Novice Reincarnator

I wanted to change. That desire had led me to begin diving into dungeons at night. When an explorer hit max level, they were given three options.

An explorer could try to ascend to a higher level. Ascension would increase an explorer's level cap and talent at the cost of resetting their level to 1. Nearly everyone with a Common talent succeeded in ascending to an Uncommon talent, but it grew harder to ascend the higher the talent was.

If an explorer wasn’t happy with their current life, they could choose to reincarnate when they hit max level. Like the first reincarnation, reincarnating at max level reset everything about an explorer. Appearance, Personal Skills, Race, and even Class were all subject to change.

My immediate goal was to hit max level and reincarnate as a human male. Not only would my shameful skills be wiped away, but it would also allow me to regain my cherished manhood. Something like reincarnating as a demon girl was a freak accident that would never happen again.

The third thing an explorer could do when they hit max level was of course, to do nothing. They would neither advance nor regress. In fact, most explorers that hit max level with Rare or Epic talents were in this bucket. They couldn’t ascend to a higher talent even if they wanted to.

The night after I contracted Lime, I found myself back in the third floor of the Slime Corridor dungeon. I initially wanted to enter the Goblin Nest dungeon to rapidly level up, but as I thought, it was better to get more combat experience under my belt in a relatively safe environment before I entered a place that could kill me.

It wasn’t long until I gained a level from killing soccer ball sized slimes, putting me at level 4 of 10. The third floor suddenly became a lot less efficient to level up in, but I didn’t immediately move to the fourth floor.

Instead, I worked on expanding my tactics against slimes. I wouldn’t always be able to dodge a slime’s attack and leisurely attack back in the ensuing opening. My body could take more punishment now that my level had gone up.

I practiced turning head-on collisions into glancing ones as well as trying to parry or block slime attacks. Since my goal wasn’t to defeat slimes, each battle dragged out far longer than usual. A transparent, blue text box appeared in the corner of my vision in the middle of one such battle.

White: Good evening.

“Oof!”

I was so surprised by its appearance that I lost track of where I was and ate a nasty body slam into my stomach. The thin layer of my contracted slime underneath my clothing did a good job of dispelling a portion of the impact, but I still took a rather heavy blow in an unguarded state.

I quickly killed the slime and returned my attention to the blue text box. According to the delivery notes, there was 1 person watching my broadcast. Someone saw my embarrassing failure.

“Ahaha. Good evening, White.”

My cheeks were on fire from embarrassment. I waited for a while, but there was no response to my words. The person, White, was still watching me, but they didn’t seem to have any intention of continuing the conversation further.

I held no interest in trying to stop White from leaving, so I remained silent as well. I only broadcasted my exploration because the school required me to.

I rested on a rock and recovered my stamina, hoping that my newest viewer would leave. Unfortunately, I had no luck. I resumed my trek through the third floor until I found the next slime.

Blunt attacks had little to no effect on slimes, making them the perfect punching bags. My knives remained in their sheathes as I punched and kicked the soccer ball sized slime around the corridor. The slime remained adamant in its mission to kill me. Even if it looked like a soccer ball, that didn’t stop it from bouncing off the wall at an odd angle in an attempt to catch me by surprise.

The class that every Common talent started with, Novice, began to show its true worth under my efforts. The Novice class accelerated a person’s ability to acquire experience and learn new things, but only up to the Novice level. It did absolutely nothing for people who had learned an ability past the Novice level.

My class took me from an amateur who had never thrown a punch to a Novice that had some semblance of form in my movements. My rapid improvements in such a short period of time was practically unheard of for someone as untalented as me, especially when you factored into the equation that I did not have any guidance on what I was doing.

I was hooked once I realized the value of being able to rapidly learn new things. It didn’t matter if it was only at the Novice level. The range of actions I could take would rapidly increase with each new thing I learned.

The possibilities were endless. I treated my hand as a sword and tried slashing slimes with a hand sword. Later, I even closed my eyes and practiced minimizing the damage I took and reacting to surprise attacks.

The strangest thing that came out of my practice was that I gained a vague sense of where the slime was even when my eyes were closed. Presence sense abilities were commonly found in Uncommon or Rare classes dedicated to detection, but I gained the weakest possible version of it as a mere Novice.

I quickly finished off the slime and pondered my thoughts out loud.

“Strange, was Novice really this strong?”

White: A Novice is a versatile class that can do a bit of everything, but will never excel in anything.

A blue text box suddenly reminded me of my 1 watcher. To be honest, I had kinda forgotten White was still present with how silent they had been.

“That makes sense. The Novice class is a lot stronger than I thought. Perhaps the only reason I haven’t heard anything about it is because only Common talent explorers have it.”

White: The Novice Club is a club dedicated to exploring the full potential of the class. You should join them if you wish to seriously pursue strength as an explorer.

I smiled bitterly at White’s message. No matter how strong the Novice class was, I held no illusion that it would make me a strong existence. While a system existed to allow those with lower talents to become stronger by ascending at max level, there was a hidden demerit.

A Common talent explorer who ascended to reach an Uncommon talent would always be weaker than someone who was born with an Uncommon talent. This difference grew even more noticeable the further you climbed the talent wall.

Regardless of whether you looked at my race or talent, I was at the very bottom. The critical elements that could make me an excellent explorer were absent.

Cecilia Snowlight and Leohart Maxwell were two Legendary existences that would remain forever out of my reach.

“White, do you have any recommendations on what I should do if I want to become strong?”

White: Get to level 6 in this dungeon, then reach level 10 in Goblin Nest. After that, go around the various dungeons on campus and collect as many contracted monsters as possible. Even if your max level is 10, that doesn’t mean your contracted monsters share the same limit.

“I see. I was rather unhappy when I reincarnated as a Hornless Demon, but this race has its own merits after all.”

Demons were an incredibly rare existence on their own. There couldn’t be too many Novice Demons out there.

White: If you don’t mind me asking, are you a boy or a girl?

“Eh? You really can’t tell, White? I thought it was obvious at a glance. Well… how about I leave the answer to your question up to your imagination.”

My response must have angered White because they didn’t speak up once for the rest of the time I spent in Slime Corridor. To be honest, I really wanted White to leave when I said those words.

My [Weak Bladder] was starting to take its toll. In the end, I had use the 5 minute blackout window to take care of business. I took my humiliation out on every slime that crossed paths with me for the rest of the night and eventually leveled up to 5.

One night later, I reached level 6 in Slime Corridor under White’s silent companionship. With White’s requirements out of the way, I was ready to enter the Goblin Nest dungeon and max out my level.