CHAPTER 26 – ISOLATION ROOM SPOILS –
Tom was happy with his situation. Dimitri might have thought this to be a punishment, but Tom didn’t consider it such for a second. He had an empty room, cupboards filled with mystery contents, and two hours by himself. It was going to be great. He didn’t have to complete a stock take today, since he had been exiled to this place for another three days, but he would give it a try. Unless he felt like practising his spear work, then easy come, easy go.
He smiled and turned his attention back to the cupboard.
This was amazing.
These stockpiled materials were for the reincarnated ones, or else for prodigal children, wanting to push themselves to extremes. Just thinking about what might be hidden in these cupboards was exciting. It all meant that everything here was probably linked to acquiring either an ability or a title. If the latter was the case, he hoped something unusual or unexpected would spark his imagination, inspire him to discover an alternative pathway for self-improvement that he wouldn’t otherwise have thought of. An extra method to accumulate power.
“Please let there be something,” he mock-prayed.
Then he frowned as he stared at the cupboard he had opened up, and at all the other ones with their unknown stashes. So many of the bottles in front of him were deadly, even with minimal exposure. How many of the geniuses found these stashes too early, and…
This time, he felt the artificial anger rise and quickly shifted his focus. The purpose of the current cupboard was clearly to provide materials for body-tempering and/or title acquisition. The second part was important, because he remembered his venom title from his last life.
Title: Venom Resistance (V): 25% chance to gain instant immunity the first time you are exposed to a new venom. All venoms will do you 25% less damage.
1. Awarded for: Being inflicted with sufficient venom to kill you five hundred and twelve times in a single day and surviving.
It was a body title, so he had lost access to it when he had been reincarnated, but he was sure these bottles of poisons, acids, and elemental effects were intended to allow them all to gain something similar. The five hundred- and twelve-times threshold in a single day was obviously not possible, and had only been achieved in the first place because of unique circumstances. Tom’s healing ability had allowed him to isolate and only heal the critical systems, while the wasps had kept stinging him continuously for close to a day. It was a monster wave that he had only survived thanks to multiple specialised healers dedicating their time and all their mana regeneration to keeping him alive. Tom doubted those circumstances were repeatable, and, given how close he had come to dying, that was probably a good thing.
Here, all by himself, and limited to two hours of privacy with an access to a healing orb, at least for the short term, meant something like that was beyond him. However, absorbing enough poison to kill himself multiple times and surviving was a possibility, and he didn’t need to do it five hundred plus times.
The venom title had been awarded at level five. There was no need to aim to reach that level of expertise immediately. A level one title still gave bonuses, and, given how Existentia worked, that should only require him to meet a threshold of thirty-two. That was a lot of poison, but not an insurmountable number, especially since older children were forced to do eight hours inside one of these rooms once a week.
While Tom knew the mathematics, others probably wouldn’t, and he wondered how many people only tempered the substance to twenty lethal dose levels per day and never realised what they were missing out on. They might get resistance skills that way, but would forever whiff on the title. It didn’t matter, he knew, and he would not make that mistake. Once he had gained the title at level one, Tom was confident that he would be able to upgrade it by getting a breadth of exposure. That was the most likely explanation for the presence of at least thirty types of poison. The second level would require him being exposed to two different poisons to the same level as the first one had: enough to kill him thirty-two times over. Another four unique poisons would promote it again, and then eight more would get him to a level four title.
The cupboard lacked the variety of substances to go further than level five, but he would be happy with a twenty-five percent chance to gain instant immunity and a similar level of general resistance to all poisons - especially if he achieved the same with venoms, acids, elements, curses, and hostile energies.
It was also set up to be achievable without needing outside help. The healing crystal in each of these rooms was incredibly powerful. From what he could tell, it was connected into a massive network, because there was no noticeable weakening of the enchantment when he used it, and if there wasn’t a network, then anyone chasing titles could be easily determined by checking the rooms after use. No, it had to be networked, and, given the number of rooms simultaneously occupied, any of which could have children doing tempering, he was sure it had the juice to bring kids with their low vitality back from the edge of death thousands of times a day.
