Chapter 472: Growth (2)
My options for Feats were unusual this time. I had honestly been expecting something that enhanced the magic I had used frequently during my time in this world. I had also been expecting ways to enhance my skill growth, or perhaps ways to boost my immediate combat power and shore up my weaknesses.
Instead, it seemed that the local System had recognized what I had actually done during my time in this world, and what actions and abilities I had frequently utilized. Ever since I had hit level 30, I had done a whole lot of healing and scouting, in addition to my actual interventions on the battlefield.
| Level 40 Feat Choice (Pick 1)
| Light of Healing: Unlocked by: You have healed many friends and allies during your time spent in combat zones. Effect: You convert your unusual healing magic into a Skill. This skill will allow you to spend either of your unique types of essence to fuel it, OR mana (at a moderate efficiency loss due to conversion costs). This skill will also allow you to ‘overheal’ someone who is already perfectly healthy, which will, in turn, amplify their physical stats based on how much extra life force you pump into their body.
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| Fingertips of Death: Unlocked by: You have killed many creatures using strange magic aligned with the concept of death and the seperation of the body and soul. Effect: Any spell that is meant to harm enemies will now carry very slight traces of death. Upon physical contact with an enemy, this trace of death will seep into their body, weakening them and slowing them down. Accumulation of enough death energy will result in immediate death. (Quantity of death energy is an ‘extra’ addition to your attacks, equal to about twenty percent of your mana spent on each attack. You do not need to pay for this additional death energy - it is created automatically by this Feat).
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| Concentrated Vision: Unlocked by: You have used unique visualization methods to successfully scout several times, and kept your allies safe with your unique senses. Effects: Take all of your different forms of unique vision (such as soul-sight and dimensional sight, along with any future gains) and convert all of them into a singular skill. This Skill will allow you to view souls, regular sight, and a variety of other things in all directions with minimized essence costs.
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| Devastate: Unlocked by: You have used an attack which can consume a large quantity of essence multiple times, and you have used this attack to kill numerous enemies. Effects: Once per day, upon activating this Feat, you will immediately spend all essence from ALL available sources in your body into a blast of magic. This blast of magic will mix together all abilities you currently possess that are offensive in nature (currently: Extinguish, Ice magic, a variety of minor curses, and a small amount of lightning magic). You may control the outcome of this mixture of abilities. This attack will be amplified approximately tenfold in the process of travelling towards its target.
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{Light of Healing} had the potential to get me a new, incredibly potent Skill that I could use to enhance my support abilities. This was only moderately useful in this world, and it would also take a lot of time and effort to raise this ability to a point where it was actually use. However, the Feat was attractive for a different reason - unlike other Feats, a feat that created a skill was quite easy to take out of this world. All I had to do was raise the skill to at least basic grade, and the Market would give me a purchase option for something fairly close to the original skill. Furthermore, in this world, Skills were incredibly easy to raise, in comparison to other worlds, where it was far more difficult. This Skill also had a few more interesting aspects - such as the ability to fuel my healing magic using all of my available types of essence, rather than just my alteration essence. I could imagine how powerful Sallia would become if I utilized all of my currently useless binding and manifestation essence to ramp up her physical stats. She might get another two or three grades of stats, depending on how far I pushed the skill level for this new skill and how much essence was lost in the conversion process. That would be a rather substantial boost to her combat abilities, and the strength of our team as a whole.
{Fingertips of Death} would basically let me attach a miniature extinguish to every regular attack I used in this world. That wasn’t a game changer in and of itself, since it would only work at around a twenty percent boost to whatever essence I used in every spell or attack. Still, a twenty percent boost could add up to a substantial amount over the course of a longer fight. Overall, I thought it was the weakest option, but it was still good enough that I might have considered taking it if my other options were worse.
