Chapter 426

Chapter 426

Tim sighed and put his head down on his desk, placing his pad in the holder on the side. He could hear as his teacher, Mr. Hasta, started tapping at his own pad to check on Tim’s work. But when Tim didn’t hear him say anything, the boy let himself drift off into a blissful daydream.

It almost turned into a full-on nap, but he didn’t finish quite early enough for that.

He was woken up when Mr. Hasta called out, far more loudly than was actually necessary while standing right next to Tim’s desk, “And time. Put your pads down and go to lunch. We’ll resume with the writing portion of the test after. Please don’t talk about the test during the break. Pl—”

Tim tuned the bland man out and waited until they were dismissed, where he jumped to his feet and slung his bag over his shoulder and was the second out of the door. Waiting, he fell into step with his best friend Garrett. 

“What did you get for question ninety five? The one asking about the differential. I got seventy two.”

Tim rubbed his eyes and tried not to groan. Garrett hated when he did that, but it was hard sometimes when his friend could be so dense.

“It was thirty seven point two. If you got seventy two you must have used Haltur’s formula instead of Yellik’s, but you only use that when it’s… Whatever, it doesn't matter. None of this shit will matter in a few days when we get out of school and Awaken.”

Garrett bumped him into the wall. “It doesn't matter for you because you're smart. I need to work at this stuff.”

“No, you don’t. You're going to go work at your mother’s, making leather armor just like she did, and her father did, and his father before him did. This stuff is pointless. Why bother teaching it before college? Then, at least, you are choosing to learn it.”

Garrett, normally one to complain about the same lessons, disagreed. “That's ripe coming from you, when you are going to rank in the top twenty of the class without ever opening a book.”

Hearing a twinge of something new in Garrett's voice, Tim focused on it. “What's wrong, man?”

“Nothing.”

Returning the shove from earlier, Tim asked again, “What's wrong? Don’t bullshit me.” 

“I… My mom wasn’t happy with my grades and so I’ve been studying a lot, but it's so hard. The writing and science stuff isn’t so bad, but the math just doesn't seem to stick. There is always a rule and then an exception to the rule and now I’m pretty sure my results were awful and I’m upset, okay? Just let it be.”

Tim looked at his friend. Shorter and a bit stocky instead of his own tall and lanky frame, Garrett was usually a ball of chaotic energy who hammed up everything. But today, he seemed really upset.

“Then why didn’t you say something? I could have helped you study. We still can. Retests are in two weeks, right before awakenings. If we push hard, we can bump your scores up, I’m sure.”

Garrett shook his head. “Do you even know how to study?”

That caught Tim off guard, but he nodded. “I might not need to do it, but I know you and how we can get you to learn the stuff you need to get a better score.”

All at once, every student's personal pad beeped. Tim didn’t bother to check it, but Garrett did and looked like he wanted to throw the pad.

Peeking, he saw his friend hadn’t exaggerated earlier. He had only scored sixty-four percent. Over the fifty percent passing mark, but not by much.

Grabbing the pad from Garrett, Tim opened the report and started skimming the more detailed results.

“See, this isn’t so bad. I can see where you went wrong. If we spend every day studying after school, we can get you into the seventy five percent area easily enough. In the multiple choice section, you got more tripped up by the questions it seems. That's not so much the math, but test taking skills.”

Garrett nodded, agreeing, but there was a melancholy air about him as they walked in silence until they got their food.

The fish wasn’t one of Tim’s favorites, but it was light and refreshing, which landed perfectly after his earlier nearly nap. But midway through, Garrett gestured to Tim’s bag. “Aren’t you going to check on your results?” 

“What for?”

“So you know how you did?”

“I already know how I did,” Tim mumbled around a mouth full of rice and greens.

“No you don’t, you think you know, but you don’t actually know.”

Pulling out his pad and unlocking it, he tapped to open the latest message without looking down. “Ninety-six percent.”

