Divine Apostasy Book 7 - Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Six townsfolk appeared and erected a long table behind the platform. They filled it with bread, cheese, meat, and fruit. Eight large urns of water sat along the table’s edge, and someone arrived every hour to refill anything that needed it.

The Founders had never left the tent, but dropped their invisibility at the seven hour mark to inform rung four they could now leave. Ruwen smiled as every single member of the group decided to stay and train instead. As he’d expected, the Founders had not interfered.

When Ruwen had initially trained Sift this way, Sift had made incredible progress. That was a testament to his amazing Step skills and natural abilities. Rung four didn’t make such vast improvements, because they didn’t immediately see how one change affected others like Sift had.

Ruwen and Sift patiently walked among them, providing guidance on minor changes so they wouldn’t overwhelm the Adepts. As twilight approached and the other teams returned, Ruwen and Sift stopped their instruction. Rung four moved to the back of the tent and continued to train, everyone sharing what they had learned and passing it on to the others.

The other teams looked on in amusement at Rung Four’s efforts. Ruwen’s Diamond Fortified ears allowed him to hear all the conversations, and he determined Rung One had remained stuck on level four today. Rung two and three remained trapped on level three, and from the body language and conversation, they appeared to be hindering each other there.

Tomorrow, after their seven hours of practice, Ruwen would take Rung Four to the tower. They had all made visible progress and he and Sift had corrected most of the cringe inducing mistakes. Rung four could see the difference as well, because they hadn’t stopped smiling.

As the night wore on, everyone either slept or meditated, and Ruwen sat next to a softly snoring Sift. Ruwen closed his eyes, but instead of meditating, he opened his notifications. He immediately missed Rami’s ability to summarize the vast number of notices.

The first notification made his head swim at the amount.

Your body has entered the Infernal Realm!

You have gained 1,000,000 experience (333,333.3*(3 Realm Count))!

Ruwen opened his log, which showed the last notifications at the bottom. He scrolled back a little to find another huge experience gain.

Your body has entered a Divine Realm (Pen)!

You have gained 1,333,333 experience (333,333.3*(4 Realm Count))!

Just after that entry, another one caught Ruwen’s eye.

Gong!

You have increased your Knowledge!

Level: 151

The intelligent know true power is held by knowledge. The wise know knowledge can be dangerous. Greatness is found between them.

Ruwen’s experience in Pen’s Realm, along with learning the true meaning of the third secret, had boosted his Knowledge by fourteen points.

Just like Ruwen’s notifications, his log contained what felt like an endless list of details about all the demons he’d killed in the Infernal Realm. Interestingly, he only received fifty percent of the experience. Whatever process calculated the experience, likely a portion of Uru herself, or Lir, the protector of Uru’s Third Temple, considered Overlord his own being.

Ruwen wondered how they could calculate all this. Did they access his memories somehow? But since he never detected that, he wondered if it somehow related to the grip they had on his soul.

You have defeated a Fungus Owl, Infernal (Level 53)!

You have gained 35,675 experience (71,350*(50% Group Modifier))!

You have defeated a Screaming Siren, Infernal (Level 8)!

You have gained 800 experience (1,600*(50% Group Modifier))!

You have defeated a Rotting Corpse, Infernal (Level 29)!

You have gained 10,775 experience (21,550*(50% Group Modifier))!

Scrolling through the details, the vast majority of deaths came from low-level demons.

Ruwen closed his log and reopened his notifications. Immediately after the Infernal Realm experience, his favorite notification appeared.

Ding!

Uru’s Blessings, Worker! You have reached level 27.

You have gained +1 to Strength!

You have gained +1 to Stamina!

You have 2 unassigned points.

Uru’s Blessings, Root! You have reached level 27.

You have 2 unassigned points.

New Spells and Abilities are available to you. Choose wisely.

Two identical notifications followed this one, for levels twenty-eight and twenty-nine. The level advancement felt good, and Ruwen wondered how many more might hide in this endless stack of Notifications. It would take days of clicking to get through all these details.

