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You have killed Regent’s Hound - F rank - Level 9 x5
You have killed Regent’s Hound - F rank - Level 7 x8
You have killed Regent’s Hound - F rank - Level 5 x14
You have levelled up x11
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Status
Age: 16
Name: Elijah Ashborne
Level: 20
Affinity: Shadow
Strength: 8
Agility: 9
Constitution: 16
Mind: 13
Mana: 0
Primary Artifact: None
Secondary Artifact/s: None
[Stat Points: 14]
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I dump 4 points into Constitution to speed up my wounds and 6 points into agility bringing up to a nice 15. I split the remaining points between mind and strength, turning them into 15 and 10 respectively.
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Status
Age: 16
Name: Elijah Ashborne
Level: 20
Affinity: Shadow
Strength: 10
Agility: 15
Constitution: 20
Mind: 15
Mana: 0
Primary Artifact: None
Secondary Artifact/s: None
[Stat Points: 0]
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I frown at the mana. Crap I got too caught up evening the numbers that I forgot to see what increasing my mana does. Damn.
I get up and pick up Dante, laying him in his tent. I cut open the beast to take their essence stones and see if I get any artifacts.
After cutting through half of them, I luck upon an artifact. I pull it out of the beast and get a notification.
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Sense ring - No Rank - No Affinity
Skill:
- Sense: Grants the user the ability to inspect creatures. Gives the creature’s name and an accurate depiction of its strength. Any beast below you in strength will have a white name tag. Any beasts of the same strength as your name tag will be blue. Any beast slightly stronger than you will be orange. Any beasts far above you will be in red. This ability does not give the level or tier the beast is at. This ability does not work on artifacts.
Do you wish to bond to inspect the ring:
Yes/No
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This is different from Dante’s. I mentally click yes and move on to removing the rest of the essence stones from the beast. I gather around 58 in total and split the pile in two. Half for me and half for Dante. I go to his tent and drop them into his bag. I try to wake him up, but he stays dead asleep.
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Shaking my head, I walk outside and pack up my tent, clean and sheath my shortsword and get ready to move.
As I put everything into my bag, I see Dante come out of his tent.
“Sorry, I used up all my Essence and it took more out of me than I expected,” He says.
“I haven’t put anything into Mana yet,” I comment.
“Well, that’s good,” I shoot him a weird look, but he continues explaining what he meant, “You can’t use your Mana unless you have an artifact that grants you the ability to use it.”
“Like your whip,’’ I say in confirmation.
He nods. Remembering my new artifact, I scan him with it.
[Dante Silverborne]
His name is in orange.
“What level are you,” I ask him.
“24. How about you?” He responds
I stare at him. He’s so damn close to getting an artifact. Also, I didn’t realize this before, but he always asked me my level instead of scanning me with his inspection ring. He said he should tell him my level as long as 10 levels less than him.
“Why do you ask instead of scanning,” I say, deciding it’d be better to ask than speculate.
I feel a jarring sensation as if someone is glancing at my soul and shudder.
“That’s why I don’t. Most people don’t like being scanned,” He tells me. I look at him confused. Did my skill make him feel like that as well?
“I scanned you, but you didn’t make a reaction. Do all scanning artifacts give you that feeling or only the ones with the inspection skill,” as I say that, I notice him moving closer.
“What are you doing,” I say as I step back.
“Intrigueing. You found a spectral artifact. They’re scarce and each one is original. I’ve never heard of one called Sense Ring,” He explains, continuing after seeing my raised eyebrows, “Spectral artifacts are artifacts that don’t have ranks and they have a particular ability that isn’t rank-restricted. Oh yeah, they also can’t be enhanced using essence stones like normal secondary artifacts. Only through combining them with another artifact it has synergy with or through upgrade tokens, which make them impossibly difficult to upgrade and limit their usefulness. Anyway, I’ll trade you my inspection ring for all of your essence stones.”
“You’re going to give up your ring for my essence stones?” I ask in confusion.
“With your essence stones, I can enhance my whip and bring it to E grade. Plus, F-grade inspect rings are worthless since they cost two times as much to upgrade compared to buying a D-grade one.
Also, they don’t scan entities or items higher than their grade.”
“So, I’ll be taking a loss,” I say which causes him to shrug.
Sighing, I take all of my essence stones and give them to him. I see him gaze into the air unfocused and then the ring appears on his hand. He hands it to me and moves to enhance his whip.
I watch him place his whip and the essence stones on the floor in front of him. His gaze unfocuses again, and a bright white light flash erupts from the items. The whip which was previously black and red and had one tail is now a deep red colour and has three tails.
I look down at the ring in my hand. And feel my other ring turn from a tattoo back into an item. I take it off and place it beside it. While my Sense Ring is pure white and made of bones, this one seems to be made out of black stone.
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Basic Inspection ring - F Rank - No Affinity
Skill:
- Inspect: Grants the user the ability to inspect creatures all creatures in the F grade as long as they are not 10 levels higher than the user. Gives the user a name and level. Grants users the ability to scan artifacts in the F grade from a distance, even if they are bonded.
Synergy detected with Sense ring. Do you wish to combine artifacts:
Yes/No
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Seriously. First I get no artifacts. Then one that’s extremely rare. And finally, somehow it has synergy with a basic inspect ring. I wonder what the catch is. I mentally click yes and both rings disappear.
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[Basic Inspect Ring] and [Sense ring] are bonding.
Counter: 1 Day; 23 Hours; 59 Min; 49 Sec.
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And there’s the catch.
“What do we do next? We haven’t found the return stone yet, so we can’t leave,” I say, knocking him out of his reverie.
“It’s probably in there,” He says while turning to look at the castle, “I doubt there’s any more of the hounds here.”
We walk toward the castle. As we near the entrance once more, I see it creaking open.
“I can’t see anything in there,” Dante says to me.
I look inside and grimace. We both step forward. He takes up the front and I the back. As we walk in, the room lights up, showing the inside. The walls and ceiling are made from beautiful amethyst crystals. A huge chandelier falls from the ceiling glowing and I notice two large spiral staircases that lead up the stairs.
We stop and tense as a humanoid creature made from black smoke, violet flames and a fitted robe appears at the top of the staircase. I see it holding two chakrams with blades spiralling out of them and a deep purple smoke surrounding it.
It walks down the stairs slowly, each step accentuated with a resounding thud. It reaches the bottom step and comes towards us. I try to shift my feet and notice I’m frozen. What??
I feel a deep dread reach across myself and slowly it grows until I can’t help but tremble and scream in my mind. I NEED TO RUN. TO GET AWAY. AWAY FROM THIS. THIS. This THING. I hear a ding.
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YOU HAVE BEEN AFFLICED WITH FEAR AURA.
YOU HAVE BEEN PARALYZED.
YOU HAVE LOST YOUR ABILITY TO USE ANY ARTIFACTS.
YOU HAVE BEEN DEBUFFED.
ALL STATS HAVE LOST POTENCY.
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I see the humanoid creature wave and another creature the size of a cat coalesces into existence. The cat-like creature starts to grow and grow until its shoulders reach my head. It then proceeds to charge at Dante. The humanoid creature waves its hand again and both of them disappear.
Dante, NOOO!!! YOU FUCKING INCOHERENT GHOST. YOU ABHORENT MONSTER. I’M GONNA RIP YOU APART. I’M GOING TO MAKE YOU REGRET KILLING DANTE.
I feel my mind seethe in rage and let myself entrench in it until I can’t tell where my mind starts and the rage begins.
“You’ll make a fine successor,” the thing says.
I feel my anger get doused and my consciousness slips.