[Level up]

You have gained 10 stat points and 1 skill point

Riza could never have predicted the joy such a notification would send through her once more.

The group of demons was a relatively large one but, thankfully, not something they couldn’t handle. A single greater demon with a large handful of beast demons was no match to two level 34 spiders, even with the lack of boons and skills. The level disparity was simply too great.

A calm settled over the pair of them, Lefie apparently not that worried even with being low on essence herself.

“They’re dead?” She asked confidently.

“Easy peasy,” Riza replied, summoning her spiders back to herself and promptly killing them.

“I’ve got a skill point.”

“Already?” The excitement in Lefie’s voice was infectious. “Whater you gonna take?” Her words slurred together. “A tier 3 skill?”

Ah. That’s why.

“Is there something special about tier 3 skills?” Riza asked, sitting down and relaxing. She doubted being able to kill demons without lifting a finger would ever get old.

“They’re 3rd tier,” The girl emphasised.

“So? You can get 3rd tier skill by level 4.”

“Ugh. You don’t understand,” Lefie huffed.

Riza chuckled at her annoyance.

“Well, for your information, I’m taking a 0th-er, foundational skill,” Riza corrected herself. Right. Still weird people don’t seem to know the number 0.

“Really?” Lefie asked after a slight pause, audibly deflated.

Riza didn’t respond; she had thinking to be doing.

Metamagic

0th Tier

[Alteration Mastery] (1/10)

Control the strength of an active essence skill with finesse

Cost: Variable

[Seeker Mastery] (1/10)

Multiply range of an active essence skill by 1.4

Cost: Variable

[Maximise Mastery+] -Learned

Multiply intensity of an active essence skill by 7

Cost: Variable

1st Tier

[Distinguish Life] (1/10)

Extend a continuous, single-target skill to affect 2 more entities. Additional entities experience 10% of the skills effects

Cost: Original skill cost per additional entity

[Double Cast] (1/10)

Activate a discrete skill 3 times simultaneously

Cost: 190% of original skill

[Alteration Mastery]. Just how will you work?

She purchased the skill.

The knowledge flowed through her, like it did with all skills. A lot of it useless but by now, she had enough experience manipulating essence to parse the important parts.

Now that she actually had the skill, all the experiments she had thought about could commence.

Firstly, she used a basic [Heal] on herself. Nothing happened except for her essence dropping by 8 points.

Next, she visualised the essence and imagined throttling back the surge of them, deliberately reducing the flood to a trickle.

[Heal+]

Restore 95 health, 1 stamina, 1 essence to a living entity

Cost: 5 es/sec

Her essence dropped by 4 points.

She could fiddle with the skill a little bit, changing the cost from 4 to 5 and even to 2. A bit of maths showed that they were 50%, 75%, and 25% intensity respectively.

Confusingly, however, she couldn’t exert any more control than that; only four intensity levels were available to her.

“Lefie? How does [Alteration Mastery] improve with level?”

“You took [Alteration Mastery]?” The teenager asked with a bit of shock in her tone.

“Yes. Now, tell me.”

“You can change a skill by one in two, then one in four, and it just gets smaller from there.”

“And at level 10?”

“It’s really small at that point.”

“Hmm. Can you upgrade it afterwards?” Lefie replied with a firm no.

That’s different to me. Why would that be? [Lone Wolf], perhaps? 50% goes to 25%? If at next level, I can adjust the strength by 12.5% rather than 25%, that basically confirms that theory.

Okay. Next plan; getting [Alteration Mastery] to level 2.

Thankfully, it only took Riza 13 seconds to receive the auspicious notification.

[Alteration Mastery] [Level up]

23 seconds this time and used at 12.5% power. 90% of 230 is 207. Basically 200.

Right on track.

A half minute later, another level up confirmed her theory. [Alteration Mastery] leveled up in proportion to the difference in essence between altered and unaltered skill cost.

A minute to take the skill to level 4. Shouldn’t be too long for level 10, right?

After nearly 7 minutes in total, Riza brought her newly purchased skill up to level 10.

[Alteration Mastery] [Level up]

Damn. No upgrade. I suppose I was warned of that.

Not exactly a hard skill to level up; it costs less and less each level, after all.

Okay. Onto the next experiment.

Pulling up a spider corpse, Riza rested her palms on the chill body. No longer frosty but the lack of body warmth made the handling of it always uncomfortable for her.

No big deal, however. She just needed to get used to it.

She activated the skill as normal ([Remnant Memories] included), taking a look at the stats of Spidey.

[Animate Critter] (10/10)+ -Learned

Raise a corpse smaller than yourself into a level 18 zombie

Casting Time: 5 sec

Cost: 14 es/sec

Name Unnamed Level 18 Health 20/20 Stamina 20/20 Essence

20/20 Power 1 (1) Constitution 1 (1) Endurance 1 (1) Vim 1 (1) Essence

1 (1) Spirit

1 (1) Health Regeneration

100/day Stamina Regeneration

100/day Essence Regeneration

100/day Stat Points 90

After that, she tried decreasing the power of the skill, tweaking the cost until it was an integer.

