Much to Ryan's disappointment, he couldn't use Seal on his battle machines. It was only natural since they caused fixed damage per level. Regardless, Ryan managed to focus on summoning golems and equipping them with battle machines for the rest of the night, thanks to it.

"I guess this should be enough," Ryan said while nodding in satisfaction.

"Are you really fine with that? You won't obtain a single coin unless you are close to the monsters. From my point of view, you are wasting a good chance to obtain some powerful items and skills."

"Why do you care if you are not losing anything?" Ryan asked. "While you are correct, I can't have everything I want. If I had enough time to fight for coins, I would do it, but my goal right now is to explore the continent as fast as possible. Sacrifices need to be made… which reminds me, monsters like you can obtain coins, how can you use them considering that you can't enter dungeons?"

"We can transform the coins into mana, and we can also use them to upgrade our skills."

It looked like the system in which the monsters worked was more complex than Ryan thought. Still, it seemed pretty convenient. Humans can obtain classes that grant them skills and statuses. While monsters can eat monsters to gain status, recover mana with coins, and level up their skills… It seemed pretty balanced. Which was bad since humans from the very beginning were weaker than monsters.

"You can obtain that power too if you accept to become my partner."

"Nice try," Ryan said. "While I am interested in your system, I am not willing to sacrifice half of my life for you. Besides, I have been doing great so far, so I don't need the conveniences of another system."

"Yeah, I can't deny that. Losing one hand certainly can be considered as doing great. Almost getting captured by a Cerberus was also a fine example of that. Let's not forget that you were also rescued when you defeated your first dragon."

While that annoyed Ryan a little, that feeling quickly disappeared and gave place to a slight surprise that she didn't mention the moment Lucia and the others died. Mentioning that would be a low blow, but it was within Ryan's assumptions.

When morning came, Ryan began to fly above the country and saw his creatures killing the scorpions. Much to his surprise, even though he was kilometers away from them, he received the coins of those that he could see. Even better, while Ryan had created hundreds of them, he didn't notice a decrease in their number.

"I'm almost there… so I guess I will stay here until I have enough coins," Ryan said.

Ryan almost had twenty million coins, and he wanted to see what he could buy with them. In the end, Ryan only had to wait for a few minutes since his golems and combat machines were so efficient that Ryan was thinking about using them in the future for auto farming.

When Ryan opened the dungeon shop, he finally noticed one thing. Despite the fact that he had so many coins, he never saw skills like Fire Breath being sold. After he checked the most expensive ones, he understood why. It was because he couldn't buy skills that cost more mana or stamina than he currently has.

Magic Upgrade Tome

Effect: it grants you the power to upgrade magic items even further. The limit of times you can upgrade a weapon is equal to the skill level divided by five. To upgrade a type of weapon, you need to use the soul of a monster of the same type.

Cost: 100 mana

Price: 20.000.000 coins

In the end, Ryan found the tome he was looking for, and the price was just what he had expected. Without thinking too much about it, Ryan learned the skill. While it would take a while for him to be able to upgrade his items more than once, everything had to start with a single step.

"I guess I can use the scorpions to upgrade the Pestilence Crossbow," Ryan muttered to himself. "I need to see how much the items become better, after all."

In the end, Ryan just had to find a single monster that his golems missed along the way. After knocking down the creature with some Electric Bullets, Ryan used Magic Upgrade. In a sense, the spell was pretty similar to Seal since it used monsters' souls to upgrade magic items.

Pestilence Crossbow (+1)

Effect: Consumes twenty points of mana to create a poisoned bolt. Dexterity + 82, intelligence + 55

Extra Effect: Each bolt can cause the value of your intelligence as magic damage during five seconds. Hitting the target with other bolts will also increase the damage of the poison by eleven percent.

Durability: 84/84

"Interesting…" Ryan rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Overall, the most important parameters of the crossbow increased by ten percent. While durability only increased by five percent… if I use this skill several times and reach level forty… I guess it isn't hard to imagine Katelyn defeating a dragon without classes."

Ryan didn't have many weapons that could poison his enemies, but he managed to upgrade Furball's gear and even increase his special arrows' power. Regardless, Ryan decided to move on because he was more and more getting invested in that skill. If he isn't careful, he was afraid that he would stay there for days just leveling up that skill.

Resuming his journey toward North-East, Ryan eventually arrived in Brazil, and he couldn't help but frown since the very first city he found was completely walled. While there weren't many survivors in that place, they were easily killing the iron scorpions that were heading toward their camp.

"Nothing to see here… moving on," Ryan muttered.

There weren't any powerful monsters around so that Ryan wouldn't find any tier-three dungeons as well. In any case, while he was flying along the coast, Ryan found another wallet city after flying for an hour… the same thing happened again and again. Until when he found the tenth walled city, Ryan decided to stop.