The epic champion dropped an iron spikes-studded mace. They didn’t have a Level 3 Scroll of Identification to use it on the mace and Vivena put it into her dimensional pouch, then they moved on to where the body of the boss was.

It was a large hobgoblin in iron armour, its condition good. The way Vivena had killed it—a strike to its neck—left the armour undamaged. Next to the hobgoblin were four sub-bosses. They were larger than champions and wore better armours although nothing as good as the boss.

The boss was Level 4 while the sub-bosses were still Level 3 but unlike the boss, which was of the same rarity as the rift, the sub-bosses were rare. It was Keynes’s first time seeing sub-bosses and he didn’t know if the higher rarity was a rule or an exception.

At the back of the cave was the reward chest, unopened.

No one said anything and Vivena eventually went to open the chest. She pulled two items out of it. An orb and a Level 3 Scroll of Identification.

Without hesitation, Keynes told her to identify the orb.

The Orb of Faster Recharge (Uncommon)

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Permanently decreases recharge time by 50%. The effect of the orb stack with the same modifiers.

-

Level 3

They all stood speechless. This orb technically made two rifts out of one. Each rift had a recharge time of 24 hours. If they halved it to 12 hours, they could delve it twice in 24 hours. And it stacked. If they found another such orb, would it decrease the recharge time to 6 hours? There had to be some catch.

But before Keynes could voice his thoughts, Haruka asked.

“Who are you, Keynes? A Perfect State ascender, the Elevated stage, a Flight Talent and now this.” A Flight Talent… ah, I see. Makes sense.

So it finally hit them.

Unfortunately, Keynes couldn’t keep hiding his true Talent if he wished to open the rift. He and Vivena had said too much already, only an idiot wouldn’t have figured it out by now.

“I am the one who caused the outbreaks,” Keynes said. “Though I was forced to do so by the government.”

Neither of the men said anything. They were in a state of shock. Keynes had been in their shoes over two weeks ago when Wagner and then Shaper revealed to him their machinations.

Keynes waited.

It took Haruka a bit more time to recover. Bill seemed to absorb it with less shock. Keynes told them a shortened story and soon after that the both men started joking with him. Once they accepted it, awkwardness between them and Keynes vanished.

But Keynes noticed that Vivena was still on edge. He considered asking her about it but decided to do it later. It wasn’t the right time.

They checked the room with their auras and found the hidden door!

“It’s the third time,” Haruka said as the outline of the door appeared on the wall. They approached it and a system message appeared requesting a rift door key. “We found two others in a Level 2 rift as well.”

So the hidden door appears in Level 2 rifts too. I must look into that later on.

“So you need a key to unlock it?” Vivena asked.

Haruka nodded.

“We haven’t opened the previous two doors. We haven’t found the key yet. It seems that the key is harder to find than the door itself.”

Keynes thought back to the compartment in the reward chest. It’d never asked for the key. Why was this different?

He placed his hand on the door and used his Talent. His mana was sucked out of him, leaving him with an empty tank and a splitting headache. He grunted as he went to one knee but he managed to unlock the door.

Master, you shouldn’t do that. Your Talent is too crude to open the door like this without serious negative feedback.

He didn’t reply because even thinking hurt.

Others talked to him but he ignored them. That was really bad. He only murmured that he needed to take a short nap.

When he woke up. The other three sat nearby. They stripped the boss and sub-bosses from the armour.

“What happened?” Vivena asked, worried.

“Opening that door took all my mana. I have never experienced a mana headache before,” Keynes said. Waxilium Earl had pumped him so thickly with his Talent that Keynes didn’t feel anything but euphoria. This was his first time. His mother had often pushed herself too hard, inducing mana headaches. She couldn’t stomach seeing people in distress.

“It’s incredible,” Haruka said. “You are incredible, Keynes.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Keynes murmured in reply, slowly getting to his feet. “By the way, what did I miss?”

Vivena showed him.

