by Pegaz
So, almost four hours have passed over the last twenty minutes. With seven Idlers active, roughly six hours in real time converts to a whole day in the system.
But, that's still an increase of about ten times compared to the amount needed for the first level! It’s still going to take me just under sixty hours in real time to complete. That's two and a half days!
Eager to take his mind off the time, he hovered his vision over the newest addition to his skill list.
Sprinter - Idlers 0/99, Reduction Cost - 0/10
Sprinter:
Reduction Cost: Reduces the amount of Stamina Points (SP) during faster movement speed.
Only activated when moving faster than 8 miles per hour.
Bonus for maxing all skill levels: Increases movement speed.
Level 0 = 10 SP every 10 seconds, Level 1 = 9 SP every 15 seconds... so on and so forth till... Level 9 = 2 SP every 80 seconds, Level 10 = 1 SP every 90 seconds
SP? I thought Stamina was like the attack and defence skills. The higher the points, the higher the ranking, right? By the looks of it though, I guess I was wrong about that...
Looking at the text that read ‘Stamina: N/A’ at the top of the screen, John held his gaze and counted to five.
Stamina:
You have Stamina Points (SP) and each action costs SP. Low level activities such as walking or sitting down while reading only costs 1 SP per hour, instead of seconds or minutes. The system calculates the amount of time you can fight for while supporting the cost of SP for Rank.
You currently have 91/100 SP. Rating from H to SSS.
H = 5 minutes, G = 10 minutes, F = 15 minutes, E = 20 minutes, D = 25 minutes, C = 30 minutes, B = 35 minutes, A = 40 minutes, S = 50 minutes, SS = 1 hour 30 minutes, SSS = 3 hours.
So, with a level ten Sprinter skill, my maximum stamina would allow me two hours and thirty minutes of running. That’s much higher than rank SS but still lower than rank SSS.
This is a godly skill, so I'm guessing it's going to take a long time to level up. That extra thirty-minute difference to rank SSS though… Is there a different skill that can increase it?
Not finding any skills that sounded like it could be related to Stamina, John started looking at the other Attack Skills instead.
Palm Toughness:
Power Level: Bonus in attack when using the crush grip.
Speed: The time needed to open and close the grip, it is the same motion as a fist and the Knuckle Damage's Speed skill stacks on top of this.
Ignore Defence: You ignore 0.1% defence per level. (Stacks with other skills)
Bonus for maxing all skill levels: The skin on your palm gets slightly thicker, so it is harder to pierce while keeping the nerves and senses intact.
Elbow Damage:
Power Level: Bonus in attack when using the elbow to fight.
Speed: The time needed to open and close an elbow joint.
Ignore Defence: You ignore 0.1% defence per level. (Stacks with other skills)
Bonus for maxing all skill levels: The ligaments on both sides of the elbow is hardened but keeps the flexibility of the movement, at the maximum level they are almost impossible to break.
Knee Damage:
Power Level: Bonus in attack when using the knee to fight.
Speed: The time needed to open and close a knee joint.
Ignore Defence: You ignore 0.1% defence per level. (Stacks with other skills)
Bonus for maxing all skill levels: The ligament above the knee socket is usually a weakness. Normally, if it's hit in the right spot it can cause involuntary movement of the leg. This could be fatal in a death match. As a bonus, this ligament is hardened and will no longer act as a weak spot.
Feet Damage:
Power Level: Bonus in attack when using any part below the ankle to fight.
Speed: The time needed to turn the ankle in any direction.
Ignore Defence: You ignore 0.1% defence per level. (Stacks with other skills)
Bonus for maxing all skill levels: Increases the power of short distance bursts of speed.
Basically when everything's maxed out, I can hit harder, faster, and ignore 50% of enemy's defence with any of these attacks. I’ll have a couple of bonuses too.
Ligaments hardened… I’m guessing that's to stop me from damaging myself if I hit something at a wrong angle. But that's too much information to process in one night for me, so screw it. I'm going to sleep. My brain is fried.
And so, John rolled over and in mere seconds, he was sound sleep.
Upon waking, the first thing he did was to check the Idle System. Still somewhat groggy from his rest, he skimmed through the Attack list.
Attack List:
Palm Toughness - Idlers 1/99, Power Level - 15/100, Speed - 0/100, Ignore Defence - 0/100, Time – 32m 14s
Knuckle Damage - Idlers 1/99, Power Level - 15/100, Speed - 0/100, Ignore Defence - 0/100 Time – 22m 3s
Elbow Damage - Idlers 1/99, Power Level - 15/100, Speed - 0/100, Ignore Defence - 0/100, Time – 32m 14s
Knee Damage - Idlers 1/99, Power Level - 15/100, Speed - 0/100, Ignore Defence - 0/100, Time – 32m 14s
Feet Damage - Idlers 1/99, Power Level - 15/100, Speed - 0/100, Ignore Defence - 0/100, Time – 32m 14s
The other skills had finally caught up to Knuckle Damage, though the time needed on each of them varied by a few minutes. Knuckle Damage was still ahead of the others. He went into his other skills and turned Continue off.
