“I got it!” Chilly exclaimed. The penguins went silent and turned to him. Well they were already silent. They simply stopped waving their flippers about.

“The way I see it, we have several things we have yet to test. We need to confirm that bosses level match. I think it’s obvious but we need to confirm it. That means that we must get to level 7 as soon as possible.”

“Tsk noob, don't forget. A bowl a day keeps the monsters at bay!” the penguin interjected.

“That’s the second thing. I wasn’t super excited about the bowls, but we should test to see how they work specifically.” Chilly replied, pointing at the small penguin.

Noomplet nodded in satisfaction, “Thanks for the chapter!”

Another penguin walked up, and raised Realm Walker to take the stage.

“Priests of Purity are inherently untrustworthy, kill with extreme prejudice!”

“My thoughts exactly,” Chilly said, “There is a chance the Priest is ridiculous, but I feel like I should be able to survive it well enough at least to be able to run in and out. I’ll even have the resistance shrine for the first 60 seconds, so there’s that.”

“Thanks for the chapter!”

Chilly nodded, “We will definitely bring in as many doors as we can, and every other advantage that we can think of. No one said that is against the rules. Maybe we could ask Chaeli for help?”

Chilly phrased that last part as a question. He was still not entirely sure who Chaeli was, but the penguins had acted like there had been someone in the room with him before.

“Thanks for the chapter! Rules are for the obedience of fools and the ones that shall never excell.”

Chilly responded with a predatory grin.

“Exactly.”

Chilly stood over a spare level three normal Plate Vest with two Essence Resonators beside him. The first resonator was full with 8 Essences of Iron, and would test both how many essences the bowl could use, and whether there was a limit to the number of mods the bowls could grant.

The second bowl had a single Essence of Steel in it, and three essences of Iron. Depending on the results of the first experiment, he would increase or decrease the number of Iron essences to make sense.

Without further ado, Chilly used the first resonator on the Plate Vest. Light blue dust swirled around the bowl. Twisting and turning as it gathered power. Two of the eight essences began vibrating and floating above the bowl. They liquified and condensed into a floating orb that swirled like a water droplet in zero-G.

Suddenly the bowl shattered into dozens of small shards and dropped the other six essences onto the crafting bench. The liquid essence floating above then fell gently down and melded with the Iron Plate vest. A gentle blue glow began to emanate from the item.

Iron Plate Vest

Magic

Body Armor

iLevel: 3

7 armor

9 armor

3% increased armor

Chilly considered the item as he collected the other six essences into his ring.

“Ok, so the resonators can’t bypass the two mod limit on magic items. Let’s see if we can mix and match essences.”

Chilly used the second resonator on the Iron Plate Vest. He wasn’t planning on using this item so it didn’t bother him that he was wasting essences.

Once again the bowl began collecting power. Surprisingly, two more Iron Essences rose up and fused. The bowl cracked causing the other essences to tumble to the floor. The floating sphere of essence descended and fused with the plate vest.

Chilly frowned at the result.

Iron Plate Vest

Magic

Body Armor

iLevel: 3

7 armor

7 armor

2 lightning resistance

“Damn,” Chilly muttered. The bowl hadn’t used the Essence of Steel, and instead opted to consume two Irons.

“Do you think that the bowl only works on magic essences?” Chilly asked one of the nearby penguins. It considered but shook its head. “Yeah, me neither.”

Nothing for it, he would have to use up more bowls.

Chilly pulled out another resonator, and this time put a single Essence of Steel in it. He placed the bowl onto the plate vest and waited.

Chilly’s frown deepened as nothing seemed to happen.

Feeling a little frustrated, and confused, Chilly pulled out his second and last essence of steel and placed it into the bowl. Immediately, the bowl began vibrating as its power liquified the two steel essences. They rose into the air as the bowl shattered, then fell and melded with the Plate Vest.

Iron Plate Vest

Rare

Body Armor

iLevel: 3

7 armor

15 life

8 armor

2 cold resistance

3% increased armor

“I see...” Chilly said, brushing the ceramic dust off the crafting bench thoughtfully.

