Despite spending almost all of my money in just a single day, I was rather happy with the outcome. All of the resources that I required for crafting, furnishing and experimenting in my tower were either delivered to my room in a storage ring or waiting to be received in respective shops.

With only a few days remaining before the duel, I could only focus on a limited amount of matters. Done with gathering the materials, I turned my attention back to my fighting prowess.

Being in possession of the mage's stick, I could save a lot of mana while practising my spells, yet for the sake of keeping them just my ace, I refrained from training them. No matter if I would like to continuously cast them in my room, designated training area or even in the outskirts, all possible places bore the risk of being monitored by the forces that I would be using those skills against!

To fight against this seemingly impossible situation, I wasted an entire two thousand points on acquiring several abilities.

First one was repetitive casting, that allowed me to set up something like a macro that MMORPG players were using to cast specific spells in specific order and timing by pressing just one button. This skill alone was cheap, but the second one that I had to acquire to make both of them usefull, ended up as half of the entire cost of my shopping.

With the repetitive and continuous casting, I was able to create a macro of casting a small shield in the palm of my hand, that was then surrounded by yet another barrier. Only then, I would cast fireballs in one hand and shockwaves in the other one for as long as the first barrier could hold. As soon as it broke, the second layer of the protection would shrink, only for yet another barrier to be cast in its former place and the entire process repeated.

Initially, I hoped that I would be able to power level my skills anywhere I would go, but with the city law restricting the ability to openly wear weapons to guards, I had to decide to either use all the time I had on hand to grind, or just limit myself to power levelling in my room where I could hold my mage's stick and reduce the mana cost of all the casting I was continuously doing.

Even if at the beginning the mana cost of casting was too small for me to bother when I realised that not only it grew with each level that I raised in it but the number of times I had to use it to reach new level, even 50% reduction from my weapon suddenly turned out to not be so much.

"Here, this is the last batch of the spirit stones I could find."

As soon as I realised that I wouldn't be able to get by with just my own mana, I asked Eve to take most of the remaining money that we earned and buy as many spirit stones as she could.

While each of them could only regenerate up to two thousand mana points, with over one hundred of them, I effectively multiplied my mana storage by five.

"Thanks, I really don't know what I would do without you."

Instantly changing my position to one that would look like I was cultivating, I pulled Eve into my embrace. With how certain I was about this place being monitored, I couldn't just openly use one hundred damn spirit stones just like that, without achieving any progress in my cultivation!

This was one of the downsides of the system. During some of the experiments, we made with Eve, no matter how much she would try to cultivate, neither one of us was able to grow by any bit. Ensured that without raising my levels I could only rely on improving quality of my power instead of quantity, I could only fake that we tried to cultivate at the same time to cover the real reason for using all of those stones.

"Blop!"

"Weak Barrier reached the fifth level!"

"Progress 1/500"

Fuck.

This means that not only each cast of the barrier would cost me 250 mana points after the reduction from my staff, but I would be required to cast it damn five hundred times to reach the next level!

That meant a total of one hundred twenty-five thousand mana points!

It could be translated to all of my stones and more than my daily limit of mana!

Going at it for quite a bit of time already, there was no way I could succeed today. Just a single calculation was enough to prove that maintaining both my shields and any other spell would end up with me being unable to break through with even a single one of them!

While I would love to level up all three of them simultaneously, I had to focus. With no more money to spend on mana crystals, I could only use up to three hundred twenty thousand mana points, by adding three days worth of my own reserves to the two hundred thousand mana contained in spirit stones.

Even if I could siphon some more stones from Venna, I didn't give them any favours for later use. As people say, the karma will always bite you back in the ass right when you will relax to poop. Considering that God himself sent me to this damned world, I didn't want to play around with my fate and luck!

Put against the wall, i had to decide which skill do I want to max first. The weak shield came first without any doubt, as I wouldn't be able to cast any other skills without it, not to speak about the defence aspect. As for the offensive spell, I would prefer to train myself in fireballs as they had drastically greater firepower - mostly because they were made of a damned fire - but with all the 'accidents' that kept happening in the city that I promptly blamed on Katenaris or Dracons, if I were to suddenly summon great firestorm, the entire city would turn against me!

That left me with no choice but shockwave. Even if I spoke about it as if I lost all my chadness and turned into beta male by this, this spell wasn't nearly as useless as I portrayed it to be. Not only did it break the potential enemy balance, but it also was capable of dealing with a fair amount of damage in itself. While I had yet to reach the level where just the pressure would be able to kill even a mortal level opponent, I had great hopes for the future possibilities of it, seeing how big was the growth in strength with each consecutive breakthrough to a higher level.

To put it into right perspective, back when my fireball was still on level two, by infusing it with my former full extend of mana, it was able to create a powerful solar flare that was capable of scaring the entire city with its prowess. Right now, I could replicate it just by combining five fireballs of the fifth level!

But nothing would happen if I were to only think about this. Less thinking, more training!

With the course of the action already decided, I fixed Eve's position on my lap to make sure that we would both fare the next few hours of motionless practice without any itch. As soon as it was done, I hid my hands between our bellies before she hugged me tightly.

The training process in itself wasn't as easy as one could imagine. With both of my hands busy casting both the barrier and the shockwave spell, I was unable to grasp the spirit stones to reinforce my own mana pool.

In any normal situation, that would end up with loads of annoying breaks where I would have to refill my mana pool, but thanks to our dual spirituality, Eve found a way around this problem.

With her own energy pool capable of storing around two spirit stone's worth of energy inside, I was simply feeding on her energy by pulling it from our dantian into my mana pool, while she continuously added more and more spiritual energy from the stones back into it.

As soon as one stone crumbled, she would take another one from her storage ring and continue the process.

This way, even if I wouldn't be able to break through with both of those abilities before the night, I would be able to do so as soon as we get to training tomorrow!