Almond emerged from behind the tree and began walking towards the highlands with over a hundred Infernal Crystal Bulls separated into small groups spread throughout the area.
But he was ready.
‘Ten should be enough, and the cost is 1000 Prana, 100 for each. Wild Prana is enough to execute this.’
The moment Almond absorbed wild prana, the bulls closest to him noticed him.
The seven bulls rushed at him with their fiery horns burning brighter and body-enhancing.
But suddenly, a ping-pong ball-sized spherical light emerged from Almond’s forehead, glowing in constantly changing prismatic colors.
That ball of light shot at the Bulls and suddenly changed direction.
Surprisingly, the bulls started chasing the ball of the light.
Almond continued walking as he released nine more balls of light and kept one ball of light hovering above him.
These balls of light began leading the groups of bulls around the plains.
The scenery surprised many as people began focusing on Almond’s screen.
“How interesting,” Madam Ruby blinked. “What’s going on?”
Big D narrowed his eyes and grinned. “It seems he is already utilizing his capabilities. If I am correct, to the bulls, those balls of light look like Almond himself.”
“Mental-inference type magic?” Madam Ruby raised her eyebrows. “So he is making use of his All-Seeing Eyes to affect the bulls with a sequence containing his image that makes them see the balls of light he designed for him.”
“To him, seeing the mental structure of bulls is easy with his All-Seeing Eyes, so creating a magic sequence specifically affects them is possible,” Big D chuckled. “He cooked, alright. This also consumes way less Prana, but its effectiveness is deadly.”
Madam Ruby nodded.
“But that’s not all…” Big D’s eyes glinted.
“What do you mean?”
“Just watch.”
Meanwhile, Almond was walking leisurely as his ten balls of light under his control finished his master plan.
Half of the bulls were rushing from left to right, chasing five balls of light.
And the other half of the bulls were rushing from right to left, chasing the other five balls of light.
Almond continued walking as he saw both hordes approaching each other about to crash into each other soon and making his task of killing them as easy as waving his hand.
“Holy crap!”
“That dude… how did he do that?”
“These bulls shouldn’t be this stupid! They are just going mega crash!”
Madam Ruby also frowned. “These bulls still have a certain level of intelligence, so they shouldn’t be crashing like this. Can’t they see that?”
Big D laughed and said, “That brat robbed them of their reasons. Looks like he revived and refined his specialized class’ skills into abilities. Well, that’s obviously the first thing he did.”
*BOOM!*
The burning horns and charging powers of two groups of bulls smashed into each other, creating an infernal devastation.
Almond watched explosions and destruction going off, dumbfounded. “These damn bulls….they got quite an offensive power, alright.”
Expanding his domain briefly, Almond targeted the bulls that survived and destroyed their brains with small blades.
Almond’s rank instantly shot up to 18th in the leaderboard!
[Almond Crowshade]
-Points: 238
-Rank: 18th
– Tabs –
<Leaderboard>
<Item box>
‘Looks like bulls gave 2 points per kill, unlike the rabbits. Nice.’
…
“Master, what do you mean robbed of their reasons?” Madam Ruby curiously asked.
“He literally robbed certain attributes of their intelligence, and pairing it with mental interference-type magic makes it lethal. This is the power of his natural assets that Grimworld gave him, and he comprehended them—his specialized class. It’s quite powerful and has high potential if he can master its source. But for now, he can forcefully alter a person’s mental attributes, physical attributes, and everything he can see with his All-Seeing Eyes as long as his will is higher than the target. It’s a pure conceptual-based ability.”
“…” Madam Ruby looked at Almond on the screen, feeling speechless. “I told him I wasn’t interested in his boons from Grimworld Tutorial, but I suppose he wrestled away quite powerful assets from Grimworld.”
“It’s not his until he completely makes it his.” Big D narrowed his eyes. “His specialized class is half conceptual and half element. If he wants to make that class source his, he needs to comprehend both the conceptual part of his class and the elemental part.”
“The Elemental part is easy since he made a lot of progress in it thanks to some lucky encounters and him working hard in those opportunities, but the conceptual part will take time.”
Madam Ruby glanced at Big D and asked, “Does he know about the erosion?”
“He has time, no worries. I’m sure he will grasp everything before erosion hits him.”
Erosion was something all ascenders experienced after one year of leaving the first layer. They were given sources of power like classes from Grimworld itself based on their decisions, mindset, hard work, and other things, but those sources wouldn’t become theirs unless they made them.
Many ascenders fail to comprehend and make the sources their own, so they lose the power to wield the abilities that used the assets belonging to those sources after Grimworld’s erosion hits them and removes their sources.
No more freebies, no more easy lunch. If one wants something, one must fight for it. If one wants a resource significant to one’s progress, one must be prepared to die for it. This was the basic principle for the people at High-Mortal lifeform rank, and it became ruthless as one ranked up to higher lifeforms due to the harshness of acquiring resources for further power-ups.
…
Almond walked for three hours more and killed many monsters with trickery and power, keeping his consumption low and maintaining his pace of moving and killing monsters.
However, his rank went down gradually.
After a total of five hours in this event, he was at 47th rank and hadn’t moved from this rank in the past half an hour. Explore stories at My Virtual Library Empire
He also further refined some abilities and created some new ones while further mastering his main abilities.
Two more hours passed by, and Almond decided to sit and camp because he was hungry and wanted to rest a bit.
He took out his magic camp, lit up a fire, and started cooking meat from the monsters he killed.
‘My arsenal of abilities is looking nice.’ Almond smiled as he grabbed the bone and bit on the chunk of meat while looking at the list of his abilities.
‘Arbitrary Viper and Wyrm reached a new level in lethality after I added the Nano-blade mechanism as their foundational structure.’
Suddenly, Almond was surprised as the wristwatch beeped.
[Ability measurement function has been added by the higher authority.]
[Kiddo, survive these ten days and enrich your combat power. But if you want to enter the top 10, you’ll have to grasp the source of your primary class. Make it yours and win.]
Almond blinked. ‘Big D?’
Suddenly, a list of his abilities appeared, but with their Ability Power measured. However, only the ones he used in the past seven hours were measured.
[Destruction Blade Series]
-> Orb of Obliteration [Ability Power: A+]
-> Arbitrary Viper: Erasure Edge [Ability Power: A]
-> Arbitrary Wyrm: Dismantle Fang [Ability Power: A]
-> Voidblade Catastrophe [Ability Power: ?]
[Espada Ad Grimveil Series]
-> Espada Ad Grimveil [Ability Power: S+]
-> Spatial Displacement: Swap [Ability Power: A]
-> Spatial Transfer: Teleport [Ability Power: A]
-> Spatial Rend: Voidrift [Ability Power: ??]
-> Spatial Channels [Ability Power: B]
[Others]
-> Optical Illusion [Ability Power: C+]
-> Lumeir Lightning Flow [Ability Power: A+]
-> Divine Divider’s Harvest [Ability Power: S]
*Rustle…*
Suddenly, Almond heard something and immediately used his domain as he detected someone roughly fifty meters behind him.
“Come out! I can see you!”