Garrett let his fork fall onto his plate, pushing it away disgusted. “Ugh, I hate you. That's better than most college students could get. That last ten percent is brutal.”

“Only the dumb ones.”

Garrett ignored his quip and pressed his face into his hands. “Let's change the subject please.”

Tim was all too happy to do so, and instead pestered Garrett into agreeing to take him to his house, where they could study in peace.

By the time he got home, his mother was thankfully passed out, bottle still at her fingertips.

Making sure he didn’t make too much noise, Tim slipped through the house.

Two weeks and he’d be free.

He had saved up just over one and a half thousand credits over the years, doing odd jobs for neighbors and other students. It wasn’t much, but it would see him housed for a few months as he figured out his next steps.

He had plans, but they would mainly depend on his Talent and just what it was.

Two weeks later, Tim stood in front of a chair along with the rest of his class and closed his eyes, centering himself.

He had been dreaming of this moment for years, and now that he was done with school, he was finally able to Awaken and set off on his own.

Sitting down in the chair, he took a deep breath, feeling the Awakening machine thrum as everyone went through the prompts.

Finally, after everyone finished agreeing not to share their Talents, Tim felt a pulse of essence rush through him.

It felt as good as everyone said it did, and he felt his spiritual perception manifest over his skin as his spirit was Awakened. 

He took a minute to revel in the joy of the moment before tapping at the screen to get his Talent readout.

Instead of spitting out a result immediately like he expected, he waited as the device processed.

…

…

…

Tier 1 Talent: Complexity into simplicity.

Primary effect: Simplify abilities into easy-to-understand effects.

Secondary effect: Practice the simplified skill or ability to increase proficiency. 

Tertiary effect: Perform, view, or absorb skills or abilities to unlock them.

Quaternary effect: Spend money to unlock new abilities to make them eligible to simplify.

Tim blinked, not knowing how to process his Talent, but got up and cleared the seat for the next person, his heart and mind racing.

Instead of leaving the Awakening center, he reserved one of the private rooms meant for people who needed to consider their new Talent in private. Which he was, he supposed.

An instinctive thought brought up a virtual screen similar to what he had seen an AI would give if games were as accurate as they portrayed themselves as being. It was a simple empty list of his ‘Abilities’ but Tim didn’t know how he’d get an ability to show up.

Drumming his fingers on the table, he hoped for something to pop up, but when nothing happened, he rummaged around in the cabinet for a piece of paper.

Quickly writing a few lines, something finally popped up in his view.

Beginner Writing: 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 200 credits.

Instinctively, he understood that his Talent had several ranks, and beginner was only the first, but his mind was more preoccupied on the fact that his Talent was charging him money.

What would it even do with the money?

Did his Talent create a bank account?

Could it link up to his bank account? He didn’t see an easy way to do that, but he had no idea what his Talent was capable of.

What would it even do with the money? His money?

And most importantly, how was his Talent wanting to charge him a week's worth of rent at a shitty apartment for a writing skill? A beginner writing skill.

Crumpling the paper up and throwing it into the trash, he jerked as a new entry popped up in his Talent, silently pinging him. With a thought, the screen opened up and a second entry was there just under the writing skill.

Beginner Throwing(Overhand): 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 500 Credits.

Spluttering, Tim cursed his greedy Talent, then got a second piece of paper and folded it into a paper airplane to get a new skill unlocked.

Beginner Paper Folding: 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 150 Credits.

Standing up and leaving the Awakening facility, Tim got out of the building and went into the nearby park where he started jogging.

After a few dozen steps, he felt a ping and brought up his screen.

Beginner Jogging: 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 1,000 Credits.

Picking up the pace, he sprinted.

It took longer, but he once more felt a ping.

Beginner Sprinting: 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 3,000 Credits.

Seeing that such a simple thing as sprinting would cost him more than he had saved up through years of effort, Tim felt like screaming.