Once he had Touch Heal to give himself an extra level of safety margin and got access to longer sessions, he was definitely throwing himself into the undertaking. Ten years seemed an extraordinary amount of time until you got into the nitty gritty about the size of the task. With no mistakes, it would take thirty-one sessions to gain the poison resistance title at level five. A similar number could be expected for venom, curses, acids, basic substances, and probably even more for the various resistances to elemental attacks and negative energies. With a single session a week, once you added up all the activities, you were looking at five years minimum, and that assuming no days would be lost. That was a significant assumption, because it was possible the room you were assigned might be missing the tempering agent, or you could make a mistake by administering too much - or too little - and have to abandon an attempt once you realised it. A lot could go wrong, and one thing Tom knew was that he couldn’t rely on everything going right the first time. Everyone, including him, made mistakes.
The moment he had Touch Heal and eight-hour sessions, he would start the process. And Pain Management, he corrected himself hurriedly. Given what April was doing to him in the trial for skill and spear training, that might end up requiring no extra effort on his behalf, but if it didn’t, he would use his knowledge of Touch Heal to gain the ability. In a battlefield situation, he accepted pain rather than wasting mana, but if he was doing his tempering in an isolation room, there was no need to subject himself to unnecessary suffering.
With almost two hours to satisfy his curiosity, he methodically moved his constructed tower from cupboard to cupboard and noted what each of them contained. It was a large space and there were fourteen different cubie holes to explore, with each one having three shelves and close to two metres from side to side and a metre deep. A full-sized spear fitted easily within it.
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It wasn’t until he reached the thirteenth one that he discovered a written inventory. It was a neatly bound set of papers. Before he examined them, he checked the last cupboard to get his impression of it before turning his attention to the official inventory. Everything was listed there, along with a detailed description of how best to use each of the items. He naturally checked the body, tempering descriptions first, to better understand what the documentation offered.
Frotoic Acid – Tier 2.
Warning: a single misplaced drop may be lethal. Recommended application method is to transfer two drops into a cup of water. The diluted liquid is then to be painted over all reachable exposed surfaces and reapplied when sizzling stops.
Precautions: Ready access to healing crystal.
Then, later on…
Lodeaye Contact Poison – Tier 2
Recommended dosage is a quarter of a drop onto the little toe. Immediate and sustained healing will be required for ten minutes to combat the spread of the poison.
Precautions. If you start seeing glowing spots of light in your vision, then use the supplied antidote immediately.
From his knowledge of the venom title, those recommendations were a recipe. When he did the mathematics, he realized Lodeaye Poison would take a minimum of five hours of application to reach the exposure levels required. Tom decided for safety’s sake that he would do twenty percent more than the one recommended: ten percent on dosage and ten percent on the number of applications.
That thirty-two number, he noted was carefully, was not mentioned anywhere. Then again, they didn’t need to spell it out. You only had to be successful once, because after you got your first title in these series, the key numbers would be stated, and you could work out future patterns for yourself.
The advantage of being a reincarnated one couldn’t be clearer to Tom. An adult would never be able to do this tempering, because even if they knew what they had to do, their vitality would stop them. When Tom had died, his vitality had been so high that he was not sure tier 2 poisons would have still worked on him. Even if they did, he would have needed thirty times the volume that a child required - possibly a hundred times, if the calculation was related to both mass and vitality, which was likely.
No, the titles he would be able to chase as a child were far superior to those available to adults. Not to mention that the inability to level effectively forced him to focus on these peripheral activities.
He flipped back to the index page.
1. Body Tempering Supplies. Cupboard: 1 to 4
2. Elemental Spell Aids. Cupboard: 5
3. Magic Spell Aids. Cupboard: 6
The Elemental Spell Aid section contained a series of artefacts that created magical effects clearly designed to help gain skills. An example was something that served the same purpose as the Bunsen burner he had used in science class, but it was more advanced and didn’t require a gas line. There were three dials that independently governed power, heat, and the size of the flame produced. By adjusting the settings, you could create the perfect conditions to advance or create a fire manipulation spell or skill.
