Suktuk-amorak (F) | 8,664 → 8,774 AP

Killing the middle boss gave only 100 extra AP on top of the usual for any F-rank enemy, which was annoying and disappointing. On the other hand, none of the minotaur's equipment had disappeared with him.

Shen quickly crouched, grabbed his spoils of battle, and inspected them all.

Ellok Gloves (F+)

Enchantments: Resistance (F+), Self-Repair (F+)

General-purpose gloves made of Ellok leather.

The system gave him extra knowledge once again, letting him know Ellok was a big worm found in the dark sands of planet Matn. The F+ resistance enchantment improved its resistance, letting it withstand any attempts to damage it that were weaker than an F+ attack. Even F+ hits still needed to be focused to cause any tears to the leather though.

The self-repair had a limit, and it was the material itself. Ellok leather was relatively thin, hence its usability in producing clothing, but it actually had three even thinner layers with the same enhanced durability on top of each other. The self-repair enchantment used mana to glue any tear together and the lower layers to make up for lost materials.

Shen was disappointed by the gloves, but he still put them on. Their resistance was greater than his hand, so they might help. It would take him a while to get used to fighting with gloved hands, but he could do it.

As soon as he put them on, they decreased in size to fit his hand, and he got a system message.

Tutorial - 2nd Stage

You've looted your first item!

You'll notice that, just like the weapons and equipment given to you by the tutorial and bought from the Guardian Store, the item you've found will be automatically optimized for your usage.

To prevent confusion later on, please take note of the limitations of such a function.

During the tutorial:

You cannot give any items to others, and your items cannot be stolen.

All items you buy or find will be automatically optimized for you according to the profile the Guardian System generated from you.

You can specify the characteristics of items you want to buy, up to a few sentences, and some options are barred from sale.

Outside the tutorial:

You'll be able to give your items to others.

Items you buy will adapt to you only if you ask for it on purchase (it's still free).

You'll be able to specify the characteristics of bought items up to the smallest details, even going as far as providing blueprints.

Found items will not automatically adapt to you. You'll need to purchase such services from other sapients.

Shen didn't care much about it. It was just natural to not have the system making everything he picked up in his life automatically fit him and his tastes. Hopefully, the Feng Clan's artisans could deal with system items too, and if they couldn't, he'd just have to find a way to use the services of an older race of the alliance.

After putting the gloves on, he checked on the golden shirt with golden runes on it. It felt like extra soft silk to the touch.

"Inspect," he said.

Gold Shirt (F)

Enchantments: Resistance (F), Self-Repair (F)

A shirt made of gold cloth.

The runes are purely ornamental.

Gold cloth was, according to the silent information the system put in his mind, gold that had been magically turned into cloth. It was very good for some low-level enchantments like resistance and self-repair.

The gloves had disappointed, and the shirt was even worse. They were a tier lower, and though beautiful, they weren't his cup of tea. They also weren't much better than his own skin, resistance-wise.

Therefore, Shen didn't immediately disrobe to put the shirt on.

Cultivators usually cared about their appearance a lot, and martial arts robes were worn as much out of tradition as a matter of pride. You could tell a cultivator apart in a single glance.

He had dreamed of becoming a cultivator for all his life, and now he was one. It would feel terrible to take off the thing that identified him as one of his people.

But his father had taught him better than that. It would be stupid to not use a piece of defensive equipment just to appease his pride. A little better than his skin was still better. He might even try to put the robe back on later anyway, on top of the minotaur's former equipment, though he guessed it would hinder his movements.

He checked the pants and jerkin next.

Ellok Pants (F+)

Enchantments: Resistance (F+), Self-Repair (F+)

General-purpose pants made of Ellok leather.

Ellok Jerkin (F+)

Enchantments: Resistance (F+), Self-Repair (F+)

General-purpose jerkin made of Ellok leather.

Both items were almost extensions of the gloves, their material, enchantments, and even style a perfect match. He would be willing to bet they had been created as a set. He put them on and checked the last things, the boots.

Autaur Boots (F+)

Enchantments: Resistance (F+), Move Speed (F++)

Jackboots made of Autaur leather.

The description was very lacking, but the extra information the system gave him made him the happiest yet with his spoils of battle.

Autaur was the name of an alligator-like being that lived on dry earth and moved fast. Shen didn't like the idea of going against a fast alligator at all. Their jaws were terrifying.

He noticed there was an obvious pattern between items and the materials they were made of. The Ellok stuff had the same enchantments for different items, while the Autaur boots had other enchantments, one of them related to move speed—and Autaurs were fast. Shen knew nothing about item crafting at all, but he wrote that down on a corner of his mind.