A penguin hopped up and down and waved at him, all with a deeply worried expression on its cute little face.

Chilly chuckled, “Basically, it will only use compatible essences. And only two or more at a time. I guess that makes sense since if you were going to use only one, then you might as well just use the essence by itself.”

The penguin waved its arms impatiently.

“Hold up, I’m getting to that. I think the way that it works is that you can only use rare essences together and only magic essences together. It's a shame that I don’t have any Arcanite left, but if I did, we could confirm that it works with different essence types.”

The penguin stomped its foot in annoyance.

“I know, I should have tried using some azurite in the first experiment. I’m a dumbass.”

The penguin held out its flipper and rotated it back and forth twice.

“You really think it's worth checking?” Chilly asked, then shrugged, he would get another 5 resonators during the next dungeon reset. “Sure, why not.”

Chilly pulled out another bowl and put one Iron and one Azurite inside. He tried to use the bowl on the Iron Plate vest but nothing happened.

Chilly nodded to himself. “Looks like the bowls can’t turn a rare item into a magic one.”

He pulled out a normal helmet from his stash and used the resonator.

Iron Barbute

Magic

Helmet

iLevel: 2

6 armor

0.73 life regeneration

7 armor

“It works,” Chilly said, then began to pack everything up. “The way I see it, is that this is only super useful with multiple Emerald Essences. It will allow me to have increased vitality effect and increased effect of consecrated ground on a single piece of gear.”

Chilly stretched then looked towards the crack to the Bone Pits.

“Time to kill some mobs.”

Chilly stared at the Putrid Ghoul of Frost skeptically then glanced at the penguin at his feet.

“Are you sure that I can tank that guy?” Chilly asked with no small amount of trepidation.

The penguin who had been asked this question at least a half dozen times by now only rolled its eyes and gestured impatiently at the ghoul.

“Ok, so you said that it dealt about a hundred damage last time per hit, and I know that I have nearly twice as much health, and more than twice as much regeneration...” Chilly trailed off as he realized just how far he had come. “I guess I can trust you on this.”

He waited for the level 7 Patchwork Abomination to move away, then channeled a beam of fire at the Putrid Ghoul of Frost. It immediately turned to him and charged. More than slightly terrified, Chilly canceled Incinerate and backed away as quickly as he could.

The ghoul screeched-

You have been Hindered

Chilly felt the slow settle over his bones. He immediately stopped retreating and blasted the frost riddled creature with a concentrated dose of fire. The ghoul charged through the flames with its jaw wide open and its ice claws ready to slash. It raised one decrepit limb and raked it across Chilly’s shield.

Spoiler : The purple foot icon is supposed to indicate hinder.

Chilly winced expectantly, then grinned as the damage didn’t seem all that high. He felt the freezing cold pulse through his body, but it really wasn’t as frigid as he remembered it. With a bubbling laugh, Chilly hunkered down and continued blasting the ghoul

The ghoul thrashed and raged, raking its claws and teeth savagely over Chilly’s shields and plate vest, but nothing the ghoul did could break past the indomitable defenses.

Spoiler :

You have slain a level 6 Putrid Ghoul of Frost!

You have gained 1 experience!

A pulse of purple miasma spread from the corpse but was quickly overtaken by the glowing crucifixes of Pious Path. A single essence of Arcanite glittered in the remains of the corpse.

Chilly grinned, “one down, five to go.”

You are Exhausted

Debuff

Gain 1 stack of Exhausted every 6 hours up to a maximum of 10

Lose 1% of current life per second as physical damage per stack of Exhausted.

You are Hindered at 10 stacks of Exhausted

Sleeping for two hours purges 1 stack of Exhausted

Chilly frowned, as he felt a deep sense of exhaustion flood over him. It was difficult to overcome, but somehow less than what it was before. Regardless, Chilly managed to shrug off the feeling. Long practice during uni had trained him for this very moment.

He had more to do today before he rested.

Realistically 1% of his current life per second as physical damage was a negligible amount. If he hadn’t invested so heavily into life regeneration, then maybe it would have been worth noting, but as it stood, he could continue on with barely a thought.

