Arthur wouldn't have gotten the achievement if there were any monsters in the room. Knowing it was safe, he finally sat down to rest.
He took his head cover off and breathed deeply. Meanwhile, he prehended the bits of metal he had pushed into his flesh to move faster, pulled them out with a grunt, and activated the Self-Healing Surge skill.
It wasn't just his body that needed caring for. His mana had almost bottomed out. He closed his eyes and focused on absorbing the surrounding mana. It considerably increased his passive absorption.
Time passed.
Suddenly, Arthur heard footsteps. He opened his eyes and turned to see his people at the distant stairway.
After the dark spell, the cave chamber had turned into a vast, elongated, box-shaped stone room. The surfaces were so smooth, and the edges so perfect that they looked sculpted and polished. The staircase now ended dozens of yards above the ground.
Graham, in the front, held a round light crystal that illuminated his surroundings. Of the three, only Tamara had the Night Vision skill, but it was at D-tier, unlike Arthur's A-tier. Sophie could see much better in the dark than the average human because of her vampire heritage, even a little better than Tamara, but it wasn't as good as C-tier Night Vision.
They noticed the ground was not where it was supposed to be, stopped at the edge of the room, and squinted their eyes to try to see better.
"I can hear his heartbeat and smell his blood," Sophie announced a few moments later. "He's not moving, but he's alive," she breathed relievedly and pointed deep into the room. "There."
"His robe is damaged," Graham pointed out. Sophie wouldn't have been able to hear his heartbeat otherwise. "Or he took it off."
"Does his heartbeat sound stable?" Tamara asked. Sophie nodded. The maid continued, "Tell me if that changes, and I'll go in."
They didn't rush into the room. Arthur wasn't moving, but he might still be fighting, surrounded by an illusion or a strange spell. A dragon could kill them with a single attack, and their presence in a tight battle might distract him.
"Come on in," the prince said, turning his flaming sword on.
With his perception stat and skills, he saw the happiness and relief on the women's faces. The three jumped down—that height was nothing, even for Arthur's low body stats—and Sophie ran at him.
"Archie!" the half-vampire said as she approached. He let go of his sword, stood up, and caught her in a hug. "You took so long that we feared for the worst."
Her blood-repelling choker violently pushed the blood inside his robe—but outside his body—away. His sorcerer's robe would also have protected him from that effect if he had the head cover on. Its absence created an opening for the choker's magic to sneak in.
Some of his blood was on the front side of his body. His body was in the way, so most moved sideways, then to his back. A few drops went the wrong way and ended up trapped. The choker's enchantment still pushed them firmly, but not enough to pierce his body. It was only mildly uncomfortable.
"Why do I smell blood?" Sophie asked after they separated a few seconds later. "Where are you injured? Does it hurt?"
He smiled. "A minor injury. It's already healed."
Sophie looked pointedly at him as if asking whether he wasn't lying. He widened his smile and winked at her. She rolled her eyes.
"What happened here?" She asked, looking around. "Did you do this?"
He chuckled. "I wish." He told them all that had transpired. "...and as you can see, this is the boss room," he gestured to the still-floating treasure box. It would remain there until either someone opened it or everyone left the room. "Fate destroyed the spell as soon as the reward's light pillar arrived."
During his tale, Sophie said "ohhs" and "ahhs" at the appropriate time. She was a cordial listener. But as soon as he was finished, she threw herself in his arms again and hugged him tightly.
"I almost lost you again," she said, more angry than sad.
"I overestimated myself," he admitted. "I'm sorry."
"Rather, master, we all underestimated the dragons," Tamara said. "Space destruction. Teleportation. Whatever the shadowbender did. I'm glad some of them died arrogantly before using their true power. You might've died otherwise."
"As you know, Head Maid, combat is also about exploiting the enemy's weaknesses," Graham interjected. "His Highness knew beforehand that these dragons would behave arrogantly and prepared accordingly. It was a close call, but there's no denying his merits."
Tamara raised her eyebrows in surprise. "That's not at all what I was saying, Grand Knight. I was attempting to share his burden. We all believed it would be easier than it was."
Graham only nodded in response.
