Augmented Aspects: Chapter 119 All Caught Up (Patreon)

Chapter 119

All Caught Up

So where to begin? So many things have happened over the past three months, and they are all amazing. First, I have my daughter Jackie, AKA Gwendolyn, AKA Mega Me here with me. I would call her mini-me but she does play a fully aged individual that is 36 years old for an elf, which makes her tower above me. So, any time I try to call her mini-me, she picks me up and hugs me. So Mega Me it is, especially as she is a fully awakened member of my Legendary bloodline, and she also is the first and likely only person I will teach the Ethereal Healer class to.

Since I am the highest level for this class, I am of course the only one who can decide who to train in my class, well classes plural as I do have a second class, Ethereal Simulacrums Master, that I can train people in. My third class is apparently a super unique class, Akashic Qi Master, I know sounds super long and pompous, but it is what it is. As far as I can tell from the class, and the world messages that keep going off every time I enter or leave a tower zone, this class means that I can train others to be Qi users, but I am like the Highlander, in that there can only be one Akashic Qi Master. Hiya. Yes, I just mentally posed into a martial stance in my mind. I am so glad Mallory or Mega Me can’t see the inside of my mind right now.

Where was I? Oh right, since I have now trained someone to be an Ethereal Healer, I might have to worry about them eventually overtaking my level and thus kicking me out of choosing the evolution for this class. Fortunately, I don’t believe this to be an issue, first Jackie is both completely loyal, and well behind me in terms of gaining experience. So even if she did manage to gain experience faster than me, she would still need to gain more experience than I have accumulated thus far. And if I do say it is a lot, especially as a number of my longer term schemes have finally paid off in full, along with being able to constantly trickle in experience with my second class, the Ethereal Simulacrums Master class, that allows me to have two simulacrums that constantly read books to help power level me, well us, as they are part of my soul, through our levels.

Experience Gained from turning trash into gold with the Midnight Hunter’s Guild:

650,000 / 325,000 / 325,000

Experience Gained from Simulacrums Reading 27 books each a day for the past 90 days:

133,650 / 66,825 / 66,825

That is using my patented 50% by 25% by 25% breakdown of experience. Meaning that my main class of Ethereal Healer will still be my fastest class to level and increase. Of course, that is a boatload of experience to gain in a relatively short period of time, which had a drastic impact on my overall growth, and most importantly my overall survivability for myself.

Class Ethereal Healer has risen to Level 195.

Base Attributes per level: +1 Dexterity, +1 Endurance, +1 Sociability, +1 Personality, +1 Perception, +1 Intelligence, +2 Willpower per level. (Times 42 levels gained).

Total: +42 Dexterity, +42 Endurance, +42 Sociability, +42 Personality, +42 Perception, +42 Intelligence, +84 Willpower.

Class Ethereal Simulacrum Masters has risen to Level 171.

Base Attributes per level: +1 Personality, +1 Sociability, +1 Attractiveness, +1 Perception, +1 Intelligence, +1 Willpower. (Times 25 levels gained).

Total: +25 Personality, +25 Sociability, +25 Attractiveness, +25 Perception, +25 Intelligence, +25 Willpower.

Akashic Qi Master has risen to level 91.

Base Attributes per level: +2 Strength, +3 Dexterity, +2 Endurance, +1 Attractiveness, +1 Intelligence, and +2 Willpower per level. (Time 69 levels gained).

Total: +138 Strength, +207 Dexterity, +138 Endurance, +69 Attractiveness, +69 Intelligence, +138 Willpower.

Racial Bonus (With Legendary Bloodline Awakened)

Base Attributes per Racial level: +2 Attractiveness, +2 Perception, +2 Intelligence, and +2 Willpower every level. (X136 total class levels gained across all three classes).

Total: +272 Attractiveness, +272 Perception, +272 Intelligence, +272 Willpower.

That was a lot of overlap, but most importantly it showed that I had growth in all my Attributes, something that I have been missing up until now. Thanks to the addition of my third class, and hopefully last class for a while, I gained the following total bonus over the past three months.

Grand Total improvements from everything: +138 Strength, +249 Dexterity, +180 Endurance, +67 Personality, +67 Sociability, +366 Attractiveness, +339 Perception, +408 Intelligence, and finally +519 Willpower.