Ruwen opened his Notification settings and accepted them all at once. The lightly glowing yellow box in his lower vision disappeared. Moving to his Profile, he opened it, wondering how much experience destroying an entire Infernal army would provide.

When Ruwen had left Shelly and arrived at the Black Pyramid, he’d remained at level twenty-six. The experience needed to move from level twenty-six to twenty-seven was three hundred fifty-one thousand.

Ruwen glanced at his current level.

Level: 58

Experience: 1,420,331/1,711,000

Ruwen stared at the value. He calculated the experience needed to move from level twenty-six to level fifty-eight and arrived at a staggering value of over thirty-one million. Traveling into two new realms had given him over two million experience, which meant he’d gained around twenty-eight million experience fighting Lalquinrial’s demon army.

But jumping thirty-two levels made Ruwen’s skin flush with excitement. He glanced down his Profile. His Strength and Stamina had increased by thirty-two each from the automatically assigned Worker Attributes. He looked at his unassigned values.

Before the ordeal in the Infernal Realm, his unassigned points had looked like this.

Attribute Points: 8

Spell Spells: 13

Ability Points: 4

Now they had increased to these values.

Attribute Points: 136

Spell Spells: 61

Ability Points: 36

Ruwen didn’t know how to spend his Spell and Ability points. He didn’t have any information on advanced magical capabilities. He had learned to mirror his current Mana based spells and Abilities with Spirit, and while he couldn’t use Spirit right now, it wouldn’t always be like that. Adding points into spells he’d already mastered seemed a little pointless. It would be better to save them and find out what advanced things he could learn. That would make creating essence recipes from them easier.

But that still left one hundred thirty-six Attribute points. Those he needed to spend, or at least assign a significant portion of them.

Ruwen didn’t know how much longer he would keep Fighter assigned to his Root Class. Even if he wanted to change right now, he couldn’t, because he held a Divine fragment of Uru. This not only gave him the Unworthy Vessel debuff, but made synchronization to the Temple impossible.

That meant if Ruwen died now, he would reset to the version of himself from the time he’d last synched with Uru, and that had been sitting in the underwater safe house the night before their final match in the Step Championship. An unbelievable amount of things had happened to him since then, and dying now would prove catastrophic.

Since, for the foreseeable future, Ruwen planned on keeping Root assigned to Fighter, he re-stepped through the logic of how to distribute his Attribute points.

So much had changed with Ruwen’s body and skills that he reconsidered maximizing a couple of attributes at the expense of the other four. Unlike most people who encountered similar challenges every day, he never knew what might happen. His life since Ascendancy had been a whirlwind, and having a weakness would almost certainly be deadly at some point.

Even though Ruwen had mastered spells from all the Classes using Spirit instead of Mana, he couldn’t rely on those right now because of his damaged Meridians and pathways. That meant maximizing one or two attributes to gain an advantage in some situations would also make him vulnerable as soon as his opponent figured out his weaknesses.

Ruwen had spent a massive amount of time and effort to Fortify his body to Peak Diamond, and that provided a huge gain in each attribute. Every time he increased his Fortification level, those points went into every attribute, which automatically kept him somewhat balanced.

Because of the Fortification bonuses, Ruwen decided, like before, to stay with a more hybrid approach. He could emphasize his essential attributes while not letting the non-critical ones fall too far behind.

Ruwen created four attribute lists in his head: critical, important, minor, and occasional.

Under critical, Ruwen placed Stamina since it kept him alive and added to his Energy, Resilience, and Endurance.

For important attributes, Ruwen listed Intelligence and Dexterity.

Many of his Fighter spells, while powerful, consumed a lot of Mana. This would be even more critical now that he couldn’t rely on his Spirit. Until he could use Spirit to cast spells, he needed to bank on his Mana. Intelligence also increased his Cleverness and Perception, and his Cleverness stat, in particular, had benefited him many times.

Dexterity helped Ruwen’s Unarmed Combat, Step training, Energy, Armor Class, Critical Chance, Dodge, and Perception.

The two minor attributes were Wisdom and Charisma.

