Universe's End

Tier eight. If the gulf between tier six and tier seven had felt long, then the decades of tier eight put it to shame. It had been a long time coming, and with plenty of experiences to account for during his time in tier seven, Rory fully expected the list of available skills to be quite extensive.

What he hadn't expected was-

One hundred fifty-two? God above that is a lot of stuff.

One hundred and fifty-two options. An impressive number, but his excitement quickly faded as he began to skim through every listed possibility.

These are just rebrands of things I can already do!

Elemental manipulations from lightning to earth, fire, and even blood, and several varieties of each as well, it was something that Rory found his non-corporeal eyes rolling over.

Well…. That's actually disappointing.

There were also plenty of crafting skills listed, but again, they felt pointless given that most were just flavor text upgrades of his own crafting skills. He already had metallurgy, why would he need 'Free Range Metallurgy?'

The only variety of skills not offered was any form of combat skills, as usual.

Not that I'm surprised.

Spending several minutes longer investigating, Rory finally sighed. Seated at the familiar metal table floating within a black void, Rory shook his head.

"Change of plans, let's start with attributes, a whole lot less thinking and options with attributes."

Switching his interface over, Rory found his eyebrows creeping up.

"Orrrr not."

In the past, attributes were always depicted with a slider and a bell-curve graph indicating their overall placement. The slider was still there, but the bell curve was gone. Instead, it was what looked like a blank box.

Curious, Rory messed with a slider, watching the new box. The instant he fully slid it over, the letter S appeared. Sliding it halfway, the S changed to a C.

Ohhhh. I think I get it.

Just to be sure, Rory began messing with the slider, moving it around at roughly ten percent intervals before nodding to himself.

Looks like Eon got tired of the bell curve stuff. Can't blame 'em.

Instead of a bell curve, it had changed to a simple letter grade to indicate how many attributes had been put forward. Less than ten percent was an F grade. Ten to nineteen percent was an E. Twenty to thirty-nine came in as, shockingly, a D. Forty to fifty-nine, C, sixty to seventy-nine, B, eighty to ninety-nine, A, and finally, at a maxed-out bar, or anything higher than a hundred percent if borrowing from bonus attributes gained from growth, an S grade.

Very game-y. Which I suppose is the point.

Having made sense of the minor alterations to how attributes were presented, Rory focused on the important stuff: determining his attribute distribution.

"Well, I know one attribute I won't be touching this tier, and that's growth."

Tier eight was likely to be crucial, given that he and his fellow founders would be clashing. Now was not the time for sandbagging for the future. In tier seven, Zoey, a defensive fighter, had been nearly too much for him to keep up with. Sure, that was while her attributes were inverted, but that didn't change much, if anything.

"So, no growth, got it. Also, probably want to cash in on my growth stockpiles from tier seven."

That was a prize that had been building for some time now. In tier six, his attribute distribution had been split fifteen, fifteen, fifteen among strength, durability, and flexibility. With the benefit of having invested in growth in the earlier tiers as well, he'd still had seventy percent attribute density to distribute, which had gone toward cognition and growth.

Tier seven, he'd dumped everything he'd gained from growth back into growth.

Which meant that now, in tier eight, Rory had roughly 50% more attributes to use.

Which I definitely need.

Unlike most people, Rory needed every attribute. Strength, Durability, and Flexibility for his physical capabilities, he wouldn't always have Zoey to hide behind after all. Cognition was crucial for specific crafts, such as gem crafting, as well as for basic precision and brainstorming. Then there was pneuma. He'd managed to get away with minimal pneuma investment until now in thanks to his efficiency and practice with freeform magic. Still, he would need to deepen his well for the future, not just for fighting, but for how useful it was to be able to utilize magic while making stuff, without requiring an extensive bound circle set up that had been pre-filled for who knew how long in advance.

So, with a 150% attribute density, Rory made his decision.

Fifty percent to cognition, still my bread and butter. Then, thirty-four percent to pneuma. Finally, twenty-two percent to my three physical attributes.

If Rory had to give himself an archetype, he was probably closest to something like an artificer who had a subclass in spellsword. Rory could easily imagine how, for most, it was a rather messy 'build'. The sheer attribute demand requiring so much growth investment would also slow down ascensions considerably, so if you weren't constantly working as if you didn't have any other hobbies, you'd stall out within your first two or three ascensions. Hell, he'd seen how there were crafters in Ehkorrus who spent years stuck in a tier that had taken him months if not weeks back in the day.

But Rory was someone whose enjoyment came from his work, and thus, he was able to keep pace with the extended time required for a tier-up because of his growth investment.

Let's see: I spent over six decades in tier seven, and accounting for the lack of growth investment in tier eight, I'm thinking… A long time. At least two centuries, maybe three.

That was a bit of a strange thought. A few hundred years. That would be generations on Earth. That was the difference between Benjamin Franklin's birth and the very first moon landing.

And here he was already thinking about tier eight as just another chapter in his life.

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Man, talk about how things change.

Letting himself steep in the significance of reality for several more seconds, Rory finally shook his head.

"Alright, enough gushy stuff. Back to the real problem at hand: God damn skills."

Having charted his attributes for tier eight, Rory had a better sense of what would be appropriate for his skill selection.

"Well, first order of business, any elemental or similar style skill can get gone."

Relying on a skill for elemental manipulation felt like a crutch. Earth Soul was different, as he hadn't gained the skill through an ascension. Anyway, the difference between something like Earth Touch, a basic elemental manipulation in line with many of the listings, and Earth Soul was night and day, like the difference between a handgun and a railgun.

"Next up, basic crafting skill upgrades, goodbye."

His list shrinking more, Rory nodded to himself.

Far more manageable.

With just those two 'filters' applied, the list had shrunk to a sixth of its original size. Of the remaining list, most were still some form of manipulation-type skill. Still, rather than basic elemental skills, many were more esoteric in nature, similar to his use of lattice-concept in his magic.

Interesting and novel, but ultimately still not what he was looking for. A manipulation skill was like a cheat code for manipulating a concept in magic, or in the 'real' world, but it wasn't the same thing as having an affinity for it. Even Earth Soul, as god damn useful as it was, didn't grant him the sort of reflexive understanding or ability to utilize something like his blood or lattice affinity did; he couldn't combine earth element magic on the fly with other concepts or elements as he did with his affinities.

Shrinking the list even further, Rory eventually found himself torn between three skills, each something he was exceptionally interested in.