[SS] Chapter 5: School really sucks but Godly school... also really sucks.

Oh my god, I was going to die. Ughhhhhhhh. Order just kept talking. I now knew enough about humans that I felt like I could build a person while blind.

At least classes were kinda cool but I honestly didn’t really care at this point. Boiled down: You rank up a class, you sometimes go up a grade in a class, you get skills from a class.

The main part I really honed in on was how completely boned I was. I’ll be honest, I didn’t pay nearly enough attention to the class part as I should have. But a class can rank up to 500 (even if only heroes were expected to get that far with it, over the course of a lifetime), you could switch classes, and they provided so many points that unless I did my math wrong (I didn’t) a person got like 2000 ish stat points from a level 500 class. That was a single class. And there wasn’t exactly a penalty for switching classes.

Again, like with Generation monster swapping thing, I wondered why everyone didn’t just pick up 15 classes and swap around until they had a bunch of points.

The reason given was time.

500 ranks. At ranks 1-50, you get 1 points. 51 required a grade up and you got 2 points at 51. 101 required a grade up and you got 3 points at 101. So on and so forth. And Grade ups got you free points and advanced skills, which seemed very important. For example, a mage got enhanced mana regeneration right off the bat, at rank 0, grade bronze, the starting level.

It was more worthwhile, to most people, to try and spend your time and effort focusing on 1, maybe two classes, then multiple. That still meant a commoner who level up to, say, lvl 50, would have 50 stat points. They would be auto determined, sure, but that’s still 50 points. A lvl 100 warrior would have 150, skills, plus free points for their rank up, and so on and so forth.

How many stat points did I get for evolving a whole generation?

Gen + 2.

So a Gen 2 monster moving to a Gen 3 monster? +4 points to every stat. That was apparently 40 points, but, still. I felt like I was getting raw dogged.

Order finally finished and I nearly bolted out of my seat before her words continued.

“A Goddess will be with you shortly to go over the system with you.”

NOOOO!!!!!!! Just let me be a slime! No, no, hold it together Mark. There’s power in knowledge.

Order disappeared and I noticed that at some point, Chaos had left as well. I hadn’t been paying nearly enough attention. I waited and soon, a new Goddess appeared and my mouth hit the desk I was leaning on.

I had met two Goddesses by now and thought I knew what to expect. Flamboyant and a whole fucking lot of shit that was hard to describe. This Goddess broke that rule over the head.

Because she was naked. Nearly completely and utterly naked.

She had see through leggings, see through sleeves on her arms, golden anklets and bracelets, a collar with a heart on it, and a golden chain tiara on her head. But I was much, much more focused on her Tan skin, C or D breasts, and striking figure. She seemed like an Egyptian Goddess. It took me more than a few minutes to notice she was wielding a scythe and had wolf ears on her head. Those hadn’t seemed at all important.

A part of me wanted to scream “Why are you naked?!” But her expression cooled my lust. She was looking at me with utter boredom.

“Greetings Godling, I am @$%^^&*&^, a God of Knowledge.”

My fucking ears. It sounded like her name was a screech that I couldn’t understand. Whatever her name was, it was simply not meant for mortal ears. Chaos and Order never caused my ears to nearly implode by their name alone, what gives?!

“I am here to explain and show you what the status, stats, and skills are. I will be explaining them one at time with the status window. Prepare yourself.”

And Gods above and here, she meant it when she said prepare yourself.

She completely and fully explained the status to me, what MP and HP were, what each stat was and how they worked and so much more. My head felt like it was full of bursting. A very condensed version is this:

Everyone gets a status window. Look depends on person. There were three tabs.

General - shows a visual representation of my body, stats, HP and MP, Astra, current Generation and Monster (class for Humans), and my skills.

Crown/Hero - For me, shows an image of my crown, how long I can summon it, Crown Types, Crown Authorities, and all other such relevant Crown information.

Class/Evolution - Shows current form, future forms, past forms, and the requirements and details and etc. Will only show up to 2 generations away and will advance when I advance.

And that was the status I could see. It was simple but in depth details were insane. For example, you could go deeper and see a creatures height, weight, and general likes and dislikes or you could change how the visual representation of your body looks like slightly and about a million and one other tiny small things that added up and up.

Next were skills and my focus rallied and became laser focused. This was important. I hadn’t forgotten that I already had a few skills. Danger sense, Enhanced healing, Magic Skill (Dark) Tier 2, and Physical Resistance (Piercing) Tier 1.

There were 4 skill types. Physical, magical, general and special. I refused to repeat all that information again. It was a lot, varied, and sometimes hyper specific. It would come up later.

