Chapter 341: Evil Eye
Ashlock's leaves rustled in the chilly winter breeze as the sun set and the sky became a seemingly endless sea of stars. It was breathtakingly beautiful, and Ashlock knew that somewhere out there in the vast cosmos under the heavens, his sect members were doing their best in pocket realms to achieve their own goals and dreams.
In the stifling silence left in their absence, he awaited their return by distracting himself by mulling over a problem unique to him: how to spend his credits on his increasingly growing list of skills and mutations. For once, he had a rather large budget of 7680 sacrificial credits due to his antics in the shadow realm getting multiplied by Morrigan's slaughter, and he also had far more options than ever regarding what to do with them.
Upgrading skills and mutations was twice as expensive as an equivalent grade gacha pull, but it guaranteed that he would gain something useful for his current situation. Meanwhile, if he signed in with all the credits he had right now, he would get an SSS grade draw that could change the whole game.
There was also now a third option. Do nothing and let the credits multiply due to the divine stock market. But that was boring, and there weren't massive results due to diminishing returns the more credits he had, unless he got someone to do something as ridiculous as slaughtering the Skyrend family while wearing his cult clothes to generate an obscene amount of divine energy.
Ashlock may have gotten a huge boost in power from the Mystic Realm, but he still wasn't strong enough to let credits sit around idly. His Ents had high cultivation levels, but Ents were comparatively weaker than cultivators at the same cultivation stage due to their lack of techniques and being even more simple-minded than monsters.
On the topic of his personal power, Ashlock's jump in cultivation had been considerable, but he was still below many powerhouses. Apart from his unique biology, what gave him a tremendous advantage over the other powerhouses was his system, which gave him skills, summons, mutations, and items at the price of having to spend his sacrificial credits.
He had also gained control over a pocket realm, but it was unclear how that would affect his combat power as he hadn't gotten a chance to explore its capabilities yet.
"Mhm... This was easier when I only had the binary choice of to sign in or not," Ashlock hummed as he glanced over the floating list of skills and mutations in his mind for the tenth time since the sunset. He had already narrowed down a few options he liked and was now debating between them. "System, can you highlight this one and this one? Oh, and this one..."
[Demonic Demi-Divine Tree (Age: 9)]