I looked around. Alya wasn’t anywhere to be found, which could be good or bad.
“I’m tired of this bullshit, Bikrmorr. Say what you want to say, I got places to be.”
No way I was going to give them even an ounce of ground. The only one who could threaten me here was Brick, and he wasn’t going to lose his class and skills just for petty revenge. The others could try to attack me, I would like to see how that was going to pan out.
“Human Elias,” he said while shaking his giant head, “I came here as representative of my superiors. Today you have made an enemy of the company, and while we can’t act legally through the System, we won’t forget. You will find your end as soon as the tutorial ends, of that you can be certain.”
I looked at him, then at all of them.
“Yes, ok, are you done?”
I already expected something like this, but if these morons couldn’t kill me now, by the end of the tutorial I for sure wouldn’t be an easy target. Even Vix said that I would be able to take on the big guy here, but I believed that Vix underestimated me quite a bit.
“Hey, just out of curiosity, how powerful are you within your organization? You know, usually in companies like yours, it’s not raw talent that gains the good positions, but connections and nepotism. After the stunt of tonight, I have the feeling that whoever orchestrated it is not more powerful than you. Actually, I believe they are quite weaker.”
His stony expression didn’t let anything slip, but the guards were another matter. Some looked at each other in surprise. In my accelerated perception, their reaction didn’t escape me.
I continued.
“And I believe so for the simple reason that they didn’t order you directly to perform the act, because they most probably couldn’t. Anyway, that move reeked of pettiness and weakness, but most of all of stupidity. Tell whoever decided to sacrifice that poor sod that if they ever cross paths with me in the future, I’d make them pay for the murder attempt.”
Bikrmorr stared at me for a long while.
“I said what I had to, and I will pass along your words, but on a personal note: the Lugan Company is much bigger and has a farther reach than you can possibly understand. Run if you want to save your life, Human Elias. This is goodbye.”
Then he turned and walked away. Some of the guards dutifully followed after him while others launched scathing looks at me.
Not that I cared.
They demonstrated themselves inept. I had no doubt that the company was a great power in the multiverse, but I was intent on exiting the tutorial strong enough to contend with them, and more.
I would not serve my world on a silver platter. Whoever came to try us, they’d find out that humans were not to be underestimated.
I adjusted the strap on my backpack and made for the shop. There were some necessary items I’d have to buy.
As I entered the shop I found it void of the usual ugly mug of the merchant.
Better. Last thing I needed was for him to nag me about last time.
I tried to sell the eggs and the crystals, alongside the core of the Venomfall Serpent. The eggs were not available for selling, something about it being impossible to sell lifeforms to the shop, a pity in a way, while for the other items I got offered nearly half a million.
It was a lot, but I refrained. The lack of any description made knowing anything about them really hard, but I had an idea.
I knew that the eggs belonged to the serpent, and I knew the name, or the species, so I searched for them in the shop, for the core and for the crystallized venom.
What I found wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but maybe it would be worth exploring some possibilities.
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[Venomfall Serpent Rearing Manual] – 3800 TPA weathered, scale-bound booklet teaching foundational knowledge on breeding, feeding, and controlling Venomfall Serpents.
[Venomfall Alchemy Primer: Eggs & Cores] – 4600 TPA meticulously illustrated manual teaching safe extraction and usage of Venomfall Serpent eggs and cores. Contains recipes for toxins, elixirs, and enhancement catalysts.
[Venomfall Grimoire: Aberrations] – 7200 TPA forbidden tome detailing methods of forced evolution and accelerated breeding of Venomfall Serpents, drastically increasing their lethality and mutation potential. Enables the creation of aberrant variants with unpredictable abilities.
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I bought the first two.
The points would have fazed me before, but were quite negligible now.
I started skimming the booklets. While accelerating my perception I managed to finish them in no time.
My head, though, was starting to throb quite hard.
I abused the ability today, and I would pay the price it seemed. Maybe a bit of life-force would fix the problem?
No, it didn’t.
But it’s not like I was planning on going into another deadly fight anytime soon.
For now, I started buying some necessities as I thought about my findings.
One, I could raise the serpents as my pets, or familiars.
Apparently the black egg was a kind of mutation. It shouldn’t be that color, which could be good or bad. That would be a wildcard.
In any case it would take time and effort.
The serpents were known for their acidic poison, capable of melting both magical and non-magical materials. They had the innate ability to create that cloud of acid rain that nearly melted through all my aura, so they would be strong pets to have, that was for sure, but they would require some binding skill or items.
I was thinking that I could condition them with Veiled Marionette from now. They would be a really long-term project though. It would take months or years to make them powerful enough to matter.
That was in normal conditions.
Here in the tutorial, it was another matter.
The thing that was more interesting to me was that they absorbed what they got fed during the first meal to empower themselves. The crystals and the cores would serve as perfect nourishment to enhance their constitution.
That was the most vanilla option. Get two pets and grow them. In here they could become quite fierce, even rival their parents in a short time.
The other option, though… was to consume them.
It wasn’t as simple as my omelette idea.
There were processes to follow, reagents and equipment to buy to refine their essence and basically create an elixir.
It would grant whoever consumed it, if they survived the consumption, which was a clear possibility listed in the booklet, a kind of magical resistance to venoms and acids both magical and not, while at the same time granting a number of stats and possibly causing mutations in one’s genome, a slight one-in-five chance, the book said.
Yeah, that was not happening.
I wasn’t going to lose my nose for being able to resist poisons better.
I would prefer to avoid getting poisoned at all.
It would work exceptionally well for someone with a serpentine or draconic bloodline already, but I didn’t have that.
Actually I totally didn’t have one.
