Several hours of grinding, seven levels, and a few boss trolls later, we stopped again. Since we only had about an hour left in the Cheon Bu training area before Jee-Han had to leave and I wanted to party grind a bit more, I mentally called out for Washu. Time froze.
"Yes?" She asked in my head.
"What happens if I create a time-dilated Instant Dungeon inside another time-dilated Instant Dungeon?" I queried mentally. There was a long moment of silence before I got an annoyed sounding reply.
[By coming up with a good plan, you increased your wisdom!]
"After looking over the rules and what we've established between us, it would give you even more time by multiplying the time dilation effects together. I don't like it, though. What do you want in exchange for me capping that? You'll still be able to nest IDs but the dilation would only be the maximum you could achieve in one ID."
I blinked in surprise. I'd expected her to say I'd get tossed into the void or something. Or that I'd just piss off Gaia.
[Using good reasoning to come to a likely conclusion increased your intelligence!]
"Um….what are you offering?"
"Considering how ridiculous you stacking time-dilation could get, I'm going to have to say quite a bit. You could have bought yourself unlimited training time, which would have been good for power but terrible for your mental health and the experiment overall. It would have also been extremely boring for me," she replied.
"Ok. Since what I would have gotten would be more loot and more experience, can you give me an experience boost whenever I'm in an Instant Dungeon for the rest of the Jump? And maybe an increased learning speed outside of Instant Dungeons?"
"I like that you're willing to negotiate on this, so how about I give you the experience boost for the remainder of the jump regardless? The amount of time you spend in Instant Dungeons before you leave isn't capped, and you can theoretically get literally time-stopped IDs if you practice enough anyway. I just don't want you loop-holing this and getting it without working for it. I can also increase your learning speed, but I'll do it by maxing out your intelligence for your current level as if you'd raised it by studying."
"Considering I'm really studying for knowledge on how to create and refine my skills, that sounds great. I know I get intelligence from studying, but the rate is really slow. If you boost it up to the maximum I'd get from studying for this level I'll keep the benefit outside the jump and be able to do my studying faster to better effect. I accept."
"Excellent. From now on you cannot multiply or add time dilation together using Instant Dungeons, but will instead take the maximum time dilation and run with that. In exchange your intelligence goes up to 150. If you haven't been paying attention that should tell you the maximum you can train any stat above what you've gained in other ways is three times your total level."
Time restarted, and my head really hurt for a moment, then I got a lot of pop-ups.
[Since you raised your intelligence past one-hundred, you've gained a random ability related to your brain functions.]
[New skill: Basic Willpower created!]
[By raising your intelligence to 100, you've gained the skill: Medium Mana Capacity!]
[By raising your intelligence to 100, you've gain the skill: Mana Regeneration!]
[By raising your intelligence to 150, you've gained the skill: Advanced Magic!]
[Advanced Magic has combined with Basic Mana Manipulation to form Basic Mana Mastery!]
[Basic Mana Mastery has combined with Basic Ki Mastery to form Mystical Energy (Basic Mastery)!]
[Mystical Energy (Efficiency)'s name now indicates it overlaps another skill, would you like to change it?]
I went through the descriptions of [Basic Willpower], [Medium Mana Capacity], [Mana Regeneration], and [Mystical Energy (Basic Mastery)] and had to bite my cheek not to start laughing like a madman. My MP regeneration was now so high I could use flight and a few other skills at the same time without losing any MP at all! Hell, even the cost of my skills was reduced by [Mystical Energy (Basic Mastery)]! All of my basic stats now received passive bonuses, and I could enhance those and my senses further at the cost of additional MP. [Basic Speedster] was impressive as hell, but with [Mystical Energy (Basic Mastery)] added on top of it I could boost myself to levels I hadn't thought I'd see in years. That reminded me...I hadn't practiced [Mystical Energy (Efficiency)] in a while. I resolved to do so and changed the name to [Mystical Energy (Concealment)].