The move speed enchantment was the best one yet. It allowed him to continuously move at the same running speed which the F+ tier agility would let him, without spending a single stamina point.

The system also let him know that the enchantment was supposed to be at the E- tier but had been forcibly downgraded because the item was only at the F+ tier. It seemed the enchantments and item tier were related. Still, even downgraded, it went beyond what an F+ enchantment should provide him with.

Shen loved the boots despite being a martial arts slippers guy himself.

Together with everything else, the boots painted a picture of either someone who wanted to run for a long time and withstand some attacks while on it or a warrior that depended on positioning to battle. He couldn't imagine why the strong middle boss would run away from anything, and Suktuk-amorak hadn't shown great tactical prowess when he had killed the spellcasters either. Therefore, Shen took the equipment to just be something the tutorial gave to trainees to make that stage easier.

Were other middle bosses similar? He would find out eventually.

He put the boots on, then tested using his damaged robe on top of his new equipment. As he had expected, it didn't fit well.

One last thing to try to appease his pride.

"Buy G-rank martial arts robe like mine that would fit me well over what I'm already wearing and not annoy me too much based on my profile," he said.

Nothing happened.

Shen sighed and let go of his robe, and it turned into light as soon as he did. Damaged items did that when he stopped touching them, like his broken spears.

After cladding himself in superior equipment, he trained with his gloved hands and F+ move speed. The latter took greater effort, as his reaction time was still at the F tier. Still, a few hours later, he rushed out of the fortress into the forest.

He had things to buy, and he needed AP for that.

It was time to start a new carnage.

"Buy Magic Nanobots Injection," Alicia said. It had taken her six days to get enough AP to buy the rank up and the injection, but now she was ready.

She was sitting in a small cave, Mark and Ken standing guard just outside, though the former was looking at her to see what would happen. To everyone's surprise, They had found Ken, a handsome blond guy with blue eyes, in the forest a few days ago. From the system's message about the stage, it was something very unlikely to happen, but Mark theorized that there was hidden stuff at play to push trainees—whom he had started calling players—together.

Alicia's hand was extended in front of her to get a syringe, but the system didn't give her one. Instead, she felt a prickle on the side of her head.

Then everything went crazy.

She could physically feel cold tendrils moving through her brain while sheer euphoria filled her body. It was pleasure without measure, happiness without limits, a feeling she had never felt before. She opened her eyes wide as she fell backward, arched her back, and extended her limbs. Instead of the cave's ceiling, she saw blue.

A boundless floating ocean with glittering stars was moving at great speed toward the horizon. It was beautiful, but suddenly, it moved away from her, and she saw the sea was but a river among many in a limitless void. They looked like cords, endless cords, flowing everywhere and glowing at random patterns.

Suddenly, white light in humanoid form appeared in front of her. She expected it to materialize into a monster or trainee, but instead, it spoke in that same form.

"Another tutorial human," it said with a jovial female voice. The language was so alien it sounded like synthwave music or all things. "Did you read a lot of fantasy in your childhood?"

Alicia was flabbergasted by everything, barely capable of thinking, yet her mouth spoke by itself. "Yes."

"As a pioneer trainee, I can give you a shot at forming a Mana Root for the price of the nanobot connection. Roots are stronger than nanobots, but they are..." It said something that Alicia didn't understand. There was a long silence, then the word was translated late into her mind. "...alien, mystical, arcane, superior, divine, transcendental."

The translation wasn't just late, it also hurt her. Her head flared with pain as she heard each syllable of electronic music. The very concepts of what she was hearing entered her head, but they were much more than the human meaning of the words, and her brain suffered, incapable of understanding them. She felt his brain might melt from the overload of alien information.

She didn't reply for a long time, and that seemed to be answer enough.

"Nanobots then," the being said.

They extended their arm and one of a million fingers that impossibly superimposed on each other touched her forehead.

Alicia felt herself being pushed at high speed until she hit the ground. She blinked, and just like that, she was back at the cavern, breathless.

The overwhelming pleasure was gone, but there was something inside her. Tiny bits of what felt like cold energy moved through her entire body.

Tutorial - Magic

Magic is the manifestation of one's will through the use of mana.

The nanobots inside you are directly connected to the mana created by the Multiverse Alliance. You can use as much mana as you want if you have the required willpower and focus.

Using magic will tire you, and going beyond your limits can cause pain, internal injuries, fainting, or even, in extreme cases, death.

To use magic, you only need to understand the secrets of the world and will it to obey you; the nanobots will do the rest. We'll explain how that works by using a simple example:

Turning water into ice.

Ice turns into water when the temperature is low. Low temperature is the absence of heat. You can thus turn water into ice by willing mana to push all the heat in the water away.

