Bae, Mal-Chin enjoyed going out and grinding mobs in the beta. It was a nice change of pace from gathering, crafting, designing, or building structures. He was part of the test group focused on crafting, town, and city development. It was a difficult task when starting with just a single basic tool each, such as an axe, hammer, or harvesting sickle in a new world with zero facilities, anywhere.

In Cheon Chilbaeg, he spent much time in the Mage Hall, gaining reputation and earning experience for completing various tasks. It eventually enabled him to access more powerful spells, of which he chose a channelled damage-over-time (DoT) spell. Naturally, when the event started and he was transported into the safe room reading the message about Extant upgrades he decided to take a similar route.

Firstly, he took a look at the [Spell] option, seeing some interesting choices before checking out [General]. There he purchased the [Personal Status] option for 180 minutes. He took a quick look at his mana pool and mana regeneration rate before look at spells once more. There was little in the way of viability, the spells simply cost too much mana for his early regen.

That was fine though, he took a look at [Enhance] and saw there were a few different types of mana regen. He continued to look scrolling through the list for anything else interesting and came upon [Custom Enhancement Creator]. With a quick look and a play with the various options he soon discovered he could make the spells far more cost effective and powerful than the standard pre-made ones. A custom version seemed like a great idea to him. So Mal-Chin began to really think of the best way to go about making an effective enhancement spell.

Mal-Chin spent quite a few minutes playing with the [Custom Spell Creation] tool. He was trying to balance the cost of his Channeled DoT spell which was considerably expensive depending on the adjustment of variables. It generally sat around 700 to 850-minutes. The enhancement spell while cheaper still cost 400 to 580-minutes. With Mal-Chin already having the [Personal Status] already purchased, no matter what he did he could not get both spells under the combined total of 1440 minutes. Fantastic he thought, spellcasters are getting shafted terribly in this competition. How can they possibly compete compared to people who primarily use melee combat? Dejectedly he continued trying various ideas. He had the time while stuck in the start room.

Looking in the upgrade section of the custom tool, he noticed something interesting. Making some adjustments he found he could add an evolution to the spell. It had some basic requirements, though not much different from the spells base requirements. The really nice thing about an evolution was that with some easy tweaking of requirements, the cost could be almost completely nullified. An additional effect for free, almost. 'Very interesting,' Mal-Chin thought. 'Is this a mistake from the developers? It must be an oversight, strapping the Powered1 spell mechanic into the loop and adding a custom spell tool. If the devs involved were tight on time maybe they cut corners with this event. With only weeks until the new world goes live to millions of people they would have to be tight with their time. So, it's probably not surprising something like this was missed, but still, this is a pretty major miss. One that I am happy to make the most of.'

With minor adjustments complete, Mal-Chin had the two spells. He could afford them both right now and still retain over 4-hours of time currency. He sent them to the checkout, though that is as far as they went. Mal-Chin needed to see how things went against the first mob to get a handle on experience and the speed with which he would accumulate DP. Mal-Chin reviewed his damage spell.

Spell: Malicious Poison

A custom channeled damage-over-time poison spell created by Bae, Mal-Chin.

[Purchase: 730 (Minutes)] Descriptors: Variables: Spell Type: Channeled Damage Over Time Magic Type: Poison Targeting: Line of Sight Delivery: Coordinate Location Envelopment Effect: Channeled Damage Over Time Advanced Effect: [Advanced Evolution] Special Effect: N/A Cast Range (m): 40 Cast Time (Sec): 3 Cool Down (Sec): 0 Spell Duration (Sec): Channel Duration Cast Cost (mana): 50 Channel Cost (mana / damage): 0.8 / 1 Requirement: Attunement [100]

Control [100]

Focus [100]

Wisdom [100] Total Upgrades: 0 / 40 Upgrade Experience: 0 / 1460 [Advanced Evolution] Slow Movement Upgrades: [Damage: Channel Multiplier]

[Efficiency: Reduce Channel Cost]

[Effect: Improve Slow Movement] Advanced Evolution: Slow Movement

Instantly slows the movement of the target for the duration of the spell.

[Activate] Advanced Effect Slow Movement Requirements: Attunement [200]

Control [150]

Focus [150]

Wisdom [120]

Mal-Chin then moved on to take a look at his enhancement spell.