Arthur couldn't deny he had been somewhat lucky in getting rid of the lightbender right at the beginning and the chronomancer while it was still somewhat arrogant. However, he also agreed with his people's perspective. Combat was always dangerous. Using your weakness against an enemy's strength was stupid and potentially lethal, so information mattered. He had come expecting dragons to behave arrogantly.
Would he have fought if the monsters weren't dragons? Maybe. Maybe not. He didn't pursue that light of thought. It served no purpose but to make him feel lacking, and he had experienced how dangerous that was not long ago.
"How many extra weapons do you have?" Arthur asked the knight.
"Not many, sire. A few dozen swords and disks, half a hundred spheres. I threw almost everything in this room." He extended his arm sideways and took a helmet out first. "I have plenty of equipment, though."
Arthur nodded, softly patted Sophie's back, and had her release him. "We'll have enough time together after the war ends," he promised. "Right now, I have something to do."
His mana was almost replenished already. He started putting the equipment on, then prehended the new weaponry Graham threw on the ground.
The prince looked at his people after he was done. He regretted not bringing them to a safe floor before this. Now, they could only come with him because he didn't trust himself to kill the dragons again without studying a lot about space, time, light, darkness, and water. Translating that knowledge into being magically useful might take months. That was a luxury he didn't have.
He sighed and checked the treasure chest.
The lid was the heaviest he had lifted to date. Inside, Arthur found three skill crystals, three mythril coins, and an enchanted item. It was a crimson ruby shaped like a water drop and filled with tiny internal silver runes that looked like stars.
Arthur pushed mana into the ruby and saw as it released crimson red mana into him. He felt nothing different. However, when he turned to Sophie, he could see every drop of blood inside her. They were translucent, and her blood vessels were prominent.
He blushed slightly when he saw blood mounds where he would have none and turned to Graham. A grand knight's armor wasn't built for stealth but had basic anti-detection enchantments. Yet, he could still see the man's blood.
"Do any of you have a stealth technique?" he asked.
"I do, master," Tamara said.
"Use it, please."
"If you want it to be more effective, I must use it far away from you and out of sight."
Arthur nodded. "Get behind me."
She moved to his back. Moments later, Graham said he could no longer see her, and he had been staring her way. Arthur turned and had no trouble finding Tamara—or the blood inside her—standing a dozen feet to his right.
"This is a powerful detection item that can pierce stealth," he said while deactivating it. "It reveals all blood nearby, including inside living beings. Sophie should have it. It'll synergize well with her blood element. It might also assist her in staying away from blood." He wasn't worried about her feeling tempted to consume what she saw. She was smelling his blood yet hadn't acted on it. "Tamara, Graham, do you have a spare enchanted necklace?"
"No, master."
"I have a gold necklace, milord, but it's not enchanted."
The prince shook his head. "If it's not enchanted, I'd rather not use gold. We don't want anyone easily ripping the necklace off." He smiled apologetically at Sophie. "You'll have to do with my terrible artisan abilities." He threw two mythril coins to Graham. "Help me out."
The knight understood it at once. He used his flaming fist on the coins.
Mythril had a much higher melting point than any metal Arthur had ever worked with, especially his steel weaponry. His lack of experience with it also meant his magic wouldn't be as effective. He had a lot of theoretical knowledge of mythril, but some things could only be understood or felt with practice. Whatever he tried to do with it would only be about seventy percent as effective as if it were steel.
He prehended the coins and willed them into melting. Graham's flames' heat helped, but the prince still had to use almost ten percent of his mana before the mythril turned liquid.
Then, he started casting intertwined, thin, delicate chains. Not as thin that they would be fragile regardless of being made of mythril, but also not as thick as to be too conspicuous. Minutes later, he also created a frame for the ruby, so it wouldn't be easily stolen, leaving only half the crimson drop visible. He turned it into a pendant, attached it to the necklace, and finally willed everything to cool down.
It was a beautiful piece. It was plain metal, severely lacking in details because Arthur didn't have a single artistic vein to his body, but the silvery metal and enchanted ruby somewhat made up for it. It was physically resistant but very vulnerable to metalmancy, so Arthur would keep it prehended whenever he was with Sophie, thus stopping enemy metalmancers from taking it off her.
