Chapter 8 Instead of Becoming an Adventurer I Chose to Fish

There were a lot of people at this lecture. The reason for that was quite simple, the last half of the lecture the lecturer would allow anyone to ask questions about their own build, and she would give suggestions on how you could achieve what you want.

It was the first time I’d seen an actual person I would call old. That was a weird realization, as I hadn’t noticed before that there were so few who looked old.

“Settle down, everyone. I will start with what everyone who’s new here wants to know. The best way to get inventory and looting.”

That silenced absolutely everyone, including me, and I was ready to take notes.

“I have some unfortunate news for you. You have to make a choice between the two. Choosing one will make it less likely to get the other. That being said, I do recommend trying to get inventory first, because overall it is better. And if you get looting first, there’s even less possibility of getting inventory than the other way around.”

I had a bad feeling that the one level in fishing I have was really bad for me. She confirmed it almost immediately after, when she started explaining how getting some skills before others influenced every other skill gain.

“Now for the important part: to get the best chance to get inventory is to advance your Keeper and Scribe professions first. An important thing to note, do not worry when you reach level 10 and get your first choice and they are not what you’re after.”

“You can keep leveling, and every level those choices can change up to level 24. Always pick at 24, because if you don’t, one will be picked randomly for you.”

That was actually good to know, that you got multiple chances to hopefully get what you were after. All of this was quite exciting but also a bit terrifying. What if you didn’t get what you wanted? She also said that going over level 15 in both would start lowering your chances at getting looting.

She also added a bit of history, talking about why the system was important. It appears that before the system, you didn’t get to pick, when you reached a certain strength, you just had to hope that you’d get something good for you.

“There are old methods that can help you get certain skills. The profession training you will do in the library for your Scribe and Keeper is deliberately designed to help you get inventory.”

My notes were starting to fill up quite fast. Some others seemed to just be listening. I’ve never been the one who could just listen and remember everything.

“Now we come to looting. For that, you have more of a chance if you start with it, simply because there are five professions that you can level up and have a chance to get looting. Those professions are, starting from best to worst: Miner, Trapper, Gatherer, Harvester, and finally Fisher.”

I was not amused at hearing that. Inventory still sounded so useful that I think I will still try to go for it. One level can’t make that much of a difference, now can it?

“If you get a choice for looting or inventory without a Roman number behind it only consider taking it if you are reaching near the second milestone at level 25. It would limit it so much, but.”

“Statistically speaking, it is still worth it to take them even without that, it’s just worse. Also, while inventory I is the max you can get with professions, looting can show up multiple times. If you are lucky enough, you can get looting III just by your profession choices.”

Immediately murmuring started. Everyone seemed quite excited, and I was as well, but I felt like there was a catch. She confirmed it almost immediately.

“If you get looting I, the chances of getting looting II are lowered quite a lot. So, while I still recommend you go for it, if you already have looting I and you see some skill that fits you really well, take it.”

She only briefly explained how looting worked. Apparently, there was a dedicated lecturer for that. What she said still seemed quite important.

She mentioned that we would only get small nuggets of basic metals or some of the monster parts if looting triggered, with a really low chance of getting rarer loot. The chances of getting loot only happened when you killed something, not while you were crafting.

Once again, dungeons were mentioned, but I still didn’t know what those things actually were. There was no way they were some kind of prisons.

She brought up a few other skills, like perfect memory and its lower versions, but if you didn’t have a good memory to begin with, it would be impossible to get the best version of the skill. It looked like what you already had influenced a lot of what you could actually get.

All of this seemed more complex than I originally thought. Somehow everything you did influenced what you might get. It was also why specializing was so sought after, because if you could do one thing really well, everything else compounded toward it so you would do that even better.

“For this last segment before the questions, I will talk about recommended levels and what they mean. Let’s start with a really easy one: if you have an average of 10 in all your professions, it is a good rule of thumb to have your class level twice that.”

“Your profession levels help you survive in higher-ranked worlds. Your class level is the one that helps you exert that power. A two-to-one ratio allows you to function at an elevated rate in a normal world for you, which is best for survival and advancement.”

I needed to write down basically everything. All of it seemed so important. She also referenced multiple other lectures that would help build upon the basic knowledge she was explaining. Then she finally started answering questions.

