Chương 5: options

The store interface unfolded the moment Alex focused on it. Six categories hung in the air like tabs on a menu. Knowledge. Equipment. Consumables. Skills. Cultivation. Lodging and Infrastructure. He tapped each one in turn, watching a list bloom underneath it, then collapse when he moved to the next. He started with Skills. Mostly out of curiosity, since he was too broke to afford anything in there. A short note sat above the list, warning that each skill purchased would raise the price of the next one.

It didn't explain the actual curve. For now, every Common rank skill on offer sat at a flat 500 tutorial points. Mana Bolt (Common) Condense raw mana into a bolt of concentrated energy and launch it at a target. Damage scales with Intelligence. Minimal training required to cast, though accuracy depends entirely on the user's own control. Duplicate Arrow (Common) Split a single fired arrow into two identical copies the instant it leaves the bow.

Both arrows travel the same trajectory and deal the same base damage as the original. Fireball (Common) Compress mana into a sphere of fire and hurl it at a target, detonating on impact for area damage. Larger mana investment increases the blast radius. Acid Ball (Common) Form a sphere of corrosive mana that splatters on impact, dealing damage over time to anything caught in the splash. Effective against armored or thick-skinned targets that shrug off blunt or piercing damage. Does not stack with itself.

Reinforce Skin (Common) Channel mana into the skin's surface, hardening it against cuts and punctures for a short duration. Reduces piercing and slashing damage significantly. Power Shot (Common) Use mana to reinforce a single ranged attack, increasing its penetrative force and travel speed. Works with bows, thrown weapons, or any other ranged delivery method. Costs more mana the heavier the projectile. Five hundred points each.

Alex didn't have anywhere close to that, but he figured it was only a matter of time before he was dropping everything he had on one of these. He scanned the list anyway. Power Shot and Duplicate Arrow leaned Ranger. Reinforce Skin looked built for someone on the front line, like him. Mana Bolt, Acid Ball, and Fireball all sat in Mage territory, which explained why Liam had been so wound up earlier. A few skills near the bottom carried a small note: Healer-locked.

Healers got their own pool entirely, different enough that Alex didn't bother reading further down that part of the list. With nothing in Skills he could touch, he moved to Equipment. Common-rank weapons and armor, closer to what he already had, ran in the low hundreds, steep, but at least within reach. He glanced down at his hammer. Fang marks scored the haft where snakes had caught it mid-swing, but nothing looked deep enough to threaten the head. He turned it over once, checking for cracks and finding none.

The armor was the same story, scuffed but fine, not worth replacing tonight even if he'd had the points. What he didn't have was anything for range. The hammer worked for getting close and ending things fast, but that fell apart the second something got past the front line. Something he could throw before a fight turned into a wrestling match sounded worth the points. He found a javelin bundle of three for 10 tutorial points and bought it, leaving him with thirteen. The javelins appeared in his hand a second later.

He turned the first one over, testing the balance the way he'd test a new bar at the gym before loading plates onto it, lighter than he expected, dark wood with a faint grain running its length, the head a narrow triangle of dull metal. The weight sat just behind the head, built to be thrown rather than swung, and his fingers found a row of shallow grooves cut into the grip, just enough texture to keep it from slipping mid-throw.

Three of them wouldn't win a fight on their own, but three of them landing in something's flank before it closed the distance sounded a lot better than nothing. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Thirteen points wasn't enough to chase anything else in Equipment. Alex backed out and pulled up Knowledge instead. Tutorial Basics (Common) - 1 TP A ball of condensed knowledge about how the tutorial works.

Bring it near your head to absorb its contents instantly. He bought it without thinking twice. His dad had probably already grabbed the same thing, but one point wasn't much to give up for information that could keep people alive. A small glowing sphere appeared in his palm, warm against his skin in a way that made no sense. Further down the list, another entry caught his eye.