It was later than he thought. He had really slept in. When he was finally awake enough to head downstairs, he asked about breakfast. To his dismay, he found out that it was already after 9am, whereas the breakfast only lasted until 8:30am. This inn catered to ‘adventurers only’, and they were the type to usually leave before 8am.
John was about ready to try begging for food—even cold leftovers would do at this point! But seeing the Sider’s desperation, the reception staff instructed John to where he could get a cheap and decent meal.
Walking along the street, John approached a vendor selling sandwiches and bought one for £1. Meal in hand, he walked towards the library while he ate, scarfing it down before he arrived at the doorway. He wiped off his hands on his trousers and stepped into the building.
John was absolutely sick of math. Figuring out how much time it took to complete each skill was growing to be a pain, especially since the amount of Idlers he had to factor in was constantly changing. For now, he just wanted to read some books while the Idlers did all the work for a change, and that's when he received a pleasant surprise.
ToolTip - The first Level in Senses is Time. With this skill activated, you will acquire a clock in the top right corner of the system. The system will then calculate the time needed for each skill. It will include Idler Speed and Max Idlers.
“YES!!!” Punching the air in a victory pose, John couldn’t help but release a shout of joy. Realising where he was, he then glanced around to make sure that there was no one nearby to witness his outburst. Satisfied, he opened the Idle System and searched for Senses skill.
Mind's Strength - Idlers 0/99, Thinking Speed 0/100, Memory - 0/2, Senses - 0/10
He ignored Thinking Speed and Memory, instead resting his gaze on Senses.
Senses:
The human mind has more than the five senses, even if most don't realise it. Each level unlocked boosts one sense.
He just had to wait for his current attack skills to finish levelling up. Once he had his Idlers back, it would be smooth sailing.
Reading in the library, time flew by and before John knew it, the skills in question were complete. Seeing that he now had five of his twelve Idlers, he took a gamble and placed all five into the Senses skill slot. The timer immediately popped up, reading 6h for the first level. John converted that to roughly half an hour, so he closed the system and kept reading about the kingdom's laws.
‘Ding!’
Thirty minutes later, the bell sounded. John smiled and opened up the system, lo
oking at the skill.
Senses:
The human mind has more than the five senses, even if most don't realise it. Each level unlocked boosts one sense.
First Sense: Time. You can keep track of time in any shape and form.
John needed to test this to make sure the system wasn’t just screwing him over. He looked at Senses skill and placed one Idler into the slot.
The time that the skill needed showed up as 30h, and was going down by 1 second. Hesitantly, he put the rest of the Idlers in and watched the timer drop down to 6h. Great, it works!
With just a single Idler in, the sixty-hour had dropped to thirty because of the Idler Speed skill, which doubled the time per second that got knocked off. With 5 Idlers in, it knocked off ten seconds per second. Under these conditions, every hour in real time converted to six hours in the Idle System.
John closed the system and went back to reading, feeling quite giddy. He buckled down to read, preparing to learn as much as he could within this month's free lodging and library access. After this month, he'd have to fend for himself.
Chapter 9
After a Month
Almost a month went by in a flash. It was now the second-to-last day of John’s free pass. At this point, John felt confident that he'd learned everything inside the essential education section of the library. Still, he returned to double and triple check that he did not accidentally skip over any books. Satisfied and convinced that he’d read them all, he opened the system.
First, let's just check the basic stats.
Name: John
Age: 15
Idlers: 0/16
HP: 61
Attack: G (220 Points)
Defence: N/A (20 Points)
Stamina: N/A
Okay, now, let's get to the boring part first and review what I’ve learned about this place.
There are five kingdoms total in this world, and none of them put much effort into coming up with names. We’ve got the Kingdom of the North, East, South, West and the Centre Kingdom. These names are for official purposes, to sound nobler.
Unofficially, however, they're called the North, East, South, West, and Central Kingdom. How original.
The Centre Kingdom is the smallest, but the most powerful since no mortals are allowed there. The only information I've found here about that kingdom is that the immortals don't have any royalty—only representatives of their sect. The representative is usually the member with most seniority or sometimes just the plain strongest of them.
The other four kingdoms are quite similar with the only significant difference being that they have different royalty names. According to history, about ninety-thousand-years ago, four brothers fought each other for some priceless treasure where the Centre kingdom is today. They ended up losing it to a wild animal, got pissed off at each other, and then split up.
After roughly thirteen to fifteen years after this split, South Kingdom was the first to be founded, shortly followed by the North and then West, with only a few years between each other. About twenty years later came East Kingdom.
East Kingdom is where the first Sider ever showed up and rose into power, the fourth brother from the feud all those years ago was acting as the Sider’s adviser.
There's a theory as to why the Kingdom Treaty came to be. Some think the adviser to the king still hated his three brothers who went on to become kings of their own land. This brother kept advising the Sider to go to war with them.
The plan was to fight them one at a time until all three were gone. But the king kept refusing for some reason or another. However, he was running out of excuses to refuse the war. The adviser was perfect for the job, aside from matters involving his brothers. But the Sider king didn't want to lose his loyal support.