The important parts: Magic skills had 20 tiers, Physical resistance skills had 5. Each physical resistance skill added 5% resistance and then doubled up to 5. So T5 would equal an 80% resistance.

The problem with that, is that it requires extreme and long term amounts of receiving damage from that type, ie, a month or two of constant significant damage or suffer a lethal amount of that damage and then somehow survive afterwards. I can already imagine spending over a year of literally constant stabbing so I could gain an 80% resistance to it. I’d probably go insane after 3 days.

But the most important part was learning other skills. You just did it and it basically made you better at things. Which, was, horribly lame but foundations were important. I didn’t even know what skills to try and learn though. I felt like my best bet was to just work on my darkness magic skill and evolutions…

There were 10 stats.

Health Points/HP

Magic Points/MP

Strength/STR

Agility/AGI

Dexterity/DEX

Constitution/CON

Endurance/END

Intelligence/INT

Wisdom/WIS

Spirit/SPI

They were basically what they said on the tin can. Intelligence didn’t increase actual intelligence though, just mental reactions and mana efficiency. Wisdom increased mental fortitude but not actual wisdom. Spirit increased “mental clarity” whatever that meant, MP regen and MP maximum (slightly).

Points could be put into HP to increase maximum HP. Constitution also affected Maximum very slightly but majorly affected HP regeneration.

Points could be put into MP to affect maximum MP.

There was a lot more information but I had a secret. I…. I hated stats. I hated all that calculation and figuring things out and blah blah blah. I hated it so much. I knew my stats were, at a base level, abnormal and higher than a regular monsters. And I even got a bunch of free stats too. I could really make a good build here and it was probably super important to think this through and………………………….

I was just going to always make sure my stats were even and throw a bunch into HP and MP whenever I felt like it. I’m sorry me of the future and past, maybe I will eventually change my ways, but come on! Stats suck! I don’t care. Just let me be a slime or give me some cool powers again or something!

Though… there was technically an 11th stat. It wasn’t really a stat though. More of a resource.

Astra.

After everything else, this was the first thing The Goddess had mentioned that actually drew my attention away from her stunning body and my own boredom. Astra was the source of, well, everything it seemed like and I wanted to desperately know more about it.

And I was mainly right about my early guesses on it. Astra was the energy of life and was responsible for empowering it and creating it. She mentioned how it was responsible for old age, How the older you got the stronger you got because you had more Astra but the weaker you got because your body was falling apart from it. All creatures, even monsters, had an Astra cap. Except for crowned monsters. But too much and we would still die. I wasn’t too worried when she mentioned the average cap for a human was 100,000 and for a cat was 16,000. Sure, a slime probably didn’t have much, at first, but I was sure a higher level monster had a higher cap. I wasn’t exactly in danger of reaching that cap, ever. Prince slime only required 50 astra after all. Which was less than Core slime.

But that all made sense. Astra was basically synonymous with age. To be a Gen 1 or Gen 2 monster, which was as far as I could see, probably didn’t take you being very old. Technically, monsters were suppose to start off as children when they evolved but Crowned Monsters skipped that step entirely. That astra limitation was probably just there because babies couldn’t handle rapid evolution than any real requirements. I didn’t expect the later generations to stay that way. There was going to be a steep jump sooner or later.

But still, I desperately wanted more information but that was it. Then came boring stuff. Of all things, she started telling me about how human stats worked and I zoned out.

Then she said something that shocked me.

“Monsters gain stats from Evolving and eating Hearts. Creature hearts will give you Generation + 1 free stat points. So a Gen 2 monster will give you +3 free stat points. Human hearts are special in that they give stats from their total grades + 1/6th Total Rank into free stat points. A human with 2 classes at Grade 3 and 25 total ranks will give you 10 free stat points.”

…what. No way, that was impossible. My brain latched onto the last part to not go insane from hearing the first part. 25 divided by 6 equals 4, rounded down, + 3 and 3, from each class being at grade 3. So, 10 stat points. Sure.

But what the fuck do you mean I can eat monsters to get Gen + 1 free stats?! WHAT. WHAT?! Is no one else seeing the problem here?! What’s to stop a dragon from just, eating 2000 goblins and getting 2000 points?

As my heart shook with excitement and cold, cold dread, I realized the answer to my own question: Nothing. Nothing was stopping them. Or from them spending dozens and dozens of years doing exactly that, getting tens of thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of stat points. Hell, if you got strong enough and found a fast enough breeding species…. Farms. People and monsters have probably made monster farms, specifically to train up monsters this way.

