Chương 163: Chapter 161: New spells and abilities

I gather the books together and move them to the edge of the room, near where all the treasure is and as far away from the swiftly rotting corpse of the glutton lord as I can get. I'm holding my nose closed again, but it only helps so much. Gigi has separated the gold into five piles. Four of them are roughly the same size, and the fifth one is much smaller. Is she planning on giving that to Vincent? I could see that.

He wasn't here and didn't help even a little bit, but it would be nice of us to give him some coin to spend. Then again, he didn't spend all of his coin getting across the ocean.

"That pile is for the party fund," Gigi says, pointing at the small pile.

"The other piles are about five hundred gold a piece. If we add in the money from the treasure chest, that gives us each three platinum and five hundred and eight gold. The rest of it goes in the party fund. That sound fair?" We all agree that it is, and put the piles of money into our spatial bags. The gems go into the pouch for the party fund. I don't know if Gigi is intending for the party to buy a house or something, but I don't ask.

It'll come up when we have reason to spend it, or when someone needs more money, I guess. I spread out the books and start offering them around. El gets the stinging defense and the spike growth without anyone arguing. They see the same reasoning I did. Gigi ends up taking both bleeding strike and sharpen, and Ash takes both leaping attack and critical strike. No one else wants lava lance or any of the crafting spells, so I take all of that.

We'll sit down and learn our new abilities and spells once we get out of here. Which may be easier said than done. There aren't any secret passages leading out of the boss chamber, and there isn't a clearly marked exit, either. If I were designing a dungeon, I'd make sure there was a short cut to get out once you've cleared it. But I didn't design this dungeon, I just adventured through it. So I guess we have to do this the hard way. We head back to the pit.

"If you learn that leaping attack ability, you might be able to jump out of here," I tell Ash.

"I'm pretty sure I can get out with Dash. But the question is for the two of you. How do we get you out of here?"

"I can give her a boost," El says.

"Maybe toss her up partway. Then she could maybe catch the rope that one of you drops down when you get to the top?"

"But then how do we get you up?" Gigi asks. El doesn't seem to have much of an answer for that.

"Maybe you can climb?" I offer.

"If you stand on my shoulders, you can probably get to the edge of the hole going up. Then you can climb up until you can reach the rope?" That makes sense. I just have to be the last one out. And since I can Dash at any time, that isn't a problem. We don't need both Ash and myself to get out of the pit to drop the rope down. Either one of us can do it. Since we have a way for two people to get out, we can do this. It isn't pleasant.

After we wait for Ash to learn the ability, she takes the coils of rope from El and leaps out of the pit. Then she drops the rope down, and El and I basically toss Gigi up as high as we can. She catches the rope and climbs out without any difficulty. But El has a really rough time climbing up the side of the pit. She only has to make it about ten feet, but I swear those ten feet take her almost ten minutes to traverse.

I don't know if the sides of the pit are just kind of smooth or if it's just that El isn't a very good climber. She should have at least some experience with climbing. I watch her go from underneath, ready to try to catch her if I can. But she doesn't fall. She just moves incredibly slowly, testing out every handhold and foot hold before transferring her weight even a little bit. I call up encouragement while she's going, and she does eventually make it, but I bet she's a bit exhausted when she does.

I use Dash and head up at an angle. I have no problem getting out, per se, but it isn't a pleasant experience. My Dash takes me one hundred and five feet up. Which is more than enough to clear the pit. In fact, it's more than enough to clear the room above the pit. I crash into the ceiling of the room, then again onto the floor of the hallway. I take four hundred and fifty points of damage, though the only that is really harmed is my pride.

It's embarrassing, but I suppose it's understandable; the ability isn't supposed to work like that. We have very little trouble getting out of the dungeon after that. We know where the traps are, and there are no more monsters, so we make it out pretty quickly. Soon enough, we're camping outside the backwards wall that seals the dungeon in. Which means that we're potentially once again being spied on by the assassin girl. I do my best to find her, but I don't see anything. She is probably hiding behind something.

