The Systemic Lands

Chapter 296: Day 673 – Powering Up

Chapter 296: Day 673 – Powering Up

I turned in my points for the last 40 days worth of grinding during the early morning at Neo Brasilia. The guards gave me looks but no one interfered with me. Since I hadn’t gotten a mental alert, it appeared that the Divine Empress hadn’t made a move yet.

Chest after chest was unloaded, filled with level 4 crystals. I had earned almost 90 million points in total. It was an astronomical sum. That was the kind of wealth that would catapult a person to stratospheric heights. But for me it was just some more water into the bucket that was impossibly large to fill.

I purchased 2,000 stat points and put the remainder into my health insurance plan that was now up to around 1.5 million points. I felt it prudent to start stacking up there as well, since if I did manage to survive a high level fight, I might not come out unscathed.

Body-1,330 (+630); Mind-700 (+300); Spirit-4,000; Perception-400; Aura-400; Regeneration-1,300; Endurance-200; Absorption-1,500 (+1,070) for a total of 9,830 upgrades.

I got the same alert that Naran had gotten for Body. I could finally adjust the amount of force my body generated by thinking about it. There was also the cost of one energy per second for every 100 in the Body stat that I used over 1,000. It was a negligible amount for me. But that limitation spoke to the explosive power a high level body combatant might employ.

For hitting 1,000 stat points in Absorption, I could now directly absorb energy in place of food. That sounded like a bad idea. I was a physical being, not a luminous being made of energy. I took a deep breath, and felt the slight amount of energy in the air as I breathed in.

The Astrologer had wanted me to absorb energy wherever he was trapped, but he had warned me about trying to directly use the energy I absorbed. Like pushing energy outside of my body to form a shell, I would need to carefully practice with this aspect of energy and myself.

If I screwed up, there would be no good way to correct things. I had made some progress on making an energy shell around me. I had been working on it every night. I could now do it on instinct. I had no idea how much of a defense it was. I had tested it on some lower level monsters on the way back, but it was impossible to maintain in combat.

High speed movement was not the time to be focusing on trying to stretch a mental muscle that was very hard to stretch. I had hoped practice would help, and it had, but it wasn’t easy. Coloring outside the lines regarding stats was not my forte’ and it was frustrating.

The Astrologer wouldn’t have explained this energy shell technique if it wasn’t important. But it was hard to know exactly what it did. I get that it would stop purely energy attacks would hit it before hitting me, but that seemed like it was covered by Aura, Mind, and Body. Aura was the first line of defense, with Mind and Body, handling the mental and physical aspects of an attack respectively.

Why was an energy shell even needed in the first place? I had been asking myself that question while I had spent time practicing each night. It wasn’t a simple or easy answer. If anything, it would weaken my defenses or Spirit as a whole, by pushing my energy outside my body.

I could maybe see its use if there was a widespread are of effect energy attack, that I wanted to avoid getting physically touched with. But that seemed like a very remote possibility. I also had no doubt that raw energy manipulation would open up a lot more doors in the future, but for now I was severely limited in what I could do.

The conscious control of force generation from Body would be useful. But one thing that would be a huge risk was becoming unbalanced. There was a total amount of force the stat could generate or nullify at one time. That meant attacking or defending had to be the priority at each precise moment, not both. If someone was hit during an attack, they would not be able to physically defend with their entire Body stat.

The timing would be critical, but it was possible. With a second being the timeframe the stat seemed to operate under. The higher the Body and Mind stat, the greater this second would become in terms of combat. At a very high level, this attack, defense, and movement balance would be critical and have to be worked into a fighting style.

It made me interested what the other stats would reveal once they crossed the thousand point mark. It was frustrating not upgrading the other stats, but Body and Mind were too important to leave at a low amount. Moving during a fight was super critical, even if I didn’t want to get into a melee, I couldn’t afford to be slow.

That was what that all critical combat number I had come up with, being the core of everything. The number of times I could get off Acid Shot before an opponent closed the distance to me. I wasn’t that worried about ranged attacks. It would be like how it had gone with the Envoy, a close run and gun. But I had the defenses to handle such things.