Dungeon Knowledge (Common) - 10 TP A condensed overview of how dungeons function within the tutorial, including spawn behavior, resource generation, and general safety considerations. Ten points was steep. But there was a dungeon sitting open less than a hundred yards from camp, for the next sixty days. He bought it too, and watched his total drop to two. The rest of Knowledge sat well outside what he could afford.

Other races, what happened after a tutorial ended, things that promised real answers behind price tags that made the javelins look like pocket change. He let those go and closed Equipment for the night. He held both spheres for a moment before using either. Feeding information straight into his own skull wasn't something he had a background in, and some part of him hesitated.

But the system hadn't shown any sign of wanting him dead this early, not after all the effort it had put into calming him down and gearing him up. He brought the first sphere to his temple and let it dissolve. It didn't overwhelm him. More like water going down slow, each swallow easy, the knowledge settling in without ever crashing into him all at once. He did the second sphere right after, and the information from both started sorting itself out behind his eyes, like he'd always known it.

There were apparently many kinds of tutorials, and which one a person landed in came down to factors nobody could predict ahead of time. The system. The planet. Luck. Some were towers, climbed floor by floor toward a boss waiting at the top. Others were pure dungeon-clearing, built around tearing through one specific dungeon until it broke. His family's tutorial sat at the overlap of two types, which made the rules feel tangled.

Survival covered one half: waves of monsters spawning across the full sixty days, fed by dungeons that never stopped producing. Conquest covered the other: rival groups expanding territory the same way the family was meant to, with failure to claim ground counting against them by the end, though apparently not as a hard penalty. Survival alone covered the bare minimum.

Conquest decided how many points landed in the final tally, the one that converted into a single, much bigger shopping trip once a tutorial actually closed. That last part stuck with him. Save what he could for the end. Prices dropped in the participants' favor once a tutorial wrapped, a small mercy buried in an otherwise brutal system. There were rarer tutorial types too, combinations that didn't come up often enough to bother memorizing tonight. One number sat heavier than the rest once it settled.

Average death rates across tutorials like this one ran somewhere between thirty and fifty percent, high enough that the system clearly wanted people to feel real danger rather than just nudging them along. Alex turned that number over a few times, and the more he sat with it, the less it matched what he'd actually lived through today.

Forty-something untrained civilians had walked away from fifty pythons with some bleeding and one very sore brother-in-law, nothing close to the kind of toll that statistic was implying. If this tutorial really carried that kind of death toll waiting somewhere down the line, today had only been the opening act, and he made a mental note to bring it up with his dad as soon as he got the chance. The dungeon knowledge filled in the rest.

Dungeons were places where monsters spawned at a rate nothing in nature could match, each one unique depending on whatever stretch of world it had carved out. Left alone too long, a dungeon's monster population would eventually spill past its boundaries entirely, a breakout, the kind of thing that turned a contained problem into everyone's problem. They held more than just danger, too.

Unique resources clustered inside them, drops that didn't exist anywhere else in the tutorial zone, which was apparently reason enough for dungeons to matter well past these sixty days. The entrance itself was typically safe to stand in front of, the knowledge told him. Whatever waited past that entrance was a different conversation entirely. With two points left and nothing else in reach, Alex wandered over to Consumables before closing the panel for good.

One tutorial point bought full weeks of food for an average person, and Alex was not an average person. He did the math anyway and spent his last two points on it, watching a stack of sealed ration packs appear at his feet, two weeks of food for somebody normal, but for him, burning through calories the way three hundred pounds of muscle does, it might stretch a few days if he stayed disciplined, and probably less than that if he was honest with himself.

Still, a few guaranteed days beat zero days, and he figured he'd make up the difference once the snake meat stopped sounding like punishment and started sounding like dinner. Alex let the panel close. The field was quieter now, most of the family already drifting toward their tents for whatever passed for night out here. Zero points left, three javelins in hand, a few days of food at his feet.