I might possibly be able to see her if she is using something like Blur or even invisibility, but if she's behind a tree and its blocking my view, then it doesn't really matter how good my awareness is. There's just nothing to see. So we don't talk all that much. We just sit around the campfire and start reading. It's late in the afternoon, but there are still a few hours of light out that will allow us to learn our new spells. Lava lance. Very rare spell 1/30. MP cost: 500. Casting time: 3 seconds.

Cooldown: 45 minutes. Duration: 1 minute. Summon forth a gout of lava that forms spears you can throw. Each spear does 200% of your willpower in damage, plus causes burning 10 for the duration of the spell. Water breathing. Uncommon spell 1/10. MP cost: 100. Casting time: 5 seconds. Cooldown: 1 hour. Touch a target to allow them to breathe underwater for your presence in minutes. Heat metal. Common crafting spell 1/5. MP cost: 50 plus special. Casting time: special. Cooldown: 1 hour.

Touch a piece of metal to cause it to rise in temperature by 10 degrees per mana spent, at a rate of 10 degrees per second. Doesn't say if that's Fahrenheit or Celsius. Might be Kelvin for all I know. I'll have to experiment with that to figure it out. Solidify. Rare crafting spell 1/20. MP cost: 250. Casting time: 10 seconds. Cooldown: 4 hours. Cause material equal to your willpower in weight to become 10% more dense, improving its quality. Soften. Rare crafting spell 1/20. MP cost: 250. Casting time: 10 seconds.

Duration: 5 minutes. Cooldown: 4 hours. Cause material equal to your willpower in weight to become 10% less firm, allowing you to bend it without breaking. Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. Purify. Common spell 1/5. MP cost: 15. Casting time: 1 second. Cooldown: 5 seconds. Remove impurities in any liquid. Removes poisons. Does not work if the liquid is inherently poisonous. I can see how those would all be useful for crafting.

Except the last one, but that's useful in and of itself. Makes it harder for someone to poison me when they serve me food or wine. I wish I'd had that before we met the maester. And I can see how the water breathing one will be useful. I mean, it's hard not to. And because my presence is 140, it will come off cooldown before the spell runs out, meaning I can stay underwater pretty much indefinitely. Or at least as long as my mana holds out.

My spellcraft skill goes up a massive three points to forty five for learning all those spells. The books all talk about how to cast spells, and all have a little bit of magical theory in them, so I guess that makes sense. It's weird that spellcraft is my highest skill. It used to be sneak, but spellcraft just edged it out. There's a bunch of notifications that have come since we left the dungeon. I start looking through them. First, I get some experience for all the traps that I detected and disarmed.

It's not all that much, totaling only 24, 000, but that brings me up to about 240, 000 out of the 370, 000 I need for level 46, so I'm not complaining. Then there are a few more skill buffs, probably from the final battle. My sword, dagger, and shield have each gained one point, and my dodge has gained two. Then there's this one: You have completed a secret quest! Quest: gain skills. Progress: 509/500. Reward: 75, 000 experience. I do wish I could have held that one for the future, just in case.

Seventy five thousand experience points would go a long way to helping me regain my levels if I ever die again. But I guess I get those points when I get them, so I'll just accept them. I mean, it's pretty cool, and it gets me even closer to the next level. I can't believe I'm within sixty thousand experience points of level 46. I'm catching up to El, and even getting close to Vincent. Speaking of Vincent. I should check on him and see how he's doing. He could still be sleeping.

But I send him a quick message anyway, telling him that we just got out of a dungeon and are heading back to town. He can meet us there if he wants to.

"How do you think Vincent is doing?" Gigi asks, just seconds after I send the message.

"I just sent him a message," I say.

"I'll let you know if he replies."

"He's probably still sleeping," El says.

"He just spent more than a week straight awake."

"That's true," Ash says.

"I hope he didn't go crazy. Don't you start hallucinating after a while?"

"Humans do," Gigi says.

"I don't know if we would. I think it might depend on where his vigor is at." It isn't that high. Last time I checked, Vincent had 2, 585 hit points. At his level, that means his vigor is only 55. Which I suppose is pretty high when you compare it to a normal human and not to one of the women sitting around me. Or to me. Why am I not giving myself credit? I have 200 points of vigor. Almost four times what Vincent has. I can be a badass too.

"He might need a few days to recover," Ash says.

"We shouldn't push him."

