I was ahead of the curve. At least for now. Currently I could grind out a level 3 monsters at a rate of around 7 minutes. The main limiting factor was my Regeneration stat at 300, only giving me 3 energy every minute. That was about 60,000 points per day with the level 3 crystals giving 450 points each.

My theoretical maximum grind speed would put me at 432,000 points per day. I would need 2,000 Regeneration and a much better Body stat to keep up that pace. That didn’t even begin to touch on my concerns about Death showing up again.

What if something stronger showed up? Or two deaths next time, for double death? That would be a quick way to die. The level of uncertainty was concerning. Also rushing back to a city to turn in points more than once every 10 days was very inefficient.

That was another reason to go back to the previous grind spot. It was a full day’s travel to the city, there and back. The one where we had run into Death would require a slight detour around to avoid the striped rats to make decent time and making it hard to make the trip in a single day.

My mind drifted back to the stats, specifically the Body stat. It was weird in so many ways. I was more dense, but dense didn’t feel right, since my weight hadn’t changed. Naran had no more difficultly lifting me, compared to someone my size. My physicality was harder to disrupt would be the correct way of putting it. But then came all the other side effects.

How Ben was able to punch heads and explode them? Even though he was dead, I still didn’t forgive him for stealing all those points. I had been putting a lot of thought into how he was able to do something that didn’t make physical sense. A human body would spin, tilt, or something else would happen, not having a head explode.

It had been one of the long-term things I had been pondering. My recent stat upgrades had given me new insight. Specifically, all the hair pulling. The Body stat had three distinct effects that I had worked out so far. Most people, myself included had fallen into the trap of thinking that Body was just a strength stat plus a dexterity stat.

The first and most important effect of the Body stat was force generation and nullification. I wasn’t getting physically stronger. I was just able to exert and resist force. This was why my abs hadn’t come in yet. This was also why when a person with a high Body stat, Ben, punched someone with no Body stat, random guard, the guard’s head would explode.

It was the direct generation, transfer, and cancelation of force. My physical body wasn’t improving at all. Another misconception which threw me for a loop and was a big reason why I hadn’t worked things out. The name the Almighty System gave was not accurate in its description only the end effects to some degree. My muscles were doing less work as my Body stat increased, or at least a minimum amount.

Whatever the Body stat was, it was changing how my physical body operated, so it was no longer all based on physical principles. There were weird force shenanigans going on.

The second thing the Body stat did was grant an instinctive use of one’s movement and force projection. I had worked this out from tweezing off the hairs on my face. I couldn’t use extensive force on myself, even with a tool. It was a subconscious thing, since there was no way to control it. Like trying to bite off one’s finger. I could also kick off the ground quickly for rapid movement in combat. Those two things made no sense together.

That was another reason why the stat was so confusing at first. It just had so many weird effects that didn’t line up. There were mental limiters in place, or other limiters since the force was being generated by the Almighty System. These limiters stopped me from crushing things in my hands.

The only time I had crushed something without meaning to, had been in that meal with Tyrese and Ken after I had faced the death monster. A cup, I had crushed it when I had been incredibly angry. But, I could exert that level of violence against stuff when I wanted to. Normally there was a mental limiter in place.

The third effect was the increase in body density. Not physical density, but damage density or health. This was from all the regenerations I had done and the research that had been gathered. It had been very informative to look over the census data and how many points certain illnesses took for a restoration.

All the recent battles had provided the last set of data I needed thanks to Clarissa rationing out the points for regenerations and keeping track. It took hundreds of thousands of points, and some follow up to get an idea of the stats of the people getting regenerations, but it had become clear. Body was HP and each point in the Body stat took 1,000 points to heal.

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It was a breakthrough on par with working out summoning and crystal powder in my opinion. But it was also near completely useless. Body was already the most favored stat by far. Just being able to move quickly was a huge boon. Force, mental limitations, and HP were all the mechanics hidden underneath what the Body stat really meant.

What I really wanted to do, was work out the details of the other stats. There were surface effects, but I had no doubt that each of them was far more than what they appeared to be. Body didn’t even improve one’s body, which was both insane and incredibly tricky to figure out.

