Chapter 289 – Upgrades and unwanted Patches

Chapter 289 – Upgrades and unwanted Patches





LaaTest novels on (n)ovelbi/n(.)com

It was the evening of Friday, around 23 o’clock, and John had just finished a day long grinding session and was just about ready to collapse. He had started at roughly 8 AM and had been running four Assaults of three hours each throughout the day.

Of course, that was three hours real time, thanks to Create I.D..’s time dilation, that was further changed to 3 hours 52 minutes. Almost four hours constantly spent fighting were pretty straining and actually about the best John could do. While he would have loved to knock the timer up a bit more and get himself even bigger rewards, he was held back by mana, mental exhaustion and other such tedious things as his bladder.

So, they had to take breaks between every Assault. Breaks that lasted around 30 minutes and were usually filled with John putting the Soulpotion in the living room and then summoning an enemy for Rave to fight while he himself rested.

Then he grabbed the Soulpotion from the living room again and went back to work. The only time he had seen Nia was in the morning if he had asked her where he could find her. She had just instructed him to leave the Soulpotion on the table, she would see it.

Worked for him, and as it was empty whenever he picked it up from the dinner table, it obviously worked for her too.

Even with breaks, the total of four Assaults John needed to finally get here had made this day the single hardest power-leveling he had done to date. At least during the one-month grind, he had to fight through weaker lower floors before getting to the actual hard stuff. Assaults were just hard all the time; the orcs adapting to his strategies certainly didn’t make it easier either.

But now he had 2 Skill Evolution Points and a new class level on the horizon, things were looking pretty good!





Of course, Gaia had to fuck him over in some way. ‘Midseason Patches are not nice,’ he thought. At least this one wasn’t going to have sweeping changes, otherwise it wouldn’t take just a few days. He found the 80% reduction interesting, however.



As that was the same number as his current Gaia Dependency Factor. ‘So, I am getting more self-sustaining?’ John thought. ‘Wonder how that works. Is part of my mana getting siphoned off at every waking moment? Is there something else supplying me? The inner workings of my powers are a mystery.’

‘So Tier 4 is the maximum I can reach, interesting. Also, it may be worth it to evolve Blink to see if I can get a skill that does the same but cheaper later on,’ it crossed John’s mind as he clicked on Mana Ray.



John blinked at the choices. Was there even one?

He had already established last time that Arcane Lance was a terrible skill that deserved to crawl under a rock. Its extra area damage was so situational that it would barely ever happen. That aside, he just got a better AoE.

While Mana Laser was a better Mana Ray, it didn’t even hold a candle to the thing that had replaced Arcana Strike in the options.

Shardbound was insane from a mechanical perspective. The damage numbers aside, which, according to evolution tradition, couldn’t be lower than Mana Ray, the applications were practically limitless.

Thanks to its variable mana cost, it would be able to fit into almost any situation. The fact that it could be aimed and shot later made it so that he could use it to lay traps. The amount of shards he could position was also anywhere between 1 and 100. If the damage scaled with the mana costs (which it should since the numbers didn’t), it was also something he could use as a long range finisher instead of his current pick of Mana Blade, which had a limited range.

He could use it for trap laying, for defensive positions, for burst damage, for AoE damage, as a singular strike or as a nearly undodgeable hail of raw arcane power. Aside from his summoning skills and Artificial Spirit, that thing sounded like the most OP thing he could get his hands on.

So, picking it wasn’t as much a choice as it was warranted. Only a fool or a meme deck builder would pass the objectively most versatile tool. With both spells acquired, John spent a moment to look at them with his skill menu and check their numbers.



Okay, its damage was slightly worse, but it was just level 1, so that wasn’t all that unexpected. It also cost 150 mana (or 25%) less, so he was still making a net gain on damage if he used it more than once. A bit of a sunk cost fallacy, admittedly, but as it levelled up, it would overtake Arcane Explosion in damage.



449 arcane damage per 100 mana. That was not too shabby at all. At 300 mana invested, Mana Ray’s old cost, that meant that it would deal 1347 damage compared to the 1274 Mana Ray did. So at level 1 it was already doing more damage, had a higher range and more versatility. This skill was idiotically strong. Using it would take some experimentation though.

John actually needed to run some numbers through his head to come to a conclusion on what he was going to use as his finishing move in the future. Between Mana Blade and Shardbound, he would prefer the latter, purely on the basis of being ranged.

‘Mhm, Mana Blade comes out ahead by about 1/3, guess being a melee skill does give it some higher damage,’ were John’s final thoughts on the matter. “Okay, I am done here,” he told the assembled girls. A bit of a needless gesture, they were all connected to his mind, but he still liked talking to them.

“Let’s call it quits for tonight and experiment with the skills tomorrow.”