Even the walk toward the desert’s edge was surprisingly pleasant. It allowed him to do something he hadn’t done in years. Relax. Not constantly rushing for more money or more experience…
Yes, he had the World Quest to complete, but one year was plenty of time to reach Cygislax, find the Primal Moon Essence and bring it to Ruby Khion.
The main reason he was so slow was because of Sofya who would most likely explode in gory bits if he tried to bring her along with him. He didn’t doubt that his mastery over law and intent would one day allow him to easily do that, but right now he didn’t really have any ways.
Something else had improved too, his ability to close his eyes. They were simply creations of his living silver so he actually could just remove them during the night if he wanted to have a semblance of sleep.
Maybe one day his body would become of such a high quality he could once again feel the sand under his feet or the wind against his skin. Drinking and eating were for now, not something he deeply missed, but he wondered for how long. What he wouldn’t give to taste some nice herbal tea once again. Or even a tasty and fat juicy burger.
“Sir Akhenamen! What about this?!”
Sofya, who had become a bit more familiar and used to him, had finally moved from “Lord” to “Sir”. He now held a paper in his hands, his voice coming from him directly now that Ascylla had finished adapting the evolution of the Common speech in her data-base. Copying that knowledge to him.
Staring at the drawings showing multiple possibilities on how to further improve the Liquid Silver, he started pointing out the mistake she had made. Or more exactly, Ascylla helped him point them out. According to her Sofya was talented but still very far from reaching anything conclusive for at least a few months.
Massive rock formations started to appear around them, a clear indication of the slow but steady approach of Oleron’s edges. The sun shining down on them was making so much heat now that Sofya’ didn’t even use fire anymore but just any of the rocks around them to cook her food now.
“You’ve made a few mistakes, Sofya. Let’s see…”
After describing her mistakes, he gave back her sheet of paper as she pushed it back inside her journal with a determined nod. No matter how much she failed, that girl just never gave up. .
The massive rocks around them started to form a real forest of towering pillars of stones. Shadows would fly over them, massive wyverns the size of buses flapping their wings, fighting each other, cannibalizing their dead comrades or actually fleeing huge… kangaroos mixed to dunkleosteus?
The beasts would use their hind legs to jump great distances, their enormous body flying straight toward some of the flying wyverns who would either dodge and evade the jumping predator or get their body smashed between one of the rock pillars and the massive jumping beast.
“So their hunting tactic is literally “throw myself at something until it dies? I thought it was an exaggeration from papa’s tales! That has to be a Crushing Rocuie!”
Sofya stared with wide bright eyes at those beasts, apparently endemic to the outback of the Oleron Desert. Akhenamen got a good look at them because of his high Sight, first they seemed to use their great rock carapace to camouflage themselves on the stone pillars.
Made completely from thick slabs of stone and if not for the skin between the thick rock plates covering its body, Akhenamen could have taken them for golems. Their hind legs were extremely thick and wide, and their front legs seemed no different.
All of it covered in thick stones. They walked on their hind legs, slow and sluggish on the floor, few of them stood on the floor but they actually seemed to either use slain wyvern’s acid to put more half melted rock on their backs or just lay in the sun to make their rocky shells dry.
Their faces seemed very wide, thick and sturdy looking, covered in as much rock as the rest of their body, their armored jaws forming some sort of denture made of sharp stones carved in the vague shape of a very pointy and rugged tooth.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
The wyverns flew in circles around some of the younger Crushing Rocuie like vultures, swooping down, their jaws dripping with acid and breathing it out in powerful rock melting sprays which landed on the thick rock carapace of their prey.
The Rocuie’s jumps would often succeed in crushing one of the wyvern against a rock pillar. But the swarm of wyvern would win in the end, their acid finally melting through the rock carapace and reaching the flesh beneath.
The Rocuie and Wyverns were respectively level 55 and 40. If that was the level of the beasts at the outback of the Oleron Desert, he could understand that inside the desert it had to be ten times worse.
Akhenamen looked down at Sofya. If he remembered correctly, she was around level 10.
“Do you wish to stay here? I can help you level up or get used to fighting maybe?”
“Well.. don’t worry. I’ll be fine. I’m not doing this trip to get stronger. I just wanna see the world. And it wouldn’t be useful, I can’t even do one damage to those guys. I wouldn’t gain any exp.”
“I see. By the way, how do you decide when you have enough traits? And if they are at a good enough level?”
“Oh well, like everyone we can’t have more than five traits granting us stats. Even Transcendents don’t have more than five! And The Academy wants a minimum of one [Epic] and four [Rare] traits at minimum before allowing us to level up to the Second Ascent!”
Before Akhenamen could even ask what all that was about, Syllena intervened.
[I KNOW THE ANSWER, DAD! :D]
“Well do tell me then Syllena.”
[It seems traits are supposed to have rarity but the feature is seemingly disabled for you as you don’t really have any limits on how many traits you can have! And an Ascent corresponds to every ten levels!]
“Thanks a lot, very well done Syllena. Proud of you!”
[ ????(??? ,<)~? ]
He wanted to laugh at his daughter’s overuse of her emoticons, but he found it quite adorable. He turned to Sofya.
“What is your current status if you don’t mind me asking, Sofya?”
“Oh don’t worry, I don’t mind showing you, maybe you can give me pointers! Here you go!”
Akhenamen observed her status, at a level ten, even if she was level fifty, her stats would be well below his. Clearly his ability to have every level count toward a stat upgrade was an absolute cheat.
Her Traits gave her alright stat, around half what his traits did. And from his quick observation, a traits rarity didn’t matter much on the number of stat points given in one stat but on the amount of stats the traits affected. Epic affected three, Rare two and Uncommon had to affect only one.
While she couldn’t raise her level, maybe he could help her get some good traits? He would have to try that later. Maybe by helping her accomplish something impressive?