I guess the biggest thing was the difference in force that was generated between a large gap in the Body stat and being able to resist that force generation. If the difference was high enough, the force would just go through and boom, exploded body parts.

This made me think through how a high-level melee fighter would fight. Speed, closing the distance, and a single alpha strike to the target. Victory or defeat would be decided then. If the target of the melee fighter dodged, then the target was clearly stronger. If the target was hit, but didn’t die, the melee fighter would be able to dodge a counterattack, since the shock of an attack would disrupt a person and skills. The exception was monsters. They would ignore damage it just attack.

I had been thinking about focusing a stat and Body was high up on the list, but I didn’t want to fight in melee. It was all or nothing and closing the distance to monsters was scary. One would need balls of steel to rush in, tanking or avoiding damage, all to deliver a single alpha strike to achieve victory.

It also felt too much like exercise and I hated exercise. I wanted to be a wizard and bombard people from a distance. Up close fighting was nerve wracking. I liked to think and plan out my moves. All rushing in had done was get my legs melted.

I had been thinking about finding someone to cover me in melee combat. To tank, block, and defend against attacks while I maneuvered behind them as a caster. The problem was, it would always be better to attack than defend. Better to move than defend.

The Body stat would remain a priority for a long time. “I got the next boar,” I said. Naran looked at me. “I want to try something. I should be fine, but watch, just in case.”

“Got it, shout if there is a problem,” he replied. I nodded at that. The boar came into range and charged me. I rushed forward and leapt into the air. The monster turned its head upwards, slowed down, but wasn’t in a position to counter my jump. I landed on top of its head with both my feet, plowing it into the ground. My feet didn’t break through its body. I leapt off. Acid Shot.

The monster disappeared into dust that in turn disappeared. That single test had told me quite a bit about my Body stat.

“Learn anything?” Naran asked. I hesitated and saw that only Naran was in range to hear me. Might as well tell him, it wasn’t a big secret, and he might have some kind of insight.

“That my Body stat is slightly above level 2.” If things had been even, my drop down, would have only exerted the force of my physical body. If it was much higher, by another level or two, then I would have smashed through the boar’s head with my feet. One good thing came of this, I finally had a way to match up my stats to their respective monster level through force generation and nullification.

The problem was that it implied something very terrible about stats. Something that I had suspected but was hesitant to say or even put into words. Once my Body stat hit 1,000 I would have a much better understanding of the stat curve.

I suspected the stat curve was logarithmic. I didn’t want to. My soul was crying out at the unfairness of it all. But the numbers and my combat ability didn’t lie. With a Body stat of 500, I was at level 2.5. This implied that a Body stat of 100 equated to level 2, while a Body stat of 1,000 equated to level 3. This was based on the innate abilities of the monsters I had faced and my previous fights and experience with the stat.

That didn’t make sense though. I thought of death. It was fast, insanely fast. To reach that speed I would need 10,000 Body if the stat scaling was what I thought. I began adding up the zeroes.

This kind of scaling implied that a level 10, would have base stats of ten billion. That was billion with a ‘b’. It was crushing to even think about. To give into despair. How much grinding was that? Higher level monsters gave less points, stat costs went up, and the effective power per stat point was going down, maybe.

I would need to run more tests to be sure, but I needed to prepare myself for the worst. I had thought that this place would be a slog, but it was looking to be even worse than that. The easy grinding. The quick progression, it was rapidly slowing down and would get worse.

I would eventually be measuring things in years, or thousand-day intervals and not days. Deeks, what a stupid name. Would there be meeks or ceeks one day? A thousand-day or hundred-day interval respectively.

I had been in the place for about a year. Would it take another year for level 4? A decade for level 5? A century for level 6? A lifetime of grinding for level 10? I could grind with the best of them. To push through the loneliness, the frustration, the repetitiveness. But that kind of timeframe was daunting.

I had thought about it. My references to this being a cultivation land weren’t a joke, but the sheer scope was hard to imagine. Humans always did have a hard time conceptualizing very large or small numbers. I had worked hard all my life to cast those preconceptions aside, but now I had slammed face first back into them.