Arthur smiled at her again. "Would you accept this humble gift, milady?"
To his surprise, she was tearing up. She nodded once, but instead of grabbing the necklace he was extending to her, she turned her back to him and pushed her hair out of the way.
Arthur wordlessly approached and placed it around her neck. There was a unique intimacy to the moment that inebriated him. He stepped back as soon as he was done, using all his willpower to resist the urge to kiss the curve of her neck.
"Let me see," he asked. She turned, and he nodded. "You look amazing."
He thought a black necklace might look better because of the black choker, but there was no point in saying so. The silvery metal looked good enough on her pale skin, anyway.
The next moment, he was glad for holding his tongue. Sophie gave him one of her dazzling smiles and lightly caressed her new piece of jewelry. It clearly meant a lot more to her than he had expected.
"Thank you, Archie. But is this okay? This... This is too much."
"Do you like it?" he asked.
"I love it," she admitted, embarrassed.
"Then it's yours," he said and pecked her lips. "Let's go." He turned and headed deeper into the dungeon.
----------------------------------------
At first sight, the cave chamber's exit looked like any other, a big archway leading to a huge room. However, going through it revealed it was more than that. One moment, they saw a vast empty room ahead. The next, they were inside a small square room.
Dungeon cores existed in a spatial pocket inside their dungeons. Unlike other floors, where a delver could bypass the boss to move on, the core room could only be entered if the last boss died.
Scholars theorized that it was only thanks to Fate that a delver could access that place at all. Many shapers had tried to bypass the final boss but never managed it.
The core room was made of obsidian and could barely fit fifty people. A pentagonal thin obsidian pedestal stood in the center, and a fist-sized round transparent crystal floated on top. The dungeon core was filled with ever-moving mist-like mana of all colors, the most condensed Arthur had ever seen. They shone bright, giving the room a beautiful atmosphere.
"The books were right," Arthur commented. "Rainbow crystal balls are but a shadow of a dungeon core's beauty."
The Ritual Room in his father's palace had two rainbow balls. They were expensive, beautiful, and inspired by dungeon cores. Cores couldn't be taken from a dungeon without being destroyed first, thus losing the beautiful multi-colored mist.
There was nothing else in the room except something that shouldn't be there: a small archway leading into whiteness. The prince turned back to confirm he also could see only endless whiteness from the entrance he had come from.
"That should be it, right?" he said, nodding to the other opening. "The place with infinite level 95 monsters for me to kill."
Dungeon core rooms always had only one way in or out. That unexpected archway should lead to the promised land unless something was wrong.
"His Royal Majesty gave me no details, master," Tamara said. "But he gave me a Royal Decree to open when we got here." She quickly took a Royal Decree from her spatial storage, opened the metallic tube, pulled the parchment it held, and read it. "His Royal Majesty confirms that is the way forward. Before we go, you must state which monster you'd like to fight. Pick one from the level 95 ones you fought. The dungeon will spawn an infinite number of them in the special area, and you'll face them one at a time. You can't change it later, so choose wisely."
"Green dragons," Arthur declared without hesitation.
Theoretically, he was better equipped to deal with thunderbringers, firemancers, or even geomancers. However, he hadn't experienced the power of lightning dragons and wasn't willing to risk a surprise. Fighting firemancers would require him to waste too much mana to prevent his weaponry from getting vaporized or splattered everywhere. And geomancers might make him waste too much time if they invested everything they had on defense.
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No, the biomancers were the safest pick. The prince had learned well not to overestimate himself after the last fight and was only fully confident in surviving a clash against a green dragon. Like geomancers, he might waste some time killing each biomancer at first, but he would face many enemies made of flesh and blood after he left the dungeon. Learning more about how his metal interacted with the life element and how to circumvent a biomancer's defenses would be much better in the long run.
At his declaration, the dungeon core pulsed once, releasing a harmless mana wave in all directions.
Arthur raised an eyebrow at it. The core could obviously understand him. Could it also speak? Could one negotiate with it?
