On the first sheet of paper Jason picks up, his starting stats are written across the top. 284 Strength, 251 Toughness, and 232 Agility. Across from that are two numbers: 107 and 395.
Those two numbers represent the average number of total stat points a person will have earned at the 3rd and 4th bottleneck, level 24 and 49. With Jason’s current level of 43, he was closer to the one than the other and already beat out the points for 395. After all, his three stats at the time added together equalled 767. Not quite twice the total.
Except that was the average. That was the number for someone who just took the default stat gain and didn’t do anything with it. Plus, it was spread over three stats. Sure, most people did a two to one with two stats. But across all three? Besides, mono-stating wasn’t rare among teams. A tank who only put points into toughness would have almost twice Jason’s.
On top of that, they would have equipment boosting their stats. Jason’s core skill was negating 84 points of stat boost individually from his gear. Thankfully, this didn’t affect his integrated parts.
Jason sighed as he looked at a series of numbers under his own.
[
284, 251, 232 (767)
---
600, 21, 300 (921)
33, 1000, 10 (1043)
253, 9, 741 (1003)
1200, 84, 91 (1375)
538, 384, 291 (1213)
]
Comparison really is the thief of joy. Those were five of the known stat lines for up and coming rich kids. Showing off to the world and really driving home that money is still a superpower. Worse? Any number under 100 was going to be a stat they didn’t put points in. So yeah, the second to last guy was also a training freak.
Oh, and this was all pre-equipment. Because as stupid and fame-seeking as they might be? They aren’t going to share the stat line of their gear.
And of course, these weren’t likely to be the strongest up-and-coming sorts. Sure, compared to the baseline, they’re at two and a third to three and a half times more stats. But Jason isn’t the only one raising his stats outside of the point paradigm. Divine blessings, Royal quest rewards, and more can all tack on an extra hundred or more points at this level.
Admittedly, Jason suspects that the high end is likely only around four times the baseline. Not because others don’t have more potential, but because they sacrificed their speed of advancement for stats instead of just pushing basic stat point gain to the max. Courtney had managed to dig up that quite a lot can be done if you trade stat points for direct boosts to a stat per level.
Jason sighs and sets the paper to the side. It wasn’t entirely fair to compare himself to them. Even braggadocious idiots tended to only share their stats at specific break points, thus suspiciously round numbers, or right before they break through a bottleneck. After all, even a normal adventurer goes from getting 12 points a level to 18 when they hit level 50 and presumably those with the silver spoon treatment have an even greater increase.
Jason picks up the next piece of paper and grimaces. He, uh, hadn’t actually kept as good of a record as he should have. Hindsight and all that. So yeah, it was basically just a sheet with his starting stats across the top and a bunch of ‘+1’, ‘+2’, and maybe two ‘+3’s scribbled down the paper with the occasional date marked out.
Quite rough, especially since he didn’t record every date properly. Still, Jason knew that to start he was gaining stats daily for the first bit, before it tapered off. Oh, with the occasional burst of gains when he figured out a new way to train something at the quarry.
Though in the end, those points added up to his new stat line. 357 Strength, 312 Toughness, and 312 Agility. Not quite breaking a K total, gaining 73 Strength, 61 Toughness, and 80 Agility for a total of 214 points. Still none of the stars are starred, though. Something Jason is quite thankful for.
It would suck for the System to so openly declare his “potential” was below all but the one guy who was clearly holding back his stat points to have a clean 600 Strength to 300 Agility. Yeah, that guy likely had a lot more saved up, but not quite enough to get a clean 800, 400. So still likely greater than him as of now.
Jason slumped back in his chair, thankfully he had a path forward now. His stat gains had been going down and trying to punch the blocks down to size was simply one of his attempts to counteract that. Now, though, not only was his concepts a clear path to improvement, looking back at his status had cleared his mind.
The basic stats were all about Ascendance. It said so right on the status itself!
☆Strength 357 ( 353[Base] + 4[Ascendance] )
Straightforward and simple. More than that, though, the help didn’t need to be direct. Moving the blocks had already been almost a moving meditation. Now? It can be a proper meditation session focused on Ascending the quality of his body.
Jason smiled, this was going to hurt, but that just came with working out sometimes.
And while he is focusing on such interesting thoughts, Rosha and Courtney are in the other room, coincidentally also about to move onto a new stage of their downtime.
Rosha stretches, “I’ll keep it up, but my exercise routine has fixed all the low-hanging fruit when it comes to purifying my Mana.”
Courtney nods, “And a couple weeks ago I got a lead.”
Rosha frowns, “A couple weeks? You should have told me!”
Courtney shrugs, “It would keep. We waited till we got to this city. Finally getting around to using all the odds and ends we collected to produce some accessories wasn’t on some kind of time limit.”