[Animate Critter] (10/10)+ -Learned

Raise a corpse smaller than yourself into a level 1 zombie

Casting Time: 5 sec

Cost: 1 es/sec

Name Unnamed Level 2 Health 20/20 Stamina 20/20 Essence

20/20 Power 1 (1) Constitution 1 (1) Endurance 1 (1) Vim 1 (1) Essence

1 (1) Spirit

1 (1) Health Regeneration

100/day Stamina Regeneration

100/day Essence Regeneration

100/day Stat Points 10

The results were interesting.

When Riza first purchased [Animate Critter], she had a level 0 zombie costing 5 essence a second. When she used [Alteration Mastery] to lower the cost down to 1 a second exactly, she had a level 2 Spidey, courtesy of [Remnant Memories].

With this method, a level 12 Spidey only cost 5 essence, meaning she could keep that one up indefinitely.

She also no longer had access to a level 0 zombie without purchasing a new skill.

Just how low can you go?

Riza was aware that decimals worked properly in the system--some skills cost essence per minute, implying a decimal per second, as well as her essence and essence regeneration showing that non-integer numbers were used in their calculations.

To begin with, she wanted two levels for Spidey which were greater than 1 away from each other but only had a cost difference of 1.

Level 12 cost 10 essence per second and level 14 cost 11 essence per second.

She couldn’t explain how she was able to so finely tune the skills to exactly what she wanted--it was wholly intuitive--but she managed to configure the skill to cost 10.5 essence per second.

At least, she felt like it was 10.5 essence per second.

[Animate Critter] (10/10)+ -Learned

Raise a corpse smaller than yourself into a level 13 zombie

Casting Time: 5 sec

Cost: 10 es/sec

The skill confirmed it. A bit of waiting also confirmed it; a level 12 Spidey consumed 20 essence over 2 seconds, a level 13 Spidey consumed 21.

Now, Riza could ask her original question.

Raising another spider, without [Remnant Memories] this time, she tried to make the cost around half an essence.

[Animate Critter] (10/10)+ -Learned

Raise a corpse smaller than yourself into a level 0 zombie

Casting Time: 5 sec

Cost: 0 es/sec

Huh. I guess they can be level 0.

Name Unnamed Level 0 Health 12/12 Stamina 12/12 Essence

12/12 Power 0 (0) Constitution 0 (0) Endurance 0 (0) Vim 0 (0) Essence

0 (0) Spirit

0 (0) Health Regeneration

100/day Stamina Regeneration

100/day Essence Regeneration

100/day Stat Points 2

Riza waited a few seconds, watching her essence decrease.

To be expected. Never rounds, always truncates. Looks to be about 0.5 essence per second.

“Are stats able to go below 1?” Riza suddenly blurted out, staring hard at Spidey.

“What? No! Of course not; you’d be dead,” Lefie stated firmly. “Wait. Are any of your stats below 1? Is Spidey’s?”

“His power is 0 and his health is 12,” Riza reported calmly, unperturbed by Lefie’s energy. Essence regeneration still at 100 per day. That’s interesting.

“That-what. That… How’s that possible?” Lefie asked, mind broken.

“More importantly, why doesn’t it matter if spirit goes below 5?”

“Huh?” Lefie grunted, confused by Riza’s nonchalance.

“5 spirit gives 100 essence per day. As does 4. As does 3. I began with 1 point in spirit but that still resulted in 100 essence per day. What’s up?”

“You had 1 in spirit?” Lefie nearly shouted, as if this was the most shocking thing that happened so far.

“Yes?”

“That’s… Why would you go for essence skills? You’re not meant to take essence skills without 5 points in both essence and spirit. You shouldn’t go for anything at all without 5 points in its respective stat. It’s a waste of skill points!”

Riza sat back in silence, shocked and unable to speak.

Close to a minute passed before Riza heard a quiet mumbling.

“Did you say something?” She asked.

“I said I’m sorry,” The teenager said indignantly, accompanied by a pair of arms wrapping around Riza’s waist and a head pressed against her back.

Riza patted the clasped hands and said ‘it’s okay’ but Lefie didn’t let go so she just decided to leave her be.

Going back to her experimentation, Riza brought another Spidey to life but tried making it as weak as possible.

It’s stats all sat at 1 and it’s health was also at 1, a new low. The moment she tried to touch it, however, it’s legs gave out from under it and died from the gentlest of tickles.

Too weak and they die from just a gust of wind. Ruins some of my plans.

Anyway, with such low health, they wouldn’t be useful for [Parasite]. Currently, I can have a level 2 Spidey for 1 essence per second and can have five of them running simultaneously. This leaves my regeneration at 0.5 essence per second.

Parasiting all of them would give me an effective health of 500. Is that worth it? If that’s not enough, I could have double the number of spiders but all at level 1?

Can’t say I’m a fan of the lack of versatility, however. Massively lowers my potential regarding healing and offence.

The spiders will also be too weak to break even on the cost with [Essence Monarch], so that’s a no-go as well.

I suppose the best I can do is always have a weak spider around for eyes and just go from there then

Patting Lefie’s hands again to get her attention, Riza indicated she was ready to get a move, although the teenager didn’t want to let go.

A bit of corralling later and she had finally let go, quite remorseful about her earlier outburst.

Platitudes exchanged, Riza feeling energised and confident even with everything else that had happened today.