[NR] The Result - Chapter 582

While haste makes waste, Jason was certainly on a timer. His body was cooling off supernaturally fast, likely because of his void body and the sudden expulsion of so much energy in the form of those Energy lines. Though if anything, that might help as it would slow down the usual nastiness a body goes through when they die.

Fighting against this was the fact that from the start it was obvious that his body had begun to lose his void-like qualities. The System slowly forcing a flesh and blood body back into place. Worse, it started at the extremities, which includes his head and brains don’t survive very well when dead. Though a stray thought flits through his mind that if this doesn’t work, then next time maybe try it in an ice bath?

Jason pushes the distracting thoughts aside and mentally reaches into his core. While the lines are gone, there was still one connection between him and the world’s Energy. The connection between here and home, his avatar and his body.

So he follows that connection and grabs onto some wisps of the planet’s Energy. The natural threads of the world, of which Jason can only touch the most minor Tufts of. Though that is more than enough for now.

With great effort, Jason pulls what he managed to grab through the small dimensional hole, back into his body. Though once through, he realizes a problem. The wisps of Energy might be threads, but they were about as organized as tufts of cotton. That includes bits mixed in that aren’t threads, but rather chunks of Energy.

When Jason had first peeked into the World’s Energy, it hadn’t been this snarled or nasty. There wasn’t anything he could do about this though and so he could only rush to straighten things out and comb out the detritus. This only took moments as it was being done at the speed of thought, but he didn’t have many moments left.

Though even once the Energy threads were sorted, that didn’t mean it became easy. In fact, in some ways it got harder as he now had to separate out and spin the threads into string. When Jason had practiced with his pinky, the energy was already portioned out and ready to spin. An oversight on his part, but he still believed that he could overcome this challenge.

With a force of will, the Energy was spun into a tight string that Jason strung up to stabilize his core. That is just the beginning though, as he winds up additional strings to send into the rest of his body. String after string is spread out through his body, but the remaining Energy in his core is quickly depleting.

Worse, unlike the System lines, his weren’t staying in place. Though that wasn’t the most disastrous. Rather, it was the fact he couldn’t see what the difference was.

Jason tied knots where they had been. He tied knots where they hadn’t been. It didn’t matter, even when he tried to tie it to his shell. His lines didn’t even stay in place in areas that had returned to being fully flesh and blood.

He had missed something.

And so he died.

...

{You have died.

Applying loses...

Experience progress towards level 29 reset to 0

Temporary stat reduction of 0 applied to Strength

Temporary stat reduction of 0 applied to Toughness

Temporary stat reduction of 0 applied to Agility

Error: Unable to remove experience from Energetic Body Reinforcement

Experience progress towards Apprentice level six of Energetic Poison and Venom Resistance reset to 0

Apprentice level five of Energetic Poison and Venom Resistance lost

Experience progress towards Apprentice level five of Body Blast reset to 0

Experience progress towards Apprentice level nine’s experience cap of Herb Farming reset to 0

Experience progress towards Initiate level nine’s experience cap of War Stomp reset to 0

Experience progress towards Novice level eight of Wilderness Construction reset to 0

All equipment not integrated into body or soul bound dropped

Judging death...

Five in-game day ban applied to account}

Jason frowned as he floated in a black void. While disappointing, this outcome wasn’t the most unexpected. There was a reason he had made sure Lily could get into the house on her own. Though admittedly, only a five-day ban was quite lenient, being about the lower end of possibilities.

The amount of time tends to scale with how you died. A simple five day? That was more inline with someone dying in a training accident somewhere safe. Which, to be fair, sort of is what happened.

More interesting was the single error. The fact that the System was unable to remove experience from his cultivation technique. Moreover, Jason could rule out this being because of it having been capped at the bottleneck to ranking up to Journeyman. After all, it wasn’t shy about taking experience from Herb Farming and War Stomp.

The fact that experience couldn’t be taken, represented the skill as being beyond at least a part of the System. Jason figured there were two main possibilities for why this was the case. The most simple explanation was that it connected directly to his body and the System had been unable to even temporarily reduce his stats.

An oddity, though, one Jason already knew the answer to. Long and short of it? The System can only take away status point derived stats. So since Jason only received stats from base ability and his concepts, there was nothing for the System to take.

Though speaking of his concepts and what they represent, there was a second possibility. The fact that the skill was of the “Truth” rarity. Jason hadn’t heard of certain rarities outright preventing skill drain on death. However, he was familiar with the concept of certain rarities increasing or decreasing the amount lost. The classic example being any Beginner rarity skills losing less experience if you haven’t reached level ten.

The only snag was the fact it counted as an error. Those other options all work within the framework provided by the System and certainly didn’t raise an error. Which was why Jason actually leaned more towards the first explanation. After all, the truth rarity was a classification under the System and thus should have something as simple as the death screen message figured out.