Over the years, the king refused the war and instead built roads, hospitals, and other public service establishments. He wrote the laws and made courts of law, he raised houses and even introduced technology.
John couldn't believe this part of history. If the first Sider came from the same place that he did, and it was ninety-thousand-years ago, how did that Sider know how to build roads? How could he have known about the technology that he passed on? John though that finger painting on the walls of caves would have made more sense.
Yet, the king introduced all these and more. He brought prosperity to his kingdom, and invited the other three royal families over to form the pact to stop any war from being declared.
John found this part funny. The actual agreement revolved around laws against abusing the Siders or misusing the technology that the Sider king brought them.
With that in mind, if you made an army roughly the same size as your enemy kingdom but slightly larger, and then equipped them with slightly better gear, you could make it look like it was a fair fight. Going along with this line of thought, you could easily get away with abusing the weak.
John wondered at the expression of the king, had he known about this loophole. Surely after ninety-thousand-years and countless kings, advisers, and officials, surely someone would have thought of this loophole. Or perhaps it was discarded because the pros outweigh the cons? John could only wonder.
The age before the first Sider King was known as the Dark Age—not because it was before the technological boom, but because on this planet, dinosaurs still existed and roamed the world. Humans were nothing but food to them. Then the birth of the monsters came. No one knows how they came to be. Some think a dinosaur mutated, or that a few got transported here like the Siders did.
This was a blessing and a curse at the same time. The stronger monsters hunted the dinosaurs for food, driving them extinct. Then they started eating weaker monsters and even humans who dared to step into their territory during the hunt.
The only blessing was they were not as active; most monsters above D rank slept during the day or even for weeks at a time to store energy in its core. Humans adapted and became stronger over time, and began to hunt stronger monsters. They eventually drove them back a little.
In this era, the kingdoms built giant walls and armed them as much as possible.
Usually, a town like this one, which is nicknamed newbie town, could hold against a Class C monster with a little luck. All the guards posted and the weapons bolted onto the city walls had proved to hold their own. The only reason it's called newbie town is the low-level areas around here.
Areas are just where the temperature, climate, monsters, plants and even the weather are different from other areas. Two areas could share a border, one side raining and the other sunny, and as long as the two areas have different weather patterns, there's 0% chance they could mix or interfere with each other. It's like there's a big invisible wall down the border separating them.
Area monsters typically stayed in their own areas, unless it was the King of the area looking to expand its territory. Monsters have evolved and adapted to survive and hunt in the areas that they have grown accustomed to. If a monster who has adapted to hours of scorching hot weather a day area went into an area where it's snowing 24 hours a day… Let’s just say it wouldn't last long.
The measurements of time are the same as on Earth, for the most part. Twenty-four hours to a day, seven days to a week. The main difference is that each month always has twenty-eight days, which meant that there is a total of three hundred thirty-six days to a year.
There is a total of forty-eight weeks per year, the current year being 90,12. The ninety stood for the ninety-thousand years since the birth of their society, and the twelve was the amount of years since passing that mark. Eventually it would count up to 90,9999. John scratched his head at the numbers, continuing with his summary.
There aren’t many laws in the kingdoms, and they have roughly the same rules back on Earth. Murder is strictly forbidden, but self-defence is a handshake and a congrats though. If found guilty of murder rather than self-defence, the penalty is death by decapitation.
The penalty for theft depends on how many times you've been c
aught and not on the value of what you’ve stolen. That way, if one were caught stealing the Kings Crown, he'd still only get branded with a T on his dominant hand. That’s the same punishment as someone who got caught stealing a loaf of bread.
The second time, it's an eye. For the third time you lose both of your hands to make sure there's no fourth time.
The punishment for rape is even crueller. If found guilty, your tongue is chopped off. Whatever’s left in your mouth is burnt to close the wounds, making sure you don't die of blood loss. Hot metal needles are then injected into your penis and when it's all burnt inside out and leaking pus from infection, they then chop it off to keep you from dying from infection. They brand both cheeks with the letter R and slice the tendons in your wrists so that you can never hold anything again. They chop your toes off so you can never walk without a walking stick—though, obviously, with both hands crippled you can't use a walking stick anyway.
99% of people found guilty of rape starve to death within a month, the 1% are the poor bastards that have food and water forced down them, so they just won't die.
John was pretty sure it was a female adviser who suggested this when the king was making the rules. It reminded him of the saying, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
Now, for the last part! The World Map! It's like what used to be Pangaea back on Earth—one big landmass. The landmass on a world map looks like a crooked circle but with a few jagged edges and islands in other places. It’s got rivers that go through the land into the sea, and I'm sure someone was bored enough to count how many of them there are, but I sure as hell am not.
Each of the four mortal kingdoms has roughly the same size territory and totals to about two-thirds of the whole world area combined. Centre Kingdom, though, only has about a fifth the size of any kingdom's area.
The unclaimed lands are the areas where there are powerful monsters ranked above S as the area kings. Even if there are SSS adventurers, the monsters have the advantage of home-field and numbers. It would cost the humans too much to take them down, only to have another S class or above replace the monster eventually.