Alas, the League forbade talking to or researching monsters or dungeon cores without supervision, so he didn't pursue that line of thought.
"This should be it, master," Tamara said. "We can go now."
"Let me go first, Your Highness," Graham said. "I don't trust this dungeon." Arthur nodded. Scouting ahead was one of a knight's jobs, even if their charge was stronger than them. Graham went through and returned a moment later. "It's safe, my prince." He turned tail and went through again.
"And I don't trust the knight, master," Tamara said, following the knight into the archway. A moment later, she returned, confirmed it was safe, and left again.
Suddenly, Arthur was alone with Sophie for the first time ever. Truly alone. Graham or Tamara were always in the same dungeon room as the two, and even if they stood on opposite sides of a vast cave chamber, their perception would let them hear even his whispers.
All four of them had acute hearing and politely closed their ears to things they shouldn't listen to, but the privacy he found now was on a whole other level.
And, to his utter amazement, Sophie took advantage of that.
They were holding hands. She stepped closer, pulled his arm down so he would slightly lower his head, and whispered while blushing furiously, "It doesn't matter if your lower body doesn't touch mine when we hug and kiss, Archie. I can see your blood accumulating now. Thanks for the gift." She lightly—but wetly—pecked the edge between his face and neck.
The physical touch after the whisper made every last hair of his body stand on its end. He was dazed, and Sophie exploited that to swiftly scurry away from the room.
It took the prince a few moments—or maybe more than a few—of deep breaths to control himself and go through the archway.
----------------------------------------
It turned out the king's letter to Tamara had been slightly misleading. There was no endless stream of enemies, only endless enemies.
They found four rooms on the other side of the archway. They were long and connected in a loop with diagonal walls between them. When Arthur stood inside one of them, another would always be at least two rooms away and out of sight.
Monsters could respawn in any neighboring room in a dungeon, but monsters on different floors always respawned faster. Some evidence suggested that what mattered was no delver having direct light of sight to the room where a monster could spawn, but it had never been proved. Now, the prince had just found compelling evidence.
After killing a dragon in a room, Arthur would always find another waiting for him in the next one, no matter how fast he was. It wasn't as convenient as having the enemy come to him, but impressive all the same. The rooms weren't too long, only ten times as big as the dragon, and he could quickly cover that distance.
Arthur's new routine became killing a green dragon every minute of his day while doing something else, be it studying by himself, learning from Tamara or Graham, or talking to Sophie. He took only one step into a room with a monster and had no trouble killing it despite splitting his focus.
Most of his time was spent alone. There was only so much to teach him, and Tamara insisted he and Sophie don't stay together all the time. According to her, it might bring up issues with their relationship, and emotional turmoil might hinder Arthur's ability to reach level 100.
As the prince had expected, he had trouble killing the first biomancers, but it was also an opportunity to hone his ability. Step by step, reading something here, talking to Tamara there, or experimenting on new things, he learned how to more effectively shatter bone and rend flesh asunder.
It took him ten minutes to kill the first dragon he fought in that special area.
A week later, it took him seven minutes.
A month later, three minutes.
Two months later, one minute.
And after three months, he could kill a dragon within instants.
He was level 95 when he felt confident about killing all dragons in floor level 95's boss room.
"I can take you back to level up now, Soph," he said.
"I feel that might be a bad idea, milord," Graham interjected. "We know nothing about this special area. What if it's a one-time-only opportunity after reaching the dungeon core for the first time? Head Maid Lauquenbur and I left this place and returned safely, but we didn't leave the dungeon core's room."
That possibility was unlikely, but there was no safe way of assessing the truth. Graham couldn't just step on floor 95 and return to the core room. The last boss had respawned, and while it was alive, no one could get to the dungeon core's room, not even if they had been there before. Only Arthur could kill the boss, but he couldn't leave without being sure he could return.
"I insist," the prince said anyway. He had thought long and hard about it. "If there were such limitations, my father would've mentioned them. He wouldn't risk the war out of laziness to write a few extra words, and he wouldn't forget something so important."
Graham argued a little more, but Arthur's argument was too strong.
In the end, they reached a compromise: Graham would stay.
