Lucas had worked pretty hard for that skill—almost fifty hours of intense training with a coach assisting him the entire time. He didn’t need to work out like regular boxers did, thanks to the system that kept him in top shape all the time. What he really needed was technique, and that was all his training focused on, wasting no time on anything else.
He looked at his new skill like a kid with a new toy. It was an incredible sign of recognition of his dedication over the last few days, but what really made him smile was the last part of the description: “Gives you a 25% boost in Strength and Agility every time you fight using pugilist skills.” That alone made his training worth it, as his fighting style relied almost entirely on these two stats, so to have a skill that gave him a boost to both was incredible. A 25% boost was pretty significant at his level, his strength would jump from 31 to 38 and his agility from 34 to 42.
The condition that he should be using pugilist skills to use the boost wasn’t bad either, as he planned on using his recently learned boxing movements for most of his attacks. Only adapting a little here and there to include the blade factor, but he imagined that as long as most of the movement was 70% percent pugilism-based, it should count for the skill boost. After all, not all boxers fought the same way.
Training before the system was completely different from training after the system, and the speed at which he progressed in only one week was shocking. His coach even said to him in their last class together that he had talent for boxing. He didn’t know if that was just something NPCs were supposed to say after their student received a skill related to the class he was teaching or if it was genuine, but he sure was happy to hear it.
The speed of his progress made him wonder, however, how much he could’ve achieved if he had added the time compression feature to his training rooms. That was one of the options available in the totem, but it was too expensive. Even the most basic option 1-2, which meant every one hour outside would be two hours inside, cost a fortune.
Lucas did have the money at the time, but he knew his money wouldn’t last forever. His Alchemy Store was still just an idea, and his necromancer money had already taken a big hit when he bought Hilda’s house. Coupled with the intense training schedule he had put himself on and the constant upgrades he made to the quest for the fungus, along with a few quests placed looking for ingredients for Hilda to make her potions, he began to run low on cash.
Fortunately, his daily visits to the library didn’t require any money, and he had also made some progress in the brains department. He had learned a lot during the past week, but a few of the most important pieces of information he found could be summed up as three things: skills, special constitutions, and hidden stats.
The first was pretty basic information that most should already have, but Lucas didn’t. The most obvious one, which Lucas had already figured out, was that the skills that appeared in the skill selection were a mixture of skills related to your experiences and actions, and a few oddballs related to your class, environment, etc. The book also mentioned that the lowest amount of skills that could appear in the skill selection were three, and the highest were five.
He remembered that his first skill selection had the lowest possible number, but he imagined that was because it was his first. It was also said in the book that usually, on the first skill selection, there would be one or more skills that were the most basic ones from the class the person had picked. Lucas took some time thinking about that.
Was his bone-blade the most basic skill in his class? It could be, but he doubted it. That skill was probably one that he would use for a long time, but maybe he had misinterpreted the book. Maybe by “basic” it could mean essential? That seemed like a long shot. He only knew one other “first” skill from another class, and that was the “split arrow” from the archer’s class. The girl in the forest had picked that, and Aysha had too. That seemed like a pretty basic skill compared to his, even if it was quite useful in specific situations. After some more thought, he concluded he shouldn’t compare his unique class to regular classes; the word unique was there for a reason and he had to remember his skill also had unique on it. His experience with his class could be completely different from others, and he should take the information with a pinch of salt.
For a few moments, he even wondered what would’ve happened if instead of picking his bone-blade skill, he picked one of the others. Would that lead him into a completely different path? Would his class take a different turn? But a few moments later, he found out that the skills he hadn’t picked would still be available for him the next time he had a skill selection, which, by the way, happened every ten levels, at least until he reached level 100. The book emphasized that the first ten skill selections would be the foundation for the next ones, so they should be carefully chosen considering the path he wanted to follow.
Lucas understood what the book said and also understood some of what it didn’t say: Considering that the skills that appeared in the skill selection relied almost entirely on the experiences a person had in that time frame between ten levels, if someone just leveled up by killing most of the same enemies and not doing much besides that, the skills they would be offered wouldn’t be so great. However, if a person learned different things and leveled up through different means, adventuring throughout the world, they would probably receive much better options in their skill selection.
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It was clear to him that the path to power wasn’t a matter of speed or efficiency in leveling up; it was about quality and maybe diversification. Which made him more assured in his choice of slowing down his rate of leveling up. That wouldn’t hinder him afterward; on the contrary, it might even help.