"Jee-Han? For this last hour or however long you've got left I'm going for melee. I just got a bunch of things I need to grind."
"Alright. Just fall back if you need to heal, and I'll start binding things."
"Let's do this!"
I engaged active concentration on [Mystical Energy (Basic Mastery)] to buff my stats, then stacked on [Mystical Energy (Concealment)]. That took a little adjusting since I'd discovered more forms of energy since I'd first discovered it, but now even my leaking holy and soul energies were being kept inside. My gloves glinted, the silver and cold-iron studs standing out prominently when I bunched my hands into fists before I launched myself at an ogre in the distance. The following hour was both painful and productive, gaining me another level and advancing my [Mystical Energy (Basic Mastery)], [Mystical Energy (Concealment)], [Physical Endurance], and [Weapon Mastery (Unarmed)] significantly. [Multi-Focus] gained a lot of experience and was just short of reaching level two, so I'd work on that after Jee-Han left.
With our time coming to a close I thanked Jee-Han profusely for working with me and asked if he'd be back the next day. When he said he'd be spending at least three normal hours here daily since he knew he didn't have to avoid me anymore I was thrilled. I still needed to develop and practice skills for mind magic, try summoning and teleporting other people, and make sure I knew how to anchor someone else's soul in place like I had mine, all of which required a partner.
"Oh! I almost forgot to ask you: Jee-Han, I was going to try and start freeing some of the slaves from the Abyss Auction but the Hwan house won't get involved with buying them. Do you know anyone who could help with that? I'm also looking for tutoring and allies. Anyone I can help with healing or warding to get them ready for what's coming would be great, and anyone I can convince to specifically prepare would be even better."
Jee-Han looked at me oddly, then took a thinking pose. I wasn't sure if he was hamming it up or if he normally did that, but I chuckled anyway. The answering smile on Jee-Han's face didn't clarify his motivation but did put me in a better mood.
"I can buy slaves if I have to, but I just remembered I got the contact information for a witch and a druid/warrior that owe me a favor. I'll contact them about both the tutoring and the slave thing if you promise to keep me involved. I trust you a little, but I want to make sure those people are freed instead of being re-sold or forced to do horrible things," Jee-Han told me with a very serious look.
"Also, I think I heard something about some Yunhonmoon members needing healing after a fight with the Hwan. If you offer to heal them it'll help relations between the two and provide more able fighters. I'd help, but that might make is less useful for mending fences. There's a girl in my class I can talk to about that and get back to you on Tuesday. Before I forget: you really need to tell me as much about this threat as possible. You were vague about it earlier and I'm always up for gaining levels, but I'll need to know specifics."
Face, meet palm.
"I'm sorry Jee-Han! I meant to give you details! I don't understand everything, but I'll give you the gist of what I know: the Abyss Auction or one of their major backers here in Korea started killing and abducting people in the Japanese Abyss a while back, and there's supposed to be almost none of them left. They went into hiding and are trying to use...thought power? I think it was called thought power. They're trying to use thought power to conjure a bunch of gods or something and attack the Korean Abyss. They'll start with the Auction and whoever their backers are, but that won't satisfy them. Letting everyone know what's coming might trigger them to attack early if they hear we know, so please only share this with people you trust. I don't know how much time they need to start for sure, but I'm hoping we have a year. Might be more, might be less."
Jee-Han's face grew steadily darker as I explained, and his fists clenched. There was rage and sorrow there, but also determination like I'd never seen before.
"I'm not sure we should save anyone who'd do something like that, but if they come after the rest of the Abyss we'll need to be ready to stop them. How sure are you of this information?"
"I could swear on any god or goddess you care to name that I believe it to be completely true. The source...well, it's very reliable. More consistently right than even the Gamer UI so far, which has also given me a quest to prepare for their arrival. In fact...we're still in a party. You might be able to access the quest, or at least see it on my UI!"
