Draco, Qiong Qi, and Clarent currently sat beneath a nice smelling yellow tree, with fruit shaped like a durian hanging from its boughs. Unlike the world's smelliest fruit though, this one smelled heavenly and tasted even better.
Qiong Qi and Clarent munched on a few lazily, while Draco frowned as he tried to come up with ways to mix some of the fruits he had collected so far into a tasty drink.
Although the simplest fruit here was Epic Rank, Draco was already Master Rank Brewer. In the time he had spent in Vita City-State, he had naturally completed his Aether Crystal infused brew.
However, to his dismay, he had been informed that just like with Cooking, all the available slots were currently occupied. As such, he was promoted to Master Rank instead, with a similar promise of getting promoted to a God of Brewing if he discovered a new field of Brewing.
As such, he could at least make Epic brews without having to rely on Aether Crystals. If he wanted to quickly whip a drink from these fruits, he could easily make one.
However, in order for the drinks to have Epic-tier benefits and the best possible taste, he would need to create a recipe. Unfortunately, Brewing was not like Alchemy or Blacksmithing where Draco could generate new designs/recipes off the top of his head thanks to his hefty foundation.
He was just like every other player in the world, a newbie to Brewing in this aspect. Well, a person who worked as a mixer or bartender in real life would not suffer this much.
Draco gave up for now, ending the short rest he had given himself as well as his two companions. According to Draco's estimations, they had already cleared about 85% of this whole orchard, leaving only the core areas.
Those areas would not be easy to break into at all. The fruits inside there were Legendary Rank. As for the final zone in the center, all the fruits there were Divine Rank. This spoke volumes about the 'guardian' of those zones.
Draco and his group had practically speedrun the outer areas, slaughtering hundreds of Rank 2 monsters like they were weeds. In this time, Qiong Qi and Clarent had honed their battle prowess fully.
Now, it was no longer a situation where they would fall into a stalemate and Draco would have to break it. Now, they were able to vanquish their own foes with considerable speed despite their lower Rank.
Occasionally, they would stop to smell the roses as well as chew some fruits, while Draco would rest and mediate on his new Star Shot Technique.
After all the fights he had - using his bow and arrow only - he had formed 10 Bow Skills based on his Control alone. Apart from that, he had already completed 5% of level 3 of the Star Shot Technique.
His progress had impressed himself. However, he felt he had reached the bottleneck for his archery and could no longer create any Bow Skills. It wasn't that it was impossible, it was just that Draco's talent with the bow was too average.
With swords, he had immense talent… and he also took over 10 in-game years to create 360 Sword Skills. More than half of them were designed to kill Riveting Night in particular, and she had provided an excellent foil.
In this timeline, he did not have that. So, Draco was already considering whether to wrap it up and move onto the next stage. Now that they were going to the harder zones, he felt that this would be a good time to do so.
As such, he entered his Vault of Techniques and called Satine over. After hearing the yandere orb's usual veiled threats, he asked her a question.
"Is it possible to classify my recorded techniques into micros and macros?"
Satine was silent for a while before she bobbed in affirmation. "Yes, Scrivener. Techniques can be placed into categories together if there is enough similarity between them."
Draco smiled. "Then I would like to put Sword Skill 1 through 360 into a category called Paragon Sword Skills: Tier 1."
This was the name Draco had decided to use for his Control-based sword technique. Just like the bow technique was called the Star Shot Technique, the one for swords he had named Paragon Sword Technique.
Satine replied promptly. "Done. Would you like to record techniques?"
Draco nodded. "Please present an archery range with mobile and static targets."
After morphing the dojo to accommodate Draco's wishes, Satine then began the recording process. Draco displayed his 10 Bow Skills one after another, having Satine grade them.
Just as he expected, not a single one rose above a Common skill when assessed, nevertheless, he was pleased. After that, Draco told Satine to name this new series as Star Shot Skills: Tier 1.
After doing this, he quickly left before the orb could threaten him subtly once more. Draco then paid the required Aether Crystals for them to be converted.
His mouth wrung into strange shapes when he saw that the Uncommon, Rare, Epic, and Legendary Sword skills needed 70 days to go until they were converted.
The original time had been 3 months or 90 days, and he had paid to speed up the process for the 90 Common Sword Skills. Each one would have taken 3 hours, which in total was about 12 days.
Draco had spent a week so far clearing the zones from the beginning up to now, including the day he wasted trying to acclimate to the 5,000% movement speed.
It couldn't be helped though. Were it not for the fact that they often had to take breaks, or rather that the other two had to take breaks due to their limitations, they would have moved faster.
Draco had unlimited physical and mental stamina, so his body would never tire in the game. It was easy for him to go on fighting for weeks or months on end, assuming he was motivated enough.
However, his experience stockpile during this week had grown to scary proportions. Even though he was now level 50 and the amount of experience he earned per kill was trash after conversion from his class, it was still exp from Rank 2 entities as a Rank 1.
As the saying went, little drops of water made a mighty ocean. On its own, the experience gain for slaughtering Rank 2 monsters in the hundreds acc.u.mulated into a sea of experience.
