Unchosen Champion-Chapter 338: Undiminished Return

Coop jabbed the three prongs of his ethereal trident into the sandy ground, letting it stand on its own at the peak of the perimeter ridge while he caught his breath. He let his head hang as he put his hands on his hips, chest heaving with each inhale. He watched droplets of moisture fall near his feet after collecting from the tip of his nose and the ends of his hair. The sweat and seawater was the physical evidence of the exertion that had been necessary to overcome the oversized flying ray creatures.

The fifth layer of the Coral Forest had presented him with another uniquely demanding grind. This time, it hadn’t been his combat power, travel speed, physical stamina, or target acquisition that limited his hunting efficiency. The biggest challenge had been toward his breath management.

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The Gliders had a rather novel combat strategy that focused on area control. As Coop contended with their swarms, the choking gas that they shot onto the surface was the primary issue he was forced to deal with. They fired rapidly moving, barely perceptible projectiles, starting at the size of a transparent volleyball, but when they collided with the ground, they burst into a solid screen of thick spore-like vapors that easily encompassed his positions.

He had made it a habit to hold his breath and gradually slide across the sandy bottom beneath the hanging seaweeds in order to minimize the effect of their attacks. Still, as he skirmished with swarms of the pseudo Elite creatures, they bathed the sandy surface with a mixture of gases that would have smothered the most impetuous of challengers, if not defeating them outright. The gaseous attacks applied a handful of debuffs, blinding and distracting their enemies such that they would lose their heads in the sweeping assaults of the deep-sea creatures even before the damage over time ticked down.

Coop could imagine the selective pressures that had driven such a mutation, considering the proximity of their habitat to where the Chompers made their homes. The gases would have been the perfect counter to the hidden ambushes of the eel-like creatures hidden with the dark crevices of the gigantic sea sponge. However, the Gliders were much too large to easily fly through the porous structure. To him, it seemed like the two monsters had adapted in parallel to fill the available niches of the Coral Forest.

Coop’s magic defenses were absurdly high, especially for his level, so much so that the damage he would have taken from inhaling the orange and green bursts of gas was practically negligible, but he was innately aware that he couldn’t always rely on such passive solutions. Instead, he added another consideration to his meditative grind, one that reduced his exposure by consciously manipulating his breath.

The actual landscape was as simple as they came, a vast but consistent sandbar with a slight slope toward the interior edge. It was so unobtrusive, he was free to focus on other aspects of the fights besides navigation. The monsters came to him, effectively eliminating the necessity of target acquisition. He also didn’t need to worry about being confused or distracted by the thick clouds of spore-like gases, as Presence of Mind, Fog of War, and his passive mana sight all combined to let him pierce the physical obstructions with ease. If anything, the haze created by the monsters only inhibited their ability to track his exact motions, rather than the other way around. Compared to the previous layers, the fights seemed to have been simplified, letting him concentrate on efficiently dealing with the poisonous gases.

At first, he would only hold his breath for minutes at a time, but as the number of monsters he fought increased, the spores of their defeated comrades would linger, altering the dynamic of the battlefield. As the fights extended, he was presented with a choice. Either keep holding his breath for longer and longer spans of time, or periodically expose himself to the orange umbra or the green bursts. The options led him to carefully test what each of them did, each representing a unique cocktail of debilitation and damage. Ultimately he found himself pushing limits he knew should have been impossible rather than accept exposure to either as a fitting compromise.

Under normal conditions, he would obviously need to breathe eventually. At least that’s what he had assumed, but as Coop stretched his lung capacity, he started to realize that with the introduction of mana to their bodies, his assumptions weren’t entirely accurate. In fact, someone with Coop’s stats might already be able to go indefinitely without breathing.

As with so many other functions within the new physical world, the limitation was actually on his mana pool. Holding his breath beyond his actual maximum applied a physical debuff that drained his mana at an increasing rate until he took another breath. It was such a simple and obvious discovery that he felt like he should have known, but somehow discovering the changes to his body left him uncomfortable. He had to stop himself from asking questions about what it meant to hang onto the idea of being human, and just how much mana had transformationally altered everything when it activated.