While I did tried to keep up, this was obviously well beyond my current understanding. An important thing I did pick up during this part of the lecture was that you could influence your own membrane to a certain degree, allowing you to adapt to more hostile environments or ones that were a step too weak for you. When everything ended, I looked at the last section of my notes.

1. 2 to 1 ratio — class level to professions.

2. F-ranked worlds are classified as normal when you have a class slot.

3. E-ranked worlds are classified as normal when you have an average of five profession levels and 10 in class level. (Average is wrong, everything needs to be at least 5, otherwise you might have vulnerabilities that could easily kill you.)

4. D-ranked worlds need a minimum of 10–15 profession level and 20–30 class level. (Not sure why there’s a range. Look into this later.)

5. C-ranked worlds require a minimum of 25 profession and 50 class level. Without that, no one will allow you to go to worlds of that rank.

6. B-ranked worlds require a minimum of 45 profession level and 90 class level.

7. A-ranked worlds require 70 profession level and 140 class level.

8. S-ranked worlds require 90 profession level and 180 class level. (She did recommend more because of how unpredictable those environments could be.)

9. Overall, it seems that there are more dangerous places in any world because some areas could be ranked higher or lower in any world.

If I understood it correctly, it would be like going to the Arctic wearing shorts. There would still be dangerous areas no matter where you were; some would just have bigger spikes than others.

I followed most of the others towards the library. Now I understood why there were so many tables here and why so many seemed to be copy books. That seemed to be a way to progress both Keeper and Scribe professions at the same time.

With so many of us coming here after the lecture, the place was packed, too packed for my liking. So instead of doing what everyone else did, I went and got in a line to ask a question of one of the librarians.

“Next?” he said, and I walked up.

“Where are the rules for all the workshops? I was told that every single one of them had their own rules about what can and can’t be done. Is there like a book for it or something?”

He smiled at me. “Wait a moment,” he said, and walked away, going towards a closed-off shelf that he opened and pulled out small booklets totaling eighteen.

“This is everything you need to know. You can take them with you, but when you’re done, please bring them back. It’s not required, but it is so nice not to have to constantly make new ones.”

“Of course, not a problem. Do you know where to get some writing materials, like paper?”

After a short explanation and me visiting the supply office, I was heading back to my room with a large stack of papers and booklets. I placed them on my table, but I wouldn’t be reading them just yet, except the library one.

Half an hour later, instead of going to bed like I planned to, the knowledge in this one made me want to read one more booklet.

I wanted to change my schedule so I could be in the library during the night and morning, and sleep during the evening, so I would never have to wait for my turn to level Scribe and Keeper, this one booklet should not change that too much.

Why there weren’t twenty booklets was quite easy to explain, because some professions were handled in the same place, a perfect example being the library, where both Scribe and Keeper levels were being trained. One of the booklets was a bit different, as it covered combat training.

This was the one I read next and found what I was looking for. There was other good information here as well, like where the training happened and what were the rules in those places.

The important thing was, however, the dungeon. That was the main spot where you could train your combat class level. Why there was a connection between the library and a dungeon was because both of those used similar objects called cores to keep those two places functioning and able to level you up.

I did wonder why I hadn’t gained a Keeper or Scribe level for all the notes that I had been keeping. That’s because I was changing the paper and the ink so little it had barely any effect on my own membrane.

Inside the library was different because of the library core. That’s what made it possible to level those skills doing things that normally shouldn’t give any significant amount of experience. What a core was I still did not know, but eventually I will figure it out.

The normal way of getting Scribe levels was to engrave stuff. So if you made a statue, you would get some Scribe levels, and if you made more and more detailed imagery on it, you would get even more.

Keeper was more interesting. A normal way of getting that experience was to store something, preventing it from normal change, like going rotten or decomposing, or making it change in some form, like pickling.

Apparently brewing was something that always gave Keeper levels as well. It seems that all of it was intertwined. I guess that made sense because all those professions represented basically your entire existence.

Damn, this was a strange concept to wrap my head around, but I was feeling that I was slowly getting used to all of this.

Now it was time to go to sleep and wake up during the night. I didn’t have any alarms, so I just had to hope that when I was rested enough, I would wake up at the correct time.

When I woke up, I noticed it wasn’t yet quite night, but it was close enough. While walking towards the library, I was eating a bit of bread. I had a feeling that if I kept eating so much bread, I would eventually get sick of it. That worried me a bit, because good food seemed expensive.

