Mr Might looked extremely proud of himself as he stood with his arms crossed in front of all the students while everyone had screens in front of them which used yet another still unexplored system outside of the bounty system, the separate Quest system.
You’ve received a quest!
Quest:
Training Calibration
Difficulty:
Easy
Objective
Through extensive research, it was discovered that the gamer space possessed passive growth connected to information gathered allowing the system to do more and better the more information it possessed for certain tasks. The task is to allow the system to gather each student’s body limit through their training routine
Reward:
10 levels worth of exp crystal, System will be able to calculate limits and produce daily quests for you based off of your training.
“How is this system giving 10 levels of exp?” Robin muttered in shock that it would actually produce so much energy for such a low difficulty quest and without even having the time to ask, someone asked it.
“It is in the wording. The first attempt was purely just making it give you your training routine as a quest but it would only give exp crystals equal to 10% of your current exp requirement for 1 level. After some thought and rewording, we found that the system can be stimulated to gather information and expand it’s normal method of being used through creative usage and it would seem it is quite exciting despite lacking emotions. This is a good start for everyone who requires a lot of crystals for new traits to enhance your powers.” He said.
As soon as he finished everyone understood what he wanted, he was using this both as motivation as well as a method to give them the resource to make immense strides to evolve their abilities.
It was quite the ingenious outside thinking you wouldn’t think about unless you were faced with a lot of new things still fresh in your mind like the game system. There are still a lot of systems not greatly explored and likely many more still inactive or hidden.
Each student told the system their common training routine and they went to get their equipment while Robin walked to the Atlas stone and began to absorb the power to roughly 25% when it was sufficiently filled his body for him to levitate the rock.
Notice
Please elevate the weight of the World Core to the limit that the host can carry and please jog one lap.
His face scrunched as he positioned himself and the stone dropped on his back and his body instantly began to flow with power while the energy from above came down like a waterfall and it soon reached his ultimate limit and he forced it to lighten up and began labored steps.
Notice
Please lighten the weight until you can assume at least a 12 km/h jog.
He felt great joy in lightening it and feeling the immense burden on his back pull back and his posture improved and he began to jog while the system helped him modify until he got a slow normal jog that was far outclassed by the running speed of many people but no one looked down on him for it because no one else could move this rock and at max weight, even Mr Might had to use his True Qi to hold 100% of its weight, something that was only possible when Robin permitted that to happen or else it was 100% impossible for him to lift it up.
When he finally achieved one lap, his body was covered in steaming sweat and he had already hardened his body just to remain standing because his body was burning from the immense workload.
Notice
Limit calculated, please proceed through the entire routine to the limit of your capacity below the point of injury. The system will point out once this limit is crossed and guide the player back for safe training.
Robin felt great joy in removing the stone from his back and putting it back on the field before he took a moment to expel the Titan force and stabilized his body with his Life Essence before going to do the full exercise after putting the gravity bracelets on.
By the end of PE, he had gone through the entire thing and he was awarded his crystals but was almost dead as he lay in class listening light heartedly. Even with just this he was already memorizing and later he would copy it down in his notes once he regained his energy to fully remember it.
He only regained his energy a little before lunch and the afternoon classes he copied down what he had in his head as well as that class.
When he finally got done, he pulled his body to the club room where he could finally lay down.
“Wow, you’ve been like that since this morning.” Lola said.
“Yeah… honestly I was feeling a strange impact on my body that is really sapping at my strength.” he said.
“Oh, that should be the effect of the new class growth effect. A side effect of higher growth is higher stamina consumption.” Kevin said.
“You don’t seem tired.” Robin said.
“I’ve got every bioenergy plus world power pumping through my body, my body was built to accept gamer effects.” he said.
“True.” Robin said and looked at the others, “Oh right, did you guys copy down the traits you can get? Got anything good?” Robin asked.
Shoji was the first to reply, “I have no psychic traits and only human biology ones. It’s been notified and it is very likely stemming from the system not having any in depth scans of proper psychic abilities, only defective ones.” He said.
“Makes sense.” Robin said and looked at the others.
“I’ve got quite a few, most of them are locked though.” Milo said.
“Locked?” Robin said, surprised.
“Yep, you know death energy right? Undead use that as their power source, well supposedly I can actually use it as well. Training the spells I got from the magic book from the nether realm, I should actually be using death energy to summon and enhance the bone arrows making them much more deadly and many times faster. That said, my body has no capacity to contain it, no affinity for it and no resistance to it.” he said.
