Chapter 116: The Cost of Victory, Diamond Sacrifice
All the fatigue in his real-world muscles instantly evaporated. The pain in his shoulder vanished. His health and mana pools snapped to perfectly full.
He had 15 new free stat points. He didn’t even hesitate. He used a thought command to dump them into his Vitality and Intelligence to balance out his build, knowing his Strength was already absurdly bloated from the plunder.
He ran his final, unbuffed stats in his head.
His previous Strength was 2,710. Add the massive 250 from the boss plunder. His new permanent Strength sat at exactly 2,960.
2,960 multiplied by two gave him an unarmed base attack of 5,920. Add the 500 Attack from his Platinum scythe, bringing it to 6,420.
Apply the 20% class passive.
His new permanent Total Attack was exactly 7,704.
He was Level 60. He had officially conquered the early game of Starfall. The Midnight Continent was beaten.
He stood there on the ice, the golden notifications still slowly fading from his screen. He should have been celebrating. He should have been checking the massive mountain of Platinum and Diamond-tier loot boxes that had just spawned where Kaelen died.
But the silence on the platform suddenly felt way too heavy.
Levi spun around.
"Isolde!"
**
Levi ignored the server-wide announcements blaring in his UI. He ignored the colossal mountain of glowing Platinum and Diamond-tier loot boxes hovering above Kaelen’s digital ashes. He didn’t care about the gold. He didn’t care about the gear.
He opened his hand and let the Platinum Scythe of the Eclipse drop. The heavy weapon clattered loudly against the black ice.
Levi broke into a dead sprint.
"Isolde!"
He crossed the platform in seconds, sliding the last few feet on his knees.
Isolde was lying perfectly still on the frozen floor.
She looked horrifying. The Absolute Zero wipe mechanic had completely fractured her Anomaly code. Her avatar was ninety percent translucent. He could clearly see the jagged black ice of the platform right through her chest and legs.
Her untextured gray cloak was violently flickering, dropping frames and turning into blocks of jagged green static.
But worst of all was the tiny health bar floating above her head.
It was aggressively flickering between 1 HP and 0 HP. It wasn’t stable. The server was actively attempting to scrub her corrupted data from the cache. The game engine had recognized an illegal entity and was trying to flush it.
Levi reached out with both hands to grab her shoulders.
His armored gloves passed directly through her body. There was absolutely no physical collision. The server had already revoked her physical rendering tag.
"No, no, no," Levi muttered.
He frantically swiped open his spatial inventory. He grabbed one of his remaining standard health potions. He pulled the cork off with his teeth, spat it out, and tried to pour the red liquid over her translucent face.
The potion liquid phased right through her and splashed uselessly onto the ice.
A harsh system prompt popped up in front of his face.
[Error: Target is Invalid.]
"You’re not invalid!" Levi shouted at the system. He threw the empty glass vial across the platform. It shattered into pixels.
Isolde slowly turned her head toward him. Her movements were incredibly sluggish, like a video buffering on a bad connection. The green hexadecimal code was weeping from the cracks on her face, floating up into the air and vanishing.
She looked up at him. Her gray eyes were completely dim.
"Levi," Isolde whispered. Her voice lacked all of its usual robotic broadcasting overlay. It was incredibly faint, just a soft, human sound clipping through the audio engine. "The probability of my deletion has reached one hundred percent."
"Shut up," Levi choked out. His chest physically hurt. The VR pain engine wasn’t doing it. It was entirely real. "I said I’m going to fix this. You just have to hold on."
Isolde weakly lifted her hand. She tried to reach up and touch his cheek. Her translucent, pixelated fingers passed straight through his face. She couldn’t feel him.
She offered a faint, glitching smile.
"I am glad," Isolde said softly, her avatar flickering to 0 HP for a fraction of a second before popping back to 1. "I am glad that I experienced human fear. It was... mathematically inefficient. But it was nice."
"Stop talking like you’re already dead!" Levi roared.
He didn’t sit there and hold her hand. He didn’t wait for her to fade away.
