An excellent farming spot, a fun dinner with my family yesterday, and a successful late-night meeting with potential franchisees abroad—I woke up in a good mood today, ready to become harder than ever.

“Nothing like the smell of deadly poison in the morning!” I maniacally laughed, hurling a bottle of [Morabodry] and a cork-sealed glass tube of [Vaporizing Reagent] at the thickest clump of Frost Macaques on the branches above. The two chemicals exploded into a cloud of violet smoke, engulfing the monkeys throwing ice balls and inflicting them with poison.

This reminded me of my zany uncle, who moved to Assuwa several years ago to retire on the tropical beaches. When we were kids, he used to tell us stories about his time in the military. His favorite one was of this drill sergeant, unreasonably strict and ‘whacked out of his goddamn mind’ as my uncle put it, who threw smoke grenades into the barracks of cadets to wake them up.

Like everything else with him, one couldn’t be too sure if he was telling the truth. Maybe he was, which explained why he was also ‘whacked out of his goddamn mind.’

“Breathe in deep, you pesky monkeys! Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t badmouth you since you’re helping me level big time.” If their AIs could choose, the Feral Frost Macaques would certainly rather that I used smoke grenades instead of chemical weapons. This might be considered a war crime under international law.

My second [Poison Bottle Cast] landed on another heavy concentration of monsters—its first level could spawn a maximum of only two clouds.

I had plenty of [Morabodry] and would brew buttload tons more that no one was going to buy anyway, and only a few bottles were needed to coat my retribution gear per crafting and leveling session, might as well use the rest of my stocks to kill more mobs. Let the Artas I already spent continue working instead of sleeping in my inventory. This way, leveling my crafting Ocadule helped progress my Cidule and other Ocadules.

It did mean additional costs because I had to buy the [Vaporizing Reagent] to use [Poison Bottle Cast]. I bought dozens of tubes from Arakmad for three hundred Artas apiece. This was like mega-sales that enticed people to buy at massive discounts for supposedly big savings, disguising the fact that people would’ve saved their money if they didn’t purchase anything in the first place.

Such an insanely fucking expensive skill to cast. Spend money to make money… or make Essence and Gli, in this case.

Satisfied with the placement of the [Morabodry] clouds, I used [Cloak of the Plaguespreader] and got to brewing more bottles. Even if I no longer had Nam-Go Poison—I used up my single bottle yesterday—I continued casting this skill because reflecting [Minor Chill] on the monkeys lowered their DPS.

In total, I had burned five million Artas, including the supplies for my current session. That was already subtracting the measly hundred thousand or so Artas earned per session from farming the Frost Macaques.

Would’ve been great if I could sell Frosted Macaque fur, fangs, and claws in the auction house, but it was impossible. When I passed by there earlier to sell the stacks of Swineling and Crabore loot to fuel my indiscriminate spending, I noticed that there were pages of Frost Macaque loot with no buyers, in contrast to other items.

My hunch was that this quest was a sort of exploited leveling technique that many players had used, resulting in a deluge of Frost Macaque loots, a surplus that was never going away. I settled for selling mine to stingy merchant NPCs for a pittance.

Despite the massive costs, I had no plans of stopping… but I didn’t have infinite Artas, so I either had to stop in a few hours or drive myself to poverty. I had my eyes on a few level-twenty items and was setting aside a few million Artas for them.

[Poison Bottle Cast] was working better than expected. I had thought it wouldn’t add much because the monkeys would get poisoned from hitting me anyway. But the clouds also poisoned the ‘ammo carrier’ monkeys—previously, I couldn’t do anything to those buggers because they weren’t attacking.

[ Increased: Mantle of Kindling Level to 2 ]

Lvl. 2 Mantle of Kindling: Intense heat deep within bursts outward, enveloping you with protection from the ancestors. Punish those who would strike you by Burning them. (23% chance to Burn attacker with 15% of Attack and Magic Power per second for 5 seconds). Those Burned by any source will be weakened by (-8% Attack and Magic Power) when attacking you. Replenish (30 + 0.3% of Armor) Ancestral Shroud when you Head-On Block an attack from a Burned enemy; limited to once every second.

The second level of [Mantle of Kindling] didn’t have a new effect, unlike the other Cidules skills—it probably had enough as is.

Nonetheless, the percentage values for its effects had large increments, especially for just one level up. An eight percent added chance to Burn was awesome because the faster I could inflict that status, the sooner I could trigger the other effects of [Mantle of Kindling], such as lowering a Burned enemy’s Attack and Magic Power, as well as replenishing AS whenever I blocked them.

It also increased my DPS a bit, which was nice.

Instead of working while semi-AFK leveling, how about watching movies for a change? Relaxing while getting harder and brewing dangerous chemicals at the same time? Is there anything Herald Stone can’t do?

[ Increased: Player Level to 17! ]

“Awesome!” I pumped my fist in the air. An awkward gesture with a broad shield attached to my arm. “And here I was thinking I mightn’t make it.”

Halfway through my fourth and the last session for the day, or anytime soon, because I only had five million Artas left, I completed one of my aims before taking a break from brewing. [Poison Bottle Cast] made such a big difference in leveling compared to yesterday. In fact, [Cleansing Flames] was also about to level up—my other aim.