“Resistance, what does it do just normally?” Robin asked.
“It erodes living vitality and rots flesh away. Anything with flesh in the nether world is either made in a mortal realm and enhanced with pills or they are born with extremely high affinity and resistance. Scar gained both of those from living in the nether realm while getting steady supplies of pills. Affinity is required to be able to use that power and storing is just like you guys who have chi and stuff.” Milo explained.
“Interesting.” Robin said.
“Mine is similar, the first one I 100% need is a mental ability which helps dominate demon minds, it is some kind of evolution in my brain tied to my demon summoning and contract somehow. It clearly says i need to get this, supposedly i would develop it naturally though but i can speed it up. After that is a big enhancement to my life force circulation system which expands the number of special acupoint connections which are drastically lower than what the lower dantian and meridians possess. It will expand the connections allowing me to use more acupoints to compress and process my life essence. The rest are just strengthening traits which would stimulate my body and strength which transmit that back in the form of life force growing more powerful.” Lola said.
To the side Lilian was happily playing with the chomps, “My traits involve energy efficiency. It basically reduces the amount of energy I need to make my chains and chomps with the same energy. There are some which also improve my control and let me do more than just grow and lengthen. It should let me flow life essence to enhance impact but it seems pretty primitive because life essence requires blood or some special channels. I think the initial change is setting up for a bigger evolution to let free flowing power through the chomps. Besides that there are more physical traits like producing different kinds of chomps like ones with spinning fangs like saws.” Lilian said.
“Woah!” Milo said, surprised.
Oliver and Tristan were listening in and looked over, “We actually don’t have any power based traits, most of ours are purely human biology. The system has no clue which traits would help ours improve so we are pretty stuck until the gamer space grows large enough to cover much larger areas and scan millions.” Oliver said.
“What about the spawns?” Robin asked.
“They have no traits either, their biology is tied to data and they don’t have DNA, they have immense algorithms that the system hasn’t learned to read yet.” He said.
“Really…” Robin said and looked at Lola and Milo.
“I’m keeping my undead from accessing more than just the basic stat system. They were made and believe me to be the source of their growth, if that changes I am not sure how that would affect their loyalty.” Milo said.
“For my demons, what I summon is their souls and give them life force to mold a form, they don’t even have a status window.” Lola said.
“I see… wait, now that you mention it, I’ve not seen Lily in month's… I think only Galman who you lend to Shoji for training the art of the sword.” Robin said.
“I’ve trained mostly with the imps to increase my control capacity and merging. It is still a bit of a burden but it allows me to exert 100% of my power when merged and in that form I get much stronger as well. Since I need to be able to draw out 100% of their true form before I can even do that, the five basically told me to only train with the imps unless necessary and to avoid summoning them at random. To summon them, I would do a small pull to advise who I was calling in case they were in the middle of training.” She explained.
“Training?” Milo asked.
“Yeah, ever since they discovered that life force, their source of power, can be actively processed, they’ve been working to do that but I don’t really get the effect of this.” Lola said.
“Why not just ask?” Shoji said.
The others were all curious including the teacher, Lola closed her eyes and looked to Yez who was generally the most sociable and knowledgeable.
She sent a small signal and after a short bit she summoned the succubus.
“Did you need something dear?” She asked.
“Right… we were talking about the gamer systems and all and it eventually led me to mention you five were training. It made us curious why you are all so heavily focused on trying to get Life essence despite already having so much life force that you have nearly braveman level strength.” Lola asked.
“We are only short of that strength level dear and by no means do we do it for no reason. We are doing it to evolve. The entire point of your contract with all of us is for us to be able to gain life force, no matter how little, through a stable method. By training with you, a small bit comes back to us, it is equal exchange. However, every demon holds ambition to become higher forms.” she explained.
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“Mind explaining demon biology then? I’ve never really heard any in-depth knowledge because I’ve never encountered a person who could summon demons directly.” Chasm Might asked.
“If that is what you want…” She said and gathered her thoughts and nodded. “Alright, demons possess several stages as you could call it. The first is servants, they are mindless and savage, aka imps. Every last demon race begins as one, there are no ifs ands or buts to this, every last demon that wasn’t born from a powerful parent is an imp. Imps are born in spawn pits and are incapable of self reproduction but they fill roughly 90% of hell’s population.” She explained
This actually shocked them.
