Chương 536: Skill Training

The next few years were calm. The village didn't encounter any crazy disasters, and I was more than happy to use that time for something else - skill training. I had looked through my Status Screen recently, and concluded that what I was lacking the most in our return trip to the Market was a way to use my Glut penalty to increase my power.

Based on my understanding of the Market, our case was probably unusual - plenty of the pamphlets we had seen seemed to imply that glut penalty was usually the biggest bottleneck to someone's build. However, I had quite a bit of free space in my Glut penalty right now - I was currently at 122/320, which was simply absurd. I was using a little over a third of my glut penalty, which meant I had plenty of glut to use. Ideally, I should be using at least 80 or 90% of it to enhance my combat strength.

Since I didn't think I had a good way to get an evolution for {Eldritch Soul} right now, that meant focusing on non-keyword abilities. Fortunately, this world's local System directly aided the training time for any Skill I had gotten through my Sparks. So I began to train my Skills. I didn't bother much with some of them, like {Basic Ice Manipulation} - after all, what I was really missing was ways to make my abilities strong enough to contend with whatever powerful guardians protected Lives in the Market.

Investing in a totally new magic system wasn't a good way to do that, at least in my opinion. I would be much better off shoring up my weaknesses, or finding ways to amplify my already-existing specialties. However, I had gained some genuinely powerful and valuable Skills that I hadn't had enough time to train, ever since the invasion of the Universal Tree started.

For the past several months, I had been forced to constantly run around like a headless chicken, putting out fires that were in the midst of burning the village to the ground. That hadn't left me with a lot of time to hit Tier 1 for some of the Skills that I thought were valuable, but time consuming to train. Now that we had finally resolved the immediate crises, I finally had time to relax and focus on them. The first skill I thought to work on was {Born of Winter's Hold}.

This was when I realized something rather awkward, {Born of Winter's Hold}, had actually been sacrificed to my level 80 Feat. Of course, I still thought I had made the right judgement call - at the time, it had been uncertain whether we would survive long enough for me to train {Born of Winter's Hold}, or any other Skills, up to a higher level, because it had genuinely looked like we might be on the verge of extinction.

Furthermore, the boost I could grant to my friends and myself using my third rune was now absolutely massive. It was more than enough to make up for the loss of my original Skill, and any potential future raining related to it. Still, my level 80 feat had ensured I had a much more limited pool of Skills to work with. I focused primarily on {Void Mastery}.

{Void Mastery} was a simple, no nonsense upgrade to my mastery of spatial manipulation, which would empower and enhance my ability to create portals, improve their size, and improve how quickly I made them. It also slightly reduced the essence cost of creating a portal or using my dimensional sight - and interestingly enough, I also realized that it could mildly decrease how hard it was for me to slip into conceptual sight.

Ever since the fog pillar left to roam the underground ocean, I hadn't made much progress in furthering my understanding of conceptual manipulation - so I was more than happy to see new ways to grow. Of course, {Void Mastery} didn't give me any massive upgrades, but it was a useful way to boost my already-existing abilities. In short, it was exactly what I wanted. In order to train the skill, I constantly created, tested, and poked at my portals - but I also asked other villagers to help me train.

It was easiest to practice {Void Mastery} by pushing my own skills against other people's skills - such as having another spatial mage lock down a certain region of space before trying to open a portal into it. Luckily, the village recognized me as a hero at this point, so when I asked for some volunteers to help me artificially create an environment suited for training my skills, plenty of people were willing to help out.

Since everyone here had migrated with the help of spatial mages, we weren't exactly short of spatial mages, either.

You have raised Void Mastery from Tier 0 to Tier 3 Mana Stat +10, Mana Stat +30, Mana Stat +50 Skill: You have increased your {Void Mastery} Skill to Basic Grade, Intermediate Grade, Advanced Grade Achievement + 7, 000, Achievement + 15, 000, Achievement +30, 000 I managed to boost {Void Mastery} from gradeless all the way to Advanced Grade in a little over three years of training, which was a huge amount of progress. Naturally, the Market also gave me a few options for what I could bring with me.