He had so many plans for whether his Talent was good or bad, crafting, fighting, or utility, but he had never considered that his Talent would be a black hole of money and he didn’t know how to pivot. Well, aside from just pretending it was strictly useless and ignoring it, but that felt like too much of a waste, considering it seemed like it could be very strong if he was understanding it.

His Talent seemed like an incredibly useful form of an innate understanding Talent, but he didn’t have enough money to get it going.

He could afford one or maybe two of these unlocks, but then what? What did beginner paper folding give him?

Nothing that would make him easy or quick money, that was for sure. But even that wasn’t his main issue. He needed to know how the Talent worked. It talked about simplifying the complex, but what did that mean in practice?

He didn’t know. It could either be really good or useless, and he was too scared to test it.

Heart thumping and breathing hard, Tim slowed down to a walk, letting himself calm down both mentally and physically.

Beginner Breath Control: 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 2,000 Credits.

Not letting himself get worked up, he pondered how breath control was a thing but breathing wasn’t and hadn’t unlocked anything. Squinting at a faraway sign, he tried to get a better vision unlock, but nothing happened, so he gave up.

Finding a fairly sword-shaped stick under a tree, he picked it up and went through one of the more basic sword forms he had learned at school.

Beginner Sword Fighting: 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 10,000 Credits.

Seeing the sky-high credit cost, he groaned but dutifully went through several of the other martial skills he knew. They all cost over five thousand credits, putting them well out of his price range, but that wasn't all he unlocked.

Beginner Footwork: 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 300 Credits.

Beginner Jumping: 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 150 Credits.

Beginner Flexibility: 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 2,000 Credits.

The prices seemed semi-random, but he thought he was beginning to come up with an idea.

One of his original ideas had been to use his savings to delve. But it was a last resort, only to be done if he got a purely combat Talent.

He knew how to fight as well as basically any regular new Tier 1, thanks to school. But his original idea, if he had to go the delving route, had been to use the Tier 0 skills to establish a foundation while relying on the combat Talent to make enough to afford housing.

Tim didn’t want to fight for a living, but it was one of the easiest ways to make money fast since Ascender Titan had made the skills public so many years ago.

Another of his ideas was to rely on his Talent and go a crafter route, but that was slow and expensive to start, and he really didn’t want to join a guild or corporation. They weren’t bad, but after being in school and having someone tell him what to do every day in and out, Tim wanted his freedom. The problem was that even if his Talent gave him unparalleled skills in crafting, that didn’t negate both the material costs and the upfront costs of the unlocks and tool purchases to boot. 

Pulling out his pad, he checked a few of the local nearby rifts, and when he saw nothing major had changed since he checked it this morning, put away his pad, an idea slowly forming.

Pulling his pad back out, he realized he was now a registered adult and downloaded Ascender Titan’s Tier 0 skill-making trainer, reading through the introductory information until he felt a ping in his mind.

Beginner Skill Making Abbreviated([Solar Flare]): 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 120,000 Credits.

Seeing four other and nearly identical entries, Tim wanted to strangle his Talent.

Over a hundred thousand credits.

It might as well be asking for the moon. Sure, a skill cost way more than that to buy, but the price just seemed impossibly high. He could probably make the skill manually before he earned enough money to unlock the skill with his Talent.

Once more, his mind went back to delving.

If there was one way to make money fast, it was delving. But all of that hinged on his Talent actually being useful.

If the unlocked skills were worthless or hard to gain proficiency in, he would have to go with his backup, backup plan of getting a normal job and just… existing.

Seeing how that had treated his mother, working by day and getting drunk by night, he wanted nothing to do with it. He, like pretty much everyone else, wanted to get strong enough to reach immortality, but he also wanted to do it in the best, safest, and preferably easiest way possible.

Knowing he needed to bite the bolt and get it over with, he opened his page and tried to buy the jumping skill, it being one of the cheapest ones, but nothing happened when he mentally clicked on it.

Theorizing he might need to get actual, physical credits, he got up and took a trip to the nearest branch of his local bank. After listening to and accepting the warnings about how physical currency wasn’t digital and so couldn't be retrieved in the event of a scam, he was given his credits.