----------------------------------------
Arthur went through the archway to floor 95 and easily annihilated the dragons.
He kept his Intent Denial zone on and rushed at his enemies. His metal moved faster now than ever before, which reflected on his own speed, making it impossible for any dragon or their spells to catch him. Even his spheres could easily pierce dragon scales and weren't hindered by bone or flesh.
He killed the shadowbender first. He guessed it was the actual boss, while the others were minions. Indeed, no other monster delivered a similar large-scale spell.
Knowing the shaper dragon's abilities over space gave him a significant edge. He didn't stand still anymore. Knowing the chronomancer's power allowed him to waste its mana with little cost.
Arthur started this fight with much fewer projectiles than the last one, but he finished it with them all intact.
Returning to the core room, he confirmed the archway to the special area was still there. They all more or less agreed it wouldn't disappear if someone was in the room. Dungeons couldn't affect any room with a delver.
So, Graham would stay, and Arthur would only take Sophie and Tamara to a higher floor.
"Have a safe journey, sire," Graham said.
"Thanks," Arthur replied.
Sophie was level 33. The trip to floor 19, where there were level 29 monsters she could easily deal with, took only five days. The prince could kill monsters much faster than Graham.
"I'll miss you," Sophie said as they hugged.
"Me too," he whispered back.
They spent a few dozen minutes comforting each other, then finally separated with moist eyes.
----------------------------------------
When Arthur returned, the special area was still there, and he killed like never before.
Level 96 came relatively quickly; he only needed to kill twenty thousand dragons. Level 97 wasn't as fast. Level 98 was a chore. And level 99 took forever.
Arthur ultimately decided to give up on studying with Graham. As the days passed, he outright stopped talking to the knight and slept as little as possible. He instantly killed biomancers while rushing to the next room in a never-ending race against time.
Graham struggled to keep up but didn't obey the order to wait in the core room until he got in the way and prevented a dragon from spawning. From then on, Arthur would only visit the man when he had an open skill slot.
Once more, the prince's life became a monotonous haze to grow stronger.
And one day...
| Progress to Level 100: +0.00002% → 100%
| Level up!
| You're now level 100!
「 Achievement: Ascender
Tier: Special
Reward: Ascension Attempt
You reached level 100!
The path to greatness is filled with broken corpses and shattered minds. You navigated the tides of blood to conquer the ocean of dead monsters. You drank from the pool of death and found sustenance in carnage. There can be no glory without sacrifice. There can be no valuable triumph without obsession. Others fell on the way, but you persisted, no matter the cost. Others gave no quarters to their enemies, but you denied it even to yourself. Most walk a path of a mediocre fate, but you have reached your grand fate and found the ladder of ascension. You've taken the first step toward your ultimate fate. 」
'Ascension Attempt?' Arthur thought as a new window appeared before him.
「 Ascension Attempt In Progress
Analyzing candidate... 」
At first, he thought something was wrong. That window made no sense, and nothing happened for a few seconds. Was Fate broken?
But then, new windows popped up.
「 Ascension Attempt In Progress
110 achievements found:
- Special: 1
- EX-tier: 1
- S-tier: 7
- A-tier: 2
- B-tier: 26
- C-tier: 9
- D-tier: 30
- E-tier: 20
- F-tier: 14
Achievement evaluation: 87/100 」
Achievement evaluation? Arthur had pursued achievements like crazy. Did his father know something like this would happen, or had the goal only been gaining as many stats as possible?
Whatever the case, his score was good... right?
「 Ascension Attempt In Progress
120 skills found:
- S-tier: 15
- A-tier: 105
Skill evaluation: 95/100 」
Even his skills were evaluated? Arthur was glad he had gotten a lot of S-tier ones. 95 had to be a good score.
「 Ascension Attempt In Progress
2 elements found:
- Metal
- Life
Element evaluation: 38/100 」
What? Why thirty-eight? Were his elements bad? Should he have picked something other than metal?
Fate had even counted them, but any level 100 awakener would only have two elements. Unless, of course, the Fated Races of his world were below average, and people in other worlds could use magic without Fate.
