SB: Chapter 268 – A Relaxing Cruise (Patreon)

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I looked at Ozy as our ice boat continued along the coast. Thinking about his low skill gain and how he would struggle once I became a lot stronger. Even now he had gone from main combatant to support.

It also explained why he wasn’t gaining levels like he had before. His heart really wasn’t into it, since I had turned him into a slave. Something that I thought about, but there was no other option. If he had become stronger, then such a change in our relationship would not have been possible.

Well, he wasn’t going to get much stronger in terms of skills or stats for a while. While there would be minor improvement over time, I had basically capped Ozy’s potential with my actions.

It was regrettable, but I still wouldn’t have changed anything about what I had done to permanently enslave him. The risk of him being able to act against me and to my soul was too great otherwise.

I could easily imagine us having a great partnership going out hundreds of years. But eventually that Spark skill would lead to him developing his own ideas and goals outside of mine. While that was acceptable for a child or another thinking being, Ozy was a monster, a pet, a tool.

Thankfully I had trained him up enough to be useful for a very long time. Alchemic Bounded Field, his healing ability, and ability to refresh stamina were all incredibly valuable support skills. While it would be nice if I could get them myself, he was an additional source of Mana and action during battle.

My mother might have survived on her own for a very long time, but I knew enough about how dangerous things could become in the dungeon. Having support was invaluable and Ozy had more than shown his worth here on the beastkin continent and getting to the Soul Forge.

While it might not seem much, making tunnels and caves, it was beyond invaluable. Being able to get out of the cold allowed us to survive on the surface of this frozen hellscape. Sure I could have done it with runic circles, but not as good, and the tunnel would have been completely impossible.

Regardless, I had won a battle that many would consider impossible. “I did it mother. I won against the impossible,” I said quietly. I felt a Tier 3 skill try to transition to Tier 4. I allowed it to happen, unlike most other skill upgrades or skills. There was something about the upgrade that seemed to resonate with a deeper part of me, and I had never heard or seen an upgrade path for this particular skill before. Empowered Will turned into Victor’s Will, a skill path that wasn’t known. It could even be a unique skill.

While it felt late to arrive, mindset mattered quite a bit for skills. Especially higher tier skills and a skill like Empowered Will. It was a nebulous skill, which helped reinforce my determination and commitment. Now that it had been upgraded, I closed my eyes to sense what the change meant.

A greater focus on winning no matter what and possibly traces of divination with the skill, leading me to victory. Trying to decide where a skill ended and a person’s thoughts began wasn’t possible at the higher levels. One had to become their skills to fully master them. In time one would gain and develop skills that suited them.

It wasn’t a skill that would be mastered any time soon, but winning was important to me. While I could run away, I wanted to win. That determination to win no matter what, I finally understood what my mother had been telling me as a child for a long time. The mindset one needed to have to go the distance and become a supreme legend as an adventurer.

I joked to myself that I just had to win 99 more impossible battles to maximize the skill. Not just survive, but win. Super easy, no problem, let me get working on that.

It really had been an impossible victory that required everything I had to triumph. Not just triumph but completely annihilate my enemy and gain benefits. I doubted such a circumstance could be replicated in another thousand years.

I had had hard battles before, but none of them had been truly impossible. The Abnormals were just super dangerous. Not something that I had no business defeating.

My Compass Of Desire went perpendicular to the coast. Time to land and get to the dungeon entrance. I turned the ice tiller and the ice boat shifted directions, rocking gently in the light waves. Like the Eldarin continent, close by the coast, the waves were fine, but once one got far enough away, the waves became brutal, making long range travel impossible.

“We are making landfall soon. Get ready. Ozy, make a dock and then an ice ladder,” I let Boris know and ordered my pet.

Boris stopped doing squats as I packed everything useful up. After climbing up the ice cliff, I had Ozy send the ice boat into the water. No need to leave it behind and give others more information about our movements or abilities.

It was only 270 kilometers to the dungeon entrance, which should be in the middle of nowhere. Great thing about moving sideways to the target of my skill was that I was able to work out the distance to it, by working out my travel distance and the change in the angle.

It was light most of the day, which was a lot nicer than the dark season. I hadn’t been up on the surface when it was light so much. If anything it was hard on the eyes, with the glare from the snow. The temperature was still cold, but not brutally cold.