Four one-hundred credits took up nearly no room in his pocket, as the coins were small, but he felt their weight like they were bricks.

Having gotten more credits out than he initially planned, Tim found a cheaper hotel room for rent-by-the-week and rented it for sixty credits, which were immediately deducted from his digital account, making him wince. It was a shitty, hole-in-the-wall single room without even a private toilet or shower, but it would work for what he needed, which was a place to sleep.

Sitting on the bed with his credits in hand, Tim clicked on the beginner footwork.

Jumping had been cheaper, but he felt footwork was more useful both in and out of a rift, and it wasn’t that much more expensive.

When Tim clicked the skill with the credits in hand, he felt something in his spirit flex and shift as the credit coins vanished into nothingness.

Instead of letting that distract him, he instead watched his Talent display as it updated.

Beginner Footwork: 0/100 Proficiency — Walk to gain proficiency.

Blinking, Tim looked at the words in disbelief.

Getting up, he paced around his room and, after thirty steps, the display changed to 0.1/100.

Some quick math later, he realized he would need to walk about fifteen miles to reach full proficiency.

That wasn’t all, though. Even with just that little bit of proficiency, he had an instinctive idea of how he could walk better. It was more a vague notion than anything concrete, but it was a sign that his Talent might be even more powerful than he realized.

Knowledge Talents were inscrutable, so there wasn’t much he had been able to learn about them when preparing.

Thankfully, walking was on his list of things to do.

One of his plans for short-term employment was to do deliveries for establishments. Normally, they were done on bikes, or by people with speed Talents or the like, to maximize profit, but there was no rule against walking other than smaller or no tips.

He’d both earn a little money and be able to fill his proficiency at the same time.

Seeing he still had a few hours of daylight left, he decided to grab something to eat.

On his way, he tried running to see if that counted but, as expected, he made no gain on his proficiency at all. He also learned that he could walk quickly— but not too quickly— or once more his proficiency gain dried up.

Two days of work and thirty credits richer from his deliveries, he took his final step and his Talent updated.

Novice Footwork: 0/10,000 Proficiency — Walk to gain proficiency.

At the same time, a stream of knowledge rushed into him. It felt like he had spent a decade practicing his martial footwork skills. He had always been light on his feet, but now he felt like he could dance. Walking through a busy street, he felt himself weaving between people as if he were some kind of movie thief. 

A gust of wind in between the slow moving pedestrians who were like trees to flow around.

Tim’s mouth went dry as he absorbed just how incredible his Talent was and its potential.

If simple footwork was so powerful, what would something like the skill creation method be like once he ranked its proficiency up?

He might become a master of the craft in just a few weeks.

Rushing back to his apartment, he realized that while his footwork was amazing, it didn’t make walking effortless or anything of the sort. If anything, it made dancing around so easy that he inadvertently tired himself out. Bounding around people was more work than it felt like in the moment.

He had his answer but he just couldn't afford it.

Beginner Muscular Endurance(Legs): 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 4,000 Credits.

An unlock during his marathon of walking over the last few days.

Still, with just over a thousand credits left to his name, Tim decided he needed to enact the second phase of his plan, now that he knew how powerful his Talent really was.

Calafor, being a Tier 5 world, had a plethora of Tier 1 rifts, which made the slots cheap, but Tim had a very particular set of criteria for his first rift.

First was a weak enemy, preferably humanoid.

Second was a harvestable resource of some kind.

Such things were more common in Tier 2 and higher rifts, but they weren't impossible to find in Tier 1 rifts.

His original choice of a rift with open iron veins in the cave walls had already had its last rift slots bought out, but he quickly found a rift that had two of the types of herbs used in a Tier 1 brightness potion, even if its monsters weren’t humanoid.

The potion wasn’t exactly valuable, with little in the way of resale value, but the rift having most of a potion available made it semi-popular with people trying to learn alchemy on the side.