On the topic of special constitutions, he found out they weren’t so rare in the multiverse and that he had even met a few beings who had one already: the undead. Undead were one of the most common special constitutions there were in the multiverse.
Their constitution, as the name suggested, allowed them to be dead and alive at the same time, giving them incredible resistance and making them extremely hard to kill. With the downside that they weren’t the sharpest tools in the shed and were usually controlled by someone else, like the necromancer had controlled those undead in the Dark Forest.
The thing that he hadn’t paid much attention to, however, was that, like his class, his constitution was also unique. If this was a good or bad thing, it was yet to be discovered. Like the undead constitution, it could present major flaws, and one obvious one was his weakened overall body.
After a while, however, Lucas closed that book. There were a lot of names and types of special constitutions there, and overall, it was a good book to have, but he knew that most of those names would go way over his head, so there was no point in reading it at that moment.
Another curious piece of information he found among those books wasn’t actually a fact but a theory or a rumor: beyond the regular stats—Strength, Agility, Perception, Vitality, Toughness and Magic—there was also another set of stats that were hidden from everyone. They called it fixed stats or immutable stats. Supposedly, they contained all the stats that they could never change such as charisma, intelligence, and even luck.
That sent Lucas mind on a spiral. Was it really possible that all aspects of a person’s life were represented by stat points hidden somewhere? If he somehow found a way to upgrade his intelligence, could he maybe become a super-genius? The possibilities were innumerable and even if the book said that theory was not proven, Lucas didn’t doubt for a second that it could very well be true. If the system was capable of doing the things it did, what could prevent it from making a hidden stats screen somewhere?
On the most regular stats, he also found some good information. He had been intrigued by the actual effects of a few stats, and in one of those books, he found a general explanation about them. On the more relevant information for him: Vitality increased the health pool and also the speed of recovery, as Lucas had predicted, but his special constitution seemed to amplify the effects of the recovery somehow.
Strength made someone stronger, but also—and that was what raised Lucas’ attention—made claws and fangs from beasts sharper. He had no idea how that worked, but he wondered if the same could be applied to his blades, because it would be very good if it did.
Toughness was what he expected, basically making the body tougher. The same could be applied to fangs and claws, and likely his blades as well.
Perception was one that he was very interested in, and according to the book, it worked almost as an amplifier of all his senses, making it very useful for hunters and archers that had to see their prey or enemies from far away.
Magic was directly related to the mana pool and the effectiveness of attacks using mana. Lucas thought again about the fireball attack he had learned during the tutorial. In the last few days, he hadn’t had the time to focus on his mana or auras at all, as all the time was consumed with his boxing training, learning alchemy and reading. There was simply too much to do and too little time.
Lucas left the library for the last time during this past week and began to think again about his financial situation again. When he arrived at the city, he was loaded with the necromancer’s money, having about a million coins. But Hilda’s place took almost half of it, and he had spent plenty on his trainings too. Still, he had about three hundred thousand coins left. That might seem like a lot, but one had to remember that he had spent almost a hundred and fifty thousand coins only on his last week’s training.
That was a completely insane amount of money, and he was even a little embarrassed. It was simply crazy to spend money like this, but the truth was: in this world, you needed to pay to play. He had stayed in the Training Center for seven hours a day with a sparring partner and a teacher, and that wasn’t cheap. Even if he chose to cut costs on the setting, it still wasn’t enough to make it any more affordable.
In a sense, his money along with his efforts were what guaranteed that sweet new skill he had gained, showing him the importance of money. But there was nothing he could do at the moment. He had to wait for his fungus to arrive if he wanted to start his alchemy store, and he didn’t dare risk the rest of his money in another investment at the time. After all, George Hastings had his filthy little hands spread all across Zoria, and before he was gone for good, it was unlikely that anyone would be sharing that cake with him.
With a sigh, he thought about the thing he had been avoiding: he would need to stop his trainings sessions for the time being, as much as he didn’t want to. He still needed to be able to raise the reward for the fungus occasionally, even if only once a week, or who knows how long it would take for him to receive the damn thing. That was directly related to his influx of cash too, because once he got a hold of that fungus, his plan could proceed.
With these dark projections in his mind, a light at the end of the tunnel appeared in the form of an idea. Hadn’t Aysha said that the rewards the Tower was giving were pretty good? Could she have meant money? Lucas thought about this for a while but decided that even if it wasn’t directly money, if it was something that he could sell, then…
To the tower we go!