Chapter 6

Sitting in a lotus position on a huge field of short green grass, a young man meditated deeply as he breathed in and breathed deeply. Around him was a red and orange aura, extremely hot and dense. Powerful bursts of heat poured from the young man's body and aura, but strangely the grass below him and around him did not seem affected.

With every few minutes of breathing, the aura grew stronger and warmer. Increasingly stronger than before, it even became a huge firebreak reaching more than two feet high.

After a while the fire aura disappeared and the young man let out a weary sigh. Opening his eyes two pairs of intense green eyes swept the place before the young man lay on his back exhausted on his back.

It had been almost 6 months since Harry had gained his powers, and in that short time he had surprisingly progressed at a baffling pace. Even Patrick who was teaching was surprised by his pace of progress.

In the physical area he focused exclusively on only two techniques, the Iron Skin and the Shénhuo Breathing Technique. As he was a user of magic, Harry primarily distributes his attribute points in intelligence or wisdom, as he had no points to spend on strength or vitality the only real alternative was to train in a way that he had results without using his attribute points.

Normally a wizard would not mind physical abilities, but again wizards could not train in techniques that required KI, luckily for Harry he was an exception to that rule.

The Shénhuo Breathing Technique besides increasing the strength of his body also actively and passively increased his others attributes. When training in this technique it was not really necessary to train the body or use attribute points since the body would naturally strengthen as the user trained in it.

At level 65 the Shénhuo Breathing Technique passively increased Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, Intelligence and Wisdom by 130 percent. Thanks to that bonus Harry had a massive increase in all his attributes besides Luck.

Thanks to this increase they again received more new skills, and had a tremendous boost in their physical abilities.

The Iron Skin magic was also a skill that Harry focused a lot on during training. It allowed the user's skin to become as tough as iron, it was like wearing armor without weight or loss of mobility.

During the training Harry would keep this magic active all the time, he even kept it active during everyday activities. After some time, the level of the spell had reached 99 and when Harry focused his attention on dominating it it evolved and became Steel Skin.

Similar to the Iron Skin, the Steel Skin gave the properties of steel to the wearer's skin. When activated the defense of this ability was much superior.

In order to test this ability Patrick had used a standard rifle and shot non-lethal points. When the Iron Skin were active the rifle shot would pull 40 HP from Harry and it would hurt a lot. After evolved into Steel Skin, however a rifle shot the result was quite different, he would lose only 10 HP and the pain was not as intense.

When both the Shénhuo Breathing Technique and the Steel Skin were active together, even a shot from a high-precision rifle to almost burn clothes would only cause 0.2 damage.

In the areas of magic Harry has had even better continuous advances. With Patrick's tutelage, he was more and more skilled with his magic.

His skills improved so much that he left the wizard rankings and became a Mage.

Wizard, Mage, Archmage, and Sage were the four main ranks in which a spell user would be ranked. In order to rise from rank of a wizard to a Mage the individual had to be able to combine four different spells.

After months of intense training inside illusory barriers with 100 times the time inside what out. Harry was able to easily combine up to five spells without difficulty. The combined power of spells could have frightening and magnificent effects.

During the training Harry can only enter once in the eternal maze, and was only to reach level 80 and get some items. Patrick was very insistent in first forming a solid foundation and only then moving forward maintaining a stable and solid foundation.

sages could be very powerful and know thousands of spells, but if their bases were weak or unstable, they would easily be defeated by others with solid foundations.

Knowledge was a sorcerer, greatest weapon and armor.

Luckily Harry had found a way to make lots of money.

The precious gems he would use to store his mana or spells within using the magic of the jewels he had learned, were of high value, and were known as magical stones. Usually the quality varied according to the sorcerer who created it, so the better it was, the greater its value would be.

Thanks to Helena's diamond spear and jeweled Storm, there was a steady supply of resources for Harry to practice without having to worry about money any more. Harry even sold some gems to the white oak clan and to the jewelry of one of the clan members.

In return, besides the money, he would also receive some items produced by the clan using magic stones made by him. Pheles to Harry's surprise was surprisingly one of the most skilled at creating stones and magical items, and began teaching Harry about it.

After some classes he gained the skills, Create Magic Stone, Create Fundamental Stone and Enchant. Under the tutelage of Patrick and Pheles, after a month Harry created his first magic item. A pair of glasses enchanting with the ability, Observe.

It was not something special, but strangely it was well sought after and sold for relatively high price at the abyss auction and he also made a small fortune. Apparently having a way to know any information of a opponents was very valious.

During pauses between intense sessions of magical training, Harry sought ways to acquire other more "common" abilities, and acquired two more abilities, Swim and Dig.

Although they did not seem like much, both had good effects, Swim helped to increase his speed in the water and his breath, Dig besides increasing its speed in making holes also gave a 30% chance of finding items or ores digging.

