"Please explain what just transpired," demanded Serlv impatiently.

"The System was programmed to infect everyone, but also to protect civilization. It recognised that infecting Earth would harm civilization, and got stuck. Now it's spread across Earth, but I detached everyone from it. It's still infecting newborns, though. I'll need to return to disconnect them periodically. Assuming I can."

My presence here was now antithetical to the goals of the System, and it knew it. If it had any way to keep me out, and wasn't programmed to always allow me in because of my administrative rights, it very likely would.

"Your complaint was that they would need time to prepare. You have given them that time."

"Yes, but..." I started, wondering how to explain when mentions of the Law would be wiped from her memory.

As things were, the Law would only affect newborns. It wouldn't be modifying anyone. There would be no personality death as a result of it. Didn't that assuage most of my complaints? I wasn't even sure how the System could spread it to Earth. So far, anyone on the other side of the portals got the System shard without the chains, and it took coming over here to get them infected.

Now that the delegation had crossed over here and back, bringing it with them, and the System was presumably going to make active attempts to spread it, there was no reason to assume that would remain the case. I had to assume that everyone on Earth was now infected with the Law, and soul incompatibility was their only protection.

"Let's just get out of here, before things get any worse," I suggested, and the others agreed. The three of us practically fled the ark, with Kari not looking disappointed at having to abandon the treasure trove at all. The System wasn't one of the surface races, and the Law did nothing to warp Kari's perception of it. She'd just seen it trap us in a room, forcing me to subject myself to soul magic of unknown purpose. She didn't want to hang around.

"If it has spread across Earth in its entirety, does that not mean they can now open portals to us with impunity?" asked Serlv.

"Yes. I suppose it does."

Another downside, although given how they were still afraid of pathogens, probably not something that would actually have any impact. Creating a sterile environment wasn't trivial.

We reached the outside without further incident, and the door once more swung shut behind us. We headed further up the passage, and out into the mid-morning light. "They've gone home, and we've done what we can here. I suppose now we just wait for their next portal," I said.

"Agreed," sighed Serlv. "Now I suppose I must take Kari home."

"It's fine, Peter can teleport me," she replied, spamming a skill to empty her mana pool. Probably [Analysis], given that I didn't see any mana activity.

"He can? What an interesting class you have. In that case, I shall depart. Goodbye."

Serlv took off, flying east, so I tapped Kari and sent her to my home in Dawnhold, before lying down and activating [Redistribute].

It was only half-way up my torso before I felt the hug.

"All that effort, and stupid Earth went and wasted it!" complained Cluma, leaving me wondering what she was talking about. She may have felt the mana drift from when they opened a portal, even if she was asleep when I was there, but wasted what?

Ah, right. She must be assuming I got dragged out of the dungeon before completing it. I was an [Artisan] now. And I still hadn't even looked at my new skills!

"Actually, the timing was pretty good. I was in the floor twenty antechamber when they interrupted, so I gave the hydra a quick beat-down before leaving."

I should be seriously tired, though, given that I was woken up in the middle of the night, and hadn't caught up since. I was still running on adrenaline for now, but I'd likely pay for it tenfold in another hour or two.

"Wait, you soloed a twenty floor dungeon?" asked a surprised Kari.

"Yup. I've changed class to [Artisan]."

"Why did I even..." she muttered, before shaking her head. "Well, I'm going home, where I'm going to have a nice, long lie-in. However interesting that was, I was still woken up in the middle of the night for it."

She left my house, heading off down the street, leaving me alone with Cluma.

"Congratulations," she said, looking torn between being happy for me but unhappy she'd fallen behind. She had a big boost of her own coming soon, though; [Darkness Mage] was likely most of the way to completion by now. "So, how did contact with Earth go? And what new skills did you get? Anything good?"

"I haven't actually looked yet," I admitted. "And Earth was complicated. They really wanted monster cores, but were perfectly happy with ones from floor twenty, so we made a good trade deal. But the System is being weird about it, and I'm not sure how bad things are yet."

I needed to check there were no adverse effects from detaching everyone, and find out whether it would open the door to me in a season or two's time, so I could check up on the new batch of babies.

"Oh. Well, if you can't do anything about it now, hurry up and look at your skills!"

Right. As much as I knew I should sleep, I wouldn't be able to yet, so skills would be sensible.

Rank 1 Available Skills: [Weapon Style: One-Handed] [Weapon Style: Two-Handed] [Weapon Style: Shield] [Weapon Style: Dual Wielding]

Rank 2 Available Skills: [Advanced Farming] [Seed] [Harvest] [Advanced Runecrafting] [Rune Link] [Disenchant] [Advanced Cooking] [Meal Temperature Control] [Prepare Ingredient] [Advanced Alchemy] [Powderise Substance] [Dissolve Substance] [Advanced Carpentry] [Season Wood] [Cut Wood] [Advanced Smithing] [Weld] [Cut Metal] [Advanced Tailoring] [Mend] [Material Manipulation] [Advanced Masonry] [Join Stone] [Cut Stone] [Disassembly] [Preserve Corpse] [Detoxify Corpse] [Advanced Glasswork] [Anneal] [Purify Glass]

Rank 3 Available Skills: [Profound Mana Pool] [Profound Stamina Pool] [Rapid Mana Regeneration] [Rapid Stamina Regeneration] [Soul Sight] [Status Concealment]

That was a lot of new skills for my measly fifteen soul points to cope with, but I could grab up to five of them if I wanted. Each crafting class had the advanced version of its crafting skill, and then a pair of add-ons. I ruled most of the add-ons out immediately; they were time savers, but weren't required. A field could be planted and reaped without [Seed] or [Harvest]; it would just take longer.

