Chapter 53

Chapter 53

The appearance of the Punishment was a great surprise to Ajax. Despite the fact that this punishment will be all but obsolete in the coming weeks, with him spending his free stats any experience he was going to get from fighting things that far below his level would have been shot from the extreme lack of difficulty and danger.

This was not to say that this was something to take lightly. A decrease in experience earned, especially one as large as a fifth was definitely concerning so he quickly guttened and collected the wolf corpses and made for the village to talk about this with Hatchet.

The way back was uneventful, having done multiple such trips before the only thing he regretted was not bringing the cart out with him. It wasn’t so much the weight of all he had to carry as the amount of space they took up. He nevertheless made good time and dropped the corpses off with the tanner before making for the secluded hut. He found Hatchet outside of his house fletching arrows.

“Hey Hatchet,” he said, trying to sound unconcerned. ething happen?” he asked with a frown on his face. Somehow he had managed to pick up the ability to read Ajax in the last few years.

“You could say that.” Ajax shifted awkwardly. “What do you know about Retributions and Punishments?”

Hatchet froze, his eyes flew open and his eyebrows made a break for his hairline. He stood silent for almost a full minute before coming back to himself and turning to Ajax.

“Tell me everything.” his cold tone made it clear it wasn’t a request.

Ajax proceeded to tell him about the hunt. Despite the lack of patience Hatchet was under right now he listened carefully and didn’t try to speed him along. He knew, not from personal experience but he had seen aftermaths, Retributions and Punishments could be a death sentence.

As Ajax described his Retribution and Punishment, Hatchet made his first contributions to the talk in a while. He wanted to know the exact wording of both the retribution and the punishment. Once he had both of those and thought about them for a short while he finally relaxed.

“Alright, the good news is that there is nothing for us to worry about right now. Your punishment is one of the lightest ones. The bigger problem comes in the form of your retribution. That is something that you will have to be mindful of from now on.” he breathed out a sigh of relief.

“What are these punishments and retributions?” Ajax asked concerned.

“Besides stats skills and traits the System deals with three more types of interference. The first you have already experienced is the Retribution and Punishments. Whenever something goes against the way of the system, Retributions and Punishments are used to try and correct that behavior. In your case, the level difference in your advantage is something the System dislikes.” he explained.

“If Retributions and Punishments are two of them, what is the last one?” Ajax asked.

“No, no. Retributions is one of them, Punishments are just a result of Retributions. On the other side we have Achievements. Much like they sound, Achievements are things that follow the same principle as Retributions but instead are there to mark the approval of the System.”

“Discoveries is the main excuse nobles use for hoarding information from the general populace. As you see, some achievements come with a required number of Discoveries in order to claim the rewards.”

After the lengthy explanation Ajax just made small talk trying to digest the information bomb that was just dropped on him. A lot of frustration at the System itself being one of them. Despite missing out on such important information he could understand why people didn’t just give it out randomly.

Not long after Hatchet finished explaining all about the Retributions Achievements and Discoveries Ajax made his way back home. He took one more look at his stats and determined that spending his points would come after Mind finally ticked over to sixty-eight. All of the rest of his stats were too far away to make it to the next whole point before his Trait expired.

After using [Expel Mana] quickly to dumb quite a bit of his mana out in the hopes of reaching that next point faster he finished his meal and went to bed.

He woke up the following morning with a new communication from the System blinking in the bottom left of his vision. He carefully opened while feeling not an insignificant amount of dread after getting his Punishment yesterday.

Achievement : Born Horder.

Spend your first fifteen years without spending a single stat point.

Reward : + 10 to all stats.

! (lesser versions of the achievement can no longer be obtained.)

Hoarder

Spend fifteen consecutive years without spending a single stat point.

Reward : + 5 to all stats.

Forced Hoarder

Spend fifteen consecutive years at zero stat points.

Reward : + 2 to all stats.