Tier 3+ - Accidental Champion - Chapter 61 - I Can Make Money

Xavier sat beside Siobhan, and across from Howard and Justin, in one of the tavern’s booths.

He couldn’t help but notice that Sam, the bartender in this place, had glanced at him a few more times than he’d glanced at anyone else. A fact which was beginning to make Xavier uncomfortable.

Two days had passed since their ninety-hour forced break from climbing the floors of the Tower of Champions. Forty-nine hours, to be precise. And there were still forty-one left.

Xavier felt more jittery and antsy then he ever remembered feeling. He wanted to fight, gain levels, but the damned System was making him slow down. He couldn’t understand why. He was glad it would in no way slow down his lead and risk losing him the first-clear title, but it would slow down his return to Earth.

What is the world going through, without its Champions to protect it?

He hoped that people were banding together. That the government or the military would have some semblance of order and control. He hoped that conventional weapons—the ones the US government had thrown billions and billions of dollars at over the years—would make a difference.

But considering the odds they’d been given by Sam—a one in ten thousand chance—of their world surviving… something told him “conventional” weapons and the military weren’t going to make much of a difference in all of this.

And, looking down at his skin, he was sure of it.

Tougher than metal. No way a bullet’s going to punch through that, unless it’s an anti-aircraft round or something…

Guns might work at the start, but they wouldn’t work once the enemies got higher in level, that was for sure.

Modern weapons weren’t really his wheelhouse. He’d always been more interested in fantasy weapons—and medieval weapons. Maybe that’s why he didn’t think Earth would be fine just because they had big guns.

“You’ve got stink-face on again,” Siobhan said.

Xavier blinked, looking over at the redheaded Mage. “Stink-face?”

Siobhan motioned to her own face, scrunching up her nose, crinkling her forehead. “Like you’re walking through a dump or smelling rotten eggs.”

“I’m just… thinking about Earth.”

“So it’s think-face, not stink-face,” Justin said.

Xavier sighed. “Suppose it is.” He sipped his whiskey. It didn’t have the same kick as it used to. In fact, it didn’t really have any kick. Probably on account of how much Toughness he had.

But he guessed he liked the taste, at least.

He placed his glass back on the table as a notification popped up over his vision.

Meditation has reached rank 7!

Xavier smirked.

Howard raised an eyebrow. “Another rank in Meditation? How many is that now?”

“Seven,” Xavier said.

Siobhan shook her head. “I can’t believe you’re meditating while having a drink with us. No wonder you’re so quiet, splitting your mind like that.”

“Meditation doesn’t split my mind, it focuses it.” Though Xavier had initially been frustrated by the System locking them out of the tower—and, honestly, still was frustrated at it, as he was sure he would have cleared the 10th floor by now and be back on Earth, probably why the place was on his mind so much—it had given him the opportunity to experiment.

It had given him the one thing he’d been shortest on since getting to this place, the one commodity he still couldn’t buy: time.

When he’d decided to learn the skill of Meditation, he’d worried he wouldn’t be able to get more ranks in it without the requisite time to focus on it. It didn’t seem like something he could rank-up in battle, after all, and battle was what he was about. It was one of the reasons he hadn’t bothered with the skill earlier—other than the fact that he simply hadn’t thought he would need it.

He’d known he wouldn’t have the time to simply sit down, shut his eyes against the world, and meditate.

But it turned out that Meditation was quite a versatile skill. Once he’d gotten the skill up to level 3, he’d been able to meditate while walking. When he’d gotten it to Rank 4, he’d been able to hold a conversation.

And the skill of Meditation, actively using it, didn’t just help him clear his mind and clarify his thoughts, it helped him to think. Helped him to focus.

What it didn’t help him do was fight. He’d walked up to the staging room once he’d reached Rank 5 in the skill. Swinging about his staff-scythe, Soultaker, he’d been more clumsy than ever. Like having Meditation active had somehow cancelled out his Scythe-Staff Mastery spell.

But he was sure that if he ranked the skill up high enough, that could very well change.

Part of him realised he was so good at Meditation from the get-go because of the number of points he had in Spirit. Which was, right now, sitting at an effective 202 since reaching Rank 7 in Meditation.

Another thing he’d found when deep in meditation was that it… it seemed to connect him to something other than himself. Something beyond his frame of reality that he didn’t understand.

He wasn’t completely sure what it was that the skill was connecting him to—perhaps it was the very System itself—but every now and then he would have insights about the System, and how things worked. Things that he shouldn’t have known, things that weren’t mentioned anywhere in any notification that he’d received, nor anywhere in that poor excuse for a manual they’d gotten.

It was as though the simple act of meditating was broadening his mind. As though, when he’d began, his mind had been a small chamber deep in the earth, only large enough to hold himself, and even then he wasn’t able to stretch out his arms or even stand higher than a crouch.

His mind had been constricted. Constrained. It had been, well… small.

But as he meditated? Rock was carved and scraped off the walls of the chamber, turning it into a cavernous space. And the more hours he spent this way—the more ranks he gained in the skill—the larger his mind became, broadening and begging to be filled with information.

And, every now and then, as the Meditation skill took a pickaxe to the walls of that chamber, slowly carving chunks off it, making it grow larger and larger, something would be uncovered. Like finding iron ore, gold or diamonds. Except in this case what he found was a small insight. An instinct. Or some knowledge he felt like he’d always known but was only now just realising it.