Once he reached Tier 2, he would be able to start delving a much more valuable rift that had the main ingredient of a body strengthening potion, which did sell for quite a bit. The potion was considered fairly advanced for Tier 2, but the light potion was deemed a good starting step.

The real question would be if his Talent considered alchemy as one entire skill or individual skills. From seeing the Tier 0 skills as separate entries, he believed it would be the latter, but if it was the former, a lot of his plans would be ruined, as there was no way he would be able to ever afford the costs of unlocking such a thing.

He had tried to just read about the potions, hoping to unlock the entries that way, but his Talent refused to make them appear.

After getting some leather armor from Garrett's family— he received a small but much appreciated discount— and arming himself with a mace, a shield, and a dagger, Tim bought his first rift slot.

It cost a thousand credits for a once every nine days slot, but it was a first and important step. 

He was terrified; but as he predicted and hoped, his footwork proficiency made fighting off the giant spiders, if not easy, safe enough.

The rift’s layout being a path through a forest ensured that, so long as the delver didn’t overextend, they would only ever fight two or three spiders at most at a time. Thankfully, they weren’t venomous, nor did they have the ability to shoot webs or anything which might trip him up.

They just had way too many appendages and teeth that could bite through an unarmored arm or leg, if given a few seconds to clamp down properly.

The boss, though, was just plain old terrifying.

The video guide he watched showed it was big, but the thing was nearly the size of a pony, and with its many limbs, was faster than any monster he had encountered before.

Tim was equally as fast, given his novice footwork, and after a harrowing few opening blows, he managed to disable its legs one-by-one and then finish it off while it was injured.

He had been hoping to get an unlock for essence absorption or the like, but he wasn’t so lucky or hadn’t done it enough to unlock the proficiency quite yet.

However, he did unlock both a dodge and shield proficiency during his delve, though they cost over ten thousand credits each, and were out of his price range.

With bated breath, Tim fumbled around with his spiritual perception until he figured out how to dispel the rift reward to see four mana stones fall out of the rift.

It wasn’t the best reward he could have gotten, but it was still four hundred credits. More than enough to pay for a much better room for two weeks. He wouldn’t be doing anything so frivolous until he had a more reliable source of income, but it was a start and was a weight off his chest.

Sadly, he was fairly sure he was about to be spending them. Walking over to the massive spider, he pulled out pliers and a short work-knife from his bag. With great effort, he carved the pincers out of the boss’s mouth.

It was bloody, messy work, but the set sold for fifty credits. The smaller spiders’ pincers only sold for two credits apiece, but there were about thirty spiders to harvest, and so it was more than worth his time.

He also got the skill he was hoping for.

Beginner Monster Harvesting(Arachnid): 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 4,000 Credits.

It was a bit more expensive than he’d prefer, but it was about what he had come to expect.

Instead, his hopes were on the final remaining thing to harvest in the rift.

The herbs.

Checking the rift guide a few times as a reference, he found the blue and purple-speckled mushrooms growing on the roots of some of the trees and carefully cut the caps off without hitting the stems, which would have ruined their alchemical properties.

After three harvests, he felt a familiar ping and quickly checked the entry.

Beginner Herb Harvesting(Common): 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 300 Credits.

He didn’t know what was considered ‘Common’ but hoped it was as self explanatory as it sounded so he wouldn't have to buy another entry too soon.

Still holding the mana stones, Tim tried to click on the entry but found nothing happened.

Pushing with his will and trying to connect his Talent to the mana stones, he just gave himself a headache from straining.

Grumbling about his Talent’s pickiness and wasted proficiency, and kicking himself for not taking a little bit of cash with him into the rift, he harvested the second ingredient for the light potion, a particular four bladed leaf off a particular bush, before leaving with his bag stuffed.

The guards outside the rift directed him to the area where he was able to sell all of his plunder, and while he was tempted to sell it himself knowing they paid the minimum for everything but the mana stones, Tim didn’t feel like dealing with the hassle for a few credits. That time would be better spent delivering a few food orders, both earning money and proficiency.