Chilly stared at the Patchwork Abomination in consideration. It was level 7, but it was also all alone. If he took it down then it would put him halfway to level 7 himself. The question here was: was he willing to take on a level 7 creature?

“I think so.” Chilly said, he thumbed the edge of his shield nervously. He really wasn’t all that sure.

A penguin approached from behind.

It looked into the chamber then turned to Chilly with fire in its eyes.

“The others mock you.” Danlin the penguin said, “Not tables, stat tables.”

“Uh,” Chilly responded, not sure where the penguin was going with this.

“Chaeli deems you weak. You struggle against the ‘weakest of monsters’.”

“I...see.” Chilly turned towards the Patchwork Abomination with renewed vigor. “The weakest of monsters you say? Well, I can certainly overcome that.”

“I wish my level was shown.” the penguin sighed theatrically, “Thirty is my goal.”

“Thirty? Is that the max level?” Chilly remarked in surprise. “Well if it is, then that is certainly my goal as well.”

Chilly stepped out into the cave like area and channeled Incinerate at the hulking bone amalgamation. Fire raced across the space and flooded over and through the hundred bones making up the monstrous entity.

It turned immediately into the flames, and cocked its head. The only sound it made as it charged at Chilly was the harsh clack of bone on stone that its numerous legs made as they forced its considerable bulk forwards. Decidedly creepy.

Chilly held his ground as the Abomination swiped him with a massive claw.

Spoiler : The gray tired stick figure is supposed to represent exhausted.

He grunted as the massive claw pushed him back. A slow grin blooming as he realized that he could take this guy.

The abomination quickly slashed out with another long appendage.

Spoiler :

Then it reared back onto three of its seven legs and began to shudder. Chilly squinted at the beast not sure what was going to happen, but confident that it wouldn’t kill him.

The bones rearranged almost randomly on the Patchwork Abomination, until suddenly they froze, shuddered, and blasted out in a spray of bone shards.

Spoiler :

Chilly hid behind his dual shields as a wave of sharp projectiles battered at him. He watched his health intently, ready to bolt at a moment's notice, but was pleasantly surprised that his defenses were holding up spectacularly against the single level 7 enemy.

As the wave of projectiles ceased, Chilly peeked over the shields only to see the abomination pull in the bones it shot out. As the bones flew inwards, the cracks that had developed from the intense heat smoothed over, and the soot that caked them flaked off. Before he knew it, Chilly was looking at a monster that appeared as good as new.

“It heals.” Chilly groaned, but maintained Incinerate on the beast. “This might be a long one, boys.”

It turned out, it didn’t take that long. The heal hadn’t fully recovered the beast, and after only one more cycle of vicious rending blows, the Patchwork abomination fell to dust.

Spoiler :

You have slain a level 7 Patchwork Abomination!

You have gained 2 experience!

Chilly grinned, “That’s three out of six.”

Unfortunately it didn’t look like the Patchwork Abomination had dropped any essences. A shame, but not entirely unexpected. He returned back to the Shrine and rested a bit in front of the fire. Before too long he was fast asleep.

There was just something comforting about an everburning campfire and a horde of fluffy penguins.

Chilly awoke to a frigid wind. He squinted into the gloom but rolled over. Just a few more minutes!

Eventually the ghost lit the campfire, and warmth soaked into Chilly’s frigid bones. He shivered a little and huddled closer to the campfire. His beard itched. It had been too long since he showered.

It didn’t take long for the penguins to grow impatient and poke and prod him until he was on his feet. They herded him towards the Bone Pits and urged him excitedly to get on with it.

Chilly rolled his eyes, but lured the Putrid Ghoul of Frost into the tunnel and killed it with indiscriminate fire.

Spoiler :

You have slain a level 6 Putrid Ghoul of Frost!

You have gained 1 experience!

No essence dropped, so Chilly returned to the chamber and opened fire on the Patchwork Abomination.

Spoiler :

This time it managed to explode twice with its wave of bone, but that meant little. Incinerate burned it down all the same.

You have slain a level 7 Patchwork Abomination!

You have gained 2 experience!

Congratulations! You have leveled up!

