Chapter 53: Grinding and Discovery
Several days had passed since Evan’s advancement, and although he had done little outside of hunting day and night, his progress felt slower than before.
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[Name: Evan]
[Age: 14]
[Rank: D]
[ESS: 4%]
[Bloodline: None]
[Divine Clone]
> Clones: 2
[Skills]: 3
[Storage]
---
Right after advancing, Evan’s progress had been at 3.8%. The reason was simple, the system had stored all the excess ESS he and his clone had accumulated after reaching their previous bottleneck.
It had happened before as well, back when he reached the peak of F-rank. But at that time, the amount stored had been so small he barely noticed.
This time, however, it was different.
The amount of ESS they had gathered while completing the advancement mission was enormous.
[Ding! All accumulated ESS has been distributed.]
[Ding! You have gained +384,000 ESS.]
[Ding! Your clone (Shadow) has gained +300,000 ESS.]
Seeing those absurd numbers, Evan couldn’t help but feel a surge of excitement. For a moment, he had expected a massive leap toward the next rank.
But when he checked his status again, that excitement vanished just as quickly.
3.8%.
That was all it amounted to.
The numbers were correct, he could verify that himself just by counting the corpses. E-rank beasts pile up, along with several D-rank kills during the month after escaping Lirath.
And yet...
All of that, reduced to a fraction.
It felt like a slap in the face.
If that much ESS only translated to 3.8%, then reaching 100% would require millions upon millions more.
The thought lingered, weighing on him for a while, before he eventually pushed it aside.
He was an Ascendant now.
Stronger than before, by a margin that wasn’t small. Of course the bar would be harder to fill, the power it represented was proportionally greater.
Even so, his speed was still far beyond that of most awakened.
While it took others years to advance from Awakened to Ascendant, he had done it in under a month. Another rank up likely wouldn’t take much longer.
He stopped dwelling on it and returned to his routine.
The grind continued, his and his clones’ both, and in just five days he had pushed his second clone from F-rank all the way to E-rank Advanced Stage, nearly at the peak. The advancement mission was already taking shape in his mind. The first had looked similar to Shadow’s, but the system had made clear that not all advancement missions would follow the same pattern.
Progress was slow, but steady.
But that slow pace wouldn’t last for long.
Because the beast tide was coming.
BranLeaf faced several each year, of varying scale, but the one at year’s end was always the largest. And this year’s was close. Word among the adventurers painted a grim picture: each tide ran stronger than the last, and this one was shaping up to be no exception.
The previous year had brought B-rank elite beasts crashing through, creatures that weren’t weak by any measure. Casualties had piled up. Even some of the stronger adventurers hadn’t made it back. The city had held, but only just.
That had been a wake-up call, a reminder of what these tides actually were, beneath all the profit and routine that BranLeaf had built around them. The celebration that used to accompany their arrival was gone this year. The atmosphere had shifted. People were quiet in the way that only came before something they were genuinely afraid of.
Evan was in the middle of collecting his daily earnings at the Association, two platinum, as usual, an amount that still made the clerk at the counter visibly struggle to maintain composure, when a small stir pulled his attention upward.
A powerful life force had appeared somewhere in the upper floors of the building. Compared to the B-rank presence he’d sensed before, this was another category entirely. Where that one had felt like a lamp, this was a lighthouse, intense, dense, unmistakable.
’An A-rank,’ he thought.
Rumor had it the royal capital might send someone if this year’s tide proved more serious than expected. But an A-rank was more than most people had anticipated. They were rare even within the kingdom, outnumbered significantly by B-ranks. Nobody had been expecting one here.
Evan looked away from the Association building and let it go.
He had somewhere to be.
***
Reiner.
The same boy who had helped him when he first arrived.
They had met several times over the past few days. Thanks to him, Evan had learned far more about the city, and the incoming tide.
Reiner was just a normal person. Someone trying to survive by hunting weaker beasts.
Evan had asked him why.
Why risk his life instead of taking a regular job?
