Chapter 143: Elevation

Chapter 143: Elevation

So my main choice for Talent was between Cumulative Catastrophe and Future Sight. But I still had one more thing to look at before making my choices. Not wanting to wait any longer, I opened up the waiting Time Loop Upgrade.

Choose one Upgrade for Time Loop:

Persistent Loop

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When you activate Time Loop, you may choose any Status Effects from among the ones you have to retain at their current time remaining, discarding all others. For all Status Effects you retain with this Upgrade, multiply their durations by Time Loop’s Rank, divided by 4 (multiplier of 5).L1tLagoon witnessed the first publication of this chapter on Ñøv€l--B1n.

Recycled Loop

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At midnight, when your uses of Time Loop refresh, for each use of Time Loop you have leftover from the previous day, discard it and increase a random Stat by 1.

You may only gain a maximum number of Stats from this Upgrade equal to your Time Loop Rank divided by 2, rounded down (10 Stats), before you must Level up to reset the maximum.

Inclusive Loop

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While activating Time Loop, you may now choose a number of additional beings equal to your Time Loop Rank divided by 10, rounded down (2 beings), that you are touching to keep their memories alongside you in the new timeline, however their Statuses are reset as normal.

Alright, definitely some less straightforward options than the ones I’d been shown for the first Upgrade. And they all seemed to follow this weird theme of being modified based on my current Time Loop Rank. But there was still some obvious power.

My eye was immediately drawn to the third option, Inclusive Loop. Being able to bring other people along with me when I used Time Loop had the most clear advantages. Erani and Ainash, of course, would certainly benefit from me not having to catch them up every time I used it. And being able to slowly bring more and more people along with me could be interesting, too. As-is, I’d be able to use Time Loop on two people, plus myself. So pretty much just Erani and Ainash. Later on, though, I’d be able to bring more and more along with me. That could lead to some very interesting strategies, though it was a bit unfortunate they wouldn’t also be able to keep the XP they got.

Good to know. Moving onto actually picking one of these Upgrades to take, what do you think of Persistent Loop? It obviously needs me to build around it to make it good, but do I even have any options in my future that’ll work with it?”

“For Spells? Hm...let me see...You went Noxious into Crippling into Ray into Well into Armor into Expedite into Bond...so from there you’ll get...and that’ll branch into...and from there...Hm. So, thing is, not really. Talents don’t look too favorable, either. I mean, you’ll get some beneficial Status Effects, but they won’t be breaking this Upgrade wide open, or anything. Right now, you’ve just got Expedite and Regenerate, which definitely aren’t worth nothing with quintupled lengths—especially Regenerate—but they’re both still not really worth enough that they beat out your other options. With Expedite, especially, you’d effectively have to go back to directly before the fight began in order to get any use out of it, even with a length multiplied by five. What you want is something that lasts hours, that way the multiplier really starts to mean something.”

And I get nothing like that?

“Like I said, not nothing, but it isn’t anything super great.”

So the Upgrade is just worthless then?

“Well, not worthless. You may not get anything in your Class’s future that works well with the Upgrade, but you can still use Enchanted stuff.”

Oh, shit, right, I’d completely forgotten about Enchantments! While most of the time, Enchanters made smaller, simpler things like Spell Crystals, basic weight decreasing Enchantments, or Magic-Usable Enchanted weapons, there were still more complex Enchantments that could be placed on items. Things like Ripley’s axe that she’d used against me, or large logic systems to make things happen automatically. And within that realm of complex Enchantments were items that could temporarily apply beneficial effects to the user. Typically with a limitation of how often you could use them, and a limited length of the effect. But those would work perfectly with Persistent Loop!

Of course, those more complex Enchantments would also require much higher-Leveled Enchanters, much more Mana, and much rarer materials. So, in short, they’d cost a fuck-ton of money. But if I could get them, they’d work with Persistent Loop perfectly. The only issue was the money, and the availability. Not just any shop in any town would hold such expensive Enchanted goods, so we’d have to find them, and then of course we’d have to raise the money to buy them, too. As mid-Level Classers, we’d certainly be able to make a lot more money than before, but it still wouldn’t be easy.

Index, can you tell me anything about the availability of Enchanted goods in this country? And maybe which ones I could find in—

“Dude,” Index interrupted, “I don’t know everything. I can tell you about the System, but I know just as much as you do about this Barinruth Empire place.”

Oh. Right. I’d gotten a bit carried away in my excitement. It seemed like I’d be making this decision blind as to whether or not it would work.

Oh, wait, no I wasn’t! I was sitting in a room with citizens of the empire! They’d totally know about this. The realization also made me feel a bit uneasy—I’d been sitting in a room with my eyes closed, surrounded by a bunch of unknowns. What if they were about to kill me? What if they knew who I was, and right now they were plotting to betray me and turn me in to the Demons?

I hurriedly opened my eyes. Oh, good. Jannin was still sitting next to me, picking at his fingernails with the tip of a knife, and Bon was sitting in the kitchen area eating a snack. The third was presumably in the bathroom, considering that door was closed.

Okay, it was time to see what these guys know. If I got a good answer, it could be possible to make quite the insane build. And maybe I could learn something from them that could help me get a mental measure on the power of these other two choices. And also the three Talent options. Plus, I also needed to ask about Spell Crystals. Gods, I had a lot to consider here. But if I played my cards right, I could very well be moving into a whole new realm of power.