension Ether Density (Primary Ether Sub-Dimension Opening Basis): +0%”.
Universe Dimension’s Information Board Dimensional Sectors will be gathered following increased ether density.
The Information Board will now allow picture information form.
Rifts leading from the Universe Dimensions to the Deep Void Dimension will start appearing. Ether density cannot increase by dimensional rift way, the Universe Dimension still doesn’t allow ether resources to form or ether life forms to live.
Primary Ether Sub-Dimensions can now be accessed.
Event “Soul Awakening” has been created.
Ether Law full activation imminent.
Masteries window added to Global System Law, only accessible after becoming independent from the Ether Law.
The Compensation Law has used every compensation quota and will henceforth be rendered inactive, no further help such as events will be created.
After every announcement, everyone knew there was so much to discuss but only so much that could be answered, so Rune prepared a plan that he kept in a corner of his head for today.
[Rune: I need to train, I’ll come back in two weeks at the end of the 15th month. As my friends I hope you can prepare a summary for me, bye.]
He then proceeded to ignore the following message that despised him in a very insulting way as they started their storm of discussion and theories, with Gar and Arik getting information from their etherly behind.
‘I’m only interested in three things, the new dimension, the new event, and the masteries window. Independence too.’
He first started with the new dimension.
Dimensions
Primary Ether Sub-Dimension
Able to bear ether life forms, Cannot birth life.
Unstable. Collapsing.
No restriction on ether.
The primary form of dimensional anomalies for a tier 0 dimension. As a sub-dimension, it only exists for a moment and will collapse soon after its birth. Its collapse will cause its contained ether to be released in its origin dimension.
Only very specific entities can avoid being pulverized by the primary ether contained inside.
The primary ether contained inside can be used to awaken one’s ether soul, symbolizing independence.
Impossible to enter currently. You must have reached peak tier 1 stats-wise and fuse your avatar with your original body to be able to enter.
‘I think I’ll train my sphere bending a bit… A lot more! To be on the safe side, I can never be too prepared after all, now for the new event…’
He opened the event window. With the knowledge that it was bound to disappear one day now.
Event
Soul Awakening
Awaken your ether soul and become independent: 1 000 000 EP
Completion Bonus: 10 000 000 EP
‘So events are really tutorials…’
Thinking about the fact that it was the last time the compensation law activated, he felt a little bit of poetic sadness.
‘Thank you compensation law, I’ll never forget that it was the Void Initiation event that allowed me to be a step ahead of others and feel confident enough to fully invest myself into this endeavor. Will future generations get those events though? Ah~ That’s not a question for me!’
That was the last compensation that all life from the Universe Dimension received.
Observing 10 seconds of silence, Rune focused on the last part that interested him: the masteries window. The rest would be managed by the IGS.
‘I need to awaken my ether soul, but before that, I need to train in perception sphere manipulation in case it awakens and becomes too hard to even train with it. Or maybe there’s a failsafe? Because you can’t lift a weight you can’t train with it? Well, better take no risk, right?’
In conclusion, Rune was cut from accessing the now officially named “masteries window” for now, but he easily comforted himself.
‘Even if I could awaken my soul now, I would still wait for the first wave to say what they experienced, so no loss for me.’
With this, Rune could begin his beating juggernaut training again, though he kept in mind that he also had to accelerate his plan for perception sphere manipulation training.
He didn’t care about integrating his avatar with his original body as he had to wait anyway.
So he just had training to do.
The same as ever.