Actually I should give some bloodlines a look…
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[Abyss-Touched Bloodline: Vein of the Hollow King] – 1,200,000 TPA sealed obsidian vial containing a slow-moving, lightless fluid. Staring at it too long creates the unsettling sensation that something is staring back from within your own reflection. Its label is etched, not written.Effect: Grants immense amplification of shadow-affinity abilities. Allows partial intangibility and resistance to physical damage.Curse: Hollowing — Gradual erosion of emotions and identity. Potentially resulting in total loss of self, leaving the body as a vessel for abyssal influence.
[Fae-Touched Bloodline: Inheritance of the Thorn Court] – 1,360,000 TPA delicate glass ampoule filled with iridescent green fluid, within which tiny thorn-like shapes drift and grow. It hums with playful but unsettling energy.Effect: Grants powerful nature magic, rapid regeneration, and the ability to manipulate flora. Enhances charm and illusion capabilities.Curse: Fae Compulsion — The user becomes bound by archaic rules of promise and word. Breaking spoken agreements results in severe backlash, including physical harm or loss of power.
[Celestial Bloodline: Descent of the Seraphim] – 1,650,000 TPA radiant vial of golden-white blood that emits soft warmth and faint choral echoes. It feels… judging.Effect: Grants flight, radiant energy manipulation, and powerful healing abilities. Greatly enhances resistance to corruption and darkness.Curse: Judgment Flame — The user is compelled toward the rigid moral alignment of the heavens. Acting against the Doctrine inflicts searing internal damage and permanent loss of power.
[Mythic Bloodline: Star Elf Covenant of the Hollow Astral Court] – 3,200,000 TPA floating crystal vial filled with miniature constellations slowly rearranging themselves, forming maps that do not correspond to any known sky.Effect: Grants increased mastery over spatial magic, including short-range teleportation, dimensional folding, spatial barriers, and star-linked navigation. The user can “fold distance” to make impossible paths traversable and anchor points across space for rapid traversal. The ability to perform complex calculations is greatly enhanced.Curse: Astral Displacement — The user’s existence gradually desynchronizes from fixed space. Their position becomes increasingly unrecordable, making targeting, healing, perception, and memory of them unreliable. Over time, space forcibly “corrects” their existence, repeatedly deleting and rewriting parts of their body and presence until stable continuity becomes impossible.
[Cursed Bloodline: Fallen Stormbearer] – 2,750,000 TPA fractured obsidian vial filled with jagged strands of violet-black lightning. The lightning does not idle. It waits.Effect: Inherits storm authority, granting control over cursed lightning that bypasses conventional defenses and directly disrupts both physical form and internal energy flow. Each strike leaves lingering scars that amplify future damage. Greatly enhances speed, reflexes, and combat acceleration through forced neural overclocking.Curse: Aura Consumption — The lightning feeds on the user’s own aura as fuel for manifestation. Each use drains life force and internal energy directly, bypassing normal recovery. As usage increases, the body begins to suffer cumulative degradation that persists even after fully recovering. Severe overuse results in the lightning anchoring itself to damaged pathways, causing permanent pain whenever power is invoked.
[Eldritch Bloodline: Spawn of the Crawling Void] – 2,900,000 TPA writhing, sealed container that occasionally bulges from the inside, as if something is trying to find its right shape. The “blood” behaves more like a living mass than a liquid.Effect: Grants shapeshifting, elasticity, and resistance to physical damage. The body can contort, expand, or divide to avoid attacks or adapt to environments.Warning: The user’s physical identity becomes fluid. Maintaining a consistent humanoid form requires focus, and loss of control may result in monstrous transformation or loss of individuality.
[Great Being Bloodline: Ember of the Star Devourer] – 3,100,000 TPA radiant, burning vial containing a miniature, contained flare that pulses like a heartbeat. It radiates both warmth and hunger.Effect: Grants immense energy absorption and conversion, allowing the user to consume magic, heat, or even attacks to fuel their own power. Capable of unleashing devastating, star-like bursts of energy.Adverse Effect: The user develops an insatiable hunger for energy. Starvation results in rapid weakening and eventual self-consumption, where the body begins to burn itself as fuel.
[Great Being Bloodline: Vessel of the Drowned Oracle] – 2,750,000 TPA pressurized, deep-sea blue vial that hums with distant, whale-like echoes. The liquid inside moves like a tide responding to an unseen moon.Effect: Grants prophetic glimpses, water domination, and the ability to interpret fragmented futures. Enhances decision-making through probabilistic foresight.Adverse Effect: The user becomes burdened with overlapping visions of possible futures. Distinguishing reality from potential outcomes grows increasingly difficult until the current self and the possible futures intermix, causing loss of identity and fractured memories.
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I looked through some of the most powerful and pricey cursed bloodlines.
Some of these weren’t even cursed for real, it was just the “normal” state of how these entities lived.
These were actually way worse than any curse I had, and I had a feeling that it wasn’t possible to remove the curse with a skill…
I re-read some descriptions.
Yeah, no.
They were undoubtedly powerful, but not without cost, and not within my budget. Despite costing one tenth of an uncorrupted, non-cursed bloodline, those were absolutely bonkers.
But I noted something interesting.
Cursed lightning seemed to function similarly to my Hexer’s Touch trait. Maybe I should consider it for the future… if I ever needed it.
Instead I started selling back the items I didn’t need from the ones I removed the curse from yesterday.
It didn’t work.
Figures.
Sorry Quinn, no money glitch here, man.
It would have been too good to be true.
The message stated that any item purchased from the shop wasn’t refundable. Apparently even removing the curses on them wasn’t enough.
I put the booklets back into my satchel along with some more amenities and dinner, then went out to find Rhea’s tent again.
Without flying I would have to run into the forest again.
I couldn’t wait for a good night of sleep.
Today had been intense, and my headache wasn’t settling down.