{Concentrated Vision} was the other option I quickly ruled out after looking over what Feats I could take. It had most of the same upsides as {Light of Healing}, such as being easy to take back to the Market with me, but the upsides were much smaller than for {Light of Healing}. Minimizing the essence cost for my soul sight and dimensional sight wasn’t that important to me, because I already had good ways to control the essence costs for those two abilities - activate them for a few seconds, then immediately shutting them off to conserve essence. The skill might offer more interesting benefits later on if I raised it to a high enough level, but I felt like I would just get a better return on my investment of time and essence if I focused on {Light of Healing} instead.
{Devestate} was a potential game-changer for my combat power in this world. This was because it amplified all essence I put into the feat tenfold - which was about the equivalent of 9 grades of Essence, considering the nature of diminishing returns on stats above grade 10. That was an absolutely ridiculous level of amplification, even if it would only work for one attack. With nine grades of essence worth of amplification, I could instantly kill most individually strong monsters that we had run into in this world so far. It would also count as using Extinguish to kill something, meaning I would get a new skill from whatever I hit.
This feat had the chance to single-handedly propel me into a new level of combat class, allowing me to deal with threats that I would normally have zero ways to harm.
The downsides of the Feat, of course, were equally obvious. First of all, I would have no way to directly bring this ability back to the Market, meaning I would need to do something cool with this feat in order to get a Market version of it. Furthermore, even within this world, this Feat was risky to use in a fight. If an enemy managed to dodge the attack, or if there were two enemies of medium strength, this feat might put me in a great deal of danger, since the feat had no half-measures. The moment I used it, I burned all of my essence in one attack. It was an all-or-nothing gamble that ended a battle immediately - because if it killed my enemy, I won, and if they didn’t die, I probably wouldn’t survive the next ten seconds of combat. My friends and the other warriors of the clan might be able to keep me safe afterwards, but there was always a chance that things could go wrong on a battlefield.
Between {Devastate} and {Light of Healing}, the question really came down to whether I wanted to boost Sallia and have a safer, more stable form of empowerment, which would be easy to bring back to the Market, or whether I wanted to gamble on higher earnings in this world with the potential for my choice to backfire and kill me.
I ultimately chose {Light of Healing}, because I felt that we already had a way to push ourselves to the strength we needed by the time we returned to the Market - Felix’s continual growth, and the fact that he was nearly able to start carving the splinter of wood from the universal tree with his Skills and Feats, would give us the advantage we needed to buy more lives. Since that was the case, I decided to go for a more stable growth path, rather than taking the high-risk, high-reward route.
The next day, my father and I went to the local [Priest], where I acquired my third Spark, which was also [Ice Mage]. I was looking forward to the day when I acquired my fourth spark, and my first compound spark.
| You have leveled up! Ice Mage has advanced from level 40 to level 41!
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| +9 Free Stat Points +3 Sense +3 Mind +3 Vitality +5 Mana
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| Power: Gain a level in your third Spark
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| Achievement +300
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This one was called {Glacial Frost}. I didn’t know exactly what it did, but I got the feeling that it was focused on improving how well I froze things when I used ice magic on them. If I used this skill while stabbing something with an icicle, I would have the ability to convert the mana I had spent on forming the icicle into a sort of ice-curse and then flood their body with it.
I got the feeling I could do other things with the skill after I developed it a bit more, but I wasn’t quite sure what those things would be. I would need to pump the skill up to at least Tier 1 to get more information, so I put it aside for now. I would learn more when I put in more effort and practice.
As my father and I walked back to our house, I was shaken out of my thoughts by a cry of alarm from one of the nearby townsfolk. I looked over at them, and noticed that they were pointing at the sky.
I looked up, and saw a giant purple crack in the sky, almost the first threads of a giant maw opening as it peered down at us from the heavens.
The moment I saw it, I shuddered. I immediately recognized the purple crack in the sky for what it was - a passage to another dimension. Given what I knew about the war between our dimensional cluster and the universal tree, I had a pretty good guess what had caused this new crack in the sky to appear.
We had run into another problem caused by the universal tree. And this time, I didn’t see any warriors from the other planes in our dimensional cluster to save us.