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Sorry for the delay. I spent a lot of time editing yesterday and couldn't finish this in time. It also ran longer than anticipated, so that's now 3 longer-than-normal chapters in a row xD

I'll persevere to have chapter 287 up tomorrow.

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Chapter Two-Hundred-and-Eighty-Six

Yenna accompanied Adam to the eastern side of the island where the dimensional tavern stood. They found Lev waiting in front of the building. This time, Yenna stayed behind to watch their training.

Everything Adam had learnt was thrown out of the window as soon as they began, and Lev taught him why having more limbs and a bigger body wasn’t necessarily an advantage, since Adam kept getting yanked by a secondary arm, tail, or wing, and tossed before he could put up a defence.

Still, it was a fruitful match, with Adam eventually becoming able to keep up with the deathguard by using all of his new limbs to his advantage after a few hours of non-stop practise. But the simple ease with which he was defeated every time they sparred proved to Adam that Lev was still holding back a lot.

It’s like he’s designed to be undefeatable.

“Eventually I’ll land a hit on you,” Adam said as the deathguard helped him to his feet.

Lev made a sign with his hands.

[“Eventually,”] Parvillo translated.

Adam said goodbye and went to his player house to beat up the target dummy for a bit.

He stopped short when he randomly appraised it with his true sight.

“It’s a mimic,” Adam realised as he saw the dummy’s true visage.

[Correct.]

“It’s not sapient, right?”

[Let us hope not,] Parvillo joked.

“It was a serious question…” he replied.

“It isn’t,” Yenna confirmed, though Adam wasn’t sure how she knew, even if he trusted her to be right.

He activated his right crawler relic and marvelled as a blue copy of his real arm, wearing a copy of his lucky bracelet and Frankie, appeared in the air between him and the mimic enslaved to be a target dummy.

With a simple mental nudge, the arm grew in size, until it was about five metres long.

Then Adam flung it around the side of the dummy in a swiping punch. It moved slowly, like the tower crawler’s arms had, but its speed didn’t matter, since its damage was still equal to Adam’s.

The dummy was obliterated, sending straw everywhere, and the blue arm vanished in the same instant. The punch seemed about equal to his own strength, except without the buff from his pugilist’s belt.

Making it bigger doesn’t seem to affect the damage, but it might increase the area of effect.

“It’s invisible to everyone else, right?” Adam asked.

[So long as they do not possess the means to pierce invisibility or perceive mana.]

That’s all I needed to hear.

Adam pulled out his heavenly wishing stone and wished for another crawler arm relic. As it manifested in his hands, he equipped it to his left grafted arm.

Then he activated Tinkerer’s skill to remove cooldowns and summoned as many arms as possible in front of himself, ending up with twelve blue floating arms.

“Turn the dummy into a discarded golem.”

[Understood.]

As soon as the dummy regrew into the large mound of corpses, Adam simultaneously commanded all twelve of his invisible floating arms to grow as large as possible, before flinging them at the golem simultaneously. He also made sure to engage his pugilist’s belt properly this time by targeting a nearby mote of dust kicked up by the previous attack.

All of the arms moved through the air silently, but when they struck at the same time, it was like a bomb went off inside the player house. The backwash of air was enough to send Adam and Yenna flying backwards, but he was quick to use his wings to catch her in the air before she could get hurt.

“Perhaps I should stay outside while you do your tests,” she remarked as he put her down onto her feet.

“That’s probably a good idea,” he replied.

There was nothing left of the golem after the attack, and Adam knew he needed to get his hands on a fourth arm.

“How far can I move the arm once it is created?” he asked.

[I am uncertain.]

Guess I’ll test it outside then.

But first I’ll destroy a few more dummies.

I’ve gotta figure out how best to take down the players at the start of stage seven as well.

As Adam continued testing the limits of the tower crawler’s arm, he made a few important observations. One, he wasn’t able to activate the relics on the arms that were copied, but if they had passive effects, like Frankie or the hand of the mad witch, those seemed to work as usual. Two, the copied version of his left arm wearing the hand of the mad witch didn’t trigger Ghost’s duplication when he punched, possibly because he was commanding something to punch, rather than doing it himself. Three, arguably the most interesting, the arms had mass that he could stand on.