Enhancement: Combat Mana Regen

A custom mana regeneration enhancement created by Bae, Mal-Chin.

[Purchase: 270 (Minutes)] Descriptors: Variables: Spell Type: Regeneration Magic Type: Concentration Enhancement Targeting: Self Delivery: Envelopment Effect: Flat Mana Regeneration Advanced Effect: [Advanced Evolution] Special Effect: [Special Evolution] Cast Range (m): Self Cast Time (Sec): 35 Cool Down (Sec): 30 Spell Duration (Sec): Channel Duration Cast Cost (mana): 50 Concentration Cost: 100 Requirement: Attunement [100]

Control [100]

Focus [100]

Wisdom [100]

Potential [100] Total Upgrades: 0 / 50 Upgrade Experience: 0 / 600 [Advanced Evolution] Stat-Based Mana Regeneration [Special Evolution] Remove Combat Regeneration Debuff Upgrades: [Damage: Channel Multiplier] Advanced Evolution: Stat-Based Mana Regeneration

A second tier of mana regeneration based on Attunement and Potential Stats.

[Activate] Advanced Effect Stat-Based Mana Regeneration Requirements: Attunement [200]

Control [150]

Focus [150]

Wisdom [120]

Potential [200] Special Evolution: Remove Combat Regeneration Debuff

Removes the combat regeneration debuff that normally exists for Health, Endurance and Mana regeneration.

[Activate] Advanced Effect Remove Combat Regeneration Debuff Requirements: Attunement [200]

Control [200]

Focus [200]

Wisdom [150]

Potential [200]

'First lap, first mob, a baby blue slime, new store, new mobs, wonderful.' Mal-Chin sighed while he took a look at his resistances. Knowing there was nothing there for the damage he would take from physical contact with the slime. That was fine, it was only small. A slime like that would likely be fairly unreactive, they tended to bulk up before they really gained much in the way of attributes. A slime this size would most likely be days old and would be consuming ground nutrients, leaf matter, plants, and carrion. Too slow to catch anything other than the most unaware of creatures, small bugs were probably its limit.

Lothe to do it, Mal-Chin approached the slime as quietly as he could before plunging his hand into its body and yanking out its core with a forceful flick. The mass splattered then went limp spreading out into a wider pool. Mal-Chin, core in hand stepped back and released the core onto the ground away from the rest of its body. A couple more flicks of his hand away from him got most of the slimes body fluids off his skin while he grimaced at the damage he received. The slime wasn't dead yet, not until its core was shattered, with that he walked over to it and ground it into the concrete like surface until he heard a satisfying breaking sound seconds later. The cores of young slimes were delicate crystalline structures that easily broken.

"Uwa, so much experience." With a thought, Mal-Chin brought up his [Experience Exchange], checking he read how much experience for his next DP was required, just 9,542 the screen reported. "So cheap!" He immediately went into the [Checkout] of the upgrade store and completed the transaction. With a great big smile on his face, he quickly opened the chest that appeared before him and absorbed the spell scrolls within.

Once both spell scrolls were absorbed, Mal-Chin stood up and activated [Combat Mana Regen] enhancement spell. The auto-cast system took over the 35-second long casting. He had only experienced a short duration cast during his time in the beta. Such a long spell cast felt very uncomfortable but, he endured it.

After casting thousands of spells under the auto-cast system in Powered1 with no discernable side effects, he was confident he would be fine. It was merely the sensation of being a puppet within his own body extended by roughly six times longer than he previously had ever experienced that grated upon the edges of his psyche.

The spell completed and Mal-Chin was shrouded by a brilliant lighting effect that was mostly sky blue in colour for a couple of seconds. He brought up the spells data screen. The cast had rewarded him with 200-experience, 'nice'. After watching the experience tick up 1-experience every 2-seconds, he found everything seemed to be working correctly. Internally he was fist pumping for his spell evolution workaround.

Next, it was time to try out [Malicious Poison] as a damage spell. That spell even with Mal-Chin's cheaper evolution build, still had a massively high cost. There were some very important reasons for some of the variables he chose to incorporate into the spell. For instance, he raised the cost by 20-minutes to extend the cast range from 30 to 40 meters. Why, because the course of the loop was exactly 1-kilometer and contained 25 spawn points evenly spaced along it, there were 37-meters to each mob. Thus, Mal-Chin stopped just a step a couple of paces behind and to the left of the previous slimes remaining viscous fluids. Eyeing off the next slime on the loop he activated his spell. The auto-cast took over for the 3-second casting time.

