"Fuck me." Cyrus groaned out loud at his options. "I knew it. The target audience of Hell difficulty are some incredible masochists."
He glanced at the description of Spirit-Severing Elixir, then at its absurd price, and finally visualized the few metaphorical coins and a couple of buttons in his digital wallet. For a second, he really considered putting this off to wait until he could afford the Elixir to get the [Blinded Sage]—it was very tempting, not just to escape pain but also to keep his eyes.
Who was Cyrus? He was a mortal crafted from Godhead, whatever that was. He was half-certain that his eyes or any of his body parts would turn out to be useful materials for something.
But he couldn't do that—he needed the 'trustworthy' ability of the aptitude to greet a certain unlucky Hero on his way.
"Hey, Ollow. Can I like borrow some Fate? Just two hundred, yeah?" He tried his luck, hoping to spare himself from the 'slow, excruciating dissolution of the eye'. The thought of his eyes exploding wasn't so pleasant either, but at least that would be quicker and cleaner.
"Byah. Ollow cannot. Ollow has no Fate. Worldy gives Fate. Ollow only records."
"Eh. Can you ask Worldy then?" Cyrus tried, though he already knew the answer. The World Will of Hollow Rift was most likely not as conscious as that of Sumiya.
"Worldly no hear. Worldy no talk." Ollow shook its head, confirming Cyrus's guess and crushing his fragile hope.
Cyrus could only sigh and accept his fate. "Fine, fine. Show me some painkillers and gauze then."
[ Complete Pain Shield: A full-body barrier that blocks nearly all pain for ten minutes, leaving senses clear and movement unhindered. (500 Fate) ]
[ Targeted Pain Shield: A focused ward that cuts off pain in a specific area for one hour without affecting the rest of the body. (250 Fate) ]
[ Pain duller: A mild, fast-acting tonic that softens sharp pain and discomfort for two hours. (100 Fate) ]
[ Common Numbing Herb: Dried leaves that, when chewed, lightly numb the body and make the mind fuzzy. (10 Fate) ]
[ Medicated Gauze: Sterile gauze soaked in a cheap antiseptic and soothing agent to reduce irritation and protect wounds. (10 Fate) ]
[ Clean strip of cloth: A simple, sanitized cloth suitable for bandaging or securing dressings. (5 Fate) ]
"Showing me things I can't afford. You're really making a poor man's heart ache, Ollow. What a heartless little bean you are..."
"Byah… Ollow sorry. Does Apostle Cyrus want to see only—"
"Nah~" Cyrus cut it short with a poke at its squishy cheek. "I'm just teasing yah, cute bean thing. Don't filter them out. I'll keep them in mind for later."
Cyrus considered for a while.
He only had one day before the Hero would be auto-summoned, so he decided to summon Yaoming. At this point, he still didn't know how to grind Fate or how long it would take him. Whether he had twenty-four hours or eight hours, the amount he could grind would depend on how rewarding the game was.
Even if he managed to scrape enough Fate, it'd be a shame to use it all up. The description of Weeping Ghost Sap read that there was no mortal danger apart from the pain.
Pain wasn’t a stranger to Cyrus. He could handle that.
Much reluctantly, Cyrus decided he could make do with what he had. "Guess the best I can do is the sap, numbing herb, gauze, and two cloths."
"Byak! Weeping Ghost Sap, Common Numbing Herb, Medicated Gauze, and two Clean strips of cloth. 280 Fate spent!" Ollow declared as a pile of items appeared within Cyrus's arms. "Thank you for your service, Apostle Cyrus!"
"Yeah, yeah. Give me a discount next time," Cyrus said with a wave as Ollow left, disappearing into thin air with a neat little spin. With the necessary items secured for his first task, the next course of action was to just do it.
"But...before that, I need to find a safe place first."
Despite Moshi's urgent exile, the night was rather young with the bright full moon still hanging overhead. Everywhere he looked was nothing but dark wood and leafy shadows, so he guessed he was probably in a forest near the starter village. Since it was a forest, there could unsurprisingly be beasts and other enemies that might attack him mid-eye-melting business.
And he totally wasn't trying to delay the deed to mentally prepare himself, or anything like that.
"Moshi, anywhere I could keep them?"
{ Master can toss anything inside His Moonglade Realm, including the mortal world's trinkets. As for a resting place, Moshi has scouted using the birds in the area and found a suitable cave nearby. If Master commands, Moshi can direct Master there. }
"Oh?" he said, thinking how to put his things inside the inventory with a fancy name. At that thought, the stuff in his arms disappeared, and a new screen emerged unprompted.
[ Moonglade Realm (14/15) ]
The screen only displayed the number of items, but he could sense exactly what items were inside. Nine cards and five items—the ten cards were technically an entire world, yet they all took a single inventory slot just like a piece of cloth did. Some game logic, that was.
But since only fourteen items were registered, did it mean Yaoming's world was a total goner? Yet still, somehow, for some reason, something inside him didn't quite believe that. Maybe that something was simply the manifestation of his guilt or denial of it. He shook his head. For now, it didn't matter either way.
