Jules was quite glad to have stumbled upon these magicule crystals. According to the memories he had obtained from the bandits, magicules crystals were a very rare and valuable resource. The reason they were so valued was due to their use in powering magical tools. This explained the presence of the red gems on both the ring and the chest. It acted as the power source for the magic symbol, kind of like a battery.
The crystals worked this way because they were made of condensed magicules. As the name suggests, magicules are the energy that is consumed when using magic. Under normal circumstances, they were tiny free-floating particles within the air. In this state magicules were useless. Luckily it seemed that humans had billions of extremely small organic devices within their bodies that were able to pull these magicules within their bodies.
These devices were named magicule condensers. These condensers had a passive role within the body which meant that they were always working without its owner even realizing it. In this aspect they were quite similar to the heart, it was not possible to stop them or increase their condensing speed by thinking about it.
This meant that at all times of the day people would be absorbing small amounts of magicules into their bodies. Many were unaware of this simple process going on. Due to this the magicules in their bodies would remain unused and stack up within their blood until the time of their death.
However, if one were to know about this, it would provide them with an opportunity to rise in strength within this world. This is because there were two main ways to use magicules. The first one was to absorb them within certain parts of your body in order to improve them. The other way was to use them on spells.
Depending on which part of the body magicules were used, different benefits would arise. To classify these benefits that arcanists of this world came up with a stat measuring system. Oddly enough that system was almost the same as Xena’s, it used strength, vitality, agility, intelligence, and perception as its areas.
This definitely came across as a surprise to Jules. After all, it was extremely unlikely for both Xena and this world to come up with the same stat system. With a bit more thinking he actually concluded that it might not actually be that unlikely. If that system was the best way to categorize stats, then it would not be impossible for both sides to have come up with the same answer.
What stood out about this system compared to Jules’ was that the values that were assigned to quantify stats were different. In Xena’s system, they increased by one for every increase in that equaled an average person’s stat. This meant that if someone had a strength of 3 then they would be thrice as strong as a normal person. On the other hand, this world’s system used a weird scale. In this scale, all stats used rank 0 level 1 as the average. If a person were to be three times as strong as the average their stat in strength would be rank 0 level 10. If they were able to reach level 11 of a stat they would increase by a rank and go back down to 1. This did not mean that their strength was lost, it was just a different way of looking at it. Also once they reached level 11, then they would experience a huge increase in strength and become twice as strong as they were in level 10. This meant that a person at level 1 of rank 1 would be six times weaker than a person at level 1 of rank 2.
Curious, Jules asked Xena to display his strength using this method.
‘[Beep! Name: Anne Martel (Jules Argent). Species: Zombie (Strand). Body statistics: Strength – Rank 0 Level 6, Vitality – Rank 0 Level 10, Agility – Rank 0 Level 6. Mind statistics: Intelligence – Rank 0 Level 2, Perception – Rank 0 Level 4 (Rank 0 Level 10.5).]’
Jules approved of this method. After all, he used to play lots of video games in his past life and this made him rather excited.
At first glance, this method to measure stats seemed rather stupid. However, it actually made a lot of sense. It seemed that the level system was made according to how much magicules it took to increase a level. Each level took 1.1 times more magicules than the previous one. If someone wanted to increase a rank it would take a whole three times as much as it took to go from level 9 to level 10. This, however, had huge benefits since increasing a rank doubled your stat.
From what Jules had learned, the reason each rank was so tough to overcome was that it required for major changes to occur within the body. These changes would be the same for everyone regardless of which stat they chose to increase. If one did not know what to improve then they would remain unable to progress. Sadly, the methods to get past those hurdles were quite expensive and poor people such as these bandits did not have the wealth to buy them. Except perhaps their leader who had stashed away a lot of wealth. This went to show how expensive they were.
Although the magicule cost for leveling up increased with each level, this did not necessarily mean that it would take an extremely long time to level up the further one went. This is because leveling up vitality caused the magicule condensers within the body to improve! This meant that the more vitality was increased, the faster one could level up. That explained why the leader and his right-hand man had both leveled up their vitality on top of their stat of choice. This way they would be able to condense magicules faster to level their other stat even faster.
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It seemed that the reason the leader had accumulated magicule crystals was not to use them to craft magic tools or to show off his wealth but to use them to increase in rank. Afterall condensing magicules was very slow and using magicule crystals allowed to bypass that process. If eaten, all the magicules within would be absorbed by the body to level up stats. This way once the leader got his hand on a method to rank up, he would be able to use the crystals to overcome the requirements.