I was wondering when the other shoe would drop, when I’d find out why so many Heros and monsters have utterly failed to become a god. Imagining a 1000 year old dragon with over a million stats was my answer. I’m sure humans had their own thing, but, well, most humans didn’t live that long. Most died at 100. Heros only lived to 300, unless they found a way to increase their lifespan. It was to the point I was shocked any hero had made it to Godhood. I instinctually knew, from my Authorities, they needed to make a Legend for themselves. There was no hard and fast rules for Godhood, even a “Legend” was a bit misleading because it didn’t mean they needed to be known at all. Merely for them to have accomplished a miraculous string of deeds to the point the universe recognized them. They didn’t even have to be strong. It was completely possible to become a God through just cooking but it would be much, much harder than through fighting, in a way. Fighting was a straight forward form of strife and a straight forward way of making a legend. Cooking isn’t. No hero would live long enough to become a God through non-combat alone. Not unless they became immortal before they became a God. Every single craftsman God and Goddess out there has now just earned my undying respect. Because that’s fucking amazing that they made it.

The Goddess of knowledge shook me from my contemplations. I had still not gotten used to her nakedness.

“I hope you caught everything I said and that it all makes sense. My time with you is now over and I will be handing you over to another god. Our time was short, but I did enjoy it as I hope you did too.”

I nodded to her and she nodded to me and then she was gone.

I got up from my desk and it poofed away. I stretched, wondering how on earth a soul could feel sore from sitting. Whatever.

I looked around and was annoyed and a bit disturbed I had missed my entire area rearranging itself from a white void to what seemed like a forge at some point. Whereas where I got my crown seemed to be the outside of a Forge or a waiting area or something, this seemed like the roaring heart of one. I could hear hammers against anvils in the distance, see lava flowing into what looked like furnaces and a bunch of other things. This whole place was just, massive and despite not seeing anyone around, it was loud in a weird way. It was a constant thrumming in the background of work. I looked around for a bit until I heard loud boisterous laughter from behind me and nearly jumped out of my skin.

“Ho Ho, It seems a Godling to be has wandered into my soul forge I see.”

I whipped myself around to look at who was talking to me and my mouth dropped open at the pure, absolute manliness on display here. The man was massive. He towered over me and looked like he fucking wrestled and ate bears for breakfast. He was like a hyper lumberjack mixed with a massive bodybuilder. He was wearing nearly nothing but a brown pair of underwear. I, genuinely hadn’t ever seen a pair of underwear like it. Like a less tight speedo? It covered plenty either way.

But that was it. And he was big and hairy. He was the definition of a man’s man. So muscular it nearly hurt to look at him with a chest the size of two barrels. Hairy, smoking a cigar, with a broad smile on his face and a magnificent beard.

I wasn’t into muscular men and I was perfectly happy with my previous body but I was now questioning both of those things as this raw chunk of an absolute beast stood before me.

“Greetings, I #%%&%$#@#, a God of Crafts, will help you forge ahead through this section. Ho ho ho.”

His laughter wasn’t necessarily loud but it was deep and hearty. Was this a coincidence? I had just been thinking of crafts god and here one was in front of me. Though if I had to guess, he was probably no stranger to combat. Wait, did he say soul forge? Before I could ask, he seemed to read the question on my lips.

“Ah, before we begin, I should explain as to what we will be doing here. I will merge your soul with Skills through the use of Soul Forging. All you need to do is tell me what you want. I will also be forging your items and equipment later after we are done here. Oh and don’t worry Godling, I haven’t messed up once during my time as the operator of the soul forge. Yet. Ho ho. Bah, I’m just joking ya’. Now, enough stalling, let’s get this forge alight shall we?”

In a somewhat surprising manner, it seems uh, the God of Crafts, was a bit impatient. He wanted to get right to it. But, I needed more than that! I mean, he’s going to be working on my soul. Literally forging it in ways. I didn’t even know what that meant. Was it going to hurt?

He started lighting up a forge and I was having one of those weird moments of enlightenment again. Where I knew things and I had no idea or reason why I knew them. The soul forge was an allegory. It existed, was real, but the whole forge here wasn’t what it really looked like or rather, it was, because the God of Crafts wanted it to look that way. There was no “normally it looked like this” it was whoever ran it wanted to look like. Which meant that all of the banging, lighting, crafting, was more a metamorph to mess with the metaphysical rather than, well, physical. It all needed to be done, of course, but someone else could forge in an entirely different way and achieve the same results, well, kinda. All crafts were unique after all.

I shook my head. That kind of stuff was really getting annoying. God, I hope they don’t read books like that up here. How boring would that be?

The forge was raring to go now and pouring out heat. The God of Crafts looked at me.

“So, uh, what now?”

“Well now, why don’t we get ya a purchasing sheet ey?”

Then, more of those screens that reminded me of my status appeared, except for the fact that I could touch and move them. So, paper screens.