You are now Level 7

Will your status screen open to allocate your points.

Chilly smiled, then walked forward to sift through the bone and ash. He found an Essence of Steel after a couple minutes of searching and happily hoovered it up into his ring.

It was time to see what leveling up had gotten him.

Gregory “Chilly” Morhuil

Level

Exp

Skill Points

Spec

7

0/7

1

Fire

Life

Life Regeneration

509/509

108.42

Armor

Fire

Cold

Lightning

Chaos

91

47.64%

19

15.97%

5

4.76%

0

0.00%

0

0.00%

Incinerate

Helmet:

Iron Barbute

Vitality

Body Armor:

Iron Plate Vest

Pious Path

Pants:

Iron Pants

???

Boots:

Iron Greaves

???

Gloves:

Hide Gauntlets

???

Jewelry:

Iron Ring

???

Mainhand:

Iron Kite Shield

???

Offhand:

Black Steel Buckler

Huh, he had 5 cold res. Totally forgot. Sure helped heaps against the frost ghoul.

Incinerate

Unleash a beam of fire that burns enemies that it touches. The beam dissipates after 5.6m

Deals 121.7 Fire damage per second

Ignites enemies for 42.6 Fire damage per second

Numbers go up. Chilly happy.

Vitality

Your body thrums with a powerful vitality increasing both your life and life regeneration.

Regenerate 9.0% of maximum life as life per second

29.9% more life

The new shield with 30% increased vitality effect was really pulling its weight here. Soon he would get 30% more life from this one skill.

Pious Path

Walk along the path of the holy. If the path does not exist, create it yourself. While moving or stationary, consecrate the ground beneath your feet granting life regeneration to you and allies.

3.3m radius

30s duration

It actually went down? Guess he had dropped an item with increased consecrated ground effect. That’s alright, 3.3 meters was plenty for light, and was more than enough to take out the errant burst of desecrated ground from a wandering ghoul.

Now though was the real exciting part.

New Skills.

As Chilly brought up the menu, a sparkle of stardust flashed across his vision. Temporarily blinded and confused he stumbled back. Before he could wonder too much about what the sparkle was, his attention was grabbed by the menu before him.

The normally flat blue menu was sparkling like the stars in the sky. Thousands of unfamiliar constellations illuminated effervescent text that seemed to pulse with power.

You have an open skill slot!

Choose from one of the following skills:

Orbiting Stars

Summon a cold star that orbits around you, seeking foes and exploding upon contact or command.

Take 5% of maximum life as Fire damage per second per active Orbiting Star.

23-35 Fire damage on hit

1m orbit radius

0.35m radius

1s cast time

Starfire Aegis

Cloak your form in starfire, granting you an intrinsic protection from the spark, and burning foes that strike you.

20 fire resistance

Deal 4% of maximum life as fire damage to melee attackers

Moonlit Transcendance

Find peace in the light of the moon.

Armor applies to fire, cold, and lightning damage taken.

50% less fire, cold, and lightning resistance

15% less armor

May the stars watch over you

Chilly shivered as a faint memory of a voice echoed in the chamber. The penguins gathered round and looked up at him with large glistening eyes.

Chilly couldn’t help but smile. A gift freely given. How could he have done any of this without them.

Chilly shook the tears from his eyes, and focused up. Another level up meant another big decision. And this one seemed especially big. Each of the options sounded epic, but for different reasons.

The first. Orbiting Stars was very interesting. It spoke of cold stars, but dealt fire damage. So it was probably being literal. A cold star could still be thousands of degrees and still be considered ‘cold’. It only allowed a single star to be summoned, but presumably as the skill leveled up he would be able to summon more stars. At least that was heavily implied. If the skill didn’t get additional stars per level up, then there would likely be an augment that increased the number of stars that he could summon.

The fire damage taken per star was worrisome, but he had plenty of life regeneration to soak up the cost. At the moment, he would be able to sustain four stars indefinitely. Also it was likely that he wouldn’t need to keep the stars around all the time. Just for a couple of seconds before a fight.

