Chapter 73
I could still taste the flies and the sewage water, even after countless rounds of brushing my teeth with the strongest mint extract I had. I was sure the food was great, everyone said so, but the mere sight of the flies and that water, meant that that was all I tasted and nothing else.
Artina had said that it was to celebrate for us qualifying to the semifinals, and effectively the Duchies. Apparently, she had heard from trusted sources she wouldn’t state that the top four would be going to the Duchies. As much as I wanted to believe that to be true, I took it with a grain a salt. Besides, I still needed to make it to the finals so as to get rid of a certain investor.
In one hand, I was grateful that the others had treated Sunshine and I to the meal. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to pay for my own meal. One of the other many reasons I had been offended by their casual disregard of the mandated meal for competitors. But it still bothered me that even after winning so many fights, I was still as penniless, maybe even more so, than when I began participating in The Grand Competition. My life had been certainly the better when I was a simple farmhand. Sometimes I found myself missing the weeks I spent helping out at Silas’. But it was always fleeting, especially when I remembered the amount of gold I would earn if I happened to win the whole thing.
Even so, I was starting to think that it might be a good idea to find other ventures that would bring me gold. Even if I did win lots of gold during my sting at The Grand Competition, I would still need to work it for me to get more. I couldn’t just keep on fighting in the competition for the rest of my life. I had a feeling that I might not be participating in the competition for a second time. The sooner I found other ways to earn gold, the better it would be for me.
How to go about that? Of the few stories I had read in old earth about other people in my situation, they always found something that the new world lacked that they had plenty of knowledge about and invested heavily in it. Sadly for me, I studied IT in college and as far as I had seen, there was nothing that could even remotely be called a computer in the Realm of Mesily. Maybe I hadn’t explored enough of it, which was absolutely true, but the little I had seen did leave much to be hoped for.
I studied a lot of things outside my degree, but the level of industrial and technological advancement was a tad behind what I could actually work with. Maybe I could ‘invent’ the internal combustion engine, I hadn’t seen any cars around. But that would require oil, which I also hadn’t seen. Did this realm even have oil? Or would I be the reason they ruined their environment by going around digging for oil. That would have to wait until I visited more of Mesily, or talked to more people. Who knows, I could find something that would make me overly rich overnight.
Then again there was the political situation to think about too. From what little I had learnt, there were several governing systems in play in the whole of Mesily. I could easily put them into two groups; the republics and the monarchies, but that didn’t mean they were so simplistic. And I really needed to understand them as much as I could if I planned to make myself rich.
I knew that without knowing how to work with the ruling government, I could so easily lose any gold that I acquired. Worse still, I could end up losing all profits, and more, in paying for fees and taxes. I liked to think that I was good with numbers, but I openly acknowledged that I lacked business acumen. I would need someone to help with the management of any venture I decided to pursue. And then someone else to help with navigating the hurdles set by the ruling government. That was just the tip of the iceberg. Maybe it would be easier to just take over a kingdom or two. Just thinking about all the taxes I could get from that had me drooling, and I nearly lost control of the Mana I had been cultivating.
Reigning it back into control, I began to fantasize about the things I would need to take over a kingdom, or maybe curve myself a piece of the Lawless Lands. The first thing were minions, and lots of them. I had never tried to be a leader in my previous life so I had no idea how good I was at convincing people to follow me. But someone had told me that I was scary to approach. Maybe that would work in my favor. Fear was good, right?
And then there was capital, or in this case gold. I would need it to entice those who weren’t exactly minions but they still worked for me. With those two, I could go for the next important thing; resources. I could see myself sweeping through the Lawless Lands with my minions to subdue all that tried to stand in my way and, negotiating with and paying off those that proved to be a little more problematic to deal with by force. Maybe then I could begin working on those things I had wanted to in my previous life.
Yeah, let’s not do that. How many innocents would I have to kill for that to come true, I thought, my family might not be okay with it. That thought quickly shattered my fantasy as a I came to a disconcerting realization; I had not, not even once, exactly missed my family from my previous life for all the months I had been in Mesily. I really was a bad brother and son. Knowing them, they must have been devastated by my death. What family wouldn’t be? Maybe they were somewhat glad though, after all, I was the laziest of the bunch. Their opinion, not mine, not that I disagreed with them.
Pushing that fantasy away, I brought all my focus into [Mana Cultivation]. I still didn’t understand why it wasn’t a Skill itself, and asking Clare had earned me nothing. Over the last few days, it had felt like the Mana in me was putting up a resistance to me manipulating it, so much so that some of my Skills were a little less powerful than I was used to. Clare had told me it was because I was in the cusps of breaking through to Level 40. When I asked for clarification on which Level 40 they were talking about, I got nothing in return.
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In general, I was at Level 39 with only three Attribute Levels left for me to make it to Level 40. I just so happened to have three Attributes; [Constitution], [Intelligence] and [Wisdom] at Level 39 too. It could be either, but I was more inclined to the bottleneck affecting the individual Attributes and not my general Level.
Come to think about it, I might have had the same issue just before the beginning of the Counties but I couldn’t be sure. Back then, I had had issues getting [Agility] and [Endurance] to level up as they had been doing. Maybe I should have paid a little more attention to it back then.
