The Apocalypse Grinder - Chapter 303

<< Chapter 302 | Index | Chapter 304 >>

Ronan stared at the Chronos Forge. He was tempted to work on some of his skills, but he knew that he didn’t have enough skills to burn for fuel. That was fine. He had decided not to head back into the nightmare difficulty tutorial for the time being and instead grind a bunch of skills, traits, and raise his cultivation and masteries across the board.

Of course, there was a chance that the administrator would still interfere with his tutorial run even if it was a lower difficulty. That was simply a risk he would have to accept. At least if I’m in a lower difficulty I can probably still defeat the challenge he puts in front of me. Hopefully. Ronan just decided to move forward with the assumption he would be fine. Ultimately there was nothing else he could do. Either he achieved what he needed to or he died.

And if he had ended up in some kind of infinite failure loop because of the administrator’s interference, then he would simply have to find a solution. There was nothing that would stop him from achieving his goals. He couldn’t die. The system might be a professional troll, but that was a hard limit it couldn’t cross.

With nothing else to do, it was time to begin his grind. However, he knew it would be made a lot easier by the fact he had just gained a huge amount in his multipliers. That alone would mean any difficulty below nightmare would feel more like a chore than a real challenge. Even so, there was a reason it was called grinding. Let’s get this over with. I can’t wait to leave the administrator speechless.

Beginning a new iteration, please stand by…

Ronan flicked his fist, sending a spray of blood and gore splattering across the ground. Thankfully the administrator hadn’t felt the need to interfere in his tutorials. And there had been a lot of them.

Ronan had spent some time planning out how his grind was going to go, and he had put the first stages into effect. He began by collecting skills, though through every iteration he would be gaining mastery points and cultivation stages where he obtained shards.

The plan was based on the fact that once he had managed to ‘upgrade’ a skill without its rarity increasing. It had been Mighty Strength at uncommon, and it had gone from 1 bonus stat point per 10 strength, to 1 bonus point per 9 strength after the upgrade. His idea was to try and run through the tutorial until he was able to upgrade all of his major skills to their maximum level. He suspected that with the upgrade shards he could hit legendary rarity with maximum empowerment.

He had been almost right in his guess.

Ronan had decided to do the harder difficulty tutorial. The reason for that was simple. When he entered the Path of the Gladiator he was able to request the skills that he wanted from his sponsor. In that manner he was able to collect the skills he wanted much faster than he otherwise would be able to.

Of course he still collected plenty of new skills from the tutorial stage rewards. He would need to spend some time in the Chronos Clan ancestral grounds to go through them and decide which would become fuel for the forge and which he would keep and add to his growing arsenal of combat skills.

His failure against Azbab had shown him how unprepared he was for the utterly strange monsters that the system could throw at him. Who knows what else is out there in the multiverse waiting to tear me apart? The thought of encountering some truly eldritch creatures that would do unspeakable things to him before he died was a very scary one. He would just have to deal with stuff like that when it came.

In any case, he had made great progress with his skills. To begin with, he had of course tried to figure out if he could make another copy of Stupendous Skills and then empower his existing legendary copy. He had first gained it at epic, so Ronan had tried to test if he could get a lower rarity. Unfortunately when he attempted to make it in the Chronos Forge, it had just returned an error for the fuel cost, which he had taken to mean the skill wasn’t possible to create. Apparently there were some things that even his heritage couldn’t overcome.

The lowest rarity had turned out to be rare. That made him glad that the forge had seen fit to grant him the epic version, because he had two common skills included when he alloyed his epic rarity copy. In any case, he had acquired a rare and an epic copy, and as expected they had empowered his legendary version. Unfortunately he realised there wasn’t a stacking effect for having both extra rarities. When he had gained the epic version after having the rare version it had upgraded the legendary skill, but it was obvious at a glance that it hadn’t stacked both upgrades. While disappointing, it didn’t stop him from carrying out the plan to its fullest. One upgrade to all his most valuable skills was still valuable and worth obtaining.

The full list of skills that he had raised in rarity and empowered wasn’t that long. For the most part, his offensive skills were no longer in skill-form, and had instead been consumed as he had learnt how to use them with sorcery. While missing out on the free empowerment was a blow, Ronan knew it was anything but. Sorcery gave him more freedom and the potential for infinite empowerment on his skills. The more he learned about magic and mana, the more powerful his skills became.

Stupendous Stats (Legendary): Gain +1 to all stats for every 8 (-2) points of any stat you possess. Does not include stat bonuses.

Relentless Training (Legendary): Mastery and Experience penalties for repeat kills on the same enemies are nullified. Defeating more of the same type of enemies will grant improved cascading experience and credit bonuses on a qualitative scale.

Critical Experience (Legendary): Gain 4.5x more experience when you kill an enemy with a critical hit.

Critical Tempo (Legendary): The third consecutive strike you land on a single target will always be a critical hit. This critical hit will deal 3x more damage.

Freeloader (Legendary): Gain 5% extra experience from all sources for every 4 free stat points you have not spent.

Idle Cultivation (Legendary): The user is able to passively cultivate while performing other actions, provided they have a charged shard in their possession. Idle cultivation is 40% the speed of regular cultivation and operates at 85% energy absorption efficiency.

Treasure Hunter (Legendary): Increases the chance of receiving specific loot drops when defeating enemies by ((Luck + (2 Level)) 4)%.

Apart from those he had also raised a bunch of skills for other purposes. Summon Insect was the one that he wasn’t sure about, but it only took one or two iterations to get the upgrade shards needed and he was on a roll by the time he had the idea. Ronan believed it would be his path into true summoning magic, but for the time being he would have to settle for overpowered insects. On a test, it conjured a swarm of locusts, which ended up turning on him. That was a failure, but he was sure there was light at the end of the tunnel.

Unfortunately it had been harder to gain new traits. The sponsors seemed to have smaller trait libraries than skill collections, which meant he would have needed to settle for some subpar options. Most of the ones presented were inferior to just upgrading his existing skills.

As for new skills he had acquired, the list was exceptionally long. There had been many duplicates along the way, but also a litany of new skills that he had tried out along the way. Most were average at best, but a few were particularly useful skills that Ronan had gone out of his way to raise in rarity. Quite a few had been put into his ‘chronos fuel’ pile. As for those that were the most outstanding, they had joined the legendary collection.

Cartographer (Legendary): An improvement to the basic map function of the system, this skill adds a plethora of functions to the system map as well as providing unique utility that is otherwise unavailable. Functions include but are not limited to: Sticky Notes, Item Fast Transport Waypoints, Multi-Map, Lifeform Tracking.

Delayed Impact (Legendary): Delay the damage and force applied for a single physical blow or magic skill by up to 10 seconds after impact.

Mastery of the Self (Legendary): Grants the user the ability to better control their internal physiological operations, on a long-scale basis or in short-term operation. WARNING: Misuse of this skill can lead to organ failure or death.

As for the rest, they were basically just fodder skills. That didn’t make them useless, but they weren’t worth putting among the list of things that Ronan was working on improving during these iterations. With his skills mostly sorted, it was time to move onto the next step of the grind: raising his cultivation.

<< Chapter 302 | Index | Chapter 304 >>