Almost two days had passed without the occurrence of a single incident. Shane felt alive and energized to spend his time hunting beasts inside the wilderness. Instead of sleeping in a room, he preferred sleeping on the open ground, leaning on a tree, close to the shelter.

Fortunately, it was summer inside the Deep Mountain-river Dimension and a cool breeze could be sensed on one's skin during the night.

The weather was neither hot nor cold and Shane was having a good time cultivating. As such, he found it unreasonable to waste a single bronze coin of his already scarce fortune.

During the last two days, many things had changed and the most important news was that he reached a purity of [1.09%]. It was already enough to break into the 2nd Mortal stage but there was something even more important that had happened a few hours ago.

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Name: [Umbra♂]

Race:[Shadow-snake]

Rank: [Peak 2nd-Wild stage(Low-Wild)]

Quality: [Uncommon](+)

|Evolution|(+)

Affinity: Lowest Basic-Darkness(Shadow)(+)

Ability: [One with the Darkness(Trash)]

Loyalty: [31%]

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Umbra's strength had almost reached the 3rd Wild stage, while he had grown to 33 centimeters, allowing him to coil around Shane's neck which made him extremely happy.

Furthermore, Umbra's loyalty had surpassed the 30% threshold, and with this a pair of notifications appeared in Shane's mind.

[Taming|Trash|] Upgrade mission |★★★★★|→ Increase the loyalty of one of your tamed beasts to 30%, accomplished. Reward: Function [Quality upgrading] ]

This was the message Shane had been waiting to receive for the last two days. He hoped to receive something useful for his trip to the Soul-Onyx-Jungle Dimension.

In the beginning, Shane had hoped that it would be similar to the Quality-enhancement he had already received, but seeing the word `function` a question mark appeared in his mind.

Looking through the description, Shane ignored the second notification inside his mind.

[Quality upgrading]-Allows host to upgrade the quality of his tamed beasts.

There was not much explanation provided but the message was quite clear. A smile blossomed on Shane's face, even though the message was most likely useless for his journey to the shadow-snake valley.

Not only was it difficult for normal tamers to accumulate enough funds to enhance the quality of their tamed beasts, but even more difficult was to figure out what ingredients were required to improve their beast's quality.

With his new function, Shane could purchase the exact amount of required ingredients and upgrade Umbra's quality. Now, he didn't need to put in years of effort to research the shadow-snake race and its evolution path which included knowing the different kinds of items were required to increase its quality.

But even so, Umbra would most likely need a bunch of expensive materials to increase its rank from [Uncommon] to [Rare] and it would take a while for Shane to save for it.

When he noticed the next message, Shane wasn't sure what to think about it. But, it was definitely a bad sign for his future progress and a silent "S**T" could faintly be heard.

[Upgrade-mission] [Innate-Skill upgrade (Trash |★★★★★|→Common |★|)] : Enhance the quality of one tamed beast]

Umbra was happily coiled around Shane's neck. But right now, Shane only wanted to curse out loud and he didn't even want to look at the Upgrade function with Umbra as his choice.

But he calmed down after realizing that there was nothing he could change about that. He opened his Innate Skills new function [Quality-upgrading]

After he selected the only possible tamed beast, Umbra, a panel popped up in front of him.

[To upgrade the quality of selected beast [Shadow-snake(Umbra)] from its initial quality (Uncommon) to (Rare) following materials are required.

→Darkness Orchid[Rare](0/1)

→Blood of a [Elite] Snake beast (0/100ml)

→Tier-1 Mana stone [Darkness] (0/1)

[Commence quality upgrade?] [Y/N]]

`Why?` Shane questioned in his mind. The emotions of being surprised and child-like glee were on his mind until he settled on a slightly amused expression."Why is it so cheap?" he mumbled to himself.

But then, it was not that illogical, after Shane realized that Umbra was only a beast at the Wild stage.

Once he would evolve, his quality would be reduced and Shane would have to increase it once again.