「 Ascension Attempt In Progress
1 dungeon defeated:
- Level 95: 1
Dungeon evaluation: 18/100 」
Well, that was unfortunate. At least the dungeon being 95 seemed to count a lot.
「 Ascension Attempt In Progress
Final evaluation: 59/100
Required score: 50
Result: PASS 」
The prince couldn't believe that. After all the resources his father had spent on him, he was only slightly above the cut?!
But he didn't dwell on that.
He had made it.
Arthur felt anxious. "Ascending" sounded great. He hoped it would let him win the war without issues.
The following windows had slightly different titles. It was no longer an Ascension "Attempt" In Progress, only an Ascension.
「 Ascension In Progress
Skills main themes:
- Self-improvement: Life - Blood
- Survival: Life - Blood
- Defense: Life - Earth - Metal
- Control: Space - Time 」
How intriguing. Different themes seemed to relate to different elements.
「 Ascension In Progress
Life: 3
Blood: 2
Earth: 1
Metal: 1
Space: 1
Time: 1 」
It looked like the number of times an element appeared on his skills' themes was relevant.
「 Ascension In Progress
Life element selected
Life element already exists
Life's elemental group: OPPOSITE
Applying rules for OPPOSITE elements
Life/Death is the absence of Death/Life
Death element selected 」
Wait a moment. Death?! He had never heard of the death element.
It wouldn't be dangerous, right?!
And why was an element selected? Would he gain a new one? Would it be another skill element, or would he be allowed to cast spells with it?
「 Ascension In Progress
Consuming skills
Assessing Ascender Candidate's knowledge
Result:
- Metal: 620 hours | Affinity set at 95%
- Life: 430 hours | Affinity set at 75%
- Death: 120 hours | Affinity set at 55% 」
Skills consumed?
Shocked, Arthur noticed that, indeed, his Mind Resistance skill was gone. He felt outraged at Fate for taking that away from him. His father had spent a lot to provide him with so many S and A-tier skills!
What about those affinity percentages? Was it based on his already existing affinity? Was his metal affinity decreasing by five percent?
What in Fate's name was going on?!
Then, he got a window with only one sentence.
「 COMMENCING ASCENSION 」
A pillar of light descended from the ceiling and surrounded him. An instant later, the world disappeared.
Arthur found himself in the sea of stars he had visited when he awakened, back when he picked an element against his father's will. However, there were already three stars right next to him this time. Looking at them felt like looking at a part of himself. He had never felt so close to anything or anyone, not even Sophie, not even metal, not even himself.
An instant later, one of them touched him, and he lost his mind.
He was metal. He was the metal in one's blood, inside an ore hidden deep under the earth, and in an asteroid shooting through the skies. And he was the nourishment in the metal in the blood flow, the pressure it felt under the earth, and the speed it moved at in outer space.
Arthur wasn't just metal. He was everything metal affected and was affected by. He was all metal in the universe and all forces that interacted with it.
It came in images, sounds, smells, taste, and touch. It came as thoughts, memories, and impressions. Knowledge flooded his brain, and he felt the urgent need to grasp whatever he could. His understanding deepened in fields and ways he had never imagined while much more escaped through his fingers like water. Yet, he had no time to regret not being smarter. He could only do his best.
It felt like an eternity. It felt like an instant. And then, 620 hours after it began, it was over.
The metal star disappeared, consumed.
Then came life.
He was the smallest bacteria and the largest dragon. He was elementals and dungeon cores. Life happened in all kinds of different ways, not limited to biology. He was life and everything that came with it, emotions and thoughts, actions and forces. He was a crushed arm and a regenerating brain.
He experienced pain and pleasure, being born and growing up. He germinated and gave birth. He understood a predator's survival instinct and became an herbivore. He was the hunter and the hunted. He lived a billion lives in moments, absorbing everything he could about how it worked.
For 430 hours, he was life.
And then, he became death.
Rot, decay, putrefaction, beheading, the end of a lifespan. He was all forms of death and the deliverer of many of them. He killed to protect himself. He killed for pleasure.
