FB: Chapter 87 – New Title, Finally

Winner! Standard 1v1: 1,000-0 Champion 1v1: 100-0 Tournament: 4-0
Please return to the platform to leave the arena.

Divine Champion
Awarded for winning 1,000 1v1 matches in a row, 100 Champion matches in a row in a coliseum and 3 tournaments between Champions.
+15% Physical Damage
+5% Magical Damage
+5% Stats
+1 Title

That had taken far too long, but I had finally done it. Looking at the requirements for the title I could only shake my head as I left the arena. I had won one more tournament than I needed to, but I didn’t have any complaints.

With one personal Legendary Feather Weight and personal 6 Epic Reduce Weight skill shards, I would be able to get my weight reduction to 68.8%. If I unlocked my last two skill slots, then I would be able to get that to 79.2% with 2 more epic Reduce Weight skill shards.

It wasn’t enough. I still needed ten percent more weight reduction along with another 16 levels before I could use the mega sword Slice. Purchasing another orb of Floating Fire to get another personal special legendary skill of Feather Weight to upgrade into the next rank of artifact would take money and experience.

I did have enough money after winning the latest guild battle. Since I had put up the stake for the battle, I took 1,300 platinum from the 3,000 we had won. Part of that was to pay back the fee on the loan I had taken, but the rest was for myself. If the guild wanted the rest they could put up the stake for the battle next time. Handing over 2,000 platinum paid for most of the consumables used.

The rest was made up for by the large influx of people who wanted to join the Fanged Fox Guild and not replenishing the stockpiles we had. In order to keep the prices manageable, we couldn’t buy supplies at the last moment. We had to have a stockpile. Right now that stockpile would remain depleted until the canal was completed.

It left us zero safety margin, but no one else was currently looking to challenge our guild to a guild battle. With the influx of quality people, cash flow was increasing and work was proceeding smoothly. Also during the attack, the Illuminati had acted as well, taking out the town that the HeroTen guild had controlled.

Now their entire guild was spiraling and China had to invest a lot of money to keep them afloat. There was a lot of negative reporting in China about the Illuminati, but my spokespeople pointed out we didn’t control the dark guild and that HeroTen had challenged us, not the other way around. The dark guild had taken advantage of their lack of preparation and the announcement regarding the battle.

It helped that other dark guilds acted against the other guilds that had joined in with HeroTen. The Knights of Ni were probably going to collapse unless they got some serious outside investment to salvage their position in Exponential.

My main goal was grinding up some levels and earning a lot of experience. I needed to get to level 120, get another Feather Weight to upgrade the skill shard to artifact rank and level up 8 skill shards for Reduce Weight to legendary. Since that was a basic skill shard, it would only take 2 skill shards of Epic rank instead of 8 to bring Reduce Weight from epic rank to Legendary rank. Normally it was better to invest into special Legendary skills which were better like Feather Weight, but only one of each special skill could be equipped per player.

I would need around 16 million experience for Reduce Weight and around another 16 million experience to increase the rank of Feather Weight from Legendary to Artifact. I would also need a bit more than 12 million experience for another 16 levels, with each level requiring 766,400 experience. If I found a monster ten levels or higher that gave me 250 experience per kill, I would need to kill 176,000 of them to be able to wield the unique mega sword Slice.

The problem remained that finding such a monster level 130 higher that I could cheese was impossible. After level 100 it was very difficult to find monsters that could be cheesed. I also didn’t know any altar set ups at that high a level either. I had exhausted my previous knowledge. Now I was so far ahead and other people were struggling to catch up with me.

If I had to kill monsters one at a time that would be a massive headache. Well, I had money to spare, it was time to spend it. I left the capital coliseum and made my way to one of the information brokers in the city.

“I am looking for high level monsters, preferably level 130 to level 140, that I can kill in large quantities and can be lured,” I stated.

“The problem is that in such zones, monster types tend to mix together,” the Information Broker replied, and I nodded at this. I then pulled out a sack of 100 platinum and set it on the table.

