Chapter 459: Ninety-Sixth Floor, Waiting Room (2)
[65 hours 11 minutes until the rest period ends. Please take a rest.]
I spent about five minutes scrolling through the shop menu, debating what equipment to buy. Before long, I realized it didn’t really matter. At my current level, nothing sold in the shop would make any meaningful difference. Their cost-effectiveness was poor, and besides, nothing there could possibly compare to the cloak I had just obtained.
It was a shame to have lost the armor and the Mana-Accumulating Gauntlet of the Underworld, though.
As I had realized on the ninety-fifth floor, my equipment wasn’t truly essential. In fact, I couldn’t help but wonder if that was what the tower had intended—to give me a kind of enlightenment, a lesson about letting go of reliance on equipment. Although the trial hadn’t been about me abandoning my gear, it felt connected.
I had intentionally entered trials without equipment before, all to push my growth further. That was that, though. I had no reason to hoard points when there was no need.
From the ninety-sixth floor to the one-hundredth. This is where the final battles begin.
Not once, in my battles against the Feast, Kalain, or the Furnace, had I found myself wishing for a single extra point of strength. That only made me less interested in spending forever getting new gear. That time would be better spent gaining new understandings and insights.
Still, it never hurt to have an edge. There was no reason to refuse any advantage I could take.
Thunder Axe kept his attire simple, but both Eternal Feast and Endless Furnace were well-equipped.
Eternal Feast had looked especially grand in his ornate armament, fitting for a god of indulgence. It was a pity his corpse had disintegrated into fragments before I could recover any of it. As for Thunder Axe, perhaps I had only seen him during his moments of rest. For all I knew, he could have proper battle equipment as well.
Either way, walking around in just a climbing suit isn’t ideal.
On the ninety-fifth floor, I had fought wearing only the climbing suit and Soulbound. To anyone else, it would have looked rather unbalanced. I decided to stop overthinking it and decided to buy the most expensive gear available. I had more than enough achievement points anyway.