“Hope your head ain’t too busy bursting from @$%^^&*&^, cuz I got some stuff I gotta tell you. All of these skills are gonna be tied directly to your soul. That means that no matter what, these skills will never be able to be altered, destroyed, or turned off. No one, not even you, can change this fact.”

He had a light smile on his face when he said that but the look in his eyes was serious. I nodded.

“Good, now, you may be wondering how I can even add skills to your soul in the first place. Well that’s because you’re a wandering soul that has been altered by the True Gods. Normally doing changes like these causes the soul to uh, Ho Ho Ho, explode out of existence, but thanks to the True Gods that won’t happen to you, so thank them the next time you see them eh?”

I stared in abject horror at his words. Explode?

He scratched his chin, giving me a “what can ya do?” look.

“Anyway, this comes with many upsides and downsides. The advantage to this is that you will be able to use, say, Magic Skill (Fire) no matter what besides the normal limitations such as MP. This means that no one can counter spell it or alter your spells cast with Magic Skill (Fire). Now, the downsides are that skills like a Tier 1 Magic Skill can normally evolve to become Tier 2, but this is no longer true. This means that the skills bought here cannot increase in strength nor can they decrease in strength. This only applies to bought skills. So choose wisely and with intent.”

That was a lot. I had gone back to needing to make decisions about big things that would affect my entire future, the literal rest of my life, right after getting creamed with knowledge. The fucking whiplash hurt. I sighed. I just wanted to be a slime damn it. When did that happen huh?! Ugh. Okay. This was cool too. Skills meant power, power meant being alive. Can’t increase in strength or decrease, total stagnation. Got it.

I took a look at the skills and my eye sharpened. For starters, I had been given a number of points and the skills cost them. That felt, so very out of place that I had to ask.

“Uh, why the points?”

“Ah, well ya see, they’re kinda uh, metaphorical ho ho. We use to do it without them but people just understand currency better than feelings. Your soul only has so much strength and increasing it requires bending some rules.”

Made enough sense to me. I sure wouldn’t want to go off feelings for this type of thing. So the points were more like how strong a skill was huh?

I read and my eyes began to shine. There was a lot of options here. Some of it was a bit ridiculous. Like, what was I seriously going to do with “an enhanced body part”? My entire body was going to be slime and I didn’t see any real option for that. Some skills, however, were necessary.

I instantly mentally marked a few in my mind.

Natural Instinct - Naturally understand the intricacies of your new body.

Universal Speech - Understand any language spoken or written. Able to translate languages into other languages you are aware of.

I hadn’t even considered either of those two things. The fact that I would have to actually get used to my new body, constantly, every time I evolved to boot, and the fact that if I ever wanted to actually communicate with anyone, I couldn’t, because none of them would be capable of speaking english.

I felt like an idiot for not considering it. Then again, I thought I would just kinda, get those things for free. Apparently not.

The next few were interesting, because they were already marked. They were the free skills I got from literally dying.

Danger sense - Able to sense danger 5 minutes in advance to your life. This sense is a sort of gut feeling. The closer the danger, the stronger the feeling.

Enhanced healing - Increases your natural healing and recovery. Recovery being your eyes adjusting better or your ears clearing out faster from loud noises. A 400% increase.

Magic Skill (Dark) T2 - A material magic skill that allows you to manipulate something that physically and naturally exists in this world. In this case, darkness.

Physical Resistance (Piercing) T1 - 5% resistance to piercing.

They all kinda said what they did already by name alone but I was still incredibly happy with them. Everything had been overwhelming so far or too much information way too fast and weird feeling or etc but this, this was worth it. These were what I had gotten for dying, to prevent me from dying that same way again. If I had had danger sense, that bullet would have never hit me. It had to have been in the air for at least 30 seconds. I could have dodged.

Enhanced healing might not have been enough to save my life, but it could have been. If I had applied pressure, maybe I wouldn’t have lost so much blood so fast and been able to live. It wasn’t likely, at all, but it was possible.

Alright, fine, the magic skill wouldn’t have helped but controlling darkness sounded freaking amazing. I wasn’t sure about it being a “physical material” but a cloud of darkness sounded incredibly useful. Couldn’t see as a slime? Fine! Then no one can see! Bwhahaha!

Piercing Resistance. I really doubt it would have made a difference at only 5% but it depends. How deep did the bullet go? Would 5% less have been enough not to reach my damn artery? And all combined, 5% resistance, 4x healing, and danger sense, meant I was virtually immune to random falling bullets and a whole lot of accidental things like that. I took solace in that fact. I would, Gods willing, never die the same way again. It was a start.

I took a deep breath and continued to look through all my options.

Then my eyes landed on something I couldn’t believe.

A solution to my blindness problem.