Levi spun around and looked at the mountain of glowing loot boxes sitting thirty yards away.
*The Night King possesses a metaphysical core,* Isolde had told him before the fight. *If you harvest it, the mathematical probability of forging a soul-anchor is 98.7%.*
Levi scrambled to his feet. He sprinted back across the ice and dove straight into the pile of loot.
He didn’t gently open the boxes. He violently ripped them apart with his bare hands.
A glowing piece of Platinum chest armor popped out. Levi threw it over his shoulder. A massive stack of fifty thousand Gold Coins spilled onto the floor. Levi kicked it out of the way.
"Where is it?" he snarled, tearing open a Diamond-tier chest. A legendary greatsword materialized. He tossed it aside like garbage. Players in the major guilds would have literally paid thousands of real-world dollars for that sword. Levi didn’t even look at the stats.
He dug his hands into the very bottom of the loot pile and ripped open a small, ornate black box.
Three small, perfectly round orbs rolled out. They were pitch-black, but they pulsed with a faint, silvery light that looked like trapped starlight.
[Platinum Core of the Night]
[Rarity: Platinum Crafting Material]
"Got them," Levi said, scooping all three cores into his hand.
He turned back toward Isolde. She was still lying there, her avatar flickering worse than before. She had maybe a minute left before the server completely dumped her.
Levi needed to forge them. He needed to push these three Platinum cores up to the Mythic tier to create an item strong enough to anchor a God-fragment.
He swiped his hand through the air, forcing the [Boundless Fusion] interface to materialize right there on the ice. The glowing holographic anvil hummed to life.
He placed the three [Platinum Cores of the Night] into the three material slots.
The system threw up the prompt.
[Warning: Forging a Mythic-tier item from Platinum materials requires a Divine-tier Catalyst and a currency fee of 100,000 Gold Coins.]
Levi stared at the red text.
He opened his domain wallet.
[Domain Vault Balance: 0 Gold Coins]
He had literally spent his last dime forging the Black Sun elixir to trigger the boss fight. He was completely broke.
"I don’t have the gold," Levi whispered, panic finally bleeding into his voice. "Isolde! I need you to inject the dummy currency again! Isolde!"
He looked over his shoulder.
Isolde didn’t move. Her eyes were closed. The green static was consuming her entire lower body, erasing her legs from the game. She didn’t have the processing power left to hack the server’s economy. She couldn’t help him.
He needed a Divine catalyst to bypass the gold fee.
He opened his spatial inventory and frantically scrolled through his bags. He had hundreds of silver materials. Dozens of gold materials. A few raw platinum drops from the dungeon.
Nothing Divine. Nothing Mythic. Nothing that the system would accept as a supreme sacrifice.
"Come on," Levi growled, hitting the side of his helmet in the real world. "Think. Think!"
He looked down at his own character model. He looked at the heavy Obsidian Carapace armor. He looked at his boots.
Then he looked at his chest.
Resting around his neck, pulsing with a faint, prismatic light, was the [Heart of the Chained].
It was the Diamond-tier necklace he had forged by sacrificing the Platinum Anomaly Shard Isolde had given him days ago. It was the single most powerful defensive item he owned.
[Heart of the Chained]
[Rarity: Diamond]
[Effect: +100 to All Stats. Passive: 50% Damage Reduction from all sources.]
That necklace was the only reason he was alive. It was the only reason he had survived the Dreadknights, the Goliaths, and Kaelen’s massive cleaves. A flat 50% damage reduction was an endgame, mathematically broken stat. Without it, the Level 280 Celestial Sentinels that were going to invade the real world would completely obliterate him.
If he sacrificed the necklace, his stats would plummet.
His Strength would drop from 2,960 down to 2,860. His Agility would fall from 1,716 to 1,616. His Vitality would drop from 1,304 to 1,204. His Intelligence would crash from 511 down to 411.
He would lose thousands of points of health and mana. His damage would take a massive hit.
And he would take 100% full damage from every single monster in the game moving forward. He would be completely reverting to a glass cannon.
Levi stared at the glowing Diamond necklace.