Phil’s jaw dangled haplessly as did mine, and everyone else’s. Scadia was now a member of First Flight, no longer representing Onyx Heart. She took the stage, her movements robotic and rusted as she tried her damn hardest to introduce herself. “I’m Scadia,” her eyes kept sweeping across the room, “an S-rank sorceress. I’ll be,” she looked right at me, “in your care from today.”

I took two big steps and hugged her, lifting her off the ground and spinning around. A jolt of electricity fell me. “At least,” I coughed, as if dying, “I got to see your cute panties before leaving this cruel world…”

She gasped and moved away, holding her skirt tightly. August ran towards me and sat his fat ass down on me, “No!” he lamented, “Don’t leave me, my love!”

“I don’t want to leave, my beloved. But I love Scadia now. She’s the only one for me!”

“Nooo!” August screamed out, throwing himself on the ground. “What am I to do without you, dearest?!”

Suddenly, the door creaked. At the worst possible timing, the messenger arrived. He looked like he lost his soul whilst watching our little theatre play. Just when I thought August would get off, he looked back at the man and asked him with the most serious of faces, if he’d like to join us. I gravely underestimated his crazy.

“Um, I’ll just, leave this here. Good day,” he put some documents on the ground and replaced his hat, quickly making his way far away from us. Poor guy must’ve washed his eyes out with the strongest of spirits.

August finally went over and collected the parcels. He ripped his own open and read. “Oh, dude. I got accepted. I sure hope you get rejected,” he revealed his unconditional love for me once again and began reading mine. “Ah, well, I guess not all dreams come true…” he hung his head down in disappointment.

“Hey guys, let’s do an S-rank dungeon,” I suggested. Scadia tittered immediately, but softly, then suddenly stopped.

“What?” I asked her, interested to know if she thought we’d be too weak. After all, August and I wasn’t sure the type of team dynamics and dungeoneers we’d need to complete an S-rank dungeon.

“Well,” Scarlet sauntered over to August and had a look at our evaluation results, “I’ve only ever done S-rank twice. One we completed, one we failed. We lost near half our team in the one we completed,” she paused and nodded at the papers. “And the one we failed, well, so many people died that the ones remaining simply didn’t have enough manpower to continue. If you want to do S-rank dungeons, at least half the group has to be S-ranks themselves. Furthermore, there’s no way in hell I’d allow anyone B-rank or lower to take part in an S-rank dungeon. I will never,” she emphasised, “place my precious guild members in mortal danger just for the claim of beating a dungeon.”

Donna slipped out of me, and tapped Scarlet on the shoulder, wholeheartedly agreeing with her. Those who hadn’t seen her at the match were stunned. “She’s my master, so don’t worry,” I calmed those who grabbed their weapons in reflex.

“Scarlet, honey, while I share your understanding of keeping your guild members safe, that protective nature can be the most hindering thing to them. Anyway,” Donna kind of pulled back when she saw Scarlet’s expression worsen, “I’m not here to lecture you. I’m just here to provide some information. August and Eric,” she pointed at us, “both effortlessly beat S-ranks, and – sorry you have to hear this Scadia – they were nowhere close to using their full strength. So,” her hands sat at her waist in pride as she spoke about us, “if they’re both much stronger than this world’s S-ranks, they can more than complete an S-rank dungeon. Besides,” she walked back to me, “if you’re worried about numbers, this guy can fill an entire group with clones of himself,” she poked my cheek playfully. “Well, the decision is yours, guild master,” Donna warped back into me, the trickling shimmers of light fading afterwards.

Her little appearance worked in our favour, but I could feel the looming murderous intent of Scadia invading my personal space. “So, you still didn’t fight with your everything,” the sorceress used Donna’s words to impale me.

I sighed, “Scadia. I like you. But you gotta understand–”

“Understand what?!” her voice raised, “I was the strongest sorceress before you came along! Now what do I have?!”

August flicked her on the forehead. “You have your life. If he’d fought at max capacity from the start, the first spell would have killed you. Take the life you have now and use it to surpass him.”

This friend of mine gave some good advice. Must be a fatherhood thing, I imagined. However, Scadia still couldn’t accept it, and stepped outside so others would not see her teary face.

Freya followed her out to console her, but that was a matter that paled in comparison to what truly had my attention. “So, what do you say, Scarlet? Shall we do an S-rank dungeon?”

