Chapter 88: Rare Grade Pickaxe
The next day, Quash came back again. He hired the same dude as before. Yesterday, Quash had paid him a full 100,000 ACP even though he didn’t have to. His reputation was bad, and he needed to fix it. What better way is there other than to stuff people with money until they burst?
But of course, it wasn’t because that guy’s opinion actually mattered or anything, but to plant a seed of goodwill. They had no real animosity. The captain had no reason to hate him other than the simple fact that his crush was married to him.
Unless he was a total simp, he would appreciate the generosity. And when Quash started to cement himself as a generous person, this senior would be among the people to vouch for that.
Quash could see the changes already. The captain didn’t seem to hate him as much. Coupled with the fact that Quash held the captain’s throat because of the recording, yet still chose to give him a full 100,000 ACP, it must have made quite an impact.
A normal travel fee is only 10,000 ACP. In other words, the rest of the 90,000 ACP went straight into the captain’s pocket. Although the amount was small to Quash, it would certainly be a lot to this salty senior who was doing odd jobs all day because he couldn’t afford his tuition fees.
Regardless of what others thought of him, Quash also wanted to get rid of his own stingy mindset. If he felt pain with every dime spent, he wouldn’t be able to go far.
Only when one spends money does even more flow in.
Quash had prepared himself much better than yesterday. He had bought a mask with a filter for two reasons. One was to make it seem like he was allergic to dust or something like that.
The second was to protect his internal organs from the underground dust. He realised that if this dust had Natural Energy blocking properties, it would certainly have some negative effects on his energy circulation.
The effect was incredibly subtle, so much so that no one else had noticed it at all, and Quash could use that to his advantage. But for now, he needed to get down to business.
He pulled off his Gojo build and started to go down, walking through the first floor. A few students couldn’t help but give him a mocking laugh. They knew this guy was attempting to use Proprioception, and they felt like shaking their heads because this amateur clearly hadn’t read the dungeon description. The Natural Energy here was very thin, rendering baseline sensory skills almost useless.
They thought they knew what would happen next. An epic fail!
But what they didn’t know was that Quash’s Proprioception was far stronger than anyone else’s. A normal person barely feels the Natural Energy through their senses, but Quash could create a literal 3D map of his surroundings.
The data processing required for that is simply too much for a normal brain to handle, causing it to ignore most of the incoming data.
And Quash had been misunderstanding it the whole time. Even when the gym bros told him that what he had was not Divine Sense but Proprioception, he had involuntarily assumed that they could also render a map just like him.
Because of a lack of in-depth knowledge on both sides, no one at the time knew that Proprioception is generally just a baseline instinct that senses Natural Energy for the first time.
It is mostly an instinct, not a scanning radar. After everyone eventually gets the skill Divine Sense when they temporarily switch to a Soul-Related Class, they just forget about basic Proprioception altogether.
Quash had only learned that fact a few days ago when he wanted to buy Divine Sense but wondered why he even needed to, since his Proprioception and Divine Sense worked almost exactly the same way.
And so, he had discovered a piece of revolutionary knowledge—to him at least. He had asked Gabriella, Alan, Gagon, and Timothy to confirm it. Now he felt that the AI that had originally gaslit him into thinking his sense was just standard Proprioception hadn’t entirely lied; it was just talking about his future potential.
After discovering that, Quash threw the idea of buying Divine Sense out the window. He would use what he had naturally instead of relying on borrowed power that everyone else used.
His method would be far more silent, because not many people use Proprioception like a literal scanner.
Quash didn’t pay those smug onlookers any mind. He minded his own business; he had a treasure to find.
He was wearing his normal, dirty clothes from yesterday, but he wasn’t wearing a hoodie. He had dyed his hair black with a powerful disguising artifact he had borrowed from Gabriella.
She, of course, had handed it over without any hesitation. Quash had decided to stay at Gabriella’s place for the rest of the nights before the Academy term officially started.
The reason was very obvious, but no one talked about it.
Quash made his way down to the 10th floor quickly. He made sure not to take out the Rare Grade pickaxe just yet, or it would arouse immediate suspicion. Even the cheapest Rare Grade pickaxe costs around 250,000 ACP, and he had bought a high-quality one for 500,000 ACP.
A student can easily discern what grade an item is just from the Aura the item emits.
So he was extra careful. When he arrived down there, the dudes from yesterday gave him a disdainful look, thinking he was back to disturb the peace yet again.
But Quash assured them that he would actually be mining with a pickaxe today.
They didn’t believe him, but they went back to their own work. Quash made his way towards his targeted mining site after taking many twists and turns.
He pulled the pickaxe out from his Spatial Ring. The tool was beautifully crafted. Although he couldn’t visually see it at the moment, he felt the undulating Aura of a Rare Grade item. It felt strong and completely solid—which wasn’t entirely absolute, since it was just tougher to break than a normal tool.
The reason this pickaxe was so expensive was because it had embedded mana circuits that energy could travel through. Unlike Common and Uncommon Grades, where one just coats the tool with Aura to increase toughness, these internal circuits allowed his active attack power to scale up cleanly.