That’s why he worried that his thoughts about Earth—about guns not working well against whatever invaders came, about the military being ineffective, about everyone being… unorganised. He worried that these thoughts were more than just fears, that they were insights borne from his practice of Meditation.

You have reached your Spirit Energy limit!

You have 21200/21200 Spirit Energy.

Xavier smiled, pushing away his worries.

There wasn’t anything he could do for Earth in this moment except keep progressing. Keep learning. Keep pushing forward.

One of the things he’d discovered from these Meditation-related insights was how valuable Spirit Energy actually was. He of course knew that Spirit Energy was needed for him to cast spells, and that one could easily get Spirit Energy when killing enemies, eating food, or just generally resting.

And he’d already learnt that one could create Lesser Spirit Coins from Spirit Energy, but when the others had told him about creating Lesser Spirit Coins, they’d said it had cost 500 Spirit Energy to create a single Lesser Spirit Coin.

Even Xavier, with a 202 Spirit attribute, would only be able to create 42 coins before running out of Spirit Energy with that conversion. Considering they’d each gained 30,000 coins from the third floor’s loot box… it didn’t seem like a good use of their time.

Until Xavier realised the equation they’d given him wasn’t from the manual—it had been from their testing. The insight had come to him when he’d been meditating.

All of the currency the System used were called “Spirit Coins.” Lesser Spirit Coins could be created by F Grade Denizens, Minor Spirit Coins be E Grade Denizens, and so on and forth until A Grade Denizens were creating Grand Spirit Coins.

That, he’d figured out already.

The word “Spirit,” however, he should have focused on earlier.

It had come to him all at once when he’d gained his second rank in Meditation. The higher the Spirit attribute, the more coins one can create per 500 Spirit Energy.

Until then, Xavier hadn’t bothered trying to create Lesser Spirit Coins, and none of the others had done so since Justin had made a few when they’d first learnt about it, back when they’d been huddling in the Safe-Zone cabin on the first floor.

When the insight had come to Xavier, he’d been sitting cross-legged on the floor in his room, too wired to sleep, instead using the time to meditate.

He’d looked down at his hand and focused, imagining what he’d wished.

As he had, he’d felt the Spirit Energy moving around his body, like blood running through veins, except he was able to direct it. Pack it together and make it into something tangible.

It had taken him ten minutes of intense concentration, but finally, a Lesser Spirit Coin had appeared.

Not one of them, like he’d expected. Like Justin had done. No, he’d managed to create 38 Lesser Spirit Coins. They’d appeared, hovering in front of him, then fallen in a clump onto the floor of his room.

Xavier had blinked, shaking his head with a small laugh.

He’d looked at his Spirit Energy reserves, seeing he’d only used 500 of them, then quickly did the math, realising what might have happened. At the time, with Meditation being Rank 2, his Spirit attribute had been at an effective 193.

Dividing his Spirit attribute by how many coins he’d created, he’d gotten 5.07. Rounding down, that was 5—which, as he’d found out later, was the exact number of points Justin had in his Spirit attribute when he’d created a single Lesser Spirit Coin from 500 Spirit Energy.

Which brought him to the conclusion: each extra 5 points in Spirit let a Denizen create an extra Lesser Spirit Coin per 500 Spirit Energy. It was an easy enough thing to test. When he’d hit Rank 3 of Meditation, bringing his Spirit attribute to an effective 195, he found he was able to create 39 Lesser Spirit Coins.

I can make money.

It still wasn’t near as much as he’d been able to make clearing floors of the tower, but he knew that not every Denizen had access to the tower. And, he had to imagine, not every Denizen had easy access to the System Shop, or countless beasts to hunt and kill.

He decided to focus on the skill of creating Lesser Spirit Coins. It was something easy he could do to break up the heavy meditation sessions.

Eventually, he got so good that he could create a batch of Lesser Spirit Coins each second, and it took him less than a minute to deplete his entire Spirit Energy reserve.

Then he’d meditate until his reserve was full once more, and start all over again. Though, even with his Spirit as high as it was, it still took him roughly an hour to fully regenerate all of his Spirit Energy, as he had so much of it.

Even eating food didn’t help him recover it all that quickly, unless he absolutely gorged himself, and Meditation proved more effective at quickening his recovery than sleep—not that he’d felt all that tired since clearing the third floor.

Sitting in the tavern, having once more reached his Spirit Energy limit, Xavier looked around the table, cracked his knuckled, then created 42 batches of 40 Lesser Spirit Coins. One batch per second, forty-one seconds later, and 1,680 coins sat in a piles atop the table—though some had surely fallen off onto the ground, rolling to other tables about the tavern.

“God, you’re like a damned winning slot machine with that.” Howard shook his head. “Making money,” he muttered.

Justin’s eyes widened and bulged. They always did when Xavier performed this little trick. “How many is that now?”

Xavier ran his hand over the pile, depositing it all into his Storage Ring. “I now have over sixty-four thousand Lesser Spirit Coins.”

Justin swore under his breath. “You had less than five thousand when you bought that wicked-looking scythe. That’s insane!”

Xavier nodded. Perhaps the forced break from the Tower of Champions hadn’t been a completely bad thing. As creating more Lesser Spirit Coins?

Well, it wasn’t the only insight he’d had about Spirit Energy.