Magicule crystals were rare and expensive because there was no way to make them. The only way they could be found was within arcane creatures. Arcane creatures could not store magicules within their blood like humans. Therefore, they would store them in the form of a magicule crystal somewhere within their body. Since arcane creatures were generally not capable of complex thought, it was impossible for them to understand how magicules worked. Luckily for them, they did not need to understand them, they made use of them without even thinking about it! Their body would naturally absorb them while some of it would form into a magicule crystal. Therefore, a rule of thumb was that the stronger an arcane creature was, the better the crystal from it would be. Nobody really knew why the crystals formed but they were useful, so people hunted arcane creatures for them.
This was of course very interesting to Jules, after all, he was a zombie now. From what he had gathered zombies were arcane creatures. Did this mean that he had a magicule crystal forming within him as well? That also probably meant that the pleasant energy he felt when he made new zombies were magicules. And that his bacteria were just absorbing those that were unused within the body. Thinking back to the energy he felt from the leader and his right-hand man perhaps he was also able to absorb some of the energy that they had already used to upgrade their stats.
Jules wanted to know more about arcanists, so he decided to dig deeper within the bandit’s memories. Sadly, his efforts were to no avail. It seems he’ll have to wait for a bit before understanding how they used magicules to cast spells.
Shifting his focus back to reality, Jules looked at the pile of valuables in front of him that had steadily been increasing all this time. He had previously ordered his zombies to bring everything of value within the camp to him. They had managed to collect all of it while Jules was still deep in thoughts.
The pile consisted of mostly weapons or valuable looking objects some of which were of unknown purposes. Within the pile, few scattered silver coins were visible along with a couple of golden ones.
Upon close examination, Jules could tell that most of it were useless. These objects were only expensive and nice looking. This had no benefits to him since he would be killed if he tried to even get close to humans that were wealthy enough to buy these. Even more so now that he had a huge fucking plague heart on his back that would turn any nearby humans into zombies.
Instead of having the zombies immediately pack away this pile of wealth, Jules picked a rather light and sharp sword from within the pile. The sword was obviously of high quality. Its edge was slightly curved and looked capable of taking a life without effort. Its handle was refined and fit perfectly within his hand. Overall the sword gave out a vibe of elegance and danger which Jules liked a lot.
He then had each zombie grab a sword as well. Afterall it was quite obvious that fighting with swords is better just barehanded. The only downside was that swords could not infect people. However, this was quickly fixed as he drew a bit of blood from himself and smeared it on the swords.
“Heh. Zombies with swords.” He chuckled. This looked rather absurd to him, Afterall zombies had always been depicted as dumb and mindless creatures back in his world. These zombies would have never been capable of wielding swords. Yet here were his zombies clumsily equipping swords.
Actually… Thinking back to Anne’s memories before she died. It seemed like the zombies she met were mindless and clearly weren’t smart enough to use swords. This had piqued Jules’ curiosity. He searched through all of the memories he had accumulated so far for more information. At first, he could not find anything, therefore, he decided to expand his search range to information that came from rumors.
‘Ah ha!’ he thought. He had found what he was looking for after having pieced it together from multiple memories.
It seemed that zombies in this world were indeed mindless creatures. It looked like zombies and their cores all had about the same level of intelligence. He also noticed that stronger zombies seemed to have higher intelligence. He could confirm that through his own experience, his intelligence had indeed risen after he absorbed more magicules. Having started off with high intelligence was definitely an advantage for him.
Satisfied with his findings, Jules ordered the zombies to move everything back into the storage tent, including the contents of the chest. The only things Jules kept behind were the ring, the sword, and the leather pouch. He quickly put the ring on his right middle finger and attached the sword’s sheath and the pouch to a belt he had stolen from the leader’s room.
Jules looked back at what he had been lucky enough to loot, especially the magicule crystals.
‘Perhaps I could eat them to become stronger, just like what the bandit leader was going to do to advance a rank?’ He thought.
Out of curiosity Jules took one of the normal gems out and carefully looked at it. It was about 5cm big while being crimson red with shades of black. It was partially cloudy, especially in the center. Jules decided to take out the small clear one to have a look. Just like the first one, this one was crimson with shades of black. However, it was completely see-through and seemed to be much purer. This one seemed to only be about 3cm big.
Jules did not really want to waste a precious resource, so he carefully considered eating a crystal. First of all, he was unsure as of which one to eat. He was also thinking that perhaps he could use the gems as extra ammo for his ring. After all his ring used one as a battery, so perhaps he could switch them out when he used one up. He was split between choosing to keep the crystals or using them.
‘Ah fuck it.’ He thought.
He grabbed one of the normal gems and chucked it in his mouth.