"I'm more curious what happened to Amanda," I say.

"She's got vigor like you guys do, so she might be fine. She may not even have stopped to rest at all."

"Where do you think she's going?" Gigi asks.

"I don't know. We could try to follow her again, if you want." El shakes her head.

"Amanda has her own thing she's trying to do. I don't want to spend all my time chasing her down again. We just started having fun adventuring. Let's not stop." She thought that dungeon was fun. I suppose in a way it kind of was. We got a crap ton of experience. I think all of us gained at least two levels in there. Gigi gained four, if I remember correctly. We also got a load of treasure. And I suppose it was kind of entertaining finding and getting around or through all those traps.

It was nerve wracking, sure, but it was also kind of fun.

"The question about Amanda is whether or not we want to allow her to do what she wants to do," Ash says.

"She clearly wants to become a god. Are we okay with that?" Gigi shrugs.

"She seems okay to me. And it seems like the world has a bit of a fail safe to prevent her from going too nuts."

"What do you mean?" Ash asks.

"The whole thing where she can't initiate fights with certain things. She's become more a part of this world than any of us, and that kind of forces her to do what's best for the world, right? So if she becomes a god, she'll probably be bound by even more rules that will prevent her from doing anything really bad."

"That's why I don't want to be a god," El says.

"I don't want restrictions on what I do."

"Like you'd ever do anything all that bad anyway," Gigi says, scoffing at El. But really, El has a good point. If becoming a god means that there are even more rules imposed on our actions and even on our ways of thinking, I'm not sure I want it either. We may lose our free will if we become gods. More so than we already have, I mean. Free will isn't an all or nothing prospect. I always thought that it was. You either can choose or you can't.

But as time goes by, and as I realize what the death cycle has really done to me, I'm starting to realize that there's a whole lot of nuance in that. There are some things that I feel like I can't really choose anymore. I'm not entirely consciously aware of what those restrictions are, but I feel like there are some choices I had before that I just don't have anymore. Some things that I could do before I went through the death cycle that I can't even conceive of anymore. Maybe that's just a factor of time going by.

I've aged a lot in these past few months. Maybe I'm just getting old, and my mind is getting set in its ways. Maybe I just can't bring myself to make certain decisions not because I've lost the will, but because I know they're bad choices. I might just have gotten smarter. Wiser. There isn't a stat for wisdom either; you just have to become more wise over time, the natural way. Maybe that's all it is. But what if it isn't?

What if there are certain avenues that I can no longer go down, certain pathways I can't even think through? What if I have fewer choices than I used to have? It makes me think about the problem of evil. That's the whole thing where if god is all knowing, all powerful, and all good, how is there evil? God would know what evil could happen, would be able to stop it, and would want to. So it shouldn't be possible for there to be evil.

This problem is usually solved by claiming that god doesn't have one of those qualities, which pretty neatly allows evil to exist. Because god either can't stop it, doesn't know about it, or doesn't want to stop it. But that always got me thinking about the concept of being all good in the first place. If you're omnibenevolent, then you not only want the best option, you are forced to take it. You don't have free will anymore. So if there is free will, there can't be someone all good.

If they can choose something other than the best possible option, they aren't all good. And if they can't, then they don't have free will. And I'm worried that becoming a god will lock us into things like that. What if I become the god of, say, archery. Then maybe I will have to bless any archer who prays to me. That takes away my free will, doesn't it? Maybe not all of it, but more of it than I'm comfortable with.

"No one who wants to be a god should be allowed to be," Gigi says, bringing me back to the conversation.

"So we should stop her?" Ash asks.

"I don't know," Gigi says.

"Maybe she'll change her mind on her own."

"Maybe she'll get killed," El says.

"This land is a lot more dangerous than the other continent, and she's still traveling and fighting all by her lonesome. She might not have been able to take out that dungeon." Another good point.

"Maybe we should give this some time," I say, realizing that we've been discussing becoming gods, potentially, in front of a spy. I still don't see the assassin, but she could very well be listening to every word we say. She might have headed back to maester Gellin to tell him about our success, but she might also be spying on us. We don't know. We can't know. Everyone else gets my point, and we shut up. The damage is probably already done, but there's no point in compounding it.