That's not to say they were all useless. [Preserve Corpse] must be how whole corpses were moved between warehouses, and left out on palettes, without any sort of preservation-enchanted containers. [Detoxify Corpse] would remove poisonous substances from a corpse, making it safer to dismantle. [Cut Metal] would theoretically be an amazing combat skill against armoured opponents, if the System permitted that sort of use.

Even something like [Meal Temperature Control] would be handy, keeping a prepared meal at its ideal serving temperature. I could make ice cream, then serve it an hour later, safe in the knowledge it wouldn't melt.

[Rune Link] was more interesting, and was the way Grover could manufacture adamantite equipment with orichalcum enchantments, and still have those enchantments apply to the adamantite.

Now that it came to it, I wasn't really sure which of the skills I wanted. Really, none of them seemed vital. Everything there, someone else could do better. [Advanced Cooking] was probably worth it, since I would certainly be doing lots of meal preparation in my life, and I may as well make it taste good. [Advanced Smithing] wasn't something I'd get much use out of, but for the purposes of Grover's new class hunt, it was essential. To a lesser extent, the same applied to [Advanced Runecrafting].

[Mend] would let me do armour patch-jobs while in a dungeon, but I wasn't convinced it would be useful. [Weld] would grant me a limited healing ability, but I suspected that any wound that [Weld] could deal with would be taken care of by [Regeneration]. Plus, using it in that way would require me to keep my metal limbs with me in [Item Box], with the associated massive mana penalty.

I would probably get some use out of [Disassembly], but anything that couldn't be dealt with using the rank one [Dismantling] that had been subsumed by my [Basic Crafting] was probably best stored whole in my [Item Box] and handed over to the guild in one piece.

I suppose I also had the option of trying to gather all of them, and getting a [Versatile Crafter] upgrade, assuming one existed. That would mean fewer skills to level. Alas, I didn't know how many of them I needed, because the title didn't say, and last time I'd bought everything all at once. It could be anywhere between five and ten. Best case, I could get it here and now. Worst case, the soul points from getting [Artisan] high enough for another class change wouldn't be enough, and I'd waste a lot of points. I doubted five would be enough, so I'd save it for later. Since the merged skill jumped to the highest level skill it subsumed, there wouldn't be any penalty for waiting.

Guess I'd need to inject some more high velocity metal into my veins.

"Thirty new skills available, all rank two," I informed Cluma.

"Wow. For one class? How is anyone ever supposed to buy that many?"

"They aren't. It's not exactly a normal class... But which ones do you think I should get?" I asked, reading out the list and their descriptions.

"[Advanced Cooking], obviously, and I agree with you about [Advanced Smithing] and [Advanced Runecrafting]. I think you dismissed [Disassembly] too quickly, though. Yes, high-level monsters are best left to professionals, but until you get an infinitely big [Item Box], we're always going to be killing more than you can bring back. Being able to strip large monsters of their cores will always be useful."

"You just want to eat the cores. You won't get the chance if we hand intact corpses over."

Cluma poked her tongue out, but didn't deny my accusation. "I'm not sure about the last one. It's a pity you didn't get [Advanced Etiquette] in that batch."

"I'll save the points for now then, and just get those four."

One at a time, because I was an intelligent human being, capable of learning from my mistakes.

ding

New skill acquired: [Advanced Cooking]

New recipes trickled into my head, along with alien memories of preparing them. With them came knowledge of new ingredients. Some were poisonous raw, and needed careful preparation. That was new; [Basic Cooking] had only included knowledge of safe ingredients. Not that I was in a rush to test any of them out.

ding

New skill acquired: [Advanced Smithing]

New techniques were added to my memory. Nothing life changing, as expected, but it really was amazing how much could be done without lathes, arc welders, angle grinders and all the other high-tech machinery Earth had. It gave me a far greater respect for the blacksmiths pre-industrial revolution, not that I'd ever looked down on that sort of thing.

ding

New skill acquired: [Advanced Runecrafting]

More new memories. There were recipes for new enchantments, but beyond that, I found I could understand a little about how my lightning glove worked; some knowledge about interactions between mana and materials was included in the download. Not enough to know what was up with manufacturing mana-materials from base metals, which was no surprise given that Grover had higher ranked skills and didn't know either, but I could see how to build a mana channel into a metal plate.

ding

New skill acquired: [Disassembly]

Yet more memories, and I quickly realised this skill was useful beyond what even Cluma had thought. I 'remembered' the anatomy of a wide range of monsters, each more alien than the last, and with it came knowledge of how to extract body-parts. Skin, teeth, claws, cores, but also internal organs. And knowledge of how to extract a heart necessarily came with knowledge of where the heart was.

The skill was an encyclopaedia of monsters' weak points.

And that was four new skills. They didn't get the level boost of replacing a high-level lower-ranked skill, but they did still get the plus-two from my bracelet. But I'd certainly need to do something with them; having them at level one would be sufficient for earning a rank three class, but I'd need them at ten to buy any of that class's skills.

"So, what do you want me to cook for lunch?"