I don’t know what I was expecting. Part of me was surprised since the other dungeons had been so straightforward, like a level designed to be fought through even if they were both kind of miserable. Now though, I was reconsidering what these portals really led to and why they were here.

I couldn’t see. It was so pitch black inside this place that I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face. Hell, even the soft glow of the portal behind me seemed to stop prematurely, as if the darkness was too thick to pierce.

“Now this is some bullshit.”

Clearly, I’d reached another piece of gated content. My awareness was rather shit, and leveling it would help me see in general even if I didn’t miraculously gain night vision. But it took forever to grind stats with one exception that I was trying very hard not to think about.

I now knew that I’d spent months to years in god’s little test server. In all that time I spent preparing for my daring escape, I still only managed to increase my stats by less than eighty points. I thought that was a lot until some fucking bees nearly killed me, but apparently I needed to be way stronger.

Yesterday though, I got seven points of agility in just a few hours. The difference, as far as I could tell, was the combat. By sprinting through enemies instead of grass fields, my rate of improvement skyrocketed. Presumably, I could do the same thing with my eyes. Not that it would matter if the stupid fucking things killed me, but that would just let me train multiple things at once while also testing my theory.

The real problem was the time spent regenerating health. I checked my stats to double check, having to face the glowing portal to even see the screen, but I still only recovered about a hundred health since I last checked. If my math was right, then I’d only gotten about an eighth of my health back after resting for half the night or a fourth of the day. Meaning it would take at least two full thirty hour days before I was able to get to full health.

That’s an abysmal 1% every thirty six minutes. That just wasn’t good enough.

I couldn’t go into the bee bullet hell with less than half health, so I was stuck testing my theory the safe way. How boring. I trudged back to the old flesh cave and got to work, doing all the push-up variants I could think of to increase the muscle strain. The hope was to actually keep track of time this go round and check my progress after a similar twenty hour period. Sad as it was to say, I didn’t exactly have anything better to do and the health needed to recover either way.

I got to work, trying a one arm version that made me balance in the air. It basically forced me to use my fingers to hold my entire body weight and then press up and down. Would it be an efficient workout under any normal circumstances? Absolutely not. Fortunately for me, training strength in one muscle, no matter how small, still improved my whole body.

This was easily the best method I’d found thus far, but it still couldn’t really wear me out. No matter how hard I seemed to push myself, balancing was wasting so much time that I couldn’t get the repetition speed necessary to actually achieve a burn. I really needed to find some lead weights or something, anything to actually push harder than just body weight. That had stopped being good enough forever ago.

Annoyed with the attempt, I went back to more regular one armed pushups, hoping to spend most of my time as consistently and efficiently as possible. After ten hours by my count, I stepped outside in time to experience the break of dawn. I barely even registered the beautiful scenery, too focused on pulling up my stats to confirm my suspicions. Right there, amongst a sea of additional information, I saw it.

Strength: 83

Well that complicated things. If it had been just a single increase then I could chock it up to timing, but I got two improvements from an about ten hour session. Doubling that, no matter how lucky or unlucky, wouldn’t replicate my sprinting achievement no matter how hard I pushed myself. Maybe sprints were just inherently more efficient than the push-ups I was doing, but I had a different suspicion.

Dungeons themselves give double stat experience for whatever reason. Maybe there was higher magic juice for all those cool kids who weren’t screwed over with zeroes in the most interesting sounding stats. Either way, fighting monsters seemed to provide another doubling factor or more, meaning that I’d improve at least four times faster while fighting monsters compared to just training outside. For a stat like resilience that required the bottleneck of health regen in the first place, that would be ideal, but I could use the simpler doubling rate for strength, agility, and maybe even awareness. My time in the darkness before hadn’t given me a point yet, but there was no reason to think it couldn’t. With that in mind, I prepared for the most boring grind fest of my life, stepping back into the dark hole for all the staring training I could stomach.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

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“You’re not looking great, Law. You hanging in there?”