While Coop tried to concentrate on his grind, his subconscious thoughts were focused on the implications of replacing such a fundamental aspect of life as breathing. Somehow, he already knew that it was possible, considering all the other essentials that had been shifted by mana. They didn’t need to eat or sleep, and they didn’t even need to age or die, but it was all because of a previously unknown substance whose control seemed contingent on having access to the system. For all the struggling to retain his humanity, he wondered if it was already too late. He had to struggle to keep himself from being distracted as he wondered about various ramifications of an existence based on mana, especially after they would be denied integration into the system and galactic community.

Coop slowly moved across the landscape, fighting frenzied swarms of the massive flying creatures as he went, pushing himself so that he couldn’t be distracted by engaging larger and larger pulls. He threw a three-pronged missile that took the monsters down, one after the other, all while holding his breath, then countered their ambushing divebombs in ways that caught them by surprise in the moment before they were defeated. The ethereal trident was a whirl of violence at range, and in melee, with Coop’s Agility, it matched the combined efforts of hundreds of the mutated creatures at a time. Hours went by, sometimes with no breaths at all, and Coop kept going.

His control over the Retribution skill that summoned his weapons was beyond advanced. The ethereal manifestations had become extensions of his own limbs, and even when they left his hands, the time that it would take to resummon them made it seem as if they had never been discarded. The combination of Retribution and Salvation had promised to protect against being disarmed by giving him the ability to keep his weapon and armor together, but that was just barely scratching the surface of the Ethereal title. That particular disarmament protection had resulted in mistjumping, a key aspect of his build, when he sent his armor to his weapon. All the practice with his movement skill had benefited him when used in the intended configuration as well. The process of returning his weapon to his hand had been refined over time just as much as his mistjumps. The process was one and the same.

The end result was that the Gliders would sometimes recognize that he was momentarily unarmed as one of their gargantuan flock fell from the seaweed filled sky, smashing into the sand like a crashed meteor with a solid thump or evaporating into the clouds as they were carried by his thrown missile. They were always swooping, testing his reactions, though most of the time they were feints meant to add to his confusion. However, when he was disarmed, they would reliably take a shot at the back of his neck only to discover that his weapon was already back in his hands, whirling with its deadly prongs directly in their path. To them, it probably seemed like he had an unlimited number of weapons, though it was really just the one. The rest of his arsenal hadn’t needed to make an appearance.

Compared to the previous layers of the Coral Forest, Coop had covered the least amount of ground among the hanging seaweeds and sandy bottom. His rotation was slow, gradually shifting as the clouds of gas filled areas and he wanted to reset the suffocating debuff by taking another breath. On the other levels, he had repeatedly rotated across wide swathes of the habitats, not limiting himself to the already spawned monsters, but also engaging with the newest returned creatures as well. Those had been tests of his travel abilities, combined with his time to kill, to establish his grind.

In the case of the Gliders, he was only after the creatures that had spawned in the days before he arrived. Coop had become well aware of the gap in levels between himself and the newest spawns within the mana well. It wasn’t at the point that diminishing returns would really put a dent in his overall progress, but it was contrasting enough that he concentrated on defeating each of the creatures once before returning to areas where he had already been. The respect toward the level gap combined with the slow deliberate movement to alter his patrol of the layer to a single scouring rotation.

It was surprisingly easy to be discerning with his targets. Each of the coral columns, rising from their anchor points in the sand, represented a single flock of Gliders. All Coop had to do was visit each pillar once and he would meet with every advanced creature on the level. Still, he was conscious of the fact that if he moved too fast, the gas would have eventually claimed larger and larger portions of the ground. It was possible that a more impulsive version of himself might have engulfed the entire level in gas by rapidly expanding his coverage. He was marginally more calculated, instead putting the pressure on his lungs, rather than his legs.