The problem that Chilly foresaw with this skill was that once he used up the stars then he had a choice. Either summon more stars, or channel Incinerate. It was possible that the stars themselves would out damage Incinerate, but that essentially meant that Incinerate would become a dead skill.

Regardless, the stars would provide a benefit in a specific type of battle. Short battles would end nearly instantly with this skill, since he could essentially buffer damage with the skill. If he was only fighting a single enemy, lobbing a half dozen stars at it could easily chunk its health or even go so far as to kill it immediately.

It was likely also good against hordes of enemies. If the star explosion was large enough then the overlapping explosions would likely be able to take out several enemies at once if timed properly. An appealing thought. Swarms of undead rats or mosquitos would be annoying to fight.

On the other hand, it was a poor skill against high health enemies. Bosses like the Priest of Purity likely had a massive amount of health. The Mrawll Wardens also had large life pools that would likely require Chilly to resort to summoning additional stars mid fight, or channeling Incinerate in order to complete the battle.

Choosing Orbital Stars essentially turned him into a guerrilla battle mage. Focusing on hit and run tactics while he resummoned his stars and ducked in and out of engagements. It was an interesting playstyle that Chilly wasn’t averse to trying out.

Again the problem would be Incinerate. It was unclear how the two skills should be used in conjunction.

The second skill was just as interesting. Starfire Aegis. Another star based skill. It would grant him fire resistance and a fire thorns effect when he was hit. It had the obvious drawback of only working on melee attacks, but maybe there was an augment that would overcome that restriction.

Taking Starfire Aegis would reinforce his defensive playstyle. He would still enter engagements head on, except with this skill, he would deal more damage for free essentially. The fire resistance was useless at the moment, but he was bound to come across an enemy that dealt that type of damage eventually. When he did, the extra fire resistance would be a godsend.

It was slightly annoying that the system only provided the numbers for a level 1 skill. It would make choosing the skill easier if he knew how much fire resistance Starfire Aegis granted at level 7. If it was comparable to his current armor, then it would almost be a no brainer. That much fire resistance would essentially make him immune to fire damage. A pleasing thought if he ever accidentally lit himself on fire with Incinerate again.

That was assuming there were fire based enemies in this dungeon. So far he had only encountered physical, cold and chaos based attacks. Fire and lightning were notably missing.

The second aspect of the skill that was appealing was the thorns damage. Reflecting damage back to attackers was epic in it of itself, except what made the skill even better was that the damage scaled based on his own maximum health. That was important because it meant that the more life he was getting from Vitality would buff Starfire Aegis. Likewise with the life mods on his gear. Essentially it meant that he could get more damage by getting more defense. A powerful mechanic.

The last skill was thought provoking. It was a passive skill like Starfire Aegis, but unlike that skill didn’t provide an immediate bonus to stats. Instead it actually took away a massive amount of his resistances for the dubious benefit of making it so that elemental damage would be reduced by his armor.

That was...interesting. Actually. It was probably incredibly strong. It meant that he wouldn’t need to change his gear whenever he came across a different enemy type. Basically he could stick with Iron armor, instead of switching to Black Steel item bases. In addition, it didn’t completely take away his resistance from the other elemental resistances, simply reducing them massively.

Fundamentally, it meant that he would be able to focus on armor, and be able to tank all forms of damage. Except chaos of course. Convenient, but also probably very strong. It would mean that he wouldn’t get surprised by an enemy that randomly dealt a different type of damage. Case in point: The Putrid Ghoul of Frost.

It was also appealing since it seemed easier to get armor than the elemental resistances. At least the elemental resistances seemed to have lower values than the armor mods on his gear.

All the skills were appealing. The first transitioned his combat style to a more active version that focused on burst damage in between engagements. The second, reinforced his defensive playstyle while also granting him additional damage. The last was likely the most defensive option. It didn’t grant any damage, and seemed to reduce his defenses slightly, but overall it would massively protect him from a wide variety of enemies, and make him immune to surprise assassinations from strange foes.

Chilly considered his choices. He didn’t really know. They were all interesting. They were all powerful.

Instead of deciding immediately, Chilly turned to the penguins.

“What do you think?”