"Thanks, and please," Cyrus agreed to Moshi's offer, and a very convenient arrow UI materialized in the air before him, pointing away from the stream. "But wait, you can scout?"
{ Moshi used Moshi's piercing eyes on the mortal world. As of now, Moshi and Master can only see about a quarter of this forest. As Master's mortal avatar grows stronger, the range will surely increase. }
[Crow Eyes] can also be used on the environment? From the description, he'd assumed it was just a simple appraisal skill that could be used on NPCs, but it turned out there was more to it.
With such a glaringly huge and bright arrow leading the way, it would take a lot of 'talent' for a player to actually get lost. Fortunately, Cyrus hadn't picked any Aptitude like that.
Without any special encounter, he quickly made it to a dark, empty cave that seemingly stretched endlessly from the entrance, with its walls and ceiling shrouded in deep shadow. When he entered, the cave was far smaller than it looked, but it was spacious enough to roll around and comfortably spend the night.
Now he was in a safe place, but not in the right mindset yet. Just now, his ignorance about how [Crow Eyes] worked had irked him a bit, and he wanted to check out the cultivation setting and all that.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
"I need to be totally prepared first before any eye gouging, right?" Cyrus snorted at his own persuasion. "Moshi, where did I put my, eh, cultivation manual? Could you also brief it back a bit? Just in case I forgot something."
{ Yes, Master. The name given to the cultivation technique is Path of Adherence. Master has played this human-thing called games before, and this cultivation is alike, or so Moshi was told. }
"Oh?" Cyrus hummed with a small grin on his face. So, Mo Tian, a god who had played games before, decided to gamify the cultivation.
{ Master simply needs to call for the cultivation script, Divine Ledger. }
He did exactly that, and a rectangular screen, bigger than the short notification screens he'd seen so far, unfolded before his eyes. And, oh boy, was it just like a game. It was undoubtedly a game's main menu screen, with a grid of two rows and three columns of square menu icons. Going in Z-order from the first item, the labels read:
Cyrus skimmed through them and briskly got himself familiar with the game functions and features.
Clicking Summoned Hero's Chronicle opened up to Heroic Quest and Hero Profile, the former allowing him to assign Quests to Heroes while the latter was just a Hero inventory listing. A collection of the profiles of all his Heroes, which was just himself and Yaoming at this moment. And this was also where he could apparently level up the Heroes, including himself.
Was this the so-called cultivation? Was he supposed to get stronger by just dumping level-up materials into himself? That, in his honest opinion, sounded...not very fun.
But the level-up button was grayed out, with a small text below it that read, No Enlightenment obtained yet. Maybe the fun cultivation part was in gathering the mats, the Enlightenment. The one way he could think of was meditation. It was a classic way cultivators attain enlightenment after all.
Making a mental note to try that out after things had settled down, Cyrus exited until he was back at the main screen. He clicked on the other sections, only to find out that most of them were empty with a blank screen where a text basically said he hadn't accomplished anything yet to be displayed—all but the Mortal Vassal Reformations screen.
Cyrus rubbed his smooth chin, somewhat unused to the sensation of being clean of stubble, at the skill tree on the screen that emerged after entering the Reform page.
On the left of the horizontally expanding skill tree was a vertical text that read, Hunting Blade, his mortal skill that was marked as the foundational skill. The skill tree only had six nodes with seemingly no way to unlock more at the moment.
"I guess I have to level first?" Cyrus mused as he went through the starting skill nodes one by one.
A movement skill that apparently muted his footsteps, one simple dodging skill that was as good as nothing since he imagined he could dodge even without having the skill for one, along with two normal attacks that were scaled with his ATK.
What caught his eye was a charged attack that halved the enemy's HP at a strike. It would have been totally OP if the damage done hadn't been capped at 1000 HP. Even then, he imagined it was still overpowered against a weaker enemy early on. The game didn't want the player to die in the starter forest after all.
The last skill was a special skill, one that seemed to also be there to help him keep his life. A foresight skill that would apparently warn him about incoming attacks.
He familiarized himself with the skills for a bit, but the best way to know what they did was to just do them.
Having now checked out everything on the game menu—I mean, Divine Ledger—Cyrus noticed that there were no meta elements such as visual or audio settings. No adjustment for performance. No help, no in-game support system, or anything like that. More worryingly, there wasn't even a logout option. He was stuck here, and the only way out that he knew, if he ever wanted to log out before the end of the first dive, was to somehow die as a god or damage his soul beyond repair.
"Talk about immersive," Cyrus sneered.
It felt a bit extreme, but what did he know? He was no game developer to understand what in those special creatures' brains thought this was a good idea. Another thing that actually did concern him was the lack of a wishing menu. Why the heck was there no obvious way to navigate to the wishing screen? This was a goddam Gacha game, wasn't it?
So, he was a bit pissed when he asked the only form of customer support. "Moshi, where or how do I summon more Heroes again?"