“No. I don’t care how strong you are. All it takes is a few seconds of aloofness for the lower ranked dungeoneers to die. We’ll do an A-rank first so we can see how the team works. But,” her volume lowered, “even an A-rank is…”

Phil interjected, “We should do it. Remember why your father founded First Flight, Scarlet.”

Her eyes opened, and a beautiful smile came about after. Phil sure was great moral support, despite his lack of skills.

“You’re right, Phil,” she admitted. She began speaking to him about preparing food and supplies. I wasn’t sure she understood that I could literally make anything, so I reminded her about those croissants she so loved the last time we were grouped.

We stood on the coast far away, reaching there in no more than twenty minutes. Some First Flight people couldn’t handle flight with zephyrs. How ironic. Of course, Scarlet and Phil were there. Freya managed to inveigle Scadia into coming along. There were four remaining slots, because regular dungeons were limited to ten members. Scarlet filled the slots with a couple healers and warriors, one of the healers was C-rank whilst the other three were B-ranks.

After a final confirmation, Scarlet and Phil entered the swirling portal and everyone else followed shortly after. We appeared on an island, somewhat circular in shape. It boasted a fifty-metre diameter, judging from the size. The island began moving, drifting along the span of a huge lake. “Remember everyone, an attack can happen at any time!” Scarlet warned. “Be vigilant!”

So, I did just that and used Life Perception. There were a few hundred life essences swimming about underneath our floating raft, or island rather. “Um, Scarlet, is it that all the enemies are in the water?”

“Well, isn’t that obvious?”

“And it’s okay if I attack now?”

“How are you going to attack if they’re under…” she sighed. “Just do what you want, Eric.”

August laid down and closed his eyes, as if sunbathing. And I was going to use Thunderstorm…

So that blacksmith could enjoy his sun, I opted for Arcane Missiles instead, with a couple stacks of Purist to increase the number of missiles. I sat down and focused on the life essences and Arcane Missiles sought them out. It looked like fireworks bolting out from me. In thirty seconds, the portal-like gate appeared before us.

“You killed the boss?!” Scadia gripped her staff in irritation. “How…”

“If one of those missiles hit any living thing, it destroys the target on a cellular level. Although, in my world, it’s a forbidden spell,” I chuckled nervously. “Anyway, let’s do this a few more times, yeah?” I dragged August by the ankle and went through the portal.

The comedic expressions they had as we excited were golden and I couldn’t help but cackle at them. “We’re gonna get stupidly rich at this rate…” Phil commented.

“Oh yeah,” August finally decided to get up, “we never got anything from the dungeons we did. Where are the items and stuff?”

“In your inventory,” Freya told him.

“Where’s my inventory?” he questioned.

Phil chuckled, “You two really aren’t from around here, huh? Everyone has an inventory in their mind. It’s like storage for items you gather from dungeons. Just uh, imagine a bunch of squares, like a grid. It should show up naturally.”

August thought about it, “Hydra’s ass! He’s right, Eric! I can see it. It follows your vision, kind of.”

So, I did the same and without much effort, the little grid appeared. There was some stuff in it like armours, weapons, clothing, materials. They all had distinct names, but the names would be colour-coded. “What’s with the coloured names?”

“From weakest to strongest, there’s green, blue, purple, orange, and lastly red. Green is the most common, where-as red is the least.” Scadia taught us a few things. At the top of the inventory there were random numbers, all written in the colours that determined the worth of items. The green number was the highest.

“What’re those numbers at the top for?” I asked.

“They’re soul shards,” August told me, “weren’t you paying attention yesterday?”

“Shut up! I knew that!” I folded my arms and faced away. “Well, let’s get to it then.”

That day, I’d no idea how many times we repeated that dungeon. It got to the point where ten seconds was all I needed. I gave out items that I collected to those that might need it. They were basically enchanted with low primary attributes. Nothing fancy like secondary attributes. One of the healers even managed to get their hands on an orange bracelet, which was the second strongest item grade. And judging by their shocked faces, they definitely weren’t expecting it. I had a few purple items, which I gave out willingly. August did the same with his items and we were eventually interrogated.

“Why the hell aren’t you guys taking anything?” Scarlet questioned.

“Why? Well…” August looked at me, and I shrugged, not really minding revealing the pillars of creation.

“What’s the weakest item you have, Scarlet?” I asked and she answered that her neck item, a choker of sorts, was the weakest item of her set. So, I recreated one embroidered with rubies, her favourite colour.

