Chapter 151

“Ooooooh shit,” Luke said.

Nobody in the crowd was panicking or screaming, so obviously they’d been expecting something like this. Blood spurted into the air, and a chorus of voices rose up, all saying the same thing. Then the man on the stage died and his murderer’s lips moved in some silent prayer. Even with his perception at 55, Luke couldn’t make out what the man said.

“What the fuck is going on here?” Zea whispered harshly as she grabbed at Luke’s arm. “Maybe we should go.”

“I think we’re alright,” Luke said. “This isn’t something weird to these people. It’s cultural, some kind of tradition.”

“How the hell can you tell?”

“Well, because I’ve been dealing with this kind of stuff since I got here. Something weird happens, and I have to figure out from context if everyone else thinks it’s just another day or if I should be worried. This is expected. Look at them all. They came here to witness this. They knew what they were going to see.”

Luke was pretty sure he knew what was happening, but just to be sure, he started spamming [Analyze] on everyone on the stage. They were organized in order of descending level, with the strongest person still alive being level 51 and the weakest being 44. The young man was level 26.

The ritual repeated itself after the corpse was removed, with the next man on the left stepping forward, and the young man murdering him. That pushed him up to level 27. By the time the process was finished and the last body had been taken away, the man was level 29.

Luke watched it silently, and when Zea saw that he wasn’t going to leave, she settled down too. Once it was over and the crowd began to disperse, they walked back to the inn they’d taken rooms at. It wasn’t until they were a few blocks away that Zea finally spoke, her voice dripping with disgust. “That was absolutely barbaric.”

“What? Why?”

“Slaughtering people like that,” Zea said. “Just… what, killing them to funnel XP to someone? What the fuck kind of civilized society does that?”

“They were all high level,” Luke said. “Some of them were over level 50. The uniforms… I think they were some sort of military force.”

“Probably. There’s a reason we rotate soldiers off the front lines when they start getting into the high 20s,” Zea said. “It’s so we don’t have to have shit like this happening in the middle of our cities.”

“You don’t know if this is a normal occurrence. Maybe something special happened here. Maybe those guys held some choke point against thousands of enemies and saved entire towns from being destroyed.”

“I fucking doubt it,” Zea said. “That wasn’t a temporary stage they set up. And even if that was the case, they wouldn’t be funneling it all into that one guy. How many years of his life did he give up right there for some extra AP?”

“I don’t think it was about the XP,” Luke said. “There are plenty of easy ways to farm XP. They don’t need to kill their own for a minor level bump that they could get with a few weeks of dedicated monster hunting.”

“No, it’s about the ‘sacrifice.’ They served the motherland well, fought off her enemies, became an impenetrable wall for her citizens to shelter behind, but now the sickness of the mind is upon them, and it’s time for one last act of service, time to die. And here’s a symbolic passing on of the duty to the next generation by making some guy get up in front of a crowd to murder the veterans in job lots. Fucking savages.”

If he’d wanted to fight about it, Luke would have pointed out that Zea was making a lot of assumptions there, some of which were suspiciously specific and made him think she’d encountered exactly that kind of behavior in the past. But at the end of the day, Luke didn’t know anything about Naldrin’s culture, certainly not enough to defend it, and he didn’t feel like playing Devil’s Advocate for a group of people he had no association with.

The whole experience did prompt him to start using [Analyze]regularly, and he quickly noticed a pattern. “There are a lot of people in this city over level 20,” he said. “A few over level 30 as well. And you know what, maybe it’s just the district we’re in, but do you see a single person who’s more than fifty years old?”

Zea frowned and said, “That’s weird.”

“Hey System,” Luke said. “What’s the average level for a monster on the western continent, and what’s the average level on the eastern continent?”

“17 and 31,” System said.

“How about the average level for people?”

“14 on the western continent, 29 on the eastern.”

“Everything and everyone is stronger here,” Luke said. “We shouldn’t expect things to go as easily as it did back on the other side of the ocean.”

“Maybe, but without the church actively hunting us down, it should be less stressful.”

Luke snorted. “There is that,” he agreed.

They turned off the street and climbed the stairs back up to their room. “We’ll have to see how the hunting is out in the wilderness,” Luke said. “I need to gain 3 levels for [XP Cycle], then another one for [XP Reset]. Then 5 levels for [Inflict Status]. Or… maybe 4 levels? I’d have to do the math. Either way, I’ll be right around level 50 just for that, assuming nothing else comes up.”

He skimmed through his skill list on his status and for probably the hundredth time considered changing the order back. He’d switched it over to read alphabetically, but he’d gotten so used to the old version of a few broad categories roughly sorted by order of acquisition that the new list was actually harder to read to him.

