FB: Chapter 14 – Planning

A week of high intensity zombie slaying later, everything was going smoothly. My dual wield plan was easy enough. It was mentally tiring to repeat the same motions for ten hours every day, but seeing the numbers shoot up was motivation enough for now.

Every 2,046,000 experience, I would personally add experience to 32 junk skill shards and make an Epic skill shard that was maxed out on experience. I had made 13 so far. The first 8 had been for Gamblers Commitment. I had 4 equipped, boosting my Luck to 209 before stat bonuses and after the stat bonus was applied it was 209. Each Epic rank Gamblers Commitment skill shard boosted my Luck stat by 50, with an additional 2 stat points coming from the 4% boost for leveling up the skill shards myself. And there was the one stat point I had in the stat that I started off with as a level one.

Once I had the fame and the funds, I could get the item needed and pay a specialist to make the special legendary skill Dice Roll. Instead of increasing my Luck by 10 per rank in the skill shard, it would increase my Luck stat by 2% per rank in the skill shard. Since Legendary was the sixth skill shard rank, that meant my Luck would get a 12% boost. Once I had more than 500 Luck, the skill shard was better than the non-special skill shard.

The one thing that annoyed me was that each special type skill could only be equipped once. So, I couldn’t stack up Dice Roll Legendary skill shards like I was doing for Gamblers Commitment.

There had to be a special Legendary skill shard that increased the max resistance cap of 70% from skill shards, but I didn’t know the requirements. Special Legendary skills were what separated the top players from the common people. If they were personally leveled up with the percentage boost, that made them even better. These weren’t unique skills, but only one could be equipped at a time per person and they had special requirements to get.

Since I didn’t plan on selling these skill shards, I would soul bind them, so I wouldn’t lose the skill shard if I dropped my weapon they were in after dying. That way they could be recovered. Once I had Dice Roll it would give me a 12.6% boost to Luck. While it seemed like a small boost, every bit helped especially when I planned to invest all the stat points I could assign into Luck. Expanding the critical hit rate for poison would become incredibly overpowered and Luck also increased my drop rate which was equally important.

The main thing I had been doing was thinking about a level 101 or higher monster I could cheese or defeat in a cheap way that didn’t depend on my stats. That was the first requirement I had thought about and there were only three.

The first option was the Lucky Bunny in the Poppy Fields. It moved insanely fast and had insane Luck. Just one paw tap, and a person would get sharded due to being hit with a super critical attack. My Luck stat might counter them to some extent and I could use poisoned bait to try and kill them.

The biggest problem was the high level. To have the poison kill the Lucky Bunny, I would have to spend at least a gold on poison per Lucky Bunny. That kind of stuff was only found in cities and required connections. The headache of getting such an item would be immense since such poison would be more strictly regulated by the Human Empire than the cursed blood flowers.

The second option that I could cheese would be the Mega Ooze of the Twilight Depths. I would just have to use sanctified salt to kill them. That item wasn’t a controlled resource which made it a lot easier to purchase.

The third option for cheese potential was the Trap Spider in the depths of the Barren Desert. I could use poisoned bait as well, which had the same problems as the Lucky Bunny.

All the monsters were solitary types, which was good. But the problem with each of them, was trying to reach them. That was the hard part. The Poppy Fields would knock players out that were under level 60. While the Lucky Bunnies wouldn’t attack unless provoked, I would have to throw bait towards them, which meant entering the zone. The adjacent zone I would have to pass through was the Blink Forest, which was death incarnate. It was considered the main hell zone for levels 30 through 60 and the monsters were varied and numerous. Similar to how the Murk Swamp was considered a beginner hell zone. The constant screaming and flashes of light were enough to give anyone a seizure.

The Twilight Depths where the Mega Oozes were, existed at the bottom of the Bottomless Pit. The descent was incredibly long. I would have to invest into camping items and a lot of gear to get to the bottom or create an expensive descent vehicle. Then there were the monsters. Rock Slugs, Howler Bats, and Earth Worms all of the large variety on the way down.

At the bottom of the pit was the boss monster The Chained Darkness that was level 100. Once I got past them all I would be in the Twilight Depths. The Bottomless Pit, while not a hell zone, was considered to be a contender for just how mind boggling long it took to reach the bottom.

The joke was a player could jump into it. Log out, relax for a day outside Exponential. Then come back and they would still be falling. They would most likely impact a monster before then, which was why leaping into the pit was considered a death sentence. But it was a common joke for how long the descent actually was.

The Barren Desert sucked the water out of people and drained their hydration bar rapidly. In three hours in game without supplies a person would be dead. The nights only decreased the exposure bar faster from the freezing temperatures. The fact the place didn’t smell like shit was the only reason it lost out to the Murk Swamp as a hell zone.

Getting to the deep desert where the Trap Spiders would be very rough and require me to hire NPCs to protect me all the way out there, which would be super expensive. With all the supplies needed, I did some math and the cost came in at around 10 platinum.

The Blink Forest was hell, so it wasn’t even a possibility to hire an NPC expedition to get to the Poppy Fields. It just wasn’t possible to get to the Lucky Bunnies.

That left the Mega Oozes and figuring out a way to get to the bottom of the Bottomless Pit and past the Chained Darkness. Climbing down was impossible, since the monsters would eat me alive as a snack. Even with a low level, it was too enclosed unlike the hydras in Murk Swamp. There was no good way to dodge or go around threats.