A quick trip to a shop saw him the owner of a secondhand portable alchemy setup and the final ingredient for the light potion.

It was only then, when he read the instructions and was able to concoct his first potion, that the entry appeared, but he let out a breath of relief he didn’t realize he was holding.

Beginner Alchemy(Light Potion | Variant Calafor): 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 3,000 Credits.

Tim had been hoping it would be cheaper, but three thousand credits was within his ability to save up for.

Instead of trying to make the potion, he immediately went and sold all the ingredients for thirty credits. He made a loss of the third ingredient, but they would only remain fresh for a few days without proper storage. He wouldn’t be able to delve again for eight more days, and definitely wouldn’t have saved up three thousand credits in that time.

He knew could have tried to learn without his Talent, but he’d much rather have the credits now rather than practice for a non-useful potion.

Instead, he went to the bank once more and took out another three hundred credits which he absorbed and immediately spent on unlocking the herb harvesting ability.

Beginner Herb Harvesting(Common): 0/100 Proficiency — Pick weeds to gain proficiency.

Tim was bemused but dutifully found a public flowerbed that had some weeds in it and started pulling them.

After ten weeds, he felt a familiar pulse as he gained 0.1 proficiency. Unfortunately, clearing out the entire flower bed only gained him 0.7 proficiency.

While it was undoubtedly easier than harvesting herbs, he didn’t know where he would find so many weeds. But then he stopped.

What was a weed?

A weed was typically just an unwanted plant growth; so by that logic, wasn’t anything unwanted a weed?

Finding the closest public park, he pulled out ten blades of grass while concentrating on the idea of them being unwanted.

To his delight, he felt a familiar pulse and smiled manically.

Wiping his hands off on his pants, he stood up and accepted another delivery.

Eight days later, once he was in the rift and had killed all of the spiders, he started to pluck everything.

It was in that process that he also learned that harvesting actual herbs also gave proficiency to his entry, and while it was more efficient per item harvested, giving 3 proficiency, his method was faster.

Everything that was smaller than a bush, he pulled out of the ground. The size didn’t matter, only the amount seemed to factor into the proficiency. Sweating, dirty, and exhausted, he exited the rift after five hours with a smile.

Novice Herb Harvesting(Common): 0/10,000 Proficiency — Pick weeds to gain proficiency.

When he crossed the threshold, he immediately felt as if he understood how to harvest the mushrooms and leaves much better. It was as if he had been doing it every day for a decade. What he found interesting was how his knowledge differed from the book he had learned from. It wasn’t that the book was wrong, but he now knew that if he cut the leaves slightly higher on the stem, they would last for longer without storage. And if he wanted to, he could harvest the entire mushroom so long as he covered them with a dark cloth first.

Interestingly, he didn’t get such information about other herbs. But when he went to a store that sold them, he only needed to see and interact with the herbs to pick up on their harvesting particularities to a similar level as the first two.

Best of all, even ignoring the advice of his new knowledge and its altered method, his general skill at harvesting became better. His cuts were cleaner, which led to higher yields, which resulted in premium payments for his herbs.

The following two months passed in a blur, as in his free time he either delivered food or laid in bed with a fresh piece of sod he slowly but methodically plucked every strand of grass from.

During that time, he was tempted to buy other skill proficiencies, but he always refrained, knowing his best money-maker would be the alchemy, and if it worked at all like his herb harvesting skill, the separate skills would have considerable bleed over when he did Tier up.

What truly saved him from months more of grinding was a lucky drop. It wasn’t a growth item or anything so useful, but a Tier 1 sharpness-enchanted dagger that was considered one of the more common rare drops of the rift.

They typically sold for a whopping seven thousand credits, and after a little back and forth, Tim got slightly more than five thousand.

Part of him wanted to buy several skills. But, seeing the money in his bank account, he struggled to do so, instead choosing to only unlock the alchemy skill. 

