Blacksmith vs. the System

I left the dungeon with another cart, accompanied by five hundred farmers and ten guards who were about to join the operation. Part of the cart was filled with the crossbows Maria had purchased for me.

Unlike what she had thought, I wasn't particularly disappointed with the situation. While I welcomed the extra income the expanded hunting operation might grant me, at this point, I could leave the dungeon naked, and I would still consider the expedition to be a huge success.

At this point, Maria needed it far more than I did, meaning she had to be the one to visit the various towns and purchase crossbows. And if I needed it … I could always try to figure out a way to create a composite bow.

My Skills didn't include woodwork, but that didn't mean that I had to stay incapable of it. All I needed was to figure out how to make a half-decent bow part out of wood, and the rest could be made entirely of metal.

As for bowstrings, purchasing them was still viable. The guilds might purchase all crossbows around the nearby towns to pressure Maria, but purchasing all of the bowstrings was a move of a completely different scale.

Of course, the cart didn't only contain the crossbows, but also several sealed empty boxes. The gold Maria had brought wasn't a part of it, as I decided to just turn it into a thick plate and wear it under my armor. Considering its importance, I didn't want to take any risks.

It was possible, while three hundred pounds of gold sounded incredible, from a pure volume perspective, it wasn't too much. If liquified, it would be around one and a half gallons. It was heavy, but my Strength allowed me to carry it easily.

Admittedly, once I arrived at the dungeon, it proved to be an unnecessary precaution, but better safe than sorry. I led the crowd to our outpost, which had grown even more in my absence. "Sir," Harold greeted, followed by a quick summary of the operation.

The performance was decent enough. I could identify several points that I might have done differently, but I ignored the temptation of turning into a micromanager and let him deal with those details, only adding a few strategic commands, both in terms of how to handle the old operation, and how to expand the new ones.

"Should we expand to the second floor?" he asked.

"Not yet. But, make sure to identify the best performers, and let them join the guild directly. Twenty of them for now," I said, and passed Harold twenty Rare Nurture skills.

"We're trying for the class upgrade, sir?" he said without any prompting.

"Yes," I said, unable to help but sigh, realizing that it was not a feature that was particularly hidden like I had first assumed, at least, not three years after the Cataclysm. It was probably a bigger secret when I still had the money. "Just make sure to pick good candidates. Calm, smart, ambitious but not too ambitious. Most importantly, smart enough to keep their mouths shut about secrets."

"Perfect foot soldiers, I got it," Harold said.

I nodded. After all, he wasn't wrong. While I had no intention of letting the ones Harold picked learn my true secrets — even Maria and Eleanor wouldn't be able to touch house secrets, let alone Harold or the people he picked — letting them operate on the second floor already required revealing some secrets that were best kept under wraps.

I didn't expect those secrets to be kept away successfully. Even without magical means like a camouflage ring, there were too many ways to dig out secrets, including simple bribery.

However, there was a difference between an ambitious recruit selling secrets for several gold coins, and an arrogant one bragging to everyone after a night of drinking. I couldn't prevent the former, but the latter was easier to deal with.

"Excellent. Make sure to work them hard. Tomorrow, we'll start building an outpost on the second floor," I told him.

With that, I left him to organize the operators while I immediately rushed to the fourth floor. The first thing I did was to remove all the gold from my armor, and place it into the forge. It was tempting to start working on forging gold items immediately, but I turned my attention to the poison refinement setup.

With some poisonous mix already gathered on the sixth tray, I had an easy way to push Nurture to the limit. It merely took half an hour, and the poison at the fifth tray had been enough. All I needed was to repeatedly poison and cure a tree.

[Nurture (Rare) 196 - 200]

[Perk Options — Bountiful Growth / Efficient Harvest / Lingering Tend]

I picked Bountiful Growth, spending a few minutes to test its effect. It helped me to grow the trees far faster.

Too bad I didn't even begin to understand how it affected the original setup. And, without understanding, I couldn't reverse engineer it. A great loss. I might have done so if I had a few months to delve deep into the secrets of Nurture.

Unfortunately, that was simply not an option.

Instead, I pulled one of the skill stones I couldn't have deciphered before, and smiled at the notification.

[Skill Stone: Nurture (Epic)]

I absorbed it. What followed was not exactly pleasant. I had absorbed many different external skills, which gave me a general sense of what to expect. However, the sensation of absorbing an Epic skill was still more unpleasant than I had expected.

[Nurture (Rare) 200 - Nurture (Epic) 1]

However, the reward was worth it. "Let's try it," I said even as I moved toward a tree that was completely grown and touched its bark, trying to use only one point of Health, wanting to understand the differences.

[-5 Health]

To my surprise, I wasn't able to use one Health. A few more attempts showed that the least I could use had turned to five health, and it only increased in multiples of five.

That was not the only difference. The Health, for the lack of a better term, felt different. In a way, it was similar to how Vitality attacks had changed the form of the Health, but instead of turning solid and sharp, it transformed almost the opposite manner, soft and docile.

The difference was interesting. The impact, however…

"Incredible," I gasped even as I watched the tree grow after one continuous burst of Health.

[Nurture (Epic) 1 - 14]

Due to the poisonous nature of the environment, I wasn't expecting to succeed at growing anything before I visited the third floor and pushed the skill to a certain, high level. To my surprise, it worked better than I had expected.

Some more practice with Health showed that I could still use the old form of Health for Nurture, but it had no effect on improvement.

I raised several trees. The effectiveness of the skill had grown further, and I slowly lost the necessity to improve the amount of Health I used by multiples of five, but I was still unable to drop it lower. Even more surprising, the growth of the skill had stalled barely at its forties. And, even after I had started using the six different intensities of poison I had collected, I wasn't able to reach a hundred.

[Nurture (Epic) - 92]

However, that inability didn't mean failure. Even with Epic Nurture barely below one hundred, I was able to grow trees effortlessly, both in terms of time, and in terms of Health required. Epic Nurture was more effective when dealing with the corrupting influence of the poison water, meaning the trees could grow far more cheaply without being restricted by the swamp, allowing me to explore the region faster.

However, it wasn't the only benefit I had derived from my Epic skill. While Rare attack skills had various Health-based special moves, they all worked in similar manners. Epic Nurture allowed me to work with Health in a completely different manner.

After an hour of practice, I was able to create that denser variant of Health more smoothly, and it had some interesting implications, particularly for Fleeting Step. Some experimentation later, I was able to create a variant that allowed me to move smoother.

When using the softer variant of Health, the movement wasn't as fast, but it was far more flexible. With those benefits combined, it was obviously the correct decision to improve Nurture.

Too bad I couldn't improve my other skills to Epic before I reached level fifty, which was why I hadn't focused on hunting beasts for Epic skills. Even with my skills maximized, I still needed a hundred points in my stats to be able to absorb Epic skills.

But, with the prospect of my class tempting me, I decided not to hurry up when it came to leveling up.

Not before I pushed Forge to Epic level.

Or, maybe more.