I had used up all my saved potions pushing myself to try and see if I could get [Constitution] to make the jump to Level 40, and Artina and the other Sjuma finalist had been so happy to oblige my request. That whole experience had left me aching so much that I thought my bones had developed pain sensors of their own. By the end of the session, I could barely walk myself back to my room.
I had decided to give my body a rest then and concentrated on trying to get [Intelligence] and [Wisdom] to level up. It had had me spending nearly all the little silvers I had left and I had ultimately missed the group fight, not that I thought it would benefit me at the time being. I didn’t see myself ever becoming part of a group, Sunshine on the other hand was hungry for it.
By the end of it, all that reading had gotten me nothing but a splitting headache. As I felt the Mana resist me further still, I regretted not focusing on the Attributes that weren’t at the bottleneck, I might have become a Level 40 before the semifinals.
Unlike the headache inducing Attributes, Skills had actually seen a considerable degree of advancement since the Counties began. [Mana Manipulation] had reached level 20, same as [Hurtling Projectile] and [Staffs]. I had thought that level 20 would be the maximum but I had gotten nothing to show whether that was the case; no maxed identifier like I had seen on some of the stories back on old earth, or even the Skills changing to become advanced as Clare had hinted at. I also had several Skills close to level 20 too.
As much as I had improved the Skills I had considerably, sadly, I hadn’t gained any new Skill that could be useful in a fight. All my new Skills were support skills, not that I didn’t value them, but I needed something that could add to my punching power. If not that, at least to my restrain capabilities. I needed to gain the power to utterly destroy my opponents, or make them incapable of avoiding my strikes. That was the only way I could see myself keeping on in The Grand Competition, and I really wanted that, no, I needed that.
After what felt like hours of punching through a wall with my bare fists, I gave up on [Mana Cultivation] and decided to study the new staffs I had acquired. Being gifted with more like. That still bothered me, but there was nothing I could do about it, not with my current financial situation. Maybe we might pass through a forest on our way to the Duchies, then I could make a ton of staffs. Assuming I make it through though. I was choosing not to believe Artina at all.
After all I had gone through with [Mana Attenuation], it felt like I had achieved a level that allowed me to enhance my staffs to a degree that they were more than just plain pieces of wood. I had read somewhere that staffs needed to have a give to them, but as I added more reinforcement to them the more rigid they seemed to get. I wasn’t sure if that was for the best or not. To me, all that mattered was the fact that they no longer broke as easily as they did before.
‘[Mana Attuned Staff] – [Quality : Adequate]’
The response I got after [Identify]ing one of the staffs was a surprise. I had gotten used to the poor quality I worked with during my experimentations in the field, so the new quality was a welcome surprise. Maybe that’s why the staff had survived my last fight.
‘Clare, how many quality levels are there for [Mana Attenuation]?’
‘Six. Poor, Adequate, Average, Good, Great and Exceptional.’
It was the first time Clare had given me an elaborate answer to a question. And I liked it. I wished it would stay so but deep down I knew that it wouldn’t.
‘So, how do I improve the quality of my mana attuned staffs?’
Truth be told, I had no recollection of what exactly I had done different that had raised the quality of my attunement from poor to adequate. It might not have been the best there was, but at least it was, well… adequate.
‘You keep doing what you have been doing.’
And suddenly it felt like we were back to the age old clipped answers Clare had been offering me before. I wanted to curse them, but prior experience had taught me that usually got me nowhere.
‘Please elaborate.’
‘You need to keep improving the quality of Mana channels you establish in the staffs. That will in turn enhance the attributes the staff gains with the imbued Mana. That easy enough for you understand?’
You didn’t need to add that last part, I thought. I didn’t direct it to Clare but I was sure they picked it up nonetheless. I was beginning to realize that it might be easier if I just assumed Clare had access to everything in my head. I just hoped that they couldn’t actually take over and control my body for me.
Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I wasn’t the best fighter out there, and I knew that. But with something that I assumed to be a universe-level intelligence in control of my body, maybe they could use my body in ways that I couldn’t even begin to comprehend.
‘Clare, is there an auto-pilot option?’
‘Auto-pilot?’
‘You know… something like auto-control. You know, for you to take control over my body. Something like that.’
There was a moment of hesitation before Clare finally answered, ‘No.’
I wanted to read into that hesitation, hopeful that it meant that there was a way. It could have been my imagination though.
‘All is the pity,’ I finally said. ‘It would be easier if you could fight the fights for me.’
‘Yes, it would be easier.’
And then they go and say that. How did they expect me to believe them when they more often than not made statements that left me more sure each day?
I chose not to pursue that. I was already exhausted already, and I had a semifinal to win come the morrow. Thinking about it reminded me of Monty, my opponent, I still felt a little angry with him for lopping me up in that debate. Maybe it wasn’t exactly a good idea to interact with the competitors before the fights after all.
I returned my staffs to their resting place by the desk, which I rarely, if ever, used. I then proceeded to take a shower to wash away the sweat I had gotten from just the [Mana Cultivation] session I had gone through. And to bed I went. I fell asleep to the thoughts of how I would fight against a sword wielding opponent. I had faced several before, and I didn’t think it would be any different. But those others hadn’t made it to the semifinals of the Counties. I couldn’t use them to gauge how well Monty would be.