Wisdom almost made it to important because it directly affected Cleverness and Resilience, both of which had saved Ruwen’s life. The days after his Ascendancy, when he’d suffered from the Wisdom debuff Foolish, had been truly painful. But unlike Intelligence, Wisdom didn’t affect his Mana pool as it did for Hamma and the Order Class.

Wisdom would remain the most important of the minor attributes, since Ruwen couldn’t always rely on others for common sense. He needed Wisdom of his own to balance out his Intelligence.

That left Charisma, which Ruwen had to admit he still cared about more than he should. It mattered how he looked and how people reacted to him. The truth was he couldn’t ignore Charisma because it affected his Persuasion stat, and if he meant to lead, he’d need that.

Strength Ruwen decided to ignore. It received a point every level automatically because of Ruwen’s Worker Class, and with his Diamond Fortified strength he probably wouldn’t add any more. His Void Band made Encumbrance a nonissue, and while Strength benefited Endurance, so did Stamina, which he preferred to emphasize for the obvious benefit of Health Points.

The balanced logic from before still held up, so with every level, after the automatic points in Stamina and Strength, Ruwen would add another point to Stamina, one to Dexterity, one to Intelligence, and alternate the last point between Wisdom and Charisma.

After another moment of thought, Ruwen decided to add a point to Wisdom twice as often as Charisma. Common sense really helped balance the tendencies of his high Intelligence.

That meant he would add the following amounts to each Attribute:

Strength: 0

Stamina: +34

Dexterity: +34

Intelligence: +34

Wisdom: +23

Charisma: +11

That spent all the unassigned Attribute points. Even though Ruwen didn’t wear any armor or jewelry and had zero buffs, he studied his Profile, curious how the additional levels had impacted his stats. He focused on the parts that had changed the most.

General

Level: 58

Experience: 820,331/1,711,000

Available Points

Unassigned Ability: 36

Unassigned Spell: 61

Unassigned Attribute: 0

Pools

Health: 1,610/1,610

Mana: 1,914/1,914

Energy: 2,440/2,440

Spirit: 7,527,309,664

Attributes

Strength: 104

Stamina: 161

Dexterity: 101

Intelligence: 191

Wisdom: 158

Charisma: 66

Ratings

Knowledge: 151

Armor Class:3,509

Regeneration

Health Regeneration per second:25.65

Mana Regeneration per second:23.58

Energy Regeneration per second:202.54

Effectively naked, Ruwen still had an Armor Class over twice that of a plate armored warrior with a tower shield. The battle in the Infernal Realm coupled with the healing to survive the Sixth Rune, had cost almost seven hundred million Spirit and decreased his total to seven and a half billion.

Resistances all hovered around one hundred eighteen percent except for Ruwen’s Mind Resistance, which had grown to six hundred seventy-one percent. He guessed whatever process Uru used to measure mind resistance didn’t know the full extent of his mental constructs. In his current state, he didn’t think much could penetrate his mind.

Ruwen studied the modifiers for his Wisdom calculation to understand why it had increased so much. It resulted from the combination of his thirty-six levels in Tactics, which increased his Wisdom by eighteen percent, and Rami’s second Codex of Bookwyrm Evolution which gave him a passive that doubled the effectiveness of all mental abilities, raising the value to thirty-six percent. It nearly made Wisdom his second highest attribute.

Adding buffs and jewelry would vastly increase Ruwen’s Stats, but even his current Regen Rates would refill his Health bar in just over one minute, Mana in eighty-two seconds, and Energy in twelve seconds.

The combination of Ascendant leveling bonuses combined with Ruwen’s body Fortifications had destroyed any sense of balance when compared to anyone else. Unfortunately, he would need all those benefits for his upcoming Divine conflicts.

Thinking about the future made Ruwen uncertain, and for a moment he considered just jumping to the end of the Master’s trial so he could go home and address the issues there. The endgame here also worried him as he didn’t know if he’d prepared enough, and some things he’d planned on, like using Spirit and having Overlord present, were no longer possible.

Ruwen pushed everything into the third meditation and let his mind rest in blissful emptiness. The future needed to wait its turn, because the present needed his entire focus. The end here would come soon enough.