Magical Engineering

The next several days had been spent in some small celebrations, which were used as an excuse for John to cook a few special meals and test out his core advancement. Rabyn used that as an excuse to take a few days off as well. I was surprised to see the Orc seeming to genuinely enjoy himself during the dinners. His apprentice was growing, though, so it made sense. He was as proud of John as I was.

After a large breakfast, following one final night of celebrations, I decided it was time to give the first Arena floor another shot. My initial plan was to do it the exact same way I had before, and use the added skill ranks to boost some of my abilities before trying to add even more experience. I wanted to unlock a few more of my class features, and if possible, get another fortification done before the tournament.

The experience had been enough to shoot me up to level four hundred, but barely. There had been another giant increase in the requirements at that level, going from a number with twenty-one zeros to one with thirty in the course of a single level. Looking over my previous level requirements, there didn’t seem to be any unified reason or easily solved algorithm for why the increase patterns seemed to shift the way they did.

I was only able to move combat simulation up a single rank, so my theory on needing to complete an Arena floor per increase was looking like a strong possibility. Assuming Corey and I had the strength, and so far it was looking like we would, I’d give the second floor a try after I finished upping my skills to their new maximums.

The sheer number of skills I had unlocked had appeared to have rapidly increased. Almost all of them were tied to different types of monsters, humanoids, or other things I had fought. There were several others that corresponded to physical actions as well, but at the moment, I needed to stay focused. Until I could find a way to increase my skill ranks easily, I had to reserve as many as I could for my mana orbs.

For now, I decided only on box cutting, malleting, paired compassing, ranged combat, and sprint. With my increase in mana orbs and the class skills I had started to unlock, I was going to need to be increasingly frugal with the invested ranks. My attribute caps seemed to have risen as well, most of them seemingly to two thousand now. I settled for putting most of my new points into my eight soul and core attributes, as those continued to be some of my most important ones.

I’d need to check over one of the people with the Jester’s soul knots again now that my power had grown there, but I expected to discover much of the same. Considering Elody couldn’t seem to do anything about them, and her core was a much higher grade than my own. It seemed there was just something we were missing in order to fix the issue. It was possible Otis had those answers, but it had been complete radio silence since we first encountered the man.

After a quick check with Corey, I booted up the simulator again. I checked the new modifier as I selected the second Arena floor, scrolling down the growing list until I found it at the bottom.

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