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Of course, as he went down the layers in the Coral Forest, each level was larger than the previous. The fifth level was consistent with the rule, so there was a tremendous amount of ground to cover. He might have been overly considerate with his footprint, but it had still led him to training his breath capacity in a way that he had neglected.

At the same time, Hai Yun and her entourage stuck with just one coral column, nearest to the pathway back up the layers, leaving Coop to do as he wished. They knew not to overextend themselves, and instead they were satisfied with the consistency of a controlled farming location and the returning monsters that sought to inhabit the location. Unlike Coop, who was always trying to push just a little bit more, letting his greed drive him to include one more spawn point, every time, Hai Yun was more modest.

Hai Yun’s reliability at least kept them connected to the rest of the Adventurer Guild and Ghost Reef itself. Coop would have been lost for weeks in the Coral Forest as he chased every monster that dared to exist in his grind zones, which is exactly what Derek and the others had prepared for. No runners would have dared enter the hurricane of gases that accompanied Coop in the hanging forest. Instead, all the important people knew exactly where Coop was and what he was doing through Hai Yun’s entourage while her bodyguards secured the path back to safety as well as the landing of their current level. It was a superb arrangement that let Coop embrace his tendencies.

However, no individual grind could last forever. The convenient setup eventually brought him to the end of his battle with the more advanced Gliders. Once he defeated enough of the local creatures, he had to reconsider his strategy. He was almost exactly 100 levels ahead of any of the monsters still in the zone, having reached level 300 as he concluded one massive sweep of the sandy bottom. If he continued hunting the flying monsters among the seaweed, he would see his rate of experience decrease compared to the first time around the expansive landscape. While that wasn’t the worst news, as it was expected, he also had other options.

Alternatively, he could go back up to a different layer, maybe all the way to the boggy algae mats where the Gulpers had been redeveloping for a few days, at least. He thought it would be reasonable to expect them to have gained 20 or so levels while he and Hai Yun continued down the well.

But that would only be a temporary reprieve from diminishing returns, barely adding more than a few hours of productive grinding before he was met with the same dilemma as he currently faced. He thought it probably wasn’t worth the potential time spent traveling, though he did glance up and consider if he could mistjump through the thicker mana barriers before putting off the idea.

Coop might not have wanted to admit it, but he was still heavily invested in the race to 500. He’d done his best to ease into the race, telling himself that it was a marathon and not a sprint, so that he wouldn’t rush past opportunities. He justified a step-by-step process after returning to Ghost Reef when he could have parked himself in the highest level grind area and forced his way back into contention with no regard to the limitations on experience gains or long term efficiency.

Even with the diminished gains from defeating enemies outside of his range, he still would have maximized his per kill progress. Such a brute force strategy might have been marginally faster overall, since it would have eliminated the downtime created by transitioning to different level appropriate grind zones, but he would have risked exhausting the advanced monsters in exactly the same way as he was now facing in the mana well.

He imagined if he had reset the mana well himself, pulling the average level back down before he was even level 100. He might have been contending with diminishing returns even sooner. Since he waited until he was well-within the window before he delved into the Coral Forest, if not for the settlement upgrade, he could have probably gained another hundred levels before restrictions on his gains became a factor again. The timing of the upgrade had thrown his itinerary for phase two slightly off, but he was still more or less on track.

Really, the progress of the assimilation was the main limiting factor on his opportunities. He had to remember that Earth was basically only halfway through the first year of what was supposed to be a 111 year experience. The places where monsters could push a person beyond level 200 were contingent on outside factors and often took time to develop, but there hadn’t been much time to do so. To wipe one out was to prevent saving it for a more opportune chance as the paths forward became more and more restricted and the average level of monsters failed to keep the same pace while mana concentrations smoothed out.

The Coral Forest was an example of a unique environment pulling beyond the default, and he was already a hundred levels beyond its baseline. Continuing with the Gliders or returning to the Chompers or Gulpers represented an acceptance that he had already exhausted the local opportunities. But that wasn’t a completely factual conclusion. Ahead was a new frontier, shaded by billowing clouds of black mana, as thick as those from an oil fire. The ridge of sand that he stood on sank further into the depths, begging him to explore more.