Since heat is energy, mana can interact directly with it with ease, requiring almost no willpower or even knowledge of energy interaction on your part.

Another way of turning water into ice requires deeper knowledge. The laws of physics taught in your world explain how matter is made of molecules. Water molecules are in constant movement due to the energy inside them. You can thus affect the molecules directly, willing them to stick together to form a solid, and get ice that way.

Since you're affecting matter directly rather than energy, it'll take extra willpower.

As a mage, your knowledge, willpower, and focus are your limit!

Fight well!

As soon as she stopped reading it, she got a new message.

Tutorial - Magic

You've gained a new stat, magic.

The magic stat is an amalgamation of your willpower, focus, and knowledge. It is an indicator of your spells' strength potential and how long you can last.

Like any stat, you can increase it through personal efforts or by using the Stat Store.

Your magic stat is being evaluated and will be shown in instants.

No sooner said than done. She was still reading the last words when she got a notification.

Magic: F

F was... less than she hoped, but good enough. She could work with that. And she knew just the perfect target to test her newfound powers.

The system had talked about freezing water, hadn't it?

Well, the human body was sixty percent water.

Mark was still looking at her when she sat and smiled at him.

"Well?" he said. "How was it? Are you going crazy? Dying? Is it safe for me to get?"

Alicia was done with getting treated as a mix of a guinea pig and a minion.

She willed his brain to freeze by having its heat taken away. She felt herself connecting to mana, felt it moving and touching Mark's head like a limb, and even felt it trying to enter his skull. It was slow—it looked like mana didn't move fast in the air—but sweet revenge was about to be hers.

Unfortunately, her mana found an insurmountable obstacle: Mark's skull. It couldn't penetrate it at all.

She was about to force it—magic was about willpower too, right?—when she got a new message.

Tutorial - Magic

Living beings have souls, which are inherently resistant to energies being controlled by external will.

Breaking through a weak non-sapient soul's resistance takes at least D- tier magic.

Breaking through a weak sapient soul's resistance takes at least B- tier magic.

That sucked, but it only meant she had to get creative, right?

She stood up and willed the air in front of his nose and mouth to turn into poison. She felt it was possible to do something like that, but she didn't have the chemical formula of any poisonous substance memorized, nor had she any idea of how to turn one substance into another at the atomic level, so she couldn't do that. Magic required knowledge to work.

She then considered just stopping the air from entering his lungs, but suffocating someone took time. What if he attacked her in the meantime? His contributions to the fights were much greater than hers, so both his strength and agility were already at the F- tier, while hers were still G-tier. He was stronger and fought better than her too.

The last thing that came to mind was a straight-up fireball to his face or other similar attacking magic from fantasy books—maybe lightning?—but she had no idea of how strong those spells would be, and she didn't want to get revenge-killed.

So she took her revenge in the most insidious way she could think of: by just smiling.

"Alicia? Talk to me! I need to know!" Mark demanded, approached, and shook her.

She just kept smiling while looking at him. Did he want to get magic for himself? Dream on! If it was up to her, he would die of old age believing magic made people lose their damn minds!

"I know you're acting; I told you I'm a genius director assistant. I take it magic is awesome and you're an ungrateful jerk trying to hoard it for yourself. Good to know. Have fun in the forest alone." He walked away. "Let's go, Ken," he said while moving.

The handsome blue-eyed blond boy, clad in leather armor, looked back at Alicia and shrugged. He didn't step away. Her fake smile turned into a genuine, grateful one as she approached and stood beside him.

Mark took a while to realize no one was following him. When he did, he turned and opened his eyes wide before spatting, "Betrayal it is then. I'll remember this."

Then he turned, walked away, and Alicia found herself free of the prick.

Seeing his lonely figure move deep into the forest did make her wonder though. He was a jackass, but he had helped her get the AP she needed. Was she behaving like an ungrateful bitch?

"Dude, that guy is competent," Ken said, "but what an asshole."

That helped her feel better about her "betrayal." She would repay Mark for his help later if she got the chance, but she sure as hell didn't have to tolerate his verbal abuses, no matter how much he had helped. Especially not when he had done it just to help himself in the end.

"Now what?" Ken asked.

"Now I learn magic," she said while raising her open hand.

She willed the heat in the surroundings to concentrate there and ignite the oxygen in the air. A floating flame instantly appeared there. That was a far cry from a fireball, and she didn't like that she was feeling heat leave her hand—maybe she could use mana to produce heat?

The impressed look on Ken's face made it worth it though.

Alicia closed her fist and willed the spell to cease. The flame disappeared.

"And then," she said, "we hunt, and show Mark we never needed him."

At last, she saw hope for herself in this goddamned tutorial.