There were several things to go over from the slew of messages that had come through following the spider's death, but Devon decided he needed to finish cleaning up the mess he made before he sat down to go over them all.

First, he retrieved his sword from the leg of the spider before stowing it in his inventory. Then he had to roll the spider over to get the axe that had been left embedded in the spider's hulking body. The task was far harder than Devon would have liked. The little rockspiders he'd first encountered in the ravines had been very light for their size, but this monster was every bit as heavy as it looked.

Next, he walked over to the cocoon the overseer's corpse resided in and snatched the tile that had appeared on the floor next to it. Then, finally, he walked over to the terminal.

Without hesitation, he brought out his cot and took a seat, finally ready to go over the results of his desperate gamble.

Status.

[Status]

Name: Devon Wells

Race: [E-Grade Human]

Level: 11

Class: Selection available.

Profession: [Cursed Schemer - Level 2]

Mana: 21/100

Talents: [Spear Proficiency - Level 1], [Sword Proficiency - Level 3]

Skills: [Sever], [The Mask]

Titles: Initiate, Cursed(3), Vicious, Ambitious, Giantslayer

Strength: 43

Dexterity: 44

Vitality: 38

Endurance: 37

Arcane: 40

Spirit: 12

Free Points: 50

Talons: 894

Holy shit.

All of his basic attributes had more than doubled, but that was only the start of the changes.

He immediately took note of the mana drain he'd accumulated, as it told him several vital things. First was that Sever cost 20 mana to activate, and second was that leveling up did not restore his mana to full, but it did give him the mana from the level immediately. He assumed the extra 1 was due to it passively regenerating. He went ahead and pulled up the descriptions for the new skill and titles next.

[Vicious]

Awarded for executing a defenseless sentient creature. Enhanced by gloating over user's victory before an execution. User may be more inclined to commit heinous acts in the future.

Strength, Dexterity, and Arcane +4. All stats +5%.

[Ambitious]

Killed an enemy 5 levels higher than your own.

All stats +5.

[Giantslayer]

Killed an enemy 10 levels higher than your own.

All stats +10.

[The Mask]

If your identity is itself a weakness, why not change it? Parameters available upon activation.

So titles can give a more adaptive bonus as well as a basic one. Holy hell, 15 extra points in everything? And if The Mask does what I think it does then I'll be able to return to society, as it were.

The encounter had been fortuitous beyond his imagination. Giantslayer and The Mask were unbelievably helpful.

Under ordinary circumstances, Devon likely never would have gotten Giantslayer. Fighting something like the trap spider with his basic attributes and the inability to distribute free points? Never would have worked. It was only due to luck that he'd happened to lure in an opponent the spider had deemed enough of a threat to spring its true trap, one that Devon hadn't even expected, on. Truthfully, Devon had thought those webs to be stuck to the ground, not left floating to be instantly spun around prey.

Still, there was more to go through. When he opened the profession dialog he noticed there was a new option for completed plots, and he quickly opened it.

[Claim the Terminal] - Cleared

Karmic Influence: None.

Complexity: Normal

Time investment: ~10 Minutes

Reward: All stats +1.

Compared to the rewards of his new titles, the 1 additional stat in all of his attributes seemed rather sad. But he supposed that was still basically an entire level's worth of stats for him, so it was a nice little cherry on top.

And finally, it was time for something he had been waiting for. He opened the class selection menu to see what his options were.

[Cursed Warrior] (Common)

[Cursed Mage] (Common)

[Cursed Assassin] (Common)

[Cursed Archer] (Common)

[Cursed Trickster] (Common)

He couldn't help but frown at each of the options listed. He wondered if everybody else started out with the same broad array of extremely general sounding classes at common rarity.

He opened the dialogs for each class down the list.

[Cursed Warrior]

The path of a warrior that has brought a curse upon themselves.

Skillset: Melee focused.

Attribute gain per level: All stats +1.

[Cursed Mage]

The path of a mage that has brought a curse upon themselves.

Skillset: Magic focused.

Attribute gain per level: All stats +1.

[Cursed Assassin]

The path of an assassin that has brought a curse upon themselves.

Skillset: Kill focused.

Attribute gain per level: All stats +1.

[Cursed Archer]

The path of a ranged specialist that has brought a curse upon themselves.

Skillset: Ranged focused.

Attribute gain per level: All stats +1.

[Cursed Trickster]

The path of a trickster that has brought a curse upon themselves.

Skillset: Varied.