I pulled up the quest screen, and sure enough Jee-Han could see it. He raised an eyebrow when he read the title ("Help Prepare the Abyss for Anime Attack!"), then read through the quest description. It included the roughly the same text as the drawback, so he actually learned a lot more than I'd told him. If anything he looked even more grim, and I saw a prompt for the same quest appear in front of him. He immediately accepted, then looked me in the eyes.
"Keep me in your party and use voice chat to get ahold of me if you need anything. If that doesn't work for any reason, here's my cell number. I'll contact the Witch of Slaughter, work on getting the Cheon Bu and by extension Chunbamoon ready, then start working on others in the area. If it's possible we can get her to tutor us or give us any information on thought power we can't afford to pass it up."
"Thank you, Han Jee-Han. I wasn't sure I could do this alone even with such a broken power, so your help is appreciated. I don't want this spilling out beyond the people that started the fight in the first place, or even worse leaving the Abyss and killing people with no powers to defend themselves."
He nodded tightly and left, probably to talk to the heir of the Cheon Bu clan. Being able to show people the actual quest and his significant rapport with them would help immensely. I looked around the training area with determination, and decided that ten-to-one time dilation wasn't enough. I could already produce Instant Dungeons of my own with ten-to-one, so I'd grind it higher. I set out to do just that, leaving [Mystical Energy (Basic Mastery)] and [Mystical Energy (Concealment)] active as I continued to create and tear down instant dungeons. I wondered briefly if the Cheon Bu would notice that I never left their training area anymore except for errands and to talk to the Hwans?
It took days of subjective time to reach a time-dilation of one-hundred to one, after which I stopped because the skill was gaining experience so slowly I thought I might lose my mind before it went up another level. My enchanted watch indicated it had only been a few hours thanks to my stepping into the higher-level Instant Dungeons to practice until I got better time-dilation, then destroying those IDs and creating new ones with the higher level. As I'd agreed with Washu the dilation didn't stack or multiply, but instead used the highest dilation level of whatever convoluted chain of Illusion Barriers I was in. I was now certain that I didn't need to eat because of Gamer's Body [1], and took full advantage of it. I'd forgotten to conjure myself some water and found I wasn't thirsty either, so I added not needing to drink to my mental list of abilities.
Between not needing to eat, drink, sleep, or wash I pushed myself even harder. My watch was moving at such a slow pace I could barely detect the second hand moving with my greatly enhanced senses. Keeping [Mystical Energy (Basic Mastery)] and [Mystical Energy (Concealment)] up had gained me several levels in [Multi-Focus], so I had started to add other abilities. First was [Mystical Energy (Gather)] to empty the area of ambient energy. Since that left me with nothing left to gather according to my passive [Mystical Energy (Sense)] I started playing around with it to absorb the heat from the air, which added [Cryokinesis] and [Cold Affinity] to my skills. [Cryokinesis] reacted with the other elements already folded into [Telekinesis] to form [Elemental Bending].
[Elemental Bending] was an active skill that would require concentration, so I started using it as the third thing I was doing. When I acquired the ability to focus on four things at once without strain I added [Mystical Energy (Sense)] as an active skill, which greatly expanded the range of my extra sense and the clarity of the passive energy sight it granted. With [Elemental Bending] and the active buff form of [Mystical Energy (Basic Mastery)] I actually started to see my mana drop from full when I did anything extreme with [Elemental Bending]. When I filled the entire Instant Dungeon with lightning and fire except for a small space around me until I could no longer breathe it nearly emptied my mana pool, but that meant I could fill an area about twice the size of a football stadium with what was effectively plasma for a few seconds.
I invoked [Mystical Energy (Gather)] to cool the place down and remove the remaining electrical charge from the air, then broke the Instant Dungeon I'd been training in. I saw the grassy landscape filled with ogres that was the Cheon Bu training area for a moment before I created a Dungeon to continue my studies in ridiculously compressed time. It wouldn't be helpful to use all the air and keep having to drop out of the best time compression I could manage, so gathered my mana and reserved a full half of it for use with [Mystical Energy Generator]. I hadn't done this since I had only a little over one hundred mana, and I had no idea that I'd actually feel the pressure of my mana attempting to overflow, hitting my [Mystical Energy (Concealment)] skill, and basically pressurizing before it hit the rest of my being.