I pushed us to cover as much distance as possible each day, since I wanted to get back to the College as quickly as possible and then deep into the dungeon to grind up my skills. It was time to remove the remaining two curse skills. My recent experiences in soul and ritual skills gave me some ideas on the type of skill I would need to pry them out of me.

What I needed was a way to inspect my soul at a deeper level. Soul Vision was leveling up slowly and there was no easy way to level it up quickly. Part of the problem was how low my stats were. Perception was my weakest stat and there was no easy way to naturally increase it.

I had held off on using stat points for so long, but the temptation to use them to help me level up certain skills a lot more quickly was incredibly tempting. But if I could defeat a violet core monster without using them, then I would keep holding off.

But I should probably set a hard limit for when I wanted to use my free stat points. When I earned less than 5 stat points over a three month period would be the sign that my improvement was slowing down too much.

Well with the money from the sword case’s materials, I was sure I could pay some professors at the College to develop some specific training courses for specific skills. Also upgrading my armor into being self-repairing.

Durability was nice, but self-repairing would make things much easier when adventuring in the dungeon. Or maybe not. I still had certain skills I needed to work on. And trying to avoid damage was more important. Self-repair on my armor would lead to me becoming a bit complacent, taking hits I might not have. That was something I would have to put more thought into.

Once Coordinated Balance was maximized I could combine that with Dancing Skills to get Focused Movement as a Tier 2 skill. Movement skills were like my armor skills, not something I planned to devote a lot of skills towards building up. Stats ultimately determined one’s speed in combat. Movement skills were about maximizing that speed.

But movement was covered by combat skills to a certain degree. One didn’t just stand on the ground and move their hands in a fight. There was a lot of footwork involved. While skills tended not to conflict, too many skills that overlapped could cause issues and make leveling more difficult.

I had Focused Dodge and Empowered Running as movement skills. I could maximize Focused Dodge into Empowered Dodge and maximize that with Empowered Running. If I didn’t consolidate Coordinated Balance and Dancing Skills, I could get them to Tier 3 and then consolidate all my movement skills into a Tier 4 skill.

Then there were a lot more social skills I could get and do the same thing with, clearing out my Tier 1 skills. In Tier 2 the only odd skill that wasn’t waiting for others was Speed Reading. There was no Empowered Speed Reading skill at Tier 3. A rare orphan skill, with no preceding or following skill at Tier 1 or Tier 3.

That was when an idea struck me. Speed Reading was ultimately a sensory skill that was masquerading as a knowledge processing skill. Higher tier skills used more complex formations of Mana, which is what most professors thought the System based the tier list of skills off of.

A skill to read books with Mana. Mana Reading, would be the name of the skill. It also aligned with Mana control skills at Tier 3. Unfortunately, that was a skill that had never been created, or at least publicly acknowledged by the College. Speed Reading was already a rare skill that had no clear requirements to obtain.

Mana Reading would be even more difficult. But if I could get such a skill, then I could level up my knowledge based skills even more. I mentally put history books into my downtime on my daily schedule. I would improve my lore skills while trying to develop a Mana Reading skill.

It wasn’t enough to just go through the motions. The Seraphim Quest and everything surrounding it had opened my eyes. I had to take charge of my own destiny. That meant looking at a way to improve how quickly I improved my skills.

I could also buy a green soul fruit with the sword case scrap money. That would probably be the best use of the money. I needed to keep my progress as high as possible. I wouldn’t be able to find one on my own. Even knowing about Abnormals and natural treasures, it wasn’t like Abnormals were common in the dungeon.

As for the other maximized skills in Tier 2, they were all sensory or lore skills. Focused Deflection was close to being maximized and it would fold into the Tier 4 Weapons Mastery along with all the weapon skills once I maximized the Tier 3 version.

Once back in the dungeon, I would be using only a spear in combat and working to improve with that weapon as quickly as possible. I still hadn’t maximized Empowered Sword Skills in Tier 3, but I wanted to push up the lower ranked skills if possible towards eventual consolidation.

It was a long and slow process, but I was optimistic in a way I hadn’t been for a long time. As my victory sank in, the depression that had been looming over me seemed to fade away. The distance to surpassing my mother didn’t seem so far or so impossible anymore.

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