By the time Kael finished inheriting the Elven God bloodline, it was already past nine at night.
He didn't rush off to level. Instead, he logged out and got some rest.
He didn't see the chaos online until the next morning. After taking Lila's suggestion and posting his attribute sheet, he stopped paying attention to the trash talk altogether.
Right now, only one thing mattered.
Leveling.
Kael left the observation platform and headed for the Teleport Nexus on the first floor.
The players in Starbough Village were still arguing about his fall from the level rankings.
"You think that screenshot online is real?"
"Which one? Dawnbreaker's level-0 stat sheet?"
"Yeah. Looks photoshopped to me."
"Honestly, I don't buy it either. Ascendant and Mythic gear might not have level requirements, but they still have stat requirements."
"Exactly. How would he have the stats at level 0 to equip any of that?"
"I think Dawnbreaker faked it on purpose."
"Same. He never posted his gear or stats before. Now he suddenly does? That means he's panicking."
"That's my read too. Quest traffic in Starbough Village is already down by half from yesterday. He got nervous and threw out a fake screenshot to string people along."
"What's the point? It'll get exposed sooner or later."
"Maybe he just wants to buy himself one more day."
"Hey, why does that elf look so weird? He doesn't look like the others."
"Hahaha. That elf's name is Dawnbreaker too?"
"Fake, right? Probably a special character, or an invisible symbol in the name."
"Wait... that bow and armor look familiar."
"Level 0... Holy crap. That really is Dawnbreaker."
"How did he turn into that?"
...
Kael ignored the gossip.
All he cared about was leveling.
After taking the Teleport Nexus back to Starlight Village, he picked his grinding spot without hesitation.
[Land of the Behemoth].
The first thing he saw upon entering was the crowd of players around Behemoth's Watch. When they spotted an elf teleporting in, they naturally gave him a few extra looks.
Word soon spread that Kael had entered the Land of the Behemoth to level.
Kael walked straight into the grinding grounds.
Before long, the scenery around him turned bright and peaceful—the same false calm conjured by the Mirage Mawflowers.
The Kael of today had nothing to fear from a Mawflower ambush. He strolled forward in the open, and sure enough, something struck him.
-1,214 (Shield Absorbed)
A Mirage Mawflower's opening strike from ambush was a guaranteed crit.
[Mirage Mawflower]: Level 30
HP: 1,000,000
Physical Attack: 8,000
...
This hidden-realm monster had once nearly wiped an entire party.
Against the current Kael—nearly 300,000 HP, over 30,000 attack, more than 14,000 defense—it looked painfully feeble.
Kael raised his bow and fired.
-28,746
The Mirage Mawflower immediately struck back.
-1 (Shield Absorbed)
-31,244
-1 (Shield Absorbed)
...
Barely twenty seconds later, the kill notification arrived.
System: You have killed a Mirage Mawflower. You gained 4,000,000 EXP.
System: Lucky Bonus triggered. You gained an additional 4,000,000 EXP.
A five-player party earned 1,000,000 EXP per kill. Since Kael had soloed it at a far lower level, 4,000,000 EXP was perfectly reasonable.
System: You have reached Level 1. You gained 10 Free Attribute Points.
System: You have reached Level 2. You gained 10 Free Attribute Points.
System: You have reached Level 3...
System: You have reached Level 17. You gained 10 Free Attribute Points.
One monster had launched him straight to level 17.
Not bad at all.
But what truly delighted Kael wasn't the levels. It was that both his core attribute gains and his Free Attribute Points had doubled.
A normal player gained +1 to all five core attributes and 5 Free Attribute Points per level. Kael now gained +2 to all five core attributes and 10 Free Attribute Points per level.
Twenty total attribute points per level—ten more than everyone else.
The only pity was that his Skill Points hadn't increased. He still earned just 1 per level.
With 17 Skill Points on hand, Kael activated three skills.
[Precision Shot]: 3 Skill Points
[Mirror Image]: 8 Skill Points
[Spatial Blink]: 3 Skill Points
Then he went back to hunting Mawflowers.
Going from level 17 to 18 required 6.55 million EXP. The requirement kept climbing until levels 21 to 22, where it hit 100 million EXP and stopped scaling.
Back in the day, just to reach level 20 and climb the Blackwind Brotherhood's mountain, Kael had issued two WANTED Posters on Cole back to back—and even then, he'd barely claimed Apollo's skill inheritance before the Autumn Rite.
Now, a mere sixty or seventy million EXP was nothing. He only needed to shoot down a dozen or so Mawflowers.
But just as Kael prepared to carve a path of slaughter across the Land of the Behemoth, he ran into an awkward problem.
The Mawflowers couldn't respawn fast enough.
Under normal circumstances, a five-player level-30 party needed two or three minutes to kill a level-30 Mawflower. Mawflowers respawned every five minutes. That meant one party could comfortably rotate between two or three spawn points.
Over the past month, the players grinding in the Land of the Behemoth had settled into an unspoken rule: each party claimed two Mawflower spawns.
Kael rarely came here to level. How was he supposed to know that?
Everywhere he went, he dropped a Mawflower in ten or twenty seconds and moved on to the next spot. Within minutes, several parties finished off their own targets only to find that some unfamiliar elf had poached their next Mawflower.
The shouting started immediately.
"Hey! You! Do you not know the rules?"
"You think good gear means you can do whatever you want?"
"Do you know whose turf this is?"
"Want me to call my big brother [Dawnbreaker] over here?"
"Let's teach him a lesson. Show him how things work around here."
...
At first, none of them believed the name [Dawnbreaker] was real. They assumed he was just another copycat.
After all, the game was crawling with names like [Dawnbreaker.], [Dawnbreaker_], [Dawnbreaker°], [0Dawnbreaker], and [Dawnbreakerr]. Every ridiculous imitation imaginable. Some players even used cosmetic effects and appearance-altering skills to mimic Dawnbreaker's look so they could scam girls. For a while, "Fake Dawnbreaker" had actually trended online.
So when an elf named [Dawnbreaker] appeared out of nowhere, who would assume it was the real one?
But once they saw how fast he was killing Mawflowers, the truth hit them at once.
It was him.
Within minutes, messages like "Dawnbreaker turned into an elf" and "Dawnbreaker is leveling in the Land of the Behemoth" were spreading everywhere.
Kael had long since muted outside messages, so he ignored all of it.
At that same moment, however, the players he had once steamrolled learned something important: Dawnbreaker wasn't even level 20.
Hope for revenge flared to life.
Before long, a fifty-player group filed into the Land of the Behemoth, one after another.
"Dawnbreaker. Instead of hiring people to protect you, you actually dared to come out here and level alone?"
The speaker was an old friend of Kael's.
Dreadfang.
"I'll make sure you learn what happens when you refuse to clear your red name."