He was death and all that came with it. Glory, shame, exhilaration, mortification. Most of it didn't matter to his magic. Happiness and sadness were irrelevant. But knowing what death could produce in the ones it only indirectly touched also made him understand it better.
Arthur died. He died, and died, and died. He was a dying amoeba, a dying phoenix, a dying flower. It was painful and orgasmic. It was ugly and beautiful. He killed and died, then died and killed, and he understood death was part of life.
Without death, the body couldn't eliminate useless or defective cells. Without life, death was meaningless.
It felt too short. Only 120 hours later, he died one last time.
Then, he was back in the starry sky.
He had consumed the three stars, and the others felt way too distant. They rejected him. He was metal, life, and death, and would never be anything else.
Instead of caring, he closed his mind's eye, and in the darkness, he focused on assimilating all knowledge he had grasped. The little he had kept was already escaping him. There was too much, and his mind was too small. He regretted not having invested more in his mind stats.
He lost the sense of time. All he cared about was making that borrowed knowledge truly his. Nothing more, nothing else.
Until, in the end, everything was either his or gone.
Arthur opened his eyes, and the stars were gone, though he was still in endless darkness. A window appeared in the distance, big enough that he could read its contents.
「 Ascension In Progress
Skill: Mind Resistance
Element: Life 」
A huge magic symbol, made of a shining green light, appeared below it. A life symbol. Arthur understood most of it. What he didn't understand, he recalled. Some of the knowledge that he had just failed to make his returned.
That was the symbol of protection, and he understood it with everything he had.
It was followed by another. And another. Many more came, once more increasing his knowledge of the life element. And in the end, it formed a life spell that achieved the same as the Mind Resistance skill.
Arthur cast it, firmly embedding it in his brain. Like a curse, it would find an external mana source to keep fueling it. Unlike a curse, it wouldn't feed on the life generated by his vitality but the life mana he produced.
That should be impossible. It went against all the magic theories he had learned. That's not how spells worked.
He knew how to do it anyway.
Then, the spell disappeared, and the content in the window changed.
「 Ascension In Progress
Skill: Improved Physical Resistance
Element: Life 」
Mind Resistance had been the first skill Arthur had learned. Improved Physical Resistance wasn't the second. Not overall, at least. It was, however, the second passive skill.
It seemed this was Fate's way of making up for the loss of passive skills, not a thorough learning experience. He agreed with Fate's logic. With his newfound knowledge, he could find workarounds for every skill that had been taken from him, but it might take a while, and without some passive skills, he might outright die.
He was convinced Fate had kept him safe after taking his skills away, but what would happen to his accumulated knowledge after he lost the Expanded Memory skill that changed how his brain worked? Or to his body when he tried to bend his neck in a way he couldn't without the Elasticity skill?
Instead of ascending, he might go in the opposite direction, straight into a tumb.
The opportunity was limited to passive skills, but Arthur felt ecstatic nonetheless. He had had a lot of passives, and some symbols let him recall things he had failed to hold on to during the enlightenment period.
With Fate's assistance, he turned skill after skill into spells.
Most of his passive skills were life-attuned, but not all. For instance, Improved Packet Size and Improved Packet Density were completely beyond his life element.
At least, they should be.
「 Ascension In Progress
Skill: Improved Packet Size
Element: Life 」
It was obvious in hindsight, but Fate was changing the skills into an element fitting of him. After all, skills always used pure mana, not elemental.
The concepts involved in making a curse-like spell increase his magic's packet size were so advanced that he hadn't even received them during his enlightenment. That new knowledge was directly pushed into his mind when related symbols appeared, and they broadened his magic horizons even further beyond his wildest dreams. Arthur could even find hints of how to create homing spells on them, which only made him even more awed and scared of the dragons.
Some skills were split into more than one spell. He got three different versions of Elemental Mana Control, one for each element. Metal and death affecting his mind to better control mana should also be impossible. It was as mind-blowing as everything else.
The previous enlightenment had been astonishing enough, but it was this skill-translation part that made him truly feel as if he was genuinely ascending into something much grander than his previous self.
Finally, he set the last spell on his body. The symbols and window disappeared.
Arthur blinked and found himself back in the dungeon.