Everything here seemed incredibly well organized, and in just five minutes from walking into the library, I was already set up behind the table, updating a book to level up my Scribe and Keeper professions.

It seemed that we were going to be updating the current books with new information. We needed to erase information from one book using a special pencil that erased ink and then write where we had deleted. In just two pages, I felt the same kind of expansion of myself as I did when I got my first Fishing level.

That cleared my mind a bit, so I just kept going. The next level took longer, probably because I was already quite close to leveling up.

This time I did feel a bit of a difference as I gained a level in what I assumed was Scribe, and then just moments after, Keeper leveled as well. They did tell us that we would be gaining just a bit more Scribe experience than Keeper.

I wasn’t the only one who thought about coming here during the night. I gained level after level while some stopped and left. One thing that I’ve always been good at was focus and perseverance.

For a time, when I first started my business, it was quite normal for me to work 16 hours a day, every day.

I managed to keep that up for almost 2 years, until everything was stable enough and I could finally ease off. That didn’t mean that my work hours reduced, it just meant that I could spend more time doing stuff around the farm.

I had been working and helping my family here from a young age, so work was not foreign to me. I learned to take breaks and not to burn myself out, and here as well I took plenty of breaks to let my hand rest, but I never stopped.

It was already morning, and I had gone for 14 hours before it was time for a longer break. Some of the librarians seemed quite worried, but I wasn’t. I knew what I could do and what I couldn’t, and no matter how excited I was about finally seeing what choices I could get from reaching level 10, I still stopped exactly at 14 hours.

I did have an urge to keep going, as only half an hour ago I had reached level 9 in Keeper. Each level up took longer and longer, which made sense as it took more and more experience to get to the next level, but not to worry, tomorrow, when I’m back, I will get to see what choices I get.

Now, instead of going to bed immediately, I went for a run. It wasn’t a long one, just around the lake and then back to get some food and then sleep. Physical fitness was probably going to be quite important in the future, so it was time to start getting back into shape.

The next morning came, at least morning to me, though to others it was now night. Once again, I was in the library continuing to grind, as everyone else called it. After yesterday, I did understand why they were calling it that.

Soon I hit level 10 in Scribe, and this one did feel different. It was like whenever I level up, I had been building to something, and now it was here. It was a feeling of anticipation, yet I couldn’t do anything about this feeling; it just slowly faded away into the background.

Every so often someone went towards the back of the library, where there was a small system obelisk. It was almost my height, unlike the large system obelisk I came to this world with that was easily three times as tall as me and many times wider.

This system obelisk was connected to the library core, which seemed to give it enough juice that it would allow us to see our status screen and choose a skill. It would not allow for teleportation; this one wasn’t strong enough.

Instead of going there and immediately seeing what this choice was, I continued to work until I got the Keeper to level 10 as well, and then still finished my current assignment. No point in leaving something undone.

The anticipation, however, was quite distracting. I needed to remind myself that the early levels were easy to get, but everything would get harder and harder as you continued to level until it might take you years to get to the next level of any profession. Fortunately, I was still quite far away from those times.

Placing my hand on the small system obelisk had the same strange feeling. Immediately, my status screen popped up. I could choose to view my status, but there were two larger texts pulling at my attention.

“Scribe level 10 — choice available.”

“Keeper level 10 — choice available.”

I needed to be really careful here, as they wanted you to make a choice. Our willpower needed to be strong enough to resist; otherwise, we might just choose something we’d regret later.

I could see why, because as soon as I relaxed my control a bit, immediately the choices for Scribe popped up.

“Penmanship I.”

“Multilingual.”

“Excellent Memory.”

Well, those choices sucked. None of them were what I would like to get, maybe the Excellent Memory, but it was just a non-upgradeable ability, so I pulled away, finding it easier than what was described. Next was the Keeper profession.

“More Durability I.”

“Excellent Memory I.”

“Preservation I.”

This was better, but didn’t have what I was after. I really wanted the Inventor skill. It seemed that it would be more likely that I was going to get one through my Keeper than Scribe, because the Keeper profession seemed to offer better skills for me at the moment.

Pulling my hand away once again was easier than described. Perhaps my willpower was better than I thought it was. Nothing to it, time to get back to grinding.