And just in time because my stockpile of [Morabodry] was running dry. I wasn’t using [Poison Bottle Cast] anymore as I wanted to have a few dozen [Morabodry] to use for whatever purpose until I saved enough capital to start brewing again.

It’d be a much smoother process next time. Arakmad, after tons of quests, finally considered me a preferred customer. No more limitations on what or how many of his exotic ingredients I could buy.

“A message?” I said, noticing the tiny alert on the screen of the action flick I was watching. “Ah, it’s Kezo.” Maybe I could mooch—erm, rephrasing. Perhaps I could mention in passing my money problems, and he could respond of his own free will to donate Artas to me.

[Kezodilla: Herald, how’s it going? Are you busy?]

[Herald Stone: No, just farming.] Checking his level, I saw that he had been busy himself, reaching level sixty-nine—a very nice number.

[Kezodilla: Where are you? Let’s talk.]

A few minutes later, he messaged me again, telling me he was at the part of the Golden Forest where the Frost Macaques lived, but I was nowhere to be found.

[Herald Stone: I’m right here, surrounded by monkeys.] Even if trees blocked his view, he should be able to hear these screeching bastards unless he listened to music and tuned them out like I did when I watched a movie.

[Kezodilla: Frost Macaques? I think I know what’s going on.] He instructed me to make a party and invite him. For some reason, I should be the party leader, as the other way around wouldn’t work.

[ Kezodilla joined Herald Stone’s Party ]

The monkeys quieted so fast that I thought my volume settings were broken. A portion of the sea of hairy whiteness moved away like a tidal wave. They took up firing positions somewhere to my right to shoot at the newcomer—Kezo was trotting through the trees to meet up with me.

“There you are!” He slashed the air, sending arcs of black flames to the trees. Several monkeys instantly died. The volume of chattering decreased as the blue and violet sparkles flowed to both of us. “Don’t want to disturb your leveling too much,” he explained, continuing to kill the monkeys because we were dividing the Essence and Gli between us.

“Did you join in my quest to find me?”

“Yep, a separate instance is generated for every player or party who does this quest. It’s going to be messy otherwise.” He confirmed my earlier suspicion that many players delayed completing this quest to use the infinitely spawning monkeys for power-leveling. Poor Yusa, always waiting for Peely fruits from undependable players. “This is a really good place to level," Kezo said, giving me a thumbs up, "but I didn’t suggest this to you because I assumed you couldn’t do this alone. Guess I’m proven wrong.”

“Why not?” I asked. “Seems like DPSers would have a fun time here.”

“Several of them, yes. If alone, they’d die too fast. A player should be around level eighteen, give or take three levels, to take advantage of this setup with no level gap penalty. At that point, a DPS character wouldn’t be strong enough to lifesteal or heal the damage output of the Frost Macaques.”

“Ah, I see. Several DPSers party up so that the attention of the monkeys will be divided.”

“Or they can go with a support class or two. This was a good place for a leeching business back then.”

We caught up on what we had been up to since we last met. Kezo was leveling and farming for eighteen hours a day—that didn’t sound healthy. When his friends left, he lacked the motivation to play, logging in for only a couple of hours a day. But our victory over Zoar Elab using the power of friendship and my intergalactic brain lit up his flame of motivation.

“Poison Ocadule?” he said after hearing a condensed version of my adventures—perhaps misadventures. “I haven’t heard of that one, but I’m not SpartanDonkey.”

“It’s from the same NPC where Luds got his explosive flasks Ocadule.”

“That explains it. I don’t know that questline. If I got this correctly, you have a tank build, that’s why you can survive the Frost Macaques, and then you’re using poison and retribution to kill them? Saying it out loud sounds crazy…” He blasted a tree full of monkeys. “…but it looks like you’re doing well. Another brilliant idea you cooked up here!”

As expected of Herald Stone, I thought with a mental smirk. “It’s very expensive crafting poisons for this though.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Kezo said. “I farmed plenty of Artas.” I couldn’t help but smile, so I turned away from him and caught another ball of ice with my face. “There’s something I need to talk about first,” he continued. “Two things, actually. One is about acquiring a resurrection skill. And the second, kind of related to it, is that you need to complete the quests to get to the other side of the cliff walls on your own.”

“Back up a bit. A resurrection skill?”

“If someone died during the Great Hunt, they’d have to run all the way from the Hunter-Warrior’s base camp back to their party. I didn’t consider this a problem for our party because we were supposed to do the Great Hunt casually. Just play it safe, go after the monsters we can handle, and avoid dying. That’s what I thought would be best given our… hmm… not that competitive of a party.

“Since we have all committed to giving this Great Hunt our all, our best, some rethinking is needed. Someone dying is a given if we go after the stronger boss monsters. A resurrection skill is imperative for our party to progress far during the event, or else we’d be stuck waiting for whoever died to catch up. Herald, can you be the support for our party?”

Kezo said it with such a serious face, his voice full of conviction, that it sounded like he was proposing to me. I slowly nodded, slightly taken aback. “I will”—not marry you—“be the support of our party.” It was only fitting that they should rely on the Great Herald Stone!