Mindful of the fact that there was an unknown presence stalking him, possibly a divine beast, Velik didn’t just stand there tinkering with the new limited personal system interface. He took off a good clip while he tried to figure out what changes being disconnected from the full system had made to his body.

Speed, balance, coordination, power, endurance… it all feels the same. I guess it was worth it to eat those stat buffers before crossing the boundary after all. Good to know that wasn’t a massive waste of time.

He wished he’d known that his decarma count was going to transfer into raw essence. He definitely could have buffed that up higher, but it was too late to matter now. He’d have to content himself with only doubling his already massive destructive capabilities and hope that was enough to accomplish his goals.

While Velik ran, he prodded his new system interface. The LPS, as it referred to itself, was clearly modeled off the system he’d known his whole life. That made things a lot easier, but there were a few huge differences. The biggest one was that there was no system store anymore. Keeping a stack of decarmas in reserve to buy whatever he needed in the moment was no longer a viable strategy.

A close second was that he no longer had a list of skills to peruse. More than that, his class and level was gone, replaced by an essence total and a list of configurations labeled with his current skill names. Mentally poking at them revealed complex constellations of essence tied together with misty white threads.

Are these my skills? Does that mean I could make any skill in the system if I knew the right pattern? Gods, no wonder the divine beasts defy class types. And the LPS keeps talking about configurations and saving preferences. Does that mean I could unravel a skill I have now and use the essence to make a new one?

Velik wasn’t willing to take the risk, not until he understood the system better, so he turned to the three constellations that weren’t named after his skills. It didn’t take him long to realize they were his physical, mental, and mystic stats. With each step he took, subtle flashes of essence crossed the tangled cobweb of his physical constellation.

It trickled out of some place that overlapped with his body despite not actually existing and filtered through his body, empowering his muscles many times over. Experimentally, Velik instructed the LPS to assign more essence to the constellation. He had no idea how it would do that or if it was putting the essence in the right spot, but he was willing to trust right up until it screwed something up. Hopefully, that wouldn’t happen.

Hopefully, he’d at least recognize the problem if it did. Velik was completely out of his depth here, despite his attempts to learn [Mana Control]. He was starting to see why Aria had insisted that nobody could control essence. Maybe if he’d held a mage class from the start, it would have been a different story, but watching the LPS weave new essence strands into his physical constellation was more than enough to convince Velik that he didn’t have anything remotely approaching the skills needed to do this stuff manually.

Regardless of his personal ability to manipulate raw essence, the LPS seemed to be doing a good job. It even presented him with a new status screen that was close enough to what he was used to that he didn’t have any trouble figuring it out.

[Name: Velik]

[Total Essence: 19428]

[Unallocated Essence: 8762]

[Essence Configurations:]

[Physical Enhancement: 2948]

[Mental Enhancement: 1374]

[Mystic Enhancement: 1210]

[Duskbound: 2187]

[Awakened Blood: 1372]

[Judgment of Penance: 773]

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

[Dread Lance: 457]

[The Wanderer’s Path: 219]

[Mana Control: 126]

His physical had gone up by 522 essence points. He wasn’t entirely sure how that translated into the scale he was used to, but he estimated that the constellation cloud was about twenty percent denser. Math wasn’t his strong point, but he could tell it wasn’t a flat conversion. Someone smarter than him could probably plot out what kind of curve it was on.

He decided it was best not to worry about it too much. It had always been his personal experience that practical applications were more important than theory, and in this case, it was easy to test that out. He simply sped up, his whole body a blur as he dashed across the empty desert. It took a few minutes to start seeing the results, but soon enough, he was cruising along at well over a hundred miles an hour.

Eager to spend more essence, Velik promptly fed it into mental and mystic. The results took mere seconds to finalize, then he was blinking in surprise as the world started to sharpen. He’d thought his senses were honed to the keenest edge before, but this was on a whole different level. He could hear his own blood flowing in his veins, feel the steady thrum of his heart beat, and see the minute shifting patterns of sand caught in the wind.

The first hitch came when he tried to pour essence into a skill. It didn’t just accept it like his stats had. Instead, the LPS gave him a notification he hadn’t seen yet.

[Error. User direction required to modify skill configuration.]

Too much to hope that I could just decide to have a rank 10 skill, he silently lamented as he ran.

His next experiment was a simple one: he wanted to pull essence back out. This wasn’t something a person could do under the real system. It acted as the bridge between everyone and their essence, but the LPS was letting him access it directly, so he didn’t see any reason he shouldn’t be able to move it around.

Mystic was doing the least amount of good for him at the moment, so he picked that as his stat to play with. The LPS responded to his will, breaking down the essence strands at the edge of the constellation and returning them to the pool.

[26 essence lost.]

Velik’s mouth curled into a frown and a sharp stab of pain spiked through his head. There’s a cost to it. Of course there would be. It would be too easy to shift things around into whatever configuration is most beneficial for the circumstance at hand. Still, good to know that I can change the distribution if I need more strength or speed.

Velik quickly poured essence into his stats until he was down to 5000, a nice, round number that he planned on bolstering his skills with. There’d been nothing stating a maximum number of skill slots like the system limited him to, and he was hoping to regain some of the lost utility of his gear with what was left.

That put his physical at 4448, his mental at 2610, and his mystic at 2210. At first, he didn’t feel much of anything. He’d expected that, though. His earlier tests had confirmed that the changes weren’t instantaneous, but it was still a far cry from the drip-feeding he’d done to his raw stats with Jensen’s gift of stat boosters.

He wasn’t going to complain about it. Ten minutes to basically double his physical—though felt more like maybe boosting his stats by a third—was incomparable to the month of slowly plodding along that had led up to tonight. He was inarguably stronger now than he’d been an hour ago, even without his gear supporting him.

That was what saved him. Before, he wouldn’t have noticed the signs in time to react, and even if he had, the trap was so big that he couldn’t have escaped it anyway. Now, when a hundred jagged metal teeth exploded out of the desert all around him, Velik was already launching himself into the air.

The teeth weren’t attached to jaws. Instead, they breached the sand in a ring and arced closed overhead like a giant steel cage. The gaps between them vanished in less than a second, leaving the interior black as the smaller inner teeth started to rotate.

Velik got a single glimpse at what would have shredded him while the outer ring closed beneath him. He was a hundred feet up and still rising, his spear gripped in one hand and his boots split from the force of his jump. The cage clamped shut just beneath his toes, so close that Velik could feel the impact through the air.

Morgus save me, that thing is massive!

He recognized the metal—the same stuff the golems at the sky bridge were made of, only ten times thicker up where he was. Down at the base of the teeth, the metal was at least thirty feet wide. If this was representative of the monsters that lurked in the endless desert, it was no wonder no one had ever crossed it. He was likely the strongest human on the planet, and he’d only just avoided the ambush.

Maybe I just got that unlucky and met a true monster among monsters as my very first challenge. Doesn’t matter. The real question is how the hell do I kill it?

Shifting into wolf form no longer gave him a stat boost. He was as strong now as a human as he would be with fur and fangs. His spear was the same metal as this monster, though. As long as he could put enough power behind a strike, he could damage the thing.

Reaching for [Dread Lance] was subtly different, but the skill came to his call as always. Light—bands of essence constraining a bolt of mana, he saw now—sparked down his spear and crashed into the teeth below him. The only effect it had was to throw Velik even higher into the air.

Something feathered and enormous struck him. He tried to twist out of the way, but the long bird leg just contorted at an impossible angle. Claws circled around his torso and jerked him away from the monster below.