Coop yanked his trident back out of the sand, unable to turn back and be satisfied with what the assimilation and the mana well already had on offer, especially since the settlement upgrade had wiped out the hidden pockets that would have been perfect to uncover after reaching even higher levels. It was time he explored the sixth level of the Coral Forest.

Hai Yun wouldn’t be accompanying him any further down. She had to be considerate of the safety of her bodyguards, and their levels had not risen to the level that they could comfortably explore the abyssal plains that lay further in the depths. Even after the mana of the Coral Forest was reset, the Ones That Fade who occupied the region were too dangerous, with skills that gave them the initiative by default while holding the region with the densest possible mana baths offered in the known areas of the mana well.

Coop wasn’t sure what to expect, but knowing that even Charlie and Camila, when partied up with Charlie’s parents, couldn't progress in the area gave him all the information he needed to be cautious. Still, reaching level 300 had sent his stats far beyond what he had dared to imagine, thanks to Quantum Insanity. He checked his status as he reflected on his power level, expectations for himself rising.

[Status]

HP - 45031/45031

MP - 172125/172125

Class - Revenant (Level 300)

Profession - Scavenging (Level 419)

Affinity - Spectral, Abyssal

Race - Human (Icon)

Faction - The Lighthouse

Strength - 200 (+8606)

Agility - 200 (+4303)

Body - 200 (+4303)

Mind - 6375 (+2231)

Intelligence - 200 (+8606)

Acumen - 200 (+4303)

Unallocated - 0

Titles - Champion V, Haunted, Ethereal, Reaper II, Slayer XI, Dauntless, Defiant, Stalwart, Reckless, Stacked, Valor XXIV, Siegebreaker, Underking, Mindbender, Insane

Skills (Active) - Mistwalking

Skills (Passive) - Depths of Madness

Quests - Fortune Seeker (26/50), Upgrade Metropolis to Global Capital

Basic Credits - 103,387,803

It was hard for him to wrap his head around exactly how quickly he was making gains. Quantum Insanity combined with his class choices to transform the Revenant into an actual demon of stats. 1,700 levels worth of stats were already just in Mind. He had almost 8,000 levels worth of stats in total.

Coop had been genuinely worried about his momentum when his level was reset, feeling like it had been prematurely halted, but at this point he was growing significantly faster than ever before. It almost didn’t make sense to compare the version of himself that started the assimilation and the version he was now, and it hadn’t really been that long.

He had gained 300 levels in 22 days, and that included time spent traveling and setting up his grind. If he was being more generous to himself, it had been 15 days since he defeated the first Ancient Defender after his return. That meant he had gained 20 levels a day since he restarted.

To be fair, he expected to slow down from this point on, as he had returned to the realm of diminishing returns, but 20 levels a day for any period was extraordinary. He had done it for two weeks straight, and frankly, the only limiting factor was finding suitable targets. The pace that he was going was one that he could theoretically sustain indefinitely, assuming there were enemies of more advanced levels to challenge.

In retrospect, and contrary to his initial assessments, he almost wished Quantum Insanity had been offered later in the assimilation so that he could really see what was possible without monsters being the variable that limited his potential so early. Of course, even then, with the gradual slowdown of monster development over the course of the assimilation, he probably would never have been satisfied. No matter what happened, the concentration of mana was ultimately the theoretical ceiling of progress and at the rate he was going, he thought he might actually be on track to hit the actual limits of mana itself.

Even beyond a simple one-to-one comparison between attributes, Coop had attained a mastery over his skills that was hard to define. His expertise was off the charts and even though he hadn’t been attentive to such amorphous progress with regard to mana attunements, due to the availability of much simpler number increases, that didn’t mean it hadn’t been taking place.

He had laughed off the idea of becoming a cultivator when such a clearly delineated system was already in place, but all of his grinding had been building his proficiency all the same. Coop’s actual power was becoming hard to define to himself beyond noting that his numbers were going up, but one thing was clear; he would find ways to keep getting stronger.