Draco's original 683% stockpiled experience had ballooned into 67,543%! He had averaged about 1,200% per slaughtered zone, and he had cleared around 50 or so zones so far.
While this amount sounded like a lot, Draco was depressed. He had expected to earn a lot more than this. After all, he had many 'children' to feed with this experience.
Pair Dadeni and Mjolnir would certainly swallow almost all of this up. Then, there was Fragarach and the Dragonlance which demanded 100,000% experience each.
With what he would have leftover, it would be impossible to upgrade either one of them. As such, Draco had been stockpiling quietly and letting the experience grow further so he could upgrade all the stuff at once.
While upgrading them one by one would be more efficient, Draco was that type of gamer who hated doing things sequentially. If he was gonna complete it all, it would be at once!
In the old days, he would be that idiot who would accept all the quests at once, do all of them without returning to the town and only turn them in all together instead of doing them one by one!
Draco got up and kicked Qiong Qi as well as Clarent to their feet. "It's time to continue."
The two fellows grumbled as they rose to their feet.
"F.u.c.k, how can you expect this Lion King fight every day? Don't you know I am a pacifist?"
"I'm flabbergasted myself. To think that the wretched person my dear little sister chose would be so violent, only thinking about fighting. Looks are really deceiving, even pretty boys can be muscleheads."
Draco ignored their complaints and entered the next zone. He had already scanned it and discovered that the monsters here were all Sergeant Rank.
In the previous 50-odd zones, all the monsters had been Specialists with not a single Sergeant in sight, but now every monster was a Sergeant. The scale of difficulty hadn't just jumped, it had literally soared.
Draco could somewhat easily handle Specialists, but Sergeants would be much harder to handle. However, he understood that he had no choice if he wanted to wickedly loot this whole area.
He was even thankful that the enemies were limited to Rank 2 mostly. Then again, it might be because he was only at the very outskirts of the Refinement God's Treasury that this was the case.
As soon as they entered, they were sieged upon by many different Sergeant Rank monsters.
｢Name: Creepy Crawler – Sergeant Rank monster
Level: 80
HP: 1,050,000/1,050,000｣
｢Name: Diving Flapper – Sergeant Rank monster
Level: 83
HP: 1,300,000/1,300,000｣
｢Name: Feisty Barker – Sergeant Rank monster
Level: 84
HP: 1,650,000/1,650,000｣
｢Name: Fluffy Growler – Sergeant Rank monster
Level: 82
HP: 2,100,000/2,100,000｣
These monsters were a whole different ball game from those who came before. All of them had HPs above a million and slightly higher levels than the Specialists, meaning that Draco experienced no stat boost or suppression thanks to the Heart of the Woods.
The Creepy Crawler was a giant centipede with eyes and a mouth full with sharp rows of teeth, as well as a rainbow-colored chitin armor. It was quite menacing to look at and its mouth dripped with saliva.
(Author's Note: it kinda looks like Giratina's origin form from Pokemon.)
The Diving Flapper was a large bird that looked like a cross between a hawk and an eagle. Its beak was filled with needle-like teeth and its talons gleamed with sharpness. It had hazel eyes and dark red feathers with flecks of green.
The Feisty Barker was a wolf the size of a foal. Its fur was a dark purple and it had pitch-black cornea with silver pupils. It looked buff and very evil, especially how it glared at Draco and co with murderous intent.
The Fluffy Growler was a bear that was the size of a car. Despite the cute name, it invoked no such feelings with how it growled as it approached the group. It had extremely thick hide with dark blue fur, and its eyes were red as blood.
This time, Draco was not in the mood to delay. Just like how he speedran the other zones, he first began the battle with Angel's Blessing.
This put all the monsters here under various status effects that inhibited their fighting prowess. Naturally, some got meaningless debuffs like <Starving> or <Thirsty>, while others got terrible ones like <Weakened> or <Decaying>.
This skill worked based on Luck, and Draco had 100 points of it, so it was extremely likely that the worse kind of debuffs would hit his foes unless their Luck stats were also high.
However, it would be really hard to find a monster that could boast 100 Luck at Rank 2. Maybe Strength, Dexterity, or Intelligence, but Luck? Unlikely.
As such, more than 90% of the monsters got mild but useful debuffs like <Confused>, <Poisoned>, and <Fear>. About 9% got the worst debuffs while only 1% got useless debuffs.
After doing this, Clarent and Qiong Qi selected their foes and took them head-on. Draco did the same, focusing mostly on the monsters that got useless debuffs.
His damage output was stifled by their higher levels and higher HP, but it was still considerable given his Legendary bow and arrow. If Draco had still been using Pinaka, it would have been even worse.
Draco pulled the bowstring back and activated Bow Skill 3: Flurry.
This skill allowed him to temporarily increase his fire rate to 10 per second for a minute. This was only possible thanks to his buffed stamina that was never-ending.
However, Control was not governed by the system, and Devil's Guile, as well as Demonic Might, only affected system resources. Control put a strain on his body in a different manner altogether, otherwise Draco could just use Counter Kill endlessly.
With his increased shots, he was able to reduce the HP of the monsters he targeted by 95%, and in most cases, killing them straight off!
This was thanks to a mixture of his technique and - of course - Sonic Wave.