“Couple combat skills left to max out before I start getting into advanced skills,” he said, “But I probably won’t need them once I have [Inflict Status]. If possible, I’d like to just grind that out and call it good.”

“What about [Matter Generation]?” Zea asked.

“Ah, your gold farm. Right. Uh, I guess I have nothing against the idea, but it’s kind of low priority, you know?”

“You know I could make you some incredible weapons if you could just create me anything I wanted, right?” Zea asked.

Luke shrugged. “Sure, but it’s not like I can take it with me after I get to the God Machine.”

In truth, his final level was going to be largely dependent on how much resistance he encountered on the way. While he doubted he’d just stroll right up to the place, he didn’t think he’d be killing enough monsters to put on 8 levels without going out of his way to make it work. Now that they had the time and resources, Zea could churn out enough bombs for him to decimate a few anthills before they really got going.

“The fastest way to pick up [Matter Generation] is to have you make bombs for me to use at the nearest anthill,” Luke said. “Or I guess maybe some other concentration of bugs. Wasps or bees maybe? I don’t know if I want to risk it with something that can fly.”

“I could do twenty or so bombs with the funds we have left,” Zea said. “That would probably be enough to hit level 50, right?”

“Maybe. System, how much XP would I need?”

“182,928,” System told him.

“Really, that much? Damn, that’s way more than I was expecting. Do you think there are enough anthills within, I don’t know, let’s say a hundred miles of the city?”

“There are no anthills in that radius,” System said.

Luke glanced over at Zea, who shrugged back. “Lucky for the people who live here, I suppose,” he said. “Okay, where is the nearest anthill then?”

“About four thousand miles west of here.”

“You mean back across the ocean? Are you trying to tell me there are no ants on this continent at all?”

“There are certainly some small colonies,” System said, “But the ones you are referring to, with hundreds of thousands of ants, have all been wiped out by people seeking to do exactly what you are. At some point in this civilization’s history, various species of insects used to be farmed in contained fields to allow for rapid accumulation of XP. The practice died out after it was determined that too many resources had to be invested into the closed ecosystem to justify the XP gains.”

“Meaning that naturally occurring anthills became valuable and guarded resources,” Zea said. “Probably closely monitored for size and regularly culled by whoever is overseeing it.”

“Correct.”

“But that would mean those anthills still exist today,” Luke pointed out.

“They were destroyed centuries ago during what local history books refer to as the ‘Night of the Brightest Fire,” which is a misnomer as the event actually lasted two years. According to the story, the world burned for so long that the smoke blocked out the sky and left nothing but the fires to see by. Many of the strongest humans in the world died during this event, which led to a need to replace them with fresh soldiers to fight on the front line.”

“I’m confused here. What were they fighting?”

“I do not know,” System said.

“How could you not know?” Luke asked, surprised. “You know, well, everything.”

It wouldn’t have surprised him if System had told Luke that he didn’t have access to the information. That happened all the time, though less now with the two bloodline purifications Luke had undergone. It was pretty rare for System to just not know something though. Luke couldn’t even recall a specific time that had happened off the top of his head.

“There are many logs of people dying during this time period, but their XP was returned in full to the God Machine without the normal portion being transferred to the cause of their death. This does happen sometimes, for example if someone were to die due to some sort of accident such as falling from a great height, but there has been no other instance of so many people all dying in such a short time frame due to unknown causes.”

“We’re getting kind of off-topic, don’t you think?” Zea cut in. “The point of this is that there are no massive anthills on the eastern continent for us to exploit, so there’s no reason to spend all of our funds on bombs. You’ll have to level the old-fashioned way.”

“Not the end of the world,” Luke said. As far as he knew, he wasn’t on any sort of a time limit. His family would be just as dead in a year as they were right now, and it would be the exact same amount of effort to bring them back either way. Probably. He should check on that.

System wasn’t always forthcoming with information, and it wouldn’t be the first time Luke had assumed he had a solution to a problem, only to hit a snag once he went to implement it because System had neglected to mention something vital that a normal person would have brought up during the initial discussion.

He was getting better with volunteering information, but it wouldn’t hurt to revisit some assumptions Luke had made when he first arrived on Aros just to confirm everything was going to work out the way he was planning. If he ended up needing another bloodline purification after he’d reached the God Machine, it was better to find out now.

“So, let’s talk about the God Machine itself,” Luke told System. “Specifically, I want to discuss what I can and can’t do there, and if I’m going to need to take any steps prior to reaching the physical location.”

“Of course,” System said. “What would you like to know?”

“To start…”