{ Master will have to briefly leave the mortal plane to summon more Heroes beyond the Sun. Moshi will arrange it for Master within twelve mortal hours whenever Master wishes to do so. }
Ha. So it takes half a day for the wishing screen to load. Just great. Does the game not want money from players on Hell mode? The trap of Gacha games was to have players do impulsive pulls and impulse-purchases. He doubted that the developers weren’t aware of that, so this was clearly intentional.
"How much Faith do I need for a ten-pull again? Can I do a single summon at a time, too? How does that 'only keep one Hero' thing work?" Cyrus continued to throw out questions since the game just apparently couldn't tell him in detailed paragraphs.
{ Master can summon however many Heroes Master wishes to at a time, and the summon will cost 280 Faith each for the Heroes, with the additional 200 Faith required to cross Taan River. Master can choose one Hero from every ten Heroes. If one had already been chosen, the newer summons from the remaining of the ten will automatically require Faith to be redeemed. }
That meant that mass summons were more cost-effective. Cyrus nodded. "What if I don't pay to cross the Taan River?" he asked, wondering if he could evade the tax for doing so.
{ Hero Summon searches for all mortal myriad races of the multiverse whose will shines enough to draw Master's attention. Say Master answered ten of such wills, and the price for crossing the Taan River hasn't been paid. In those ten summons, if three had been from beyond the River, then Master would only receive seven Heroes as a result. }
Yeah, no, fuck that, and take my 200 Faith. Cyrus let out a grunt of unhappy acknowledgement.
But what if he only sourced the Heroes locally and answered only those in his own universe? Though this reminded him that both his higher rarity Heroes in the first summon had been from Weaving Swarm, not Taan River. The sample size was only one, but his last ten pulls seemingly pointed toward outer Heroes being stronger. Were all native Heroes shitty?
That thought, in turn, brought about another aspect of a Gacha game. The Gacha pool. Was it all mixed into a single pool? Or did the game have separate banners, which would be universes in this case, that he could pull from?
Cyrus had a lot of questions, and Moshi seemed idle enough, so he went through them one by one with his Archon.
And it turned out there were indeed separate pools. He could either do a mixed summon as he did for the first ten-pull or a targeted summon.
The benefit of doing a mixed summon, according to Moshi, was that he would automatically be picking the strongest Heroes from all the multiverses, and the minimum total stars rating of a ten-pull was promised to be twenty. The targeted pull, however, only cherry-picked the strongest from the targeted universe. Since the pool was smaller this way, the estimated total stars of a ten-pull was only seventeen at his worst luck.
This was basically the game's pity system. He had one 5-Star, one 3-Star, four 2-Star, and four 1-Star from the last ten pulls. And it totaled up to exactly twenty as promised. Though now the pull didn't seem good since he basically got the bare minimum. Moshi said they didn't know what the upper limit was. So for better or worse, Cyrus didn't know how much he was missing out exactly, but he doubted it was anything crazy like sixty.
On another note, Moshi assured him that Weaving Swarm didn't necessarily have stronger Heroes, only that the strongest Heroes at the moment of that last summons happened to be from Weaving Swarm, and it might not be the same next time he did the summoning.
He was still a bit conflicted on whether he wanted to pull from the Taan River pool and risk getting lower rarity Heroes to save 200 Faith or not. Since it was cheaper, his gut feeling was telling him the game would punish him for that.
Regardless, he would never be happy about throwing away 200 Faith. He didn't know how hard it'd be to earn Faith, but he had a feeling it wouldn't be so easy, at least during the early-game. Easy or not, every single drop mattered to him. The past four months had changed a man. Cyrus had always been stingy and a bit of a hoarder. The recent unemployment status, however, had reminded him of the value of a penny, and this had doubled, or maybe even tripled, his stinginess.
If he did outsource, the game actively encouraged the player to pull in bulk. Cyrus decided it was best to do at least ten per pull and wait even longer if he could, but he wouldn't make any promises on the last part.
He wanted more Heroes, dammit. The wishing experience itself, with all its flashbangs, wasn't all that pleasant, but he was willing to endure all hardship to have his itches scratched in a way only a shiny wishing screen could.
As a Gacha addict who had done his dailies during inconvenient times—on his wrecked and barely functioning phone while he was bleeding out, waiting for rescue, to give an example—just so he could afford to pull for almost every character he wanted without ever paying for shitty cooperate companies like Etercon, he really wasn't confident in his ability to wisely save his Faith. Not at all. He was merely a man, and his willpower wasn't that strong.
Plus, if I just keep saving and saving, I might end up dead for not having enough Heroes to do world-saving before I could ever pull.
So, ten-pull seemed like a good compromise. Twenty pull would be better cost-wise, but he also needed to use his Faith on other things like redeeming the Heroes he already had, and gathering 5800 Faith might take him for who knew how long.
And now, it was time for what was perhaps the most important question of the game.
"So, how do I gather Faith again?"
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