Upon completion, a purple colour manifested upon and enveloped the slime. That was one of the larger expenses, the spell targeted via line of sight, the most common damage type spell targeting used. But the delivery of the cast spell was rather uncommon from Mal-Chin's beta experience. It cost an additional 60-minutes of currency because of that. Instead, the spell manifest at the target. Advantageous compared to the more common spells that manifest at the caster and traveled to the target. Mal-Chin's spell couldn't miss unless he took his eye off the target at the moment the spell completed. A spell that always hit its target unless through deliberate action was massively more efficient compared to a spell that could be dodged, blocked, or intercepted in some way.

Another tweak Mal-Chin made to the spell was to improve the initial damage of the spell, costing an additional 30-minutes of currency per 0.01-damage effect, raising it from 0.02 to 0.05 for the calculation based on the Attunement Stat. Doing this substantially raised the base damage sufficiently that he didn't feel as though he needed to include it as an upgrade. It did cost him overall, but only 30 minutes and having the higher base damage at the start could only be advantageous early on while the channel growth component of the spell was low.

.

.

.

"Uwa, so much health, it's so expensive to kill a single slime like this," Mal-Chin lamented. He walked up to the slime, most of its gelatinous outer coating had been slothed off the creature as the magical poison corrupted its materials. Really, the slimes core was contained within a very small 4-centimeters of its outer slime now, Mal-Chin didn't hesitate to grind the core into the ground until it shattered, it took a mere moment.

Looking on the bright side of things, Mal-Chin figured his [Combat Mana Regen] enhancement spell had plenty of mana restoration experience to gain now. He brought up the data screen for [Malicious Poison], taking a look at its most vital detail, [Experience: 366 / 1460], doing some maths he worked out he would just tip over the edge of the experience required to enable an upgrade after three more casts of the spell, as he just did. It was good enough for now, and as he reduced the channel cost, it would become more and more effective at gaining experience, even as the experience requirement increased.

In the meantime, he had better kill the next three slimes by hand to gain enough experience for his first DP. Mal-Chin needed to increase his enzyme resistance fast to make these slimes easier to kill, while he regenerated his mana back to full.

* * * * *

The laps continued, and Mal-Chin did the best he could. Unfortunately, he found himself in an unfortunate position, the mobs he was facing proved extremely difficult for him to manage. His [Malicious Poison] spell needed time to grow along with his stats, especially his mana regeneration. However, the mobs were growing faster than his spell could manage despite putting all his points into the right areas looking toward the long game. The result, he was losing time at a steadily growing rate, and there was little he could do about it.

Then he came across the spiders, those nasty creatures did not have much health, unlike several of the mobs previous. They were fast and deadly, one bite and the poison was almost enough to wipe him out.

There was not much Mal-Chin could do. If he fought aggressively or cautiously, he was going to be caught by the elimination boundary. He simply did not have the physique or gross motor skills needed for melee combat, especially against an agile enemy. That was why he became a caster, they took time to develop, but their power was undeniable given sufficient time and melee support. By spending so much of his starting minutes on the two spells, he couldn't afford to buy a weapon that might have helped him against such a nimble foe either. So while he was regenerating mana two-thirds of the way through lap-34 the red screen of the elimination boundary caught up to him.

Bae, Mal-Chin was immediately transported into the safe room, the red screen was once again up and opaque. In the text window, two messages were waiting for him.

The three other walls had timers on them and began a countdown from 180-seconds. Mal-Chin did not have anything with him, so he wandered over to the opaque screen. He gave it a tentative touch with his hand. It felt perfectly smooth, solid and slightly warm.

Resting his head on it, Mal-Chin let out a sigh. "At least I didn't come last, but I was really hoping to do better than that. I need my tank Hahn, or I am useless in combat. Even with the hours of help and advice from that MDP girl. I hope you are both doing much better than me right now. Getting eliminated sucks, I suck, and most of all this lanky, uncoordinated body, sucks. Why can't I fight like the others?" Mal-Chin said to the walls. He slid to the ground, resting against the red screen, and waited for the seconds on the timer to tick to zero.