Attribute gain per level: All stats +1.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

His frown deepened when he realized all of the classes had the same skill gains per level. He felt that there was something distinctly wrong with this. Shouldn't classes have a bit more individuality? The only thing that seemed to change between the classes was the skillsets. Still, there didn't seem to be much of a point in putting the choice off, so he went through the pros and cons of each.

He discarded mage and archer immediately. If he was to be expected to battle monsters in the Infinite Realms to gain levels and power he wasn't going to limit himself to classes that either used a finite resource to attack or couldn't properly defend themselves up close. These might have been appealing options if it wasn't for the fact that every monster he encountered rushed him in a frenzy.

That left warrior, assassin, and trickster. His gaze lingered on trickster for a long time, but eventually he decided against it. He had initially believed trickster to be the go-to option as it seemed like it would have excellent synergy with his profession. But there was some part of him deep inside that warned against it. He had to take a mental step back to figure out why he felt that way.

There was something about the class selection process on his screen that felt very… sterile. His profession had the feeling of an old antique that had been forgotten, and it contained a hint of unknown mystery and danger. But everything in his selection felt very bland and modernized. He didn't have any evidence, but his gut told him that the skill options trickster gave him would be either similar enough to his profession skills that they canceled each other out, or that the skills provided by trickster would be straight-up downgrades.

Warrior and assassin both had very clear connotations in his mind, and both had positives and negatives. Generally, he believed that the best way to handle a fight was to kill the enemy before they had a chance to even attack. The idea of having skills that could kill things faster fit this mentality very well. However, reality wasn't so kind.

He was more than likely going to run into more situations like the one with the rockspiders where he simply wasn't able to do anything other than deal with situations he wasn't prepared for head on. And that meant he needed versatility.

And he was kind of convinced the system would make the assassin class's skills all revolve around poisons or something, and that just seemed pointless.

Select class cursed warrior.

Accept class?

[Cursed Warrior]

The path of a warrior that has brought a curse upon themselves.

Skillset: Melee focused.

Attribute gain per level: All stats +1.

Accept.

User has accepted the class [Cursed Warrior]

Skill [Refine] has been learned.

He immediately brought up the description of his third skill.

[Refine]

Everything can be improved. All it takes is time and effort.

He once again frowned. Refine sounded a lot more like a skill for a blacksmith than a warrior. He wasn't even sure what it would do, the description was so vague.

He held out his sword, figuring now would be as good a time as any to try it out. He realized the blade on it was once again completely screwed, but he ignored that for now.

Activate skill; Refine.

Specify target.

Did that mean he needed to have a target when he used his skills? He hadn't felt like he needed to do that when he used Sever.

Uh… Set target as starter sword.

Nothing happened. Devon cursed to himself. He had gotten so used to his profession giving nice, detailed answers that going back to using the regular system was like coming back to an abusive mistress. He decided to just put Refine on hold for now and experiment with Sever, a skill he knew he could activate.

Cancel skill.

Skill canceled.

Activate skill; Sever.

Nothing happened. He growled in frustration, wishing he could somehow force the system at large to conform to the wonderful error filled design of his profession.

He glanced over at his status, hoping the +1 to all stats had at least acted retroactively, and noticed something. First, it hadn't, which pissed him off. He'd lost 5 precious stat points because he'd accidentally killed something that gave him 2 levels at once. Second, his mana had gone down.

Mana: 4/100

So the skill did activate, even though I didn't do anything. Does that mean I need to activate the skill at the exact time I swing, or…

He once again held his sword out. He took a practice slice and felt the power of Sever flow through his swing, even though he had only cut the air.

This was a huge discovery for him. It meant that he could queue up a skill to activate before he took the correlated action. He wanted to try out a bunch more things using Sever with this information, but his mana was at rock bottom, so he'd just have to wait.

But his mana being low did help him in a different way. One of the only notifications he'd gotten recently of him doing something wrong was when it notified him that he didn't have enough mana to activate Sever.

Activate skill; Refine.

Specify target.

Set target as rock. Set target as hand. Set target as cot.

He ran through dozens of things, but nothing prompted the skill's activation. Eventually, he got frustrated and started thinking random things.

Set target as mountain trap spider. Set target as Sever.

Cannot refine [Sever]. [Sword Proficiency] is not a high enough level.

Oh. Ohhhh. So that's how it is.

Refine wasn't a skill meant to be used on objects at all, but rather a skill meant to refine his techniques. He thought back to the samey descriptions all of the class skillsets had. He was willing to bet money that the only real skill each of the classes gave was Refine, and it was meant to be used on the generalist skills the system gave out. So if he went out of his way to get an archery skill for some reason, his version of Refine wouldn't work on it because an archer's skills weren't tailored for melee.