When he took his test outside after exhausting all combat-oriented uses of the arm relics, the first thing he tried was to summon a giant five-metre-long arm and step onto it, before commanding it to fly in a spiral to reach the clouds above Interim Island.

The description of the relic stated that the arm could perform an action after being created, and from what he’d seen inside the player house, the arms only disappeared once that action was complete. As such, he was able to ride the arm like an alien surfboard up into the air, until its fingers touched the cloud ceiling and the whole thing vanished.

Adam engaged his wings to stay aloft, and then summoned an arm and mentally moved it as far away from him as he could see. To his surprise, he was still able to move it even at the far edge of his vision at the end of Interim Island.

Seems like the limitation is just that it has to be within my line of sight. That’s genuinely unbelievable.

Fortunately, my true sight allows me to see invisible things, but without it I would have to keep my eyes open for floating arms. Though, I probably still have to keep that in mind.

Adam landed on the lawn in front of his player house where Yenna waited for him. He had the brief thought to go into the restaurant basement and ask it to show him Beck and Emelia, but he knew doing so would make him want to save them.

“Was it a success?” Yenna asked.

“Definitely,” he replied, pushing the bad impulse away.

She looked at him for a moment, before saying, “When this is over, I hope you will go back to being your usual self.”

Adam splayed out his grafted wings and arms. “What? You don’t like me as a man-spider? Or is it because the slime makes me look extra flappy?”

Yenna laughed. “I just think you are best when you are being yourself.”

Adam grinned. “I thought you would prefer me to have as many limbs as you.”

Yenna poked his mask in-between his eyes. Through his true sight, Adam saw her true visage grinning back at him, her siren mouth full of flesh-ripping fangs.

“Let’s go see how much worse it can get,” Adam said, picking her up with his four arms and eliciting a gasp from her as he flew them to Sprite’s lab.

In the centre of the garden nearby, the heart spire sapling that Meilo tended to was already a metre tall.

Maybe Alivida did have reason to worry about it invading her tent.

Adam walked inside Sprite’s mad workshop, finding a small fuzzy shadow-black form running across the floor with a bubbling flask atop its overlarge head. It had the shape of a chubby baby, but its arms were proportionally longer than its stubby legs, giving it a slightly disturbing appearance.

Sprite, who was standing on a stool tending to a distilling setup, grabbed the flask as soon as his smaller assistant ran past. The small shadow elemental kept running until it hit a wall and bounced backwards.

“Alas,” Sprite said, followed by a long drawn-out sigh, “My new assistant leaves a lot to be desired.”

“It’s cute,” Adam said.

“Please do not eat him, even if he is very stupid.”

“I’m not going to eat him,” Adam replied.

“Speaking of,” Sprite continued and gestured to the workstation on his right where three glass flasks were sealed with cork stoppers. Inside of them were fire, tumultuous jade-green gas, and scales.

Adam went over and appraised the cores within using his true sight.

< < Collectible Relic > >

< Fire Elemental Core (Rare) — The smouldering core of a temperamental Fire Elemental >

< Wind Elemental Core (Rare) — The turbulent core of a flighty Wind Elemental >

< Serpent Core (Epic) — A core reconstructed from a serpent’s essence >

Thank God, none of these are sapient. I don’t think I can endure any more mockery from Sprite.

The serpent core is an odd one though. I wonder how it will work.

“Are you planning on making more assistants?” Adam asked.

“Of course. Menial labour is beneath me. I yearn to experiment uninhibitedly.”

“Do Sprite’s assistants persist across loops?” Adam asked Parvillo.

[It appears that they are considered part of the building. As such, they are saved perpetually due to your Permanent Expansion upgrade.]

“I’ll bring you some more stuff after the next stage then,” Adam told the alchemist.

“Excellent.”

Yenna stooped to pick up the fallen assistant. “Will it grow larger than this?” she asked Sprite. “It is very adorable.”

The little shadow guy stared up at her with his glowing white eyes.

“I am unsure. I myself have not grown significantly since my creation,” Sprite replied.