My very good friend that I’d only met the other day was looking at me with some concern. It wasn’t even remotely unwarranted.

“I’ve recently begun considering death as a more viable alternative to the misery of life. So, you know, same old same old.”

I could imagine that despite my numbers and current settings that I cut quite the picture. Some casual conversation revealed that I’d been doing vision training in the dark for three days, and yet I was no closer to my coveted night vision. A meager fifteen points were my reward for staring into the darkness intently for three fucking days straight. The worst part was that despite the pain of the ordeal, I didn’t even get a point in resilience.

God, please. Your system is shit. Patch it. Thank you.

“You know, there are other jobs out there. I don’t think your disposition would fit a guard post terribly well, but lots of people are hiring. It isn’t like dungeon diving is the only option.”

Ah yes quitter talk, my oldest friend. It was natural for people to see the effort I put in and assume it was bad for me. Joke’s on them, I’m making myself miserable on purpose for the stat gains. They’d feel pretty dumb if they could see these numbers.

Then something occurred to me. What if they could see them? It’d be pretty important to know whether my menus were visible to other people or not, and half of the things in there weren’t fit for human eyes.

“You busy after work? I got a drink with your name on it.”

Jim, the best man I’d ever met in this world, cocked an eyebrow at me with amused suspicion.

“Along with a couple more questions no doubt.”

I shrugged back at him and pretty soon we had a place in mind. There were still a couple hours to kill, so I finally went about cleaning the bug viscera off my legs before purchasing my second pair of pants. Now that I knew what they should have cost me, I was able to get the price down considerably. For the cleaning, I just borrowed a bucket for a couple of coppers and washed them the old fashioned way.

Did I scrub skin off with my bare hands? Yes, yes I did. Am I cleaner now that I was before? Also yes, so it was all worth it.

There was still a little time, so I decided to visit my old alliance buddies and see what the danger levels were for these portals I’d been hopping into. Somehow, both of the bug dens were level three while the pitch black one was a five. It was anyone’s guess how the place I cleared on accident could be as dangerous as the one that nearly killed me two feet after entering.

Regardless, I asked around politely for a little more information and realized something very quickly. These people were born con artists. Thanks to the line of work they were in, the average stabilizer wouldn’t even tell you what time it was or point to north unless you were rubbing coins together. Forget the prices of anything else, they wouldn’t even look at you unless you were talking in silver.

With that plan busted, I just went back to the bar, ready to wait for my buddy Jim. Thanks to being a man with no chill, I even passed the time trying to train my awareness. This time, I’d try really hard to notice things in my peripheral vision, focus in on them, and try to follow the movement without looking directly. It was incredibly difficult, but I got the feeling that this was an effective strategy at least. If I ever got durable enough to withstand those bees, then I’d eventually be able to train awareness really effectively with them. A distant thought that probably would never bear fruit, but it was fun to pretend.

Jim showed up not long after, and I pumped half a dozen drinks into the guard before sneakily summoning my stats and gauging his reaction. Despite all of my prodding, he couldn’t see it at all. Thank you, god, for at least having that much foresight with your shitty design.

I got a couple more answers out of the man, but most of what I really needed to know by now was class and level information. Hell, I still asked him since I was getting desperate, but he just wanted to know too. The only new data point I got was that most stabilizers are grizzled veterans or optimistic newbies. The latter tended to die horribly or turn into the former after enough harrowing experiences and survivor’s guilt. My job really was just a damn good time, huh?

With nothing new for me to latch onto aside from my need to ask more expensive questions, I was right back where I’d started. I needed money, and the only options I had for the short term required me to punch monsters. Jim didn’t even know how most stabilizers made their money, but he was sure it wasn’t through closing portals. Knowing those cheap bastards. It’d cost me at least twenty silver just to learn what they do for coin, never mind the how.

I left the bar grumbling like so many others but frustratingly sober by comparison. There was still moonlight to burn, and I was running out of excuses. Just another night of stat grinding ahead of me, but with most of my health recovered I set my sights on more dangerous game.