Poison’s Regalia (Epic)

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+10 Vitality

-

Poison Aura (passive)

-

Poisonous Attacks (passive)

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+ 15% Poison Resistance

-

{Enchants: Self-repair; Self-clean}

[Cloak]

Level 3

“What is this made of?” It felt impossibly light, not like any material Keynes could think of. “It’s like water and smoke but so delicate.”

“We have no idea what it is but that was the only reward in the hidden room,” Haruka said.

“We’ve decided to give the cloak to Vivena as she is the one who cleared the rift,” Bill added. “I hope you don’t mind.”

Keynes shook his head then asked.

“It didn’t require the scroll?”

“No.”

The same as the hidden compartment. And judging by the properties of the cloak, it fitted Vivena. So, the hidden reward reflected their needs. It was an amazing piece of information. The question was: to what degree? Keynes understood that he’d need to spend some time and research this phenomenon. If the hidden rewards were based on conscious desires and were fairly accurate, then sky was the limit. He began making a mental list of items, spells and techniques he needed. Keynes was going to use one desire at a time and see if it was reflected in the hidden reward.

“Did you try to put it on?”

She nodded, sadly.

“My Spirit is too weak.”

“We think that she must be at least in the Medium stage to use that item.”

“Then what are you waiting for?” Keynes asked. “Start cultivating the essence.”

He wanted to check on the hidden room but it vanished soon after others had left it. From what they said, it looked out of place in the cave. It had steel columns and electrical light and a solid concrete floor.

It wasn’t the end of the world, if they encountered this room once, they’d do so again. Keynes would just need to find a way to withstand the headache.

“What now?” Bill asked and Keynes had an impression that the question was aimed solely at Haruka.

“Isn’t that obvious, Bill?” Haruka replied without hesitation. “We take everything out of this rift. Everything you see here is wealth.”

***

They did as Haruka said. Every scrap of armour was transported out of the rift, including the crude daggers and swords wielded by the goblins and the hobgoblin. After that, they checked the rift and found two small caverns. They weren’t exactly hidden but it was easy to miss the narrow passage leading to them.

In the caverns, they found more broken armours and then they hit the jackpot – a few uncut gemstones. What was interesting was the fact that the gemstones didn’t have a system window. Some of the badly mangled armour or their pieces didn’t have system windows either. The rewards always had a system window, even the raw material like a piece of wood or a slab of aluminium. It meant something important, though Keynes didn’t know yet why. It felt like the answer was shown to Keynes in Hugo’s garden.

As Keynes and others cleared the rift, which took them an entire day, Keynes replayed his time with Hugo and Sophie in his head. And there it was, Hugo had been explaining to Keynes a process called the spiritual schematisation. It was a fine line between a plant having a spiritual window and not. Hugo didn’t understand it himself. A few errors during the cultivation of plants could strip the system window from them. It also took away their primary properties, leaving a bit of a mess. But it didn’t exactly mean that a plant without a spiritual window was useless, there was always some use for it, even a marginal one.

Any thoughts on this? At some point, Keynes asked Alice. Her reply sounded distracted as if she was busy herself; doing what? He couldn’t tell.

The gemstone… no, not really. I cannot say anything, though they’d look much nicer polished up… master.

It took Keynes some time, realising that Alice dropped him a hint there. The gemstones looked crude, very crude. They needed to be worked on. Could it be the process of polishing them up made the System give the gemstone a system window? That was a possibility.

Keynes even shared his thoughts with others but they didn’t know why the System did it and had never heard about the system schematisation. Keynes could see an interest in Haruka’s eyes though. Perhaps, they could discuss the subject. Their crafted weapons had to go through the same process after all. They weren’t made out of the rift rewards but the wood found inside the rift and the final product had the system window.

I will have to meet that weaponsmith. He may know something about this process.

Finally, with everything valuable removed from the rift, their dimensional pouches full and several heaps of scrap next to the rift, came the time to decide what to do with the orb.