Adam crushed each of the flasks in turn, absorbing the cores. His health went up to 4,393 and his damage rose to 18,976% thanks to the emperor’s crown and fiend tongue.

His body shifted through roaring fire coating a body of flowing magma, dense jade-green wind that somehow maintained a cohesive shape, and a scaly appearance that seemed the most natural out of all his transformations thus far. As a result of the cores, his appearance settled on a greyish-white colour with a barely-noticeable scale pattern rippling down his torso and limbs.

“Thanks Sprite, I’ll be back after the next stage,” Adam told the alchemist.

The elemental waved an arm over his shoulder as Adam left, and Yenna put his assistant back down on the floor. Then he waved too.

“I can’t believe you consumed one of those,” Yenna said as they went outside.

“They are pretty cute,” he admitted.

Adam headed for the centre of the island, swapping between the different cores’ effects. He hadn’t used the blood and stone elements at all, but as he went through each of the transformations in turn, he found that they all affected him a lot more than he’d initially thought.

The statue and metal transformations were both quite similar, with the metal seemingly just being a stronger version at first, until Adam realised the statue form allowed him to manipulate the earth under his feet slightly. The mana form, also from the metal slimes’ cores, doubled his mana and would clearly have spell-based effects, though none he could take advantage of at the moment. With Yenna next to him, Adam’s blood form seemed to almost respond to her presence, like a very weak version of the blood sense he’d had with the Flayed Lady’s ‘Mandate of Blood’ relic. It also allowed him to crystallise his body and change its temperature from cold to boiling. The wind form let him fall at a slower rate and jump higher, while the serpent core made him extremely mobile and seemingly quicker to react, though there was no visible change in his stats. The fire transformation allowed him to play around with his body’s temperature even more, and he was able to do some very rudimentary flying by concentrating heat in select parts of his body to propel himself forward. Lastly, the slime made him corrosive on touch, and the shadow element allowed him to stretch his body and blend into darkness, not to mention delivering true damage.

“Do you think a cloud core would give me lightning powers?” Adam wondered.

“It may give you control over water,” Yenna said.

I hope it’ll give me lightning.

“I need to test out my transformations more with Lev,” Adam decided.

“Do you want me to accompany you again?” Yenna asked.

“That’s up to you.”

Before seeking out Lev once more, Adam stopped by to talk to Luvicidix.

< < Meta Upgrades For Sale > >

< Mana — Increase Mana by 50 — 5,000 Points >

< Stamina — Increase Stamina by 25 — 2,500 Points >

< Defence — Increase Defence by 50% — 5,000 Points >

< Luck — Increase Luck by 25 — 25,000 Points >

< Saved Weapon — Start every loop with a saved Weapon of Legendary rarity — 10,000 Points >

< Scale of Remembrance — 3,092/25,000 Points >

“I’ll put 5,000 points into ‘Luck’,” he said.

“Great pick!” she praised him.

< < Meta Upgrade Progress > >

< Luck — 5,000/25,000 Points >

Adam was left with 220 points, and he decided to buy two small healing potions to fill out the potion belt on his right grafted arm, which put him at forty points.

While he was in the market, he grabbed something to eat from Charlie’s grill station, which had outgrown even the stalls around it.

“Oh good, you are no longer marked by death,” Belamouranthe said. “Weaver told me my treatment of you was rude.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he told the girl.

“I must say, your eyes are even stranger now than they were before.”

“His eyes are the only things that unsettle you?” Yenna asked.

Adam laughed. “I was just about the say the same thing.”

[Again, I must ask, why were my comments construed negatively when the musician appears to be much crueller?]

“I don’t have time to teach you the subtleties of friendly banter,” Adam remarked.

[Unfortunate.]

Yenna decided to accompany Adam to the tavern again, and while he spent the rest of the day and all of the night sparring with Lev, she played her heart out with dozens of instruments, except for the drum that would turn Adam into a puddle.

By the end, Adam felt that he was finally getting the hang of his transformations.

Still, Lev remained untouchable, but ‘eventually’ seemed to be just around the horizon rather than a distant point in the future.

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