It was really strange finding a rare quality magic sword, buried in an empty illusorily barrier. It raises a lot of questions, but no one was able to came with a good answer.

After training some of his skills as a druid, Harry began training with shamanic spells. The first spell he began to train was, Spiritual Guide. The magic, Spiritual Guide enabled Harry to summon the spirit of an animal to help him.

The animal summoned by Harry took the form of a black snake, which made Harry wonder if there was any connection with his Parseltongue skill, or whether it was mere chance. In addition to helping to increase the level of the ability Parseltongue, the snake also helped him during his meditation and to protect him.

Harry also bought several books with Shamanic and Druidic spells in addition to what Patrick gave him. Some of the spells were not nearly as good as the spells of the white oak clan, but each book read better their understanding and their knowledge would deepen.

After learning the basis on shamanism, Harry learned the spell astral projection. The astral projection spell was a spell that allowed the user to separate his soul or astral body from the physical body and wander both in physical world and in the astral plane.

When entering the astral plane Harry can experience incredible experiences. With the protection of Pheles and Patrick, the youngster can explore without fear, as a spirit he could fly, cross objects and enter several places without anyone but experts realize it.

As a spirit Harry can also connect much more deeply with other spirits, the Elementals he could summon were spirits of the elements around him. In his spiritual form he can understand a little more about his spirits and even his affinity with certain elements has improved a bit.

Patrick and Pheles, taught him about the various astral plans he could access and warned him about each of them, breaking many concepts he had. One example was that certain hellish plans where devils lived worshiped worthy summoners, and would often form contracts with these individuals.

In another hand some heavenly plans had a bad attitude and would often force a disadvantageous contract of servitude as if it were a favor.

Pheles also taught him that one of the uses of a spiritual animal was to explore the astral planes, for his master, so he could avoid some less friendly plans.

Finally, last month Pheles completely took over his training, and focused all his training on three topics, creating magical items, alchemy and improve his skills.

With the Creation, skill was easy to make magical items, if he had a blueprint of with the success chance would raise greatly. However, creating an item entirely new, had a greater chance of fail, mainly because the skill level.

There were some others methods too, like runes or shaping an item from things that naturally had mana.

While experimenting the creation of magic items, harry spend literally rivers of money, in one week of the real world he had spent more than 10 millions pounds, in materials and blueprints.

Thanks to the money of potions, items and gems he could afford this spends.

Under Pheles guidance and harry effort, he continued to improve each day, it took harry about the equivalent to 9 months inside an illusory barrier, to Pheles recognize his skills as good. Taking in consideration the incredibly high standards of Pheles, harry was a lot happy with himself.

Alchemy was a huge battle for harry, Alchemy required knowledge in magic, chemistry and pharmacy, even inside a barrier where 100 hours were only 1 in the real world, he took the equivalent of 2 entire years to learn, even when they had only 3 hours of sleep, he and Pheles lived all 24 hours of a regular day inside illusory barriers.

They only exited the barriers to get more supplies or new recipes, and rarely to spend some time in the clan.

Thanks to his skills Mind of a Gamer and Body of a Gamer, he was able to endure this exhaustive and almost impossible routine.

The Shénhuo Celestial Healing¸ also had an important role taking care of their mental exhaustion.

Alchemy was very versatile, you could make potions, brew fines drinks, create magic items, create homunculus and chimeras, and more. However, it was an expensive job, mainly in the beginning were lot of supplies were lost in failed tries.

Since her didn't know or had any interest she gave it to Harry, by curiosity he began to read until he reached the page that explained the way that hp potions were made, by basically infusing healing magic in a bottle of water.

By pure curiosity he tried this method, he took water, learned the spell heal, and buy some fruits, Patrick insisted that was a waste of time, Pheles just observed him with curiosity. Imagine the surprise of Patrick when he dropped some strawberry in a bottle of hot water and used create.

The water became red, and when he used observe¸ it indicated as lesser grade health potion, Pheles thought it was interesting, Patrick just hit it forehead against a wall and walked away, leaving him, Pheles and a alchemist of the clan to study the potion.

Balancing, his skills was a lot easier than learning alchemy, he only needed to spend some hours using again and again the skills, and looking for different ways to use then.

To improve his magic, Patrick used several flying targets, and harry needed to hit them in different distances and with different spells, along with the targets was flying discs that shoot lasers at him. He should attack the targets while avoid being hit by the lasers, and he couldn't use defensive spells.

When it came to his physical abilities, Patrick came with a wood warrior, a wood puppet used to train the members of the clan in hand-to-hand combat. The puppet shape was almost identical to a human, body, arms, legs and even fingers were well detailed, weirdly it had a nose, even when it was faceless.

There were 5 different puppets, the weakest had attributes around 50, while the strongest had attributes around 250, each one had their own level of difficult, the first one, according to Patrick was like an expert boxer, simple move set but hard hits and good agility. Harry could easily defeat that puppet counting with only with raw attributes.