I ignored the two lower tier versions of the same skill, though, because only the 'end result' interested me. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Since you have trained Void Mastery to [Advanced] Grade for the first time, upon your death you will have the option to purchase [Space Mastery (Advaned)] as an ability, for the cost of 30000 Achievement.

This Ability has the following effects: Keywords: None Your ability to control space is enhanced by a drastic amount, and it becomes several times easier to raise any spatially-related abilities up to [Advanced] Grade in the future. Anytime you reincarnate or get access to a new body, you retain [Basic] grade spatial control.

All spatial manipulation is moderately cheaper and slightly more effective, and you can stretch any spells or skills significantly further than before, such as distance for teleportation, portal size, et cetera. Each of your Essence stats get a +10 boost. Glut Penalty: 40 This Ability was simple, but powerful. I liked it.

It was a good way to enhance my defensive and support skills when we returned to the market, and I also liked the +10 boost to all of my essence stats and the fact that this skill came with a 'floor' to how powerful it was.

A lot of the Market's Abilities had a lot of growth potential, but started out rather middling each time we reincarnated - which was usually fine when we reincarnated into a new world, since we had plenty of training time, but it could be a huge problem when we were trying to get things done in the Market itself. The other Skill I spent most of my time on was {Void Magic}. That one enhanced my ability to access different kinds of spatial magic.

Unfortunately, while I did still make some progress in {Void Mastery}, it was a much harder skill to advance. Even so, I still made some progress. You have raised Void Mastery from Tier 0 to Tier 1 Mana Stat +10 Skill: You have increased your {Void Magic} Skill to Basic Grade Achievement + 12, 000 Since you have trained Void Magic to [Basic] Grade for the first time, upon your death you will have the option to purchase [Void Magic (Basic)] as an ability, for the cost of 5000 Achievement.

This Ability has the following effects: Keywords: None You now carry a watered down version of the laws of reality needed to support spatial magic, especially spatial spells related to cutting, crushing, and tearing. Spells built off of these fundamental characteristics have a moderate boost in essence efficiency and overall power, and are harder to disrupt.

Glut Penalty: 15 This skill was a bit different, in that unlike {Void Mastery}, it didn't enhance what I could already do - instead, it gave me a new form of offensive magic, somewhat similar to what {Ice Magic} did for me. It made it much easier to rip, cut, or tear at things using spatial magic. I wasn't quite so sure that this was what I wanted or needed, which was one of the other reasons this skill stagnated after reaching [Basic] Grade.

It wasn't quite what I had been expecting, and I wasn't sure if it was worth investing more time into, because while spatial abilities and spells were a lot more closely aligned with my own vision of what I should be doing in the future, I wasn't sure if I actually needed this ability. I still trained it now and then, but it was definitely lower in the priority list. Years continued to pass by as I focused on preparing for our return to the Market.

Soon, I turned sixteen, meaning that by the reckoning of most people in the village, I was now officially an adult. During my spare time, I kept healing villagers. Sadly, healing didn't get me to the next Achievement reward or get me a tier in {Light of Healing}, the Skill I had gotten from becoming an [Acolyte of Healing].

There simply weren't enough injuries on the island for me to regularly train and heal people - which was a ridiculous contrast to our earlier condition, where people were dying left and right as we desperately fought against impossible odds. Apart from a few early injuries when people were learning how to hunt the porcuspikes, and the occasional freak accident, I had surprisingly little to do each day.

I also avoided hunting the porcuspike population much, because the village was still trying to get their population up to the threshold needed for more consistent hunting - which meant that for now, most of the stronger members of the village agreed to only hunt one occasionally, and leave the rest as prey for the children. That meant my level remained stagnant. A few days after my friends turned sixteen, Anise and Sallia approached me for a very different reason.

"Miria, the two of us are thinking of leaving the island to go train on other islands," said Sallia.

"There's not much to do here, and we feel it would be a good idea to get some experience fighting other monsters and farming more Achievement out there. Do you want to come with us?"