[NR] Taking Breaks For Speed - Chapter 487

As Jason cultivates and his mom wonders what is going on, Courtney has her work cut out for her. It took a good while to pep up Rachel, but that was still in VR so she still had a few days to work with. The first question she faced was what needed to be done?

There was not some enemy to research. The dungeon had simply gotten out of hand for a little. Given what she had reported to her and the note from Jason there was no helping it.

The team was all geared up with only Jason maybe needing a new skill or two. Even if she wanted to improve either, the cost would simply be untenable. After all, the closer gear gets to sixth break quality without going over, the more expensive it is.

In fact, gear made to the peak quality you can manage without it qualifying as sixth break is worth a magnitude more than sixth break gear. After all, that is when gear begins to have true requirements to use. This means peak fifth break gear can be worn below fifth break and thus all the rich types buy it up.

Not even Rachel’s parents would be able to justify buying the stuff for her. In an odd mirroring of how it normally ends up, locals tend to be the ones who monopolize the best in slot fifth break gear. Though anyone with half a brain will realize why. After all, the locals can die for real, so gear, especially defensive gear, that can be worn by young children who only just hit level ten is highly sought after.

The only equipment that didn’t follow this trend was, of course, accessories. Those things are always expensive. Courtney does admit to herself it would be nice to have at least one by now, but they tend to be limited to sixth break and above.

Not because you can’t get them before. Rather, the material needed to make them is rare enough that when people hit sixth break is around when they first have some drop. Though Courtney had thought over the logistics of the matter before and so quickly moved on.

Except she didn’t have anything to move on to. Courtney’s network of people was growing slowly, and messing around with it right now would only harm it. Outside of that, she was supposed to be in NeoRealm advancing in power.

Sure, missing a week here and there isn’t the end of the world. In fact, some researchers have posited that if you do take breaks irl, you advance faster. No one knows why, but there it is.

Though at that, Courtney stumbles upon an avenue to walk. Because it isn’t entirely true that she has no clue what might be up. Just nothing solid or proven.

And it all comes back to Jason. Courtney wouldn’t say he was a wrench in her plans. That would be rude to wrenches. He was like a flash storm that caused the river Rachel was on to jump its banks and take a new course.

After all, who in their right mind comes out and claims cultivation is real? It isn’t like they’re in a region where that was at least backed by the myths. He would have been more believable claiming to have a magic sword.

If only her experiments hadn’t been proving him correct. Because now she has to not only worry about Rachel’s physical and mental health, but her soul as well. Courtney sighs, she isn’t a priest, how is she supposed to protect a soul?

Well, she had an answer, just not one that is fully tested yet. The best protection is to be stronger and cultivation supposedly helps. Though annoyingly enough, she suspects that the answer to why breaks from NeoRealm helps, comes down to this as well.

What if the soul was involved? What if playing the game puts a strain on the soul? That would explain why taking a break would help, just like how resting after exercising is needed. In fact, would a stronger soul allow for even faster advancement?

Courtney doubted it would help Jason. Though only because he doesn’t need it and may in fact already be using it to his advantage. After all, what kind of crazy skill allowed someone to ignore the exponentially increasing xp cost?

The System shouldn’t allow that. At the start, Courtney had figured it either didn’t go all the way or had some hidden down side. Now? Well, she might have found the source of this growth.

After all, it isn’t like you get some set amount of xp from winning a fight. The System shows experience as a percentage and it will go up as you do things, but no one has ever managed to nail down an actual number to it like what you see in old games.

It didn’t take 10 experience to hit level two; it took 100% experience at level one. Even now, Courtney’s character was trapped at 99.99% experience, waiting to complete the dungeon and breakthrough. Did the percentages represent some kind of soul based growth?

Courtney shakes her head and tosses that idea. Some of the people she had in the tests had played NeoRealm for decades by this point and were at various bottlenecks. Despite that, they all seemed to be about the same.

That meant just leveling up wasn’t likely to lead to any growth. So while it shows signs of being similar to muscles, just straining the soup must not equal growth. Maybe it was more like sleep?

You don’t grow more capable of going without sleep by going without sleep. There is just a certain amount of sleep you need. Courtney nods to herself, that felt right.

Though it made her think of all NeoRealm players like pre-revolution school students. Constantly being forced to wake up too early and stay up too late for school work. Seeing the various school averages go up simply because kids started to get proper sleep schedules was always amazing.

Not because it was some meteoric rise, but because of it was such an even rise across everything. Though it probably helped on the low end that they were also getting proper meals and seeing doctors. For the rich kids, it probably has more to do with the fact that teachers were no longer shackled and could actually call out problem kids even if before their parents had been previously given big donations to the school.