“What about those born from powerful parents?” Lola asked.
“I will get to that.” She said. “Above that are demons who have killed and gathered life force from the savage survival game among imps and they evolve into a Lesser demon. All five of us are lesser demons. This is where we get the unique capacities for each. What makes each demon unique is that there are two affinity systems in our world. The first is the seven sins and the second is the primordial elements. The seven sins are Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Wrath and Sloth while the primordial elements are fire, earth, metal, water, wood, wind and lightning. Each demon has a sin and element they have the highest affinity with and once they evolve into lesser demons, the energy of each system infuses into them and they gain personalities and elemental abilities pertaining to both.” She said. “For those who are unaware, I am Lust/Earth. The elements can easily change among individuals but lust will always be the same for my race.” she said.
“So if there are lesser, there are greater?” Robin asked.
“Exactly, lesser demons possess life force but they now have sentient minds and so it allows us to gather in similar tribes and we also have the capacity to breed. However, our bodies are still relatively unstable so there is only a 1 in 10 chance of a lesser demon being born while the rest are strong imps. This is because imps and lesser demons have life force.” Yez said.
“I see, so by converting to Life essence, your biology evolves.” Mr Might said.
“Exactly, they are called Greater Demons like you guessed and they consist of 2% of the population. Their sin and elemental abilities expand greatly while they gain many new powers. I naturally don’t know much of the details but they are very powerful and each of them can control areas of territories. Above them are Arch demons. They appear in a 1 in a million among greater demons because they are said to have learned deep secrets of our world which taught them the secret method to condense a life core.” She said.
Mr Might frowned at this, “What is that?” he asked.
“All I know is legend because I’m not a greater demon, supposedly there is a method to condense life force into a solid orb. It is said that if a mortal being were to be able to achieve this, they would have sufficient life force to live several hundred years purely on the strength of their own life force alone. For demons, we channel life force efficiently without much leak and this makes us evolve and radically increases our power.” she said.
“You’ve been with Lola for years now, I’m sure you know the hero Mephesto, he calls his power Archdemon but is it?” he asked.
“I know of the guy and it definitely isn’t an archdemon. Archdemons don’t need such a method to gather life force, especially one so passive. Because of how much Lola watches them, Lily and I have constantly tried to analyze his power and it couldn’t be anything more than an extremely powerful Greater Demon. If he was an archdemon, the passive possession that Mephesto is under with him as the greater half would have been total possession for the archdemon effectively making them be reborn in the human world with the lifespan and body of a human and he would return to our home realm once the body is dead.” She said.
“So that means you guys are trying to evolve into something equal to Mephesto?!” she exclaimed.
“No.” Yez said, “The strength of greater demons is extremely wide. If spoken in terms of you humans, lesser demons are powerful strongmen, greater demons vary between braveman and hero. If the demon in that contract was truly an archdemon then without a doubt he would have long since become one of the most powerful beings on this planet. The demon is active inside him and trains the host like a teacher to bring out all their power. If he somehow had a true arch demon in a passive contract then he would have long since learned to make the mythical life core but that isn’t good for the archdemon. The longer a human lives, the longer he is trapped inside him.” She explained. “To this extent, Lola’s contract gives infinitely less benefits but she can summon many demons and merge with one she chooses.”
“Wouldn’t that make it harder for Lola to summon you at full strength?” Robin asked.
“On the contrary, it might make it easier but it would be harder to merge. From the contract I have I can tell that what is important for summoning is quantity. The closer the quantity of life force or life essence is to the maximum we possess, the easier it gets to summon. Making life essence will compress the ocean of life force we have after processing it all.” She said.
“If that is so, we should not keep you from your training.” Mr Might said. “I want to see your new strength soon if that is the case and she can summon you with higher strength due to the lower quantity.” Mr Might said.
“I can’t wait, I’m excited now.” She said and Yez smiled as she was unsummoned.
Robin looked at the newer members curious about their traits.
“Um… the list is kinda large.” One of them said, scratching their heads.
“How large?” Robin asked.
“Um… I think it might be possible to pick any analyzed power already existing. For life force ones like us… I haven’t found it because the list is so big and I don’t know what it is properly called but I think we might be able to even copy Lola’s ability.” A life force user from the civilian classes said.