“There is a difference between it doesn’t exist and just incredibly rare. That has to be at least one high level zone out there with a single type of monster that can be lured,” I replied. The Information Broker took the sack of money off the table.

“I will investigate. Come back in eight days. If there is any kind of answer I will have it,” he replied. I nodded at this and left. Problems that could be solved with money weren’t really problems in my mind. Now that I had money and things had stabilized, I felt a bit of relief.

While it might have been better to invest in the research for an alchemical product to permanently kill the Unmentionable Horror, I wasn’t overly concerned. Already several pure water concoctions had been created by the alchemists we had been investing in who were part of the guild. I would just use them all at once on the corpse of the creature and flood the entire Black Swamp with fresh water.

Even then, I knew that was probably going to fail. The Human Emperor would never assign something that was easy to complete. That was why I had already come up with a backup plan. I still had the information about several followers of dark gods in the Human Empire and had paid quite a bit for that information.

Once I was able to use Slice, I would go pay them a visit, smash their faces in, and get their pendants for their gods. I would then turn those pendants in to Cardinal Pious in exchange for sealing the Unmentionable Horror with her divine power, severing its connection to whatever dark god kept it around.

Everything else was just a side show I hoped would work or at the very least weaken the Unmentionable Horror for the actual plan to work. I didn’t plan to tell anyone about bringing in Cardinal Pious. Also to kill such a creature, I needed a strong physical attack. While it was ethereal and poison based, it was easier to counter its ethereal nature using consumables than its poison resistance.

Getting stuck on the idea about the canal and the lore had been foolish and way too stressful. I would let people like Quant Z worry about such things. I would just leverage high level connections and vast quantities of platinum to solve the problem with a minimal amount of fuss. Also getting a Cardinal involved would make it impossible for the Human Emperor to question the result.

While the Human Emperor was above everyone else, including the Trinity Church, the twenty-seven Cardinals could put pressure on him politically. One of the only organizations capable of doing so. The nobles could as well, but they were never unified to the extent that the Trinity Church and the Cardinals were. If a Cardinal said they had sealed the Unmentionable Horror, then the Human Emperor wouldn’t argue about such a result and wouldn’t be able to pursue me either.

So even if the canal did work and dealt with the Unmentionable Horror permanently, I would still want a Cardinal to confirm such a thing. It would be a small favor instead of a large favor, but the result would be the same. I would end this problem with the Human Emperor once and for all and not get pulled into another scheme of his.

That was the difference between a good player and a god tier player of Exponential like myself. The ability to plan ahead for when the quest failed. It was a reoccurring theme my last go around. High level quests were prone to cataclysmic failures. Time, energy, and a lot of money were invested into completing them, but they often had hidden twists to them.

Anything over level 120 often came with a twist. Like the adventurer team I had hired to get legendary poisons. The Dark Saint Gamabuturon showing up was the twist QAI gave the quest. It wouldn’t control anything directly, but there would be a chain of events that could be linked to the outcome. Some General would deploy scouts into one of the zones near the black zone.

These scouts would pick up on our route or a spy would report from the Adventurers Union, perhaps both. The Dark Saint Gamabuturon would be dispatched to investigate the area and intercept any adventuring parties.

If I dug into the lore enough, I had no doubt that chain of events had occurred. Now how much was just a chain of events QAI set in motion and how much did it control, it was hard to say. Regardless, it was a common theme of high level quests. QAI liked to give them surprise twists to represent their immense difficultly.

That was why I had no doubt that the quest the Human Emperor had given me was going to be a disaster. It was just a question of how much of a disaster. The canal would draw the attention of QAI, of that I had no doubt. It would then twist things to make the quest a failure, that was when I would whip out a Cardinal to solve the problem. And if a Cardinal failed, that would also give me cover with the Human Emperor, since the Cardinals were over level 300. Still, failure would be bad, and I wanted to avoid that outcome if possible.