The information made him doubly glad he had picked warrior over assassin. He had no idea what kind of skills would be considered 'kill' skills, but he had a vague notion they would have, in fact, been related to poison.

The more he thought about the potential of Refine the more he got excited. He wasn't sure exactly how much it would actually improve his skills, but it meant he could fully explore weapon types and styles as he pleased, and Refine would always be able to bring a weapon's skills up to par. He got the feeling none of the skills he upgraded through Refine would be quite as powerful as more weapon-specific class skills, but it didn't matter.

His goal had been to be versatile, and this was exactly what he needed.

He finally felt he had looked at and played with his personal gains enough. He put his blunted blade back into his inventory and took a look at the axe he had wrested from the corpse of the beast.

The handle on the thing was similar in shape to a standard wood axe you could find in any hardware store, but the blade was the size of a full-on fantasy battle axe. It looked quite like something you would see in a video game. The materials it had been constructed with seemed to be bone and leather, but that didn't stop it from feeling far more dangerous than his metal starter weapons.

[Savage Axe]

Class E

F-Grade Strength Affinity

The axe was certainly a step up from the class F starting equipment, but Devon wasn't sure he liked the heft of the weapon. Still, it saved him from having to buy a starting axe, and it was an improvement over his own shoddy equipment. He wasn't sure what affinity meant, but he didn't really care.

He brought out the overseer's tile and was grateful that the information stored on the tile immediately linked to his own system without having to search for a command for half an hour.

[Status] - Deceased

Name: Tal'o Dar Valkurna

Race: [E-Grade Vishan]

Vishan… good to have a name for them at least.

Everything else in the status screen either had none or 0 listed. Devon supposed that made sense, as a dead person couldn't exactly have stats, skills, or titles. Even in the Infinite Realms death was the great equalizer.

He did take note that spirit was not listed among the base attributes, but Devon wasn't sure if that was because the overseer hadn't awakened his spirituality or if the spirit stat was removed on death. Devon leaned toward the former being more likely, as it seemed far more practical that the system simply list it as 0 like everything else.

He moved onto the creature's inventory next, and scowled when most of it consisted of the same kinds of basic supplies provided by the system. They were of vishan make, but they were essentially the same items.

More important than the survival items were the four healing pills that sat at the bottom of the list. Devon quickly transferred those over to his own inventory, glad he wouldn't have to spend 200 of his own talons to restock on supplies. Once he was done with that he noticed a blinking notification in the corner of the dialog.

Spatial Bead too far away to access.

Spatial Bead, what the heck is that?

He thought for a moment, then stood up and walked over to the cocoon the overseer was still encased in. When he got within half a meter the icon disappeared and a second inventory list appeared.

Devon's eyes widened. Somewhere on the overseer's corpse was an item that allowed him to have a second inventory. Devon quickly looked over the new list, and quickly realized that the space within the secondary inventory must be at least two to three times as big.

However, Devon couldn't help but feel disappointed when he saw the bead was full of junk. It was just random monster parts and various hunks of garbage.

Wait, could this stuff potentially be crafting materials?

Devon looked down at the vishan skeptically. The reptilian didn't look very much like a crafter to him, but what did he know of vishan culture?

He looked at the cocoon with a sigh. It took almost half an hour to cut open the cocoon and cautiously dig through the overseer's melting body to find the stupid bead. Still, he had to admit the venture he would have otherwise completely ignored yielded good results even beyond the bead.

[Lesser Imbued Strength Belt]

+2 Strength

[Lesser Imbued Strength Vambraces]

+2 Strength

The rest of the vishan's equipment was either melting along with the corpse or completely unsalvageable. Still, free gear was a very good thing to get, even if it did seem to be pretty bottom of the barrel.

Just as Devon was content to leave the corpse and everything left on it behind he got a system prompt.

Belongings of deceased must be fully extricated before you may close the inventory dialog.

So the system didn't like people just leaving junk in empty subspace. Devon wondered if maintaining those spaces for eternity cost the system some kind of resource, but he dismissed the question. There was no point in asking questions that he doubted would ever be answered, even if he got out of the tutorial alive.

He was about to just dump everything in a corner when he thought of something. He looked at the terminal and the cot he had placed next to it and realized he shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

He dumped all the remaining survival supplies he'd bought from the last terminal on the ground around the new terminal and transferred the vishan's supplies to his own inventory to replace his own. He figured he'd probably use this terminal as a more permanent camp because of its excellent location, and then he'd use the vishan's supplies for when he needed to establish a forward camp.

And also free stuff never hurt to have.