The normal way down was to take the sloped spiraling path that circled around the edge of the Bottomless Pit. I had no chance of surviving the regular path and the expense would be massive.

That meant leaping. But the Howler Bats would get in my way. There just wasn’t enough time to adjust my descent while falling. While thinking about this problem, I recalled the descent contest that was held by a guild to find how far someone could get by going right over the edge and plummeting to the bottom. It got some noise at the time. The idea was to see how far a person could get into the Bottomless Pit by going over the edge, equipment was allowed.

I tried to remember what the winner had done. But they didn’t share their method at the time. The other factor was surviving the landing at the bottom. I had some passing ideas at the time when the contest happened, but never joined. The answer to the second problem was using a rare item with a cool down of one year. A person would survive a single attack with all their limbs no matter what but would left with one health for an entire day.

If I made it to the bottom and survived, being stuck with a single HP didn’t matter. Anything down there would be able to instantly shard me with just a poke. One HP, ten HP, hundred HP, it didn’t make much of a difference with the level gap.

The item needed was a Pendant of Divine Intervention. They only cost 10 gold. Not too much for what they did. But it was annoying though, that I would be using it up to survive the landing. It had a long cool down of 3 real world months before I could use another lifesaving pendant. That item was a powerful single use life saving item.

Getting back out wasn’t a huge issue either, since I could purchase a city teleport crystal for 10 gold. That had a cool down of 30 in game days. Another lifesaving item. Before it was too expensive, that was why I hadn’t purchased something like that when going to the Murk Tower.

That left the last issue of the descent itself. The best option in my mind, was to go for broke and build a giant enclosed ball with high grade materials and have me suspended in the center. Some impact potions and health potions would help deal with any damage transferred over to me on the way down.

I would need at least a rank 4 craftsperson and materials to make a descent sphere, preferably rank 5 which would be an Epic ranked craftsperson. Would friction be a problem? So, some cooling crystals that were normally used to chill buildings would be needed as well. The Bottomless Pit was located in the center of Hole City, so getting to it wouldn’t be a problem. It would be a bit of a trip, but I wasn’t that worried either since I could afford to pay for an airship to get into a city before level 30.

The real issue would be the cost of the descent sphere. Thankfully there was a solution in game. I paid a fee to the Designers Union of 1 gold and was able to access their holographic design room permanently. The amount paid determined the size, materials, and special actions available to me. For detailed buildings, 1 platinum was needed to get rank 2 in the Union.

Only idiots tried to design something more complex than an altar without using a design room first. Once I designed something, I could pay another fee to have instructions given to me on how to actually construct the thing. These instructions could be given to other NPCs to build what a person had created. I started work on my descent sphere for half an hour after every grinding session. This shortened the grinding session temporarily, but I considered the objective for this investment important enough.

A high quality airship chair with springs attached to the inside of a high durability metal sphere, lots of belts and straps to hold me in place of course. Cooling crystals embedded into the interior walls of the metal sphere. If they weren’t needed, I would just end up being chilly, but not frozen. Also, a couple of light crystals to see inside.

I would be wearing thick padded clothing regardless. Fall damage was complicated, and I never really dug into the mechanics. The best way to think about it was real life. If you are falling over one story, you will get hurt. Over three stories you will probably die. Over ten stories you are definitely dying. Stats helped offset this a little bit, but not much since fall damage was percentage passed damage.

The inner layer of metal was picked for durability and the outer layer picked for physical damage resistance. Thankfully I was able to see the stats in the Designer Hall and estimated rarity of the material. No costs were given, but I could easily guesstimate based on the rarity. I had a budget of 40 gold in my mind, since an additional 40 gold would be needed to make the descent sphere.

That was normally what craftspeople charged once you got into the silver and gold range, double the price of the materials to pay for the material and their labor. Anything in the platinum range, you tended to have to get materials yourself and the craftsperson would charge something crazy since there were very few options.

I paid special attention to the door. It would be bolted into place from the inside that way I would be able to unbolt it. There would be eight circular bars sticking out of the door and a corresponding bar holder on the interior of the sphere. A clamp would connect the bars to each other. The clamp could only be turned by a lever which would be removed. Like a very secure door for a submarine or a ship.

The door or hatch was also angled so it could be pushed off the descent from the inside. There would also be a second door behind my chair in case my first door was blocked. There would be no windows or anything else that created a weak point besides the doors. The rank of the depth meter I would need would require a platinum coin, so that kind of high level equipment was off the table.

I would just have to get in and hopefully it would work and ride it out until I impacted the bottom of the Bottomless Pit. I would only get a single attempt at this. All told my costs would run around two platinum. A platinum for the trip itself and then another platinum for all the sanctified salt I would need.

The big risk was not even getting a title from this and just wasting my money. It was a huge gamble. If I died, it would all be lost as well. While it wasn’t the end of the world, the stakes were very real and would represent a sizable junk of my money when I was done grinding.

It pained me to spend so much like this on an unknown, but no risk, no reward. I knew the teleporting city crystal wouldn’t interfere with the title, since people had earned Unstoppable Slayer after using it.

But if it worked and the title increased, the value would be immense and possibly a bit broken. That was why two platinum was worth the risk. Once I leveled up, doing something like this would be impossible or insanely hard without spending a ludicrous amount of money. I guess the skill Gamblers Commitment wasn’t wrong with its name after all, even if I wasn’t a fan of gambling.