The answer had been simple.
He had been fired too many times, from all kind of diffrent jobs.
This was his only option now.
Evan hadn’t pressed for more than that. It wasn’t his business,
Instead, he had offered him a deal, Information in exchange for payment.
And Reiner delivered.
He knew the city like the back of his hand.
Today was one of their usual meetups.
Evan didn’t mind it.
Meeting people helped, in a way, at least when it came to his mental state.
Not that he had made much effort in that direction. Over the past weeks, several girls, some his age, others older, had tried to approach him, and every attempt had simply faded without going anywhere.
He had tried once. It hadn’t taken long for him to decide it wasn’t worth the trouble.
Too much talking. Too many questions. Too many hidden intentions.
Money, most of the time.
He couldn’t exactly blame them for it, but that didn’t mean he was willing to pretend otherwise.
He’d briefly considered whether making the effort might be good for him in some broader sense. Then decided the time it would take to build anything resembling a real connection was better spent hunting. And so he returned, as he always did, to the grind.
He was heading toward their usual meeting point when his steps slowed.
Something had caught his Death Sense, a familiar pull, but stronger than anything it had registered since that incident with Luna. Much stronger. Dense enough to feel physical, like pressure accumulating just ahead of him.
’For god’s sake,’ he thought, already annoyed at himself for noticing. ’Why do I keep ending up in situations like this?’
He could ignore it. He almost did.
But the intensity was unusual. More than anything he’d encountered before, and it seemed to be pulling at him in a way he couldn’t entirely account for. Maybe his affinity with Shadow’s bloodline had sharpened the sense beyond what it used to be.
’I’m going to regret this,’ he thought, and made his decision.
He didn’t move directly. Instead his shadow peeled away from his feet and shot toward a nearby alley, slipping through gaps between streets and walls, traveling fast until it arrived, nearly half a kilometer from where Evan stood, at a building that looked abandoned from the outside. Worn facade, neglected stonework. But the aura of death bleeding from it was stronger up close. Much stronger.
Shadow’s senses caught voices a moment later. Low, but audible.
"...Move it. We don’t have all day. After this last batch, we’re laying low for a while, so don’t screw this up." A man’s voice. Clipped, irritated, the tone of someone used to giving orders and tired of having to repeat them.
"Boss... what’s going on? Why the rush? Today’s quota is way higher than usual... we almost got caught."
"Shut up and keep working. We’ll talk after."
The voices began to fade. Evan could still catch fragments, but they weren’t disappearing—they were moving. Descending, by the sound of it.
His Death Sense tracked several life signatures inside, all of them dropping lower. A basement, maybe. Or something deeper.
He thought about it for a moment, then gave Shadow the order to slip inside and find out what they were dealing with.
Shadow didn’t hesitate. He flowed through the building’s gaps like smoke, reaching what turned out to be a trapdoor set into the floor.
It slipped inside, seeping through cracks, merging with the walls as it followed the narrow passage downward.
The tunnel stretched far deeper than expected.
At least fifty meters.
’Quite the depth for a simple basement,’ Evan noted, tracing the tunnel’s dimensions through Shadow’s senses. Someone had put real effort into keeping this hidden.
Shadow moved without sound, pressed flat against the wall until the passage opened into a wider space below.
Then Evan saw them.
Dozens of sacks, suspended from the ceiling in rows. His Death Sense didn’t need long to parse what was inside, the aura bleeding through the fabric was thick enough to feel like pressure, dense and layered, the kind that only came from sheer numbers. No traces of vitality. No flickers of life clinging to what remained.
Just death, stacked and stored like cargo.
Through Shadow’s eyes he scanned the room slowly. The traces of each corpse registered one by one, cold, still, uniform in their silence.
Most were strangers. People he couldn’t place.
Then one wasn’t.
He recognized the signature before he fully processed it. Familiar in the specific way that only came from recent, repeated contact, someone who had walked him through every back alley and side street of this city like it was second nature.
Reiner.