They were starting to recognize him at the bank and give him odd looks, but he hardly cared, the thousand credit coins vanishing into nothing as his Talent did whatever it was that it did with the money.

Beginner Alchemy(Light Potion | Variant Calafor): 0/100 Proficiency — Stir miso soup.

Realizing he couldn’t keep buying equipment with his current accommodations, he changed his apartment to a slightly larger unit in a better part of town. It cost a hundred and twenty credits a week, double his last accommodations, but it was worth every penny, as it had a kitchen.

Tim needed to find a recipe for a miso soup, as he had never cooked it before, but each five rotations of the ladle in the pot resulted in a staggering 0.2 proficiency.

His good mood vanished when, wanting to get more proficiency, he kept stirring and therefore cooking the soup. But once it started to break down into mush, he stopped getting proficiency.

Having learned from his weed experiment, Tim tested just how small of a pot he could make and still get proficiency.

In the end, he used a coffee cup with one tiny piece of tofu, two chunks of green onion, a dab of miso paste, and a small splash of miso soup stock into boiling water, which was just enough to count when he stirred it with a spoon.

Tim got some weird looks stirring a travel mug on his deliveries or sitting on a bench at a park, but he hardly cared. This would make his life easier, and if other people couldn’t recognize that, it wasn’t his fault. His breaks to pick some grass wasn’t laziness, it was saving money on sod in between delves.

After two days of cooking and most importantly, stirring, miso soup, Tim felt the pulse as his Talent sent information into him as he crossed into novice alchemy. He quickly ran to the store to buy the third ingredient and used his harvested herbs to make a potion.

It wasn’t effortless, and while he knew what to do, he lacked familiarity with the equipment, which hurt the final product. But even his first batch was technically a success. It glowed after all.

The potions would only sell for two or three credits, but he didn’t care and made a full twenty batches, each one becoming better and better as his experience was more fully utilized each round. By the end, his potions looked like someone who had been making potions for a decade had made them, instead of someone whose first potion was made two hours before.

Now it was just about getting to Tier 2, where he could not only make more money per delve, but make potions that actually sold well.

Following that train of thought, he bought a single set of the ingredients for a body strengthening potion, just to see how much it would cost.

Beginner Alchemy(Body Strengthening | Variant Calafor): 0/100 Proficiency — Unlock Cost: 20,000 Credits.

It was surprisingly cheap for a potion that sold well on the open Calafor market, and he knew that once he raised his proficiency and practiced a little, he could sell above the standard market rate.

Following that same vein of thought, he checked out some of the other lower-level potions, buying a single set of ingredients each time to test it. While the prices varied, all of his math indicated that it would just be better and more profitable to buy a second delve slot and delve for advancement twice as fast, rather than trying to mess around with the lower-Tier alchemy potions that were mostly net zero or losses.

It took almost another two year of work to get to Tier 2. And during that time, he leveled up his novice footwork to journeyman, which flooded him with a century worth of experience. It was so profound, he almost felt like he could walk through a thunderstorm and never let a drop of water touch him.

That gave him unparalleled safety in the rifts, though he didn’t let that get to his head and always took the fights exactly as the guide and experience told him was the safest method.

He did, however, stop doing his deliveries, as the one million proficiency to finish apprentice footwork would take him over a century to earn at his current pace, and things were good enough at the journeyman level that he wasn’t willing to push himself even harder when the proficiency would come naturally.

He also cut down on his miso soup stirring when he hit the same hurdle. It just was just too much work for how little he got out of it, and he was going to pull his hair out if he needed to smell the soup for another day.

Scrimping and saving, he managed to buy the body strengthening entry, but he ran into an unexpected roadblock. His bank simply didn’t carry more than five thousand credits in cash on hand, and so his money needed to be ordered several days in advance. But after absorbing the money, he was finally able to see his reward for the last year of hard work.