"Power overwhelming," I muttered in homage to Starcraft as I pumped more and more MP into reinforcing my body. It still wasn't enough, and I was actually starting to lose HP so I picked up [Holy] as an active technique and dropped [Elemental Bending]. The whirlwind around me stilled and the chunks of compressed earth and spheres of conjured water dropped to the ground. My health stabilized, but there was still too much mana. Concentrating on bringing up another ability I started running [Divination], trying to see the inside of my warehouse after picking a location at random. A long series of failure messages appeared in front of me as my [Divination] skill rose. It still wasn't enough, and my limbs were starting to go sort of...numb and tingly. I looked at my hands and was shocked to see them glowing with energy, but also becoming translucent!
My health wasn't going down, and I hadn't received notifications of any status effects. I checked the UI to make sure, but there wasn't anything wrong with me aside from insanely high stats all-around because of my active effects. I closed the window and checked my feet, which were also fading almost up to the knee. I walked a few steps forward to ensure I still could, but it felt more like when I was using [Fly] than actually walking. Something clicked in my head.
[By doing something special, you've created a new skill: Anti-Gravity!]
[By doing something special, you've created a new skill: Mystical Energy (Body)!]
A distant part of me noted the [Divination] failure messages had stopped and I could see from both my perspective and from a position of total darkness and silence, but I dropped [Divination] and pushed the remaining energy into my body with a roar and a fierce grin, "POWER OVERWHELMING!"
My consciousness spread across the entire Instant Dungeon, and I was able to feel everything within it. With the barest thought I could direct my attention anywhere in the area, but at the same time I couldn't help but sense everything at once. The earth beneath me and the air around me were but parts of the whole. The water I'd conjured earlier was a part of me, as was the grass and the light and the heat and the faint electrical charge of the room. I had no voice, nor did I need one. I turned my mind to shrinking my presence, and my awareness of the world narrowed. What could be done with this? Ah. That might work.
HOLY
My perspective shrank and shifted once again until I was around the height of my previous body. A body and limbs of silvery-pearlescent light condensed from the air, and I examined my new form. It wasn't quite a Starcraft archon. Those were beings of flesh that had nearly transcended such limitations by converting themselves into maelstroms of psychic power. This was something else altogether.
FIRE
My new body went from a blinding bastion of holy energy to an equally blinding inferno. A thought changed it to a swirling maelstrom of air, and another pulled earth from beneath me so I resembled a golem. This form was harder to hold, so I tried pure energy again and became a ball of lightning. To complete the set the lightning faded and the water I'd conjured earlier, now soaked into the soil itself, rose up to form another sphere. Finding there wasn't enough water to fashion a humanoid body, I ripped the rest from the environment. The grass crumbled, the air parched, and the soil cracked. It didn't matter. This place was impermanent, and I had a humanoid elemental form. Now, how was I to return to what I was? [Mystical Energy (Body)] might be useful in the future, but I needed to be relatively human to continue my mission of preparing the Abyss to face the consequences of Anime Attack.
If I could have frowned I would have, but I currently lacked the anatomy to do so. Or any anatomy at all, really. That was the problem. My body hadn't disintegrated when I'd...ascended? Transformed? My body hadn't disintegrated when I'd activated [Mystical Energy (Body)], it had faded away. There hadn't been a tremendous influx of energy like I'd expect if the whole thing was actually transformed into energy. That would have likely destroyed the Illusion Barrier and most of the Korean peninsula. So where was it? There was a connection leading...somewhere. Two of them really, but one felt more accessible. It didn't feel like any direction I'd ever been able to discern before, but it was there. I tugged on the closer one, and the watery form I held fell away as my consciousness shrank back into a smaller area. Tugging at the connection a little harder caused my perception to warp again until it felt like I had sensory organs, but my body was still translucent and glowing. That wouldn't do.