“Do you use mana at all?” August asked and she shook her head. Once I gave it to August, it took only a few seconds to enchant it. He handed it over to her after. It disappeared into thin air.

I guess once the object belongs to you, you could put it in your inventory. That’s convenient. This whole inventory thing is just like the translation magic from Jynnak. Like a world magic… My mind began delving deeper into the interesting things that world magic could do but was unable to focus after Scarlet’s ear-splitting shriek.

I jumped. “Hydra’s ass, woman! You scared me!”

She continued looking absentmindedly into the air, probably staring at the item in the inventory.

“What? What is it? Tell us!” Freya couldn’t wait. Scarlet, dumbfounded, couldn’t tell them what she saw. She simply brought the item back into reality and held it out. Everyone else inspected it, so I did the same out of curiosity.

The first odd thing about it, was that the name was written in black, a colour Scadia didn’t mention. The second strange thing was the name was a simple question mark. As for the enchantments, August fitted them all at max enchantment power into that one item. It gave the wearer fifty plus to strength, intelligence and agility. He included ten percent durability and health regeneration.

We had those same enchants on the rings we wore, but the enchantments’ power was split amongst the rings so in the event that we lost one, we’d still have a lot of power remaining.

I guess that was why our group members had faces that looked like they’d seen ghosts. On the thoughts of inspecting items, I took a look at the staff of Scien. Like the necklace I transmuted, the name was a question mark in black. There was an ownership enchantment, just like August said there was, and another enchantment as well.

I confirmed what absorbing a target’s mana did. It increased my mana power, but by an almost unnoticeable and incremental amount. No wonder the spirit lords of the spirit void wanted me to come here. An endless supply of monsters to kill meant I could cultivate my mana power right here. And of course, the more difficult monsters had more mana to steal.

“I’ll be frank here. If you guys can make orange or red items, we can sell them and buy the rights to attempt a rank-up trial pretty easily. If you two can secure S-ranks in the trial, then you will be allowed to attempt Earth-Sky Tower.”

“Isn’t that a little, uhm…” Phil scratched the side of his head.

“Impossible? I don’t know,” Scarlet admitted. “But at this point, can any of us here say for certain that these two can’t do S-rank dungeons?”

August and I were looking intently at Freya, for we knew the Frozen Tear she mentioned to her brother, Shem, had something to do with Earth-Sky Tower.

After some discussions, we returned to the guild building. Scarlet brought us into a meeting about her idea to use us. We were fine with it, mainly because she didn’t intend to hide her motive behind it. “We’ll just make the items, so tell us what to make. You can do what you want with them.”

“The first thing I want, is for you to equip our guild. I know, for something like that, there’s nothing we can do to repay you, but–”

“Done,” August said, not minding it at all. First Flight was chocked full of really nice people, so I didn’t mind either. So, every day for a month, we would clear S-rank dungeons multiple times per day. Not for items in particular, since August and I could make the strongest of the strongest, but instead for soul shards, which translated to a huge influx of capital for First Flight.

As we began getting popular for the times that we completed S-rank dungeons in, our guild began getting a lot of applications from others seeking to join and share in our growing fortune. There were even a few S-ranks from other guilds checking us out. But apparently, First Flight never accepted S-ranks – Scadia being a special case – because Scarlet’s father founded the guild with the sole notion to help weaker people become stronger. Once they became strong, they were actually encouraged to leave First Flight and join a stronger guild that would suit them. In truth, many A-ranks and S-ranks in other guilds came from First Flight.

Once the first month was up, we were famous to the point where it was hard to walk through the streets. We were the most controversial guild, despite being ranked number fifteen. And with that controversy came the biggest turnout of buyers to a monthly auction held by the RC, in which guilds would put items up for sale.

Usually, these auctions had one-off items because of the randomness of item drops in the dungeons. A guild would have some blue items, a few purple items, and maybe twice a year, you might see an orange item. First Flight on the other hand, had literal armour sets along with weapons for each role in a dungeon group and each of those sets had an orange grade and red grade to them.

Scarlet, August, and myself sat in the crowd as they bid for our item sets. At the end of the night, we made a killing. The top guilds swiped everything off our hands at ludicrous prices, according to a grinning Scarlet.

In the value of soul shards, we made over twenty-five million. It was around quarter-million for a rank-up trial.