Previously, Shane had only thought about beasts at higher stages with the immense costs to enhance their quality. But even then, the stated materials were not considered rare, only slightly expensive. Shane wondered why everyone despised the prices they had to pay to enhance the quality of a beast.

He knew that if Umbra followed the shadow snake's [Common] evolution path and grew into a Shadow-python, his quality would reduce by one rank.

Normal shadow snakes with a [Common] quality would have their quality reduced to [Trash] after they evolved into a Shadow-python.

This would eliminate any chances for them to undergo another evolution if they didn't increase their quality by digesting magical treasures or being bound to someone who could increase their quality.

It was important for Shane to increase Umbra's potential as soon as possible. It was important for his cultivation path because he wanted his tamed beasts to have a high quality to evolve into terrifying beings. After seeing the required items, Shane could only smile.

Right now, after two days of hunting, Shane had only 2 gold coins and 23 silver coins.

Unfortunately, he hadn't found another group of sparky horned goats, that he would kill and increase his wealth by selling their carcasses.

Due to his desire to purchase a second dagger, he had overcome his own stinginess and purchased a [Spark Dagger [Mortal-(Uncommon)]] dagger made from the horn of a sparky horned goat after tempering it.

The dagger itself was nothing special compared to his shiolite dagger which was a Tier-1 dagger with rare quality. However, once he injected mana into the spark dagger, he could electrocute beasts up to the mid-Wild stage for a short amount of time.

This effect could be said to be extremely useful and having two weapons was better than having one.

As such, he paid 60 silver coins for it, even though it hurt his heart deeply.

With 2 gold coins and 23 silver coins, Shane wouldn't be able to purchase all required Items to increase Umbra's quality by one rank. But, it was extremely likely that he would have more than enough funds once he finished his mission within the Soul-Onyx-Jungle Dimension.

Shane estimated that Umbra's quality upgrade would cost around 10 gold coins, or maybe a little bit more if he was impatient. The cost wasn't too high and Shane was more than happy to spend that amount of coins on his companion.

Previously, he had researched a little about increasing the quality of wild-ranked beasts and there were many threads about them on the PrimWeb within the 'human' section.

Most threads were from unknown tamers and other occupations which had nothing to do with taming beasts. Almost all of them opined that it would be extremely useless to tame beasts below the Myst stage as it was a waste of time and wealth.

It cost at least 50 gold coins up to a few hundred to increase the quality of wild-ranked beasts.

Some well-known tamers even explained that nurturing a wild beast would result in having an extremely strong foundation but it would cost a fortune.

These well-known figures also said that it would cost at least 30 gold coins, probably even more to increase a beast's quality, even at a lower quality, while researching and finding the correct ingredients to upgrade the quality perfectly was even more difficult.

As such, most tamers tamed a beast until it was overshadowed by another one, with which they would exchange it.

This would cause other tamed beasts who noticed their companions getting thrown away, to have a low loyalty, fleeing as soon as the tamer was in a tight spot and not able to focus on them.

To conclude the information available online, upgrading a beast's quality was an expensive affair, as the required amount of ingredients was unknown, and figuring out the demanded items was even more difficult.

But not for Shane, who could perfectly see what kind of materials were needed and the exact quantities of each.

Besides, the price was more than acceptable, causing Shane to like the system even more.

The only disadvantage Shane saw was that he couldn't share his knowledge with others.

Either they wouldn't believe him and get into a heated debate with him on the forums or someone would test it out and see that it worked, and share it with others, thereby increasing Shane's reputation.

But what was the point, if all Shane could only tell others was the list of required materials and items needed to enhance the quality of his own beasts and not shed some light about how they could do it for their own beast?

There were no exceptions and it would only be worth sharing if Shane could use this function for all beasts, even if he wasn't the one to tame them.

But that wasn't possible and as such Shane decided to not give it a second thought. Instead, he looked at his mana purity with a smile on his face.

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