“We should keep it,” Vivena said. “This rift is only uncommon. And it seems that Level 3 rifts can go up to epic rarity. The cloak alone is worth more than anything else we pulled out of the rift, excluding the orb.”

“She has a point,” Bill agreed. “If we returned to…”

Haruka gave him a hard stare and Bill trailed off.

“We may not find another Level 3 rift for a very long time,” Haruka said. “Rifts locations seemed to be random. On top of that, this is the only unsealed Level 3 rift in the world. Finding another one, creates two sources of Level 3 materials and items.”

“Look at him,” Vivena said with a smile. “Already thinking like a businessman.”

Haruka nodded with a quiet tension on his face.

Then they turned to Keynes, awaiting his opinion. Vivena and Bill wanted to find a more valuable rift and use the orb on it. Keynes had already seen it in the White Hall. Ten the most valuable Level 1 rifts. It was a very smart idea.

On the other hand, when the Level 3 materials would begin getting out and gathering attention, others would search for their source. It could be an issue but that wasn’t really what made up Keynes’s argument.

“Can we delve a higher rarity rift without dying in a process?

This caused them to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. The fight in front of the rift humbled Keynes. If the goblins were of exotic rarity, he didn’t think they’d have made out alive. At exotic rarity, monsters had one active and two passive skills. The hounds from the island gave Keynes a run for his money.

“I can,” Vivena said but Keynes disagreed with her.

“That’s not the point, Vivena. The rift isn’t only the source of items but also the essence. We must fight the monsters too.” Otherwise, the rift won’t award us with the hidden rewards.

“Keynes has a very valid point,” Haruka added. “The strength gap between Level 2 and 3 is much wider than between Level 1 and 2. Additionally, this rift has quite a modifier. A loot drop from champions sounds like a good deal to me.”

Bill switched the sides and seeing no other option, Vivena conceded with their point of view.

They used the Orb of Faster Recharge on the Level 3 rift.

Unlike the Lesser Orb of Luck, this orb didn’t affect monsters inside the rift. Alice murmured something about two classes of orbs but when asked to elaborate, she shut up like a clam.

With the rift’s new recharging time set at 12 hours, they decided to prepare themselves and the spot around the rift. It was going to be their home for some time. They didn’t discuss the issue of transporting their loot for now, knowing well it would sour their mood.

They removed the goblin bodies, moving them back into the rift. Then Haruka and Bill took the lead and transformed the area into a nice living space. They were experienced in this sort of construction work. They smartly didn’t touch any tree around the rift because of the canopy-created cover. Both men had axes made from Level 1 materials with them. The axes gave 1% extra to damage, which made the axes quite bad but that wasn’t their purpose of course.

In a span of hours, they cut many trees and used them to build a place to sleep, a crude kitchen, an utility room, a toilet and a storage room for the things from the rift. Bill had done some digging as well, wanting to move the storage room beneath the ground. It wouldn’t be finished for days yet.

With only a few minutes left, the four were sitting around a firepit. They had found some loose rocks in the goblin cave and used it to build a crude furnace and a firepit.

As the fire happily danced, they looked at each other. Keynes had to admit that their quartet had developed chemistry. They weren’t at the stage when they had offensive skills yet but Keynes was confident that it was only a matter of time.

“Tomorrow, we must go hunt again for meat, mostly,” Bill said.

“How many purification rituals before we run out of ingredients?” Haruka asked Bill.

“About twenty, maybe a few more.”

“Cooked monster meat can last up to three days. It would give us two months before we must return to gather more ingredients. Enough time to level up.”

They all nodded, no one broached the question: what then? They were still drunk on their good fortune.

“The rift has recharged,” Bill said, they took a deep breath, this was going to be a real challenge. They wouldn’t be able to rely on Vivena’s Talent as she was down to the last serum and Keynes had asked her to keep it for an emergency.

If they couldn’t beat this rift on their own, then they had a lot to think about.