The second was a little more difficult, but after some minutes of fighting harry won.

When it came to the third, it was totally different, it had good agility, good fight skills and different move sets from dozens different martial arts. Harry bȧrėly managed to keep a fight for a few moments before having to forfeit.

Even harry with skills that were considered "broken" could not compare to that.

Besides the combat training, harry used all the free time, practicing creation skills, he learned smithing and Sewing, with hope that in some point it could be useful to make better equipment's and cloths.

Smithing was hard in the beginning, spend hours heating and beating to shape a piece of metal, were a tedious and v work. Harry lost the count of how many times he failed before he succeeds in making a bent sword.

But he persisted, and after a lot of time, he could make decent objects, then he started to use harder metals to work and different alloys, from iron to steel, then to pure titanium and alloys and finally tungsten, magic metal were rare and expensive so he didn't had much chances with them before mastering the skill.

Sewing, were a lot easier, it was as complex and exhausting as smithing, but required a lot less physical effort and more dexterity and attention, plus the price of cloth was lot cheaper than metal, some like acromantula silk were expensive anyway but affordable and easy to get with money, only some superior magic cloths were really expensive and hard to get.

Gardening, was a skill that he already had, by having to take care of Petunia's flowers and garden, and since he enjoyed this, he used this skill to plant, magic seeds that he bought from abyss auction. As the level rose, the plants got stronger, grew faster, and produced more fruits in case of trees.

Other skill that he learned was shapechange, a very useful skill, that allowed to change the body according the user's will. With harry ability a gamer he gained the possibility of shape his body in almost any form, he could get taller, change the color of his hair and much more.

By combining the use of shapechange with iron skin, he could transform his body in lethal cutting weapons.

When Jamie and Mark heard about it, they begged to learn it, and when harry was thinking a way to teach the skill to then, he got two new skills, Tutor and Training, the first allowed him to teach any skill to a person with a certain affinity with it, the second allowed to transfer the skill to any other people, even if they didn't had affinity with.

Instead shapechange, by advice of Pheles he taught then the skill Metamorphosis, a skill that temporally make the user look older. After learning this skill, they disappeared the whole day and came back in the middle of the morning completely drunks.

Pheles who already figured their intentions waited them to come and put the two under an infernal training during the whole night until dawn, before they were allowed to rest. It was supposedly to have a lesson in it, but harry couldn't figure out what was.

Speaking of them, thanks to the help of the clan and several nights of fighting in the maze, all the group were capable of fighting efficiently, as individuals they were in the C rank, strong enough to survive alone in abyss, as a group they were a rank C+ to B, skillful but nothing special in general.

Angela was the healer and support, she focused the most in healing and support spells, but was very good with offensive spells and fighting with magic. Her healing skills with her medical knowledge, quickly made her capable of rejoining cut members and heal most of the wounds, unfortunately regrowing members were still far from her capabilities, that why she always carried a batch of potions.

As a mage she was a solid C, had good amount of spells and a decent magic knowledge, she used mage robes and jewelry that helped her recover mana faster and increased the power of her spells, she had a decent rare rank staff that increased the power and reduced the cost of magic.

Mark, was the another mage, he was more focused in fighting than Angela, he learned several spell and always studied how and when was the best way to apply then, besides his hooligan side he was very smart and receptive to learn, with some help he already almost reached the rank B, and already was capable of mixing 3 spells.

In fighting capability, he surpassed Angela by far and his magic knowledge were even a bit higher than she. As Angela, he used mage robes and jewelry that helped her recover mana faster and increased the power of her spells, he had a high rank staff that increased the power and reduced the cost of magic.

Jamie, has the hooligan that he is, loved fighting so he preferred to learn it properly, the clan gave him lessons and he was learned how to use different tips of weapons, as a front line fighter he focused his attributes in strength, vitality and dexterity, he learned an aura skill that enhanced his physical skills. Thanks to harry he could learn some skills that were useful to him.

He had a complete magic armor that enhanced his skills, with her he was stronger than most of C ranks but not stronger than a B rank, he used a rare rank poisoned sword.

Tig surprisingly was the first of the four to reach the rank B, he trained very hard and was the one who more gained free attributes by training, he had decent fighting skills that were refined by the clan, he learned different skills and learned the aura body.

He also had a complete magic armor but totally focused in enhancing his Dex and defense, he used a rare rank tower shield and a magic rare rank one handed hammer, and was very good with them.

As a group they had a good coordination, and in their levels could easily overcome guardians of the 6° and 7° floor, for the guardian of the 8° floor they could fight him but with very difficult.

According to Pheles, groups like that were very the common on abyss, and not much of a fight to any really strong Rank B, but a group like that still were far above the weakling groups that filled the abyss.

To be "secure" in the abyss, be it as a group or alone they had to reach at least the Rank A.