Beginner Alchemy(Body Strengthening | Variant Calafor): 0/100 Proficiency — Stir vegetable soup.

Seeing that it wasn’t an onerous requirement, he repeated his actions with the miso soup, stirring small pots of soup as he did other things until he reached novice proficiency. He didn’t even walk or pluck grass during that time, simply trying to grind out the proficiency as much as possible.

Once he reached novice, he immediately made ten batches of the body strengthening potion.

Not having his Tier 2 rift slot where he could harvest the main ingredient yet, he had to buy the ingredients. If he had to buy everything he needed every time, it would cut into his profit, but four hundred credits for ten batches of attempts wasn’t an onerous expense for him anymore, and he decided it was worth it.

As it turned out, it was the right choice to get the extra sets as he nearly ruined the first batch, even with his proficiency, thanks to his unfamiliarity with the more complicated alchemical process. The efficacy of that first batch of potions was ruined, leading to a product that, while technically a potion, would be impossible to give away, let alone sell.

The only reason it wasn't a true failure was that it technically had the strengthening effect, which meant he got a decent burst of proficiency.

He still poured it into the neutralization jar for failed experiments, knowing no reputable shop would buy such a product, and he wasn’t going to use something so trashy himself.

The second batch was much better, and while the potions weren’t excellent, they reached what he considered a sellable standard. They were at least comparable to the cheapest ones sold near the rifts or in the local shops.

Unlike the light potion, the strengthening potions vials were actually quite small, only as long and thick as his pinky, which meant he got four potions per batch, which was standard for the recipe, and with an estimated duration of roughly an hour apiece. People much smaller or larger would have a correspondingly longer or shorter effect, but an hour was typically more than enough for most delvers at their Tier to plan around.

At forty credits per batch of ingredients, that meant each potion cost ten credits to make. Potions of that quality typically sold for twenty credits apiece, and the sellers bought them at roughly fifteen credits, leaving a profit of five credits per potion or twenty credits per batch if he didn’t want to sell them to delvers himself.

It didn’t seem like a lot, but the strengthening potion was common enough, it was sold everywhere, and the batch had only taken him forty minutes to create.

Checking himself, Tim realized that his main limiter would be his mana reserves, as he had spent close to thirty of his two hundred mana on the attempt, meaning he could only make seven batches a day, every other day, given his regeneration rate.

He hadn’t realized that would be such a limiting factor, and so had done an even fifty-fifty split between his physical and magical cultivation instead of a more typical mage or melee seventy-thirty split. The light potion was more of a chemical effect rather than a magical one, and so didn’t need mana added when it was being made.

Cursing his past self, he accepted the misstep and decided to rectify it going forward. He didn’t exactly have spells to cast, but if he could gather a hundred-twenty thousand credits, he could make one, which was exactly his next goal.

There was always the option to buy mana to refill his pool, but after the conversion losses and expensive equipment to convert the mana to something that was safe to absorb into himself, Tim decided to just rely on his own natural mana generation.

Finishing the next eight batches, his skills improved with each one until the final three batches were closer to something a large alchemy company would produce with trained and possibly Talented crafters.

Those potions, because of their quality and therefore effectiveness, sold to the shop for an astronomical thirty credits, netting him four times the expected profit per batch.

Back at his apartment, Tim did the math and stared at the results.

At his current proficiency level, he made twenty credits per potion after the cost of buying all of the ingredients, for a net profit of eighty credits per batch. At three batches a day, he made two hundred and forty credits of profit. More than enough to live comfortably.

For three hours of work.

The rest of the days he wasn’t delving, he could just relax, having pushed himself so much in the previous months. If he could find a more profitable potion— he had been eyeing the healing potions for their higher costs but higher profits— he could increase that even further. 

He would also start to earn more as he Tiered up and got both more mana and mana regeneration, which would let him unlock some of the cheaper proficiencies that would be nice to have, but out of his range currently.

Tim felt himself grinning as the path ahead of him started to look not just bright, but incredibly promising.