Everyone instantly looked at the purely energy control students. The others smiled weakly and looked away but this confirmed it and Mr Might asked to see their trait tables and began to look through it. They had a different setup, it was traits based on their energy instead. It was a large list and asked the name of Lola’s trait for her demon ability. Mr Might ran down through the list until he reached it after nearly 100 pages but it was there and cost 500 levels worth of exp crystals to build the genetic sequence that Lola possessed.
“Well shit…” he muttered and looked at the children and rubbed his head. “Don’t add anything, at least until we can figure out how large the gamer space can get and how large the scanning potential can reach. If the system gets better, the cost of everything drops.” He said.
“If we can have something like her strong ability wouldn’t it be better to have it early?” One of the life force controllers asked.
“My power is focus and growth is tied directly to the amount of life force or essence I have. It needs a certain quantity to achieve different effects. If you properly train your amount then if you actually save up enough to get my power, it will rapidly grow to a similar level to mine.” Lola said. “But i think if you are going to become your own fighter, you should get traits you feel comfortable with.” She said.
“I agree, copying a person will get you only so good. You will limit your imagination to what that person does. An example is if you Chi controllers get all of my body enhancement abilities and eventually train just like me. What would that lead to, just another Chasm Might but you will just become a nomad whose strength is dangerous to use inside cities.” He said.
“Yeah but all hero’s fights can be called natural disasters no matter who you ask. There is no safe fight when heroes are involved.” one of them said.
“There are differences, some powers can instantly incapacitate a villain with far less damage than others. A single downward punch from me, sending my enemy into the ground, is enough to damage the entire underground piping for five blocks around me. If I’m ever forced to use a full powered punch, it would be enough to punch clouds above me clear or create updrafts that cause rain to fall. Do you know what an updraft is? A rising tornado, can you imagine the damage in a city if that thing began to move like a normal tornado? In return, there are people like Server admin who use immense skill to release all the force of his power only into his enemy.” he said.
“Why don’t you learn stuff like that?” one student asked.
“I have, but my body strength and energy are explosive in nature. I’m unable to contain the explosion from my attack into a focused burst, if I could I would be much stronger and you would see me much more often fighting in cities.” He said. “That is why you shouldn’t try to copy someone and instead build your own power in this rare opportunity that we have, or don’t and live a normal life, there is nothing wrong with a normal life.” He said.
His words rang true to the club members who had seen the effects of deactivating powers. Those people were happy just living normal lives so they felt no trouble with having that fate. It was better to live a normal life than to not live life at all.
The students understood and agreed to not make such a big decision without letting the system mature more and get a much greater scanned archive. It would mean they would not get into a heroics course but that didn’t mean they couldn’t become crime fighters, it was just that they would have not gotten a highschool education as one. There were supplementary courses for the education and ethical knowledge required by the government for rising heroes to be able to accept the rank despite lacking highschool education and training.
He used Mr Atlas as an example of late bloomers so they wouldn’t be discouraged by this and ended the subject. They can have a lot of time to learn and the system AI would slowly be able to learn proper combinations even among incompatible powers. They decided to take it slow.
***
In another realm, filled with magma and chaos, Lily, or as she was truly known in this world Mania Sek Elizabeth Satanis, was sitting in her cave while her body was glowing like flames were around her.
The other four servants were protecting her and they watched in awe by the immense ocean of life force that had always been stored.
The flames of her life force were spinning and firmly attached to her body compared to before and her chest, particularly near her heart, was glowing from the immense amount of life force that was almost bursting from her chest.
It spun with great chaos and there was enough energy to blow her up in her chest at this moment and it was flowing through the special system of life force. Unlike humans, it was heavily developed in demons but it lacked nourishment which had been happening for months now.
Spinning through every channel and vein in her body, her life force infused into them and in each acupoint it was connected to it would spin like Robin had done.
The reason this could happen was because demons lacked the lower dantian.
What is surprising was that it was hard for her to channel the life force through it and had to dig open these channels and finally she was reaching the return channel and finally it fully opened and began to flow freely.
The force returning smashed into the overflowing chaos and finally the process of compressing started.
It pushed out more life force while she made the denser one begin to spin and compress the life force.
As soon as it happened, the others noticed instantly because the life force flames got denser.