I carefully tucked the excess energy away with [Mystical Energy (Concealment)], and the result made me look like a ghost. One final tug restored complete feeling to my body, causing my mana to start overflowing again and gravity to reassert itself. I idly reset my active skills to [Flight], [Mystical Energy (Basic Mastery)], [Mystical Energy (Sense)], and a touch of [Mystical Energy (Gather)] to clear the area of errant motes of power. I hadn't left much useful energy sitting around, just some electrical charge to the air. I left the temperature where it was and dropped [Mystical Energy (Gather)] for [Mystical Energy Concealment] then sat down in mid-air. At the rate time was flowing for me compared to the outside world I had several months before Jee-Han returned to the Cheon Bu training area, and I could just barely sense outside the Instant Dungeon with my [Mystical Energy (Sense)] the way it was going. By the time he returned I shouldn't have any trouble picking up his presence. I entered a meditative state. I could manage my mana generation and my active skills like this, so long as I didn't exceed the limit of [Multi-Focus], which should also level up.
[By doing something repeatedly, you've created a new skill: Basic Meditation!]
[With long practice, Basic Meditation has become Meditation!]
[Through constant meditation you've increased your wisdom!]
Jee-Han's return to the Cheon Bu training area was obvious. His power stood out like a road flare in a lightless cave. I stood, then checked the levels on the skills I'd been grinding via [Meditation], which was itself level twenty six. [Flight] was level ninety-seven, and now cost only sixteen MP per second. It looked like the minimum was ten per second, but I wasn't sure what would happen if the skill evolved into a new one at level one-hundred. My maximum speed was beyond respectable at several hundred times the speed of sound, but limited by my total MP.
[Mystical Energy (Basic Mastery)] had actually evolved into [Mystical Energy Mastery], and was now providing the same bonus to my special defense as it did to my special attack. That meant whatever my basic defenses were against magic, ki, soul energy, and anything else I was familiar with would be multiplied several times over.
[Mystical Energy Concealment] had evolved into [Mystical Energy Concealment and Illusion], which meant that I now trapped all of the energy that would otherwise leak from my body and could provide an illusory aura to replace the one I would have had without the skill. At present I could look like anything from empty space to a moderately powerful ki-user, which meant I could actually hide the universal energy that made the Gamer so unique. It hadn't occurred to me until my months-long-meditation, but Hwan Sung-Gon might already know I had the same or at least a similar power as Han Jee-Han. It really was dependent on how long he'd spent around Jee-Han and whether he was able to sense that particular type of energy in addition to the mana the boy radiated.
[Mystical Energy (Sense)] hadn't evolved but had gotten progressively more ridiculous. I could now sense points of energy within the two illusion barriers to such a degree I could make out the discolored skin on the faces of the various wandering ogres. Outside of the two barriers I could all of Seoul and few of the surrounding cities. The Abyss was more prevalent than I thought, and some of their little mana extraction facilities were actually inside the city. There was also a bizarre collective consciousness wandering around that seemed to be focused on one building in particular but had bodies across the entirety of what I could sense. They were heavily involved two of the mana extraction facilities I could sense. The large number of wounded enclosed in another illusion barrier might be the Yuhonmoon Jee-Han had suggested I heal, but sensing through two barriers over a large distance into a third made it difficult to get more detail than "wounded humans with abundance of ki and soul energy."
With the spare threads of concentration I'd built up from using [Multi-Focus] I'd started alternating between conjuring air and blasting it away with [Elemental Bending (Electricity)], then done both at the same time when I acquired another thread. My sixth and final free thread of concentration had gone toward adding fire to the mix, which had given me quite a bit of experience with [Elemental Bending (Fire)]. Both bending skills had contributed to [Fire Affinity] and my newly gained [Lightning Affinity]. Both had acquired MP discounts when I passed level twenty-five in them, and [Fire Affinity] was close to granting me full immunity at level fifty while I was only reducing damage from lighting by about two-thirds.