I was far more concerned about the Divine Empress and a Body stat focused build. I didn’t have a hope of winning, but creating a stalemate might be possible, if I could force her to keep her distance. It wasn’t the best option or idea, but it was the only immediate idea I had on how to fight her.

Thrown bombs would be too slow and she would easily move out of the way. So, while a possible delaying tactic, one that wouldn’t work for a long time. That was the problem with fighting a high Body stat build, was their ability to persist and have movement control over the fight.

That was why after Absorption, increasing Body and Mind had been the priority, even if I had wanted to spread out my stats a bit more. It was just too risky at the moment. I would have to come back to them later. It was aggravating to have to adjust my stats and skills so much, but I didn’t want to be in the middle of a fight and have regrets. There was no medicine for regret, only acting ahead of time and hoping my preparations were enough.

Ideally, I would never even see the Divine Empress and could hide out and gather strength out of her sight. A couple more grinding sessions like this, and I would be fairly stacked in terms of base stats. Which was the other problem, I had no idea what was stacked and what wasn’t.

The Astrologer had speculated she had at least 50,000 in her Body stat. That was insane. I had done some math. Assuming another 50,000 stat points spread out, that was about 25 billion points spent on stat points.

It was an astronomical number. A number that boggled the mind. While point crystals fell from monsters, that was around 7 million level 4 point crystals. At my current speed it would take me around 12,000 days of near constant grinding to earn that many points. That was a bit less than 33 years.

That was the real frustrating part about all of this. She had been around for almost 8 years now, but her speed had increased exponentially. If she had 100 people farming level 4 crystals, then it would only take 120 days to get the 25 billion points.

But that would require those people to give up everything and work for basically free. No person would be willing to do that without the thought of taking the Divine Empress out. Perhaps that was the reason she had so many rebel problems? Another issue that constantly came up, was the lack of information to the West.

We had no idea of how her government functioned or how she organized her Empire. She couldn’t be everywhere at once, but was it possible to track her movements? There had been a lot of brainstorming, but the simple answer was to not poke Divine Empress and let her make the first move to buy ourselves as much time as possible.

Once she made her move then we would have to plan our counter attack based on the actions she took initially and we got a better idea of her personal strength and the strength of her Empire. Clarissa would take charge of taking on her Empire, while I had the unenviable task of finding a way to kill her.

There would be overlap for sure, but it would likely come down to direct combat. At a certain point, when you have a total of 100k stat points and a meta-point, assassinations and plots can’t kill a person. Like an immovable object, Clarissa would have to work around her and attack from oblique angles to undermine her rule. She was already putting the building blocks into place.

I had to just kill her. It was hard to say which of us had the worse job when the Divine Empress made her move. I would have to find out her combat power by going to the West and investigating. I couldn’t exactly ask to spar with her and expect her to monologue her weaknesses to me in a middle of a fight.

Then there was still the Astrologer’s main body in a tower. That was not going to be fun, and I wanted to put that off for as long as possible. If I could kill the Divine Empress before the deadline, it would give me confidence to handle any tricks the Astrologer might throw at me. While they would have different fighting styles and I would boost my mental defenses up a lot, I would know I could take him…hopefully.

What I really needed was a meta-point, but there was no clear or easy way to get one. I had been tempted to try and find the boss of the zone I had been grinding in, but that was too big a risk. Which was the kind of mindset that didn’t get meta-points. It was rage inducing and I wanted to scream at the Almighty System.

Just teleport Leroy Jenkins in and have him run screaming out into the wilderness. That was actually the real name of the Astrologer I had come up with. Since he had to be an insane risk taker to get at least the two meta-points I suspected he had.

He didn’t fit my idea of a mindless barbarian, but after that little side trip with his proxy to check on a physical chunk of energy over the void, I was completely convinced he was insane and had no sense of danger. Maybe it was unfair to him, but I didn’t care. He was now and forever, a Leroy Jenkins, just blindly charging into danger.

It was the very anthesis of my being to even consider that. While I wouldn’t hesitate to act, when I decided to act. I didn’t like needless danger. I wanted other people to scout and take those risks. My life was more valuable than a meta-point, even three meta-points. Which was probably why I wasn’t going to get any, any time soon.