At this point Yez opened her eyes. “What did she want?” Galman asked.
“They were curious about our biology.” Yez replied.
“Did you explain it?” he asked.
“Naturally.” She said.
No more words were spoken as they watched the immense life force spin and the energy in the heart was filled and released through the body.
It flowed through it and just like Robin’s ten cycles, each time it would be more greatly compressed after a full cycle through her body and would replace the spinning energy and start absorbing it causing the overflow to compress towards her body even more and release half into the blood and absorb the less dense energy.
It went on for hours until the ninth cycle pulled the last of the excess into the body and the wild chaos ended and it just became silent.
Only the glowing heart showed off the immense energy condensed inside and slowly lines spread from the heart through each of her extremities and when it filled, out the heart shined extremely bright showing the creation of a new force.
The newly forged life essence began to spin and life force in her body, cells and everything were pulled and all four witnessed a chilling sight as the veins brightened with all that life force slowly pulling from the five corners while the body started to age rapidly.
The aura of death filled her body and it slowly gathered at the heart until nothing was left and Lily looked like a half dead old woman with her chest shining brightly.
It continued for half an hour until the last bit of life force was absorbed.
As soon as it did, cryptic markings appeared on her body. All four felt their hair stand on ends as they felt an intense anger in the air seep out from hell while the destructive winds of hell began to turn into energy and appeared.
After a bit it surged into her body and they saw the withered body break down and gather at the glowing essence and infuse throughout the liquid mass while the sin of wrath and the element of wind infused immensely through the essence and body while the essence spun and absorbed these forces to grow.
It continued and the essence spread and slowly formed five extremities in human shape before they saw the sin of wrath gather horns, claw while the sin infused wind formed wings. It was the size of a child when it stabilized but it moved and they heard the sound of suction and all that immense excess was sucked towards her.
The four all had to drop to the ground and hold on to the ground not be sucked up by her and they saw her body continue to grow forming powerful muscular contours and feathers on the wings until she solidified.
Bright red skin of a sin of wrath, long feathered wings of a wind element greater demon and muscles that made even Broncos feel timid. It was the birth of a creature to fear.
The full size was nearly 5 meters tall and she was bent over and raising her hand, wind exploded from her hand instantly digging into the extremely hard volcanic rock of hell and the cave expanded to over 7 meters of height perfect for her to move freely.
Once she reached full extension she breathed in and her body began to glow and shrink once more and gathered into a small point and what was left looked like a human with red skin and a pair of horns. Her height was barely 180 cm tall but her body was muscular and firm. Soon her power gathered and formed clothing unlike the common stuff before.
She felt strange and slowly her nails turned into short claws and her wings formed again on her back as she found a balance between demon and human. This was the sign of Greater demons, a human form, however complete human form meant restraining their power fully but releasing it all meant giving into the savage side. Only by achieving the perfect fusion would they achieve savage power and control.
No one spoke as she fixed her form until she felt truly comfortable. “This is amazing, so this is a greater demon.” she said with a smile. She clenched her fist and closed her eyes before her aura spread and all of them felt the weight of it but it lacked the immense capacity that the ocean of life force could produce but they felt it was more dangerous like this. All that energy condensed into so little.
50% was in the cells of her body, 25% in her heart and the rest in her blood. The power of this balance felt lethal.
Barely 10% was in the lesser demons, 40% stored and 50% in the blood, it went to show the difference between lesser and greater demons.
Finally she looked at the four and smiled, “Soon it will be each of your turns. You can get to work, I will defend this location as I have always.” She said.
“Yes my lord!” the four said and each left to a small camp around the cave but no where near daring to train in there. Each had a camp managed by their imp groups.
In the cave Lily sat down in her favorite location with a smile as she felt all the life force in her body. “So this is the proper form of distribution. Such a magnificent form, no wonder humans have such potential for growth without their bodies changing. They naturally form this amazing balance.” She said as she kept examining her own body until she knew roughly how much she had. “So I have roughly 100 times what Lola has, that said, I have a complete channel method from my heart but she has the obstruction of the energy which she does not require.” She muttered. “I think she will have to sacrifice it to change it for the life force method or it will be impossible to generate enough to fully summon me through body stimulation and just eating.” She said.
She looked at the markings of her contract which was slowly growing bit by bit and she smiled at it. She was excited for the day she could fully be summoned and merged with Lola.