I dropped my Instant Dungeon and moved to meet my fellow Gamer.
"Han Jee-Han! It feels like it's been months," I addressed him as I approached. He looked at me curiously, then muttered [Observe] and paled. Oh! [Mystical Energy Mastery] was still buffing all my stats, and my intelligence had gone up to 150 before that. Also I had no aura at the moment, which might produce some interesting results. I'd have to check in a mirror or something later.
"You've gotten stronger," he said. His voice only shook a little, which I thought was great. He needed to be more accustomed to seeing bizarrely high stats and other worrying information. I clapped him on the shoulder and guided him over to the spot I'd been using to create my Instant Dungeons, then promptly dropped us into an empty one at one-hundred-to-one time dilation. Another muttered [Observe], and I could see the whites of his eyes as he gazed around in wonder.
"Yes, ridiculous time compression and meditating on improving your stat buffs will do that. Now, what have you got for me?" He took a moment to gather his thoughts, then replied.
"Good news and bad. The good news is that the Cheon Bu clan is behind us, and even let me join. The Witch of Carnage and her partner are also coming from Europe to train us for as long as we pay them, and the Yunhonmoon will happily listen to anything we want to say if we can heal even one of their injured. The bad news is that someone released a bunch of manuals on how to refine black souls on the Abyss Auction website, so there were a couple of attacks on the Hwan compound. Also: there's something weird going on with my Instant Dungeons. I created one earlier and found DLC content. Have you ever seen DLC content?" Jee-Han asked.
"No, but I think I know what it is. We're going to need to practice mind magic and get the Yunhonmoon up and about as quickly as possible. We'll use my Instant Dungeons so you don't have to waste time grinding yours up to this level of time compression, if that's alright with you?"
"Yeah, sure! I'll want to get it this good myself eventually, but that can probably wait until after the whole attack thing. I've got the address of the Yunhonmoon compound." He replied, enthusiastic about having so much time to grind.
"Then let's get to it. Mind magic first?" I asked.
"Sure. What am I looking for exactly?"
"Well, what we really need is a defense against fooling the senses and one against reading or altering our thoughts. To get that and practice it, I think we need skills that fool the senses and read or alter thoughts. I'll show you my basic [Illusion] technique so you can work on it while I try and think of a way to manage directly altering the senses instead of just shaping light."
A little over a month of subjective time later we both stumbled out of the Instant Dungeon to head for Yunhonmoon. In that time we'd both become amazingly good at [Illusion], [True Sight], and sort of okay at [Mind Magic]. Gamer's Mind apparently made us immune to anything external altering our minds (I'd forgotten), but didn't block out mind-reading or people trying to go through our memories. The walk from Cheon Bu territory to the high rise the at the heart of Yunhonmoon territory wasn't terribly long, and I had fun telepathically exchanging jokes and gamer stories with Jee-Han. We got into talking about movies near the end, and he gave me the amazing idea to combine my [Elemental Bending] to create light-saber-like blades from plasma. If the sound was wrong I could add a little bit of [Illusion] when I was feeling funny. That of course led me to the idea of lasers and plasma cutters. I was pretty sure a flamethrower was less powerful than a plasma cutter, and combining lightning and fire produced plasma. The doorman was not reassured when he was informed the man with the demented grin was in fact the healer they'd been told about.
We left the building three hours later. Jee-Han and I had both gained a few levels for [Holy] and learned [Remove Curse] after he figured out a way to just rip the damn things out where they could be attacked directly. He'd gone on to explain the situation as best he could to a red-headed girl who seemed way too serious even before hearing about the threat, and she promised him that the clan would prepare for an external threat but keep it between themselves and their allies. I really wished he'd made her promise to keep it in the clan. That was going to come back to bite us.
I tripped on a rock and face-planted on the sidewalk, despite my superhuman senses and dexterity.
[Physical Endurance has gained a level!]
Well, at least I still got experience for that even when [Basic Strong Body] made the damage meaningless. This Gamer thing was even more broken then I thought.