That was not the only ingenious design included. There was something for everything Tom could think of. For magic shield creation, there were artefacts that would shoot weak magical missiles at you. Better still, they could be adjusted to change the frequency. From his own experience of crafting, he knew how the efficacy of the shield could be boosted by constructing it from the right element and then tuning it. The fact they had supplied the perfect object to practice that skill was an example of how carefully the orphanage had been planned out.
Which made the lack of locks on these cupboards even more surprising. Why? That thought kept reverberating in his head.
There was something he was missing about the setup, and that frustrated him no end.
The next set of contents raised a completely different set of questions.
4. Cupboard: 7-8
5. Cupboard: 10-11
Why were these available? They were there to be used in fights, so the more precise question was where were the monster sources that the older kids had access to, because when the index described them as weapons, that’s exactly what they were. They were not toys or practice versions - each of them were sharp, deadly and designed for violence.
Which meant there were monsters the kids had access to. Tom thought about the door in the gymnasium. The one the older kids noticed but pretended not to. The snatches of conversation, their fear and excitement when they discussed it. If there was a source of monsters, it was down there, and he wondered how to go about getting permission to explore what it offered. If normal children even with weapons were allowed it couldn’t be that dangerous.
The fact every set of armour was way too large for him also factored into that decision. They looked like they were designed for teenagers, with the smallest set possibly being useable by an eight or nine-year-old; though even it was probably intended for a short teenager rather than anyone that young. All the armour had been locally manufactured instead of it coming from a loot portal. No effort had been made to enchant them with any unique abilities. That was not a result of a lack of care, but apparently a deliberate design choice. They each had low level sizing functionality and an increase in durability. If the crafter could do that, they could have done something more exotic. They were all tier one, but Tom could see their quality and suspected that they were right at the peak of that classification.
More deliberate decisions made for unknown reasons. He guessed it was only a matter of time before he discovered why.
Following the weapons was more stuff that held even less interest for him.
1. Crafting tools. Cupboard: 11
2. Crafting supplies. Cupboard: 12-13
They contained exactly what they promised, with the tools all being tier two while the materials were a mix of mundane and tier one. Once he got his wood-shaping skill, Tom might consider taking some of the wood to practice with, but until then, nothing there interested him.
The final cupboard had more potential.
3. Cupboard: 14
The trinkets were a variety of simple rings, necklaces, chains, bangles, and three spatial storage objects with a footnote stating they were only replaced annually. He immediately went to the cupboard to check them out, but the two items he was interested in - a necklace and a ring that could both be concealed - were both missing. Only the spatial pouch was still present, and that was not something he could just steal and lug around.
He was disappointed, but understood why they were gone. If there were other reincarnated ones out there, then they would think the same thing as he did, and having a hidden spatial storage was a trump card.
The rest of the trinkets didn’t interest him, though he was amused to find a version of the danger sense bracelet that April was going to get him to craft. He wondered whether his creation would be more powerful because of his high precognition affinity or not. It was uncertain whether the precognition-tinted mana or the accuracy of the danger sense ritual drove the performance of the artefact. He guessed it didn’t matter. What he created would go into the GOD’s shop and disappear. Purchasers would be sold the standardised versions rather than the ones he crafted.
Satisfied with his understanding of what was available, he carefully dismantled his tower and returned everything to the correct spot. Once he had created Heal Cut, he would rebuild the structure each session to gain access to the materials necessary to progress Purge Foreign Substances.
Then, having over forty minutes to waste, he grabbed the singular spear in the room and, despite its awkward length, executed the spear kata shown to him in the trial.
There was a ding, and he put away the weapon. The cleaning spell was triggered, and, when the door opened, there was no one to greet him.
He set off to locate the others.