This burst in activity pushed me into vaunted territory, as I was pretty sure I now had the highest, or one of the highest Willpower Attributes in the game. Considering every one of my classes gave me two Willpower Attributes, well every class but my Ethereal Simulacrums Master class that only gave one per level. The class bonuses along with my racial bonuses effectively doubling my Willpower, it is safe to conclude that I now gained a minimum of three, but mostly four Willpower points per level.

Physical   Base   Bonus

Strength     61    199

Dexterity      95   469

Endurance   89      249

Social        Base   Bonus

Personality      79   292

Sociability        76   296

Attractiveness   63  767

Mental       Base  Bonus

Perception    133   822

Intelligence  136   949

Willpower     121   1304

The best news about my clearly being 14 right now, is the fact that my Broke flaw, and its tireless limitations has finally been removed from me.

WHOO!

Of course, my daughter and I are now full-fledged members of the Midnight Hunter’s Guild. I am just listed as the position rank: Doctor.

Title: Doctor of The Midnight Hunter’s Guild: You have been fully recognized as a Doctor of the Midnight Hunter’s Guild, a position that is only one step below the Guild Leader, and parallel to the Vice Guild Leader, but holds no actual weight or authority within the Guild hierarchy, except for Healing, and Magical related advancements are concerned.

Yep, I was promoted to show how valuable I am to the team, but placed in a position where I could do whatever I want without it directly impacting the guild too much. Or in effect I was my own one woman R & D department for all things magical, healing, and soon to be Qi related.

My daughter on the other hand was also given a high-ranking title for her part.

Gwendolyn Spiritlight: Provisional Officer of the Midnight Hunter’s Guild.

Gwenny’s new position was listed as just below an acting officer, but above the general enlisted. Her placement was given partly due to me, and partly because she volunteered to come out here to Deolar with us and was listed as one of the first thirty guild members needed to begin claiming the territory for ourselves.

As it turned out, everyone that was part of the initial thirty received a guild promotion, thus my new title as Doctor, which everyone was already calling me. Thus, it was that my unique standing within the guild was instantly accepted and encouraged. I was especially accepted by those wishing to be selected as either a magical student or qi student, which were apparently part of my tasks. Of which, I had surprisingly many tasks that I could do, but I was never forced to do anything.

Take for instance the fact that I was in charge of expanding the zone of habitable territory available to us, which is now up to fifteen of the initial twenty kilometers. Now I can teleport to every area, cast the required Cleansing Rain spell to purify the area and ensure the plants that were present grew quickly, or I could cast the spell while training the older more “talented” magicians the spell.

Needless to say trying to tell a level 500 Arch Blow-Hard, that is his title he is a wind mage, the spell should be easy. But you try to point out the fact that the level three hundreds are casting it better because they listen to me, a person who has two doctorates in spell crafting, you think it would be easy. But that is at a standstill. Instead, over the past week I have left the Arch Blow-Hard to his own devices while I have gone about using my Master Enchanting skills to erect pillars around the land that will make it so I can bypass having to deal with the bellow meister.

Also, our Guild Time Quest to hold the land ended, well it didn’t end, we are still on it, but it did restart once we were over twenty days into the quest. The reason why, was a surge of Blighted creatures came invading our territory and killed two guards. Don’t worry, I revived both, going so far as to do a Perfect Resurrection on both of them, for their sacrifices. But the damage had been done, our timer was reset, just before the final wave of Blighted monsters was quelled.

See, we thought that just being in the area was enough, thus we had over a hundred in the airships. In fact, that was where we sent most of the civilians at the time, even my daughter was evacuated due to the sheer number of monsters that arrived. The fact that less than thirty of us were on the ground was what made it, so we lost the challenge. Now we know better and are ready to do more. Also, I have spent the last few weeks, building up natural defenses, and making it so a similar invasion would be nearly impossible to be as effective by another swarm, even if it was five times the size of the force we face.

The only silver lining about having had our Guild’s land reclamation quest reset was that it meant I didn’t have to start teaching people Qi already.

As it was, I was still having a hard time figuring out what everything meant and did. I also realized that Qi could use a magical core to help a person cultivate. However, there was a problem, for people like me who were already using said core for mana, we had a particularly hard time as we apparently needed to create a secondary core either using our body, our Will, or a combination thereof.

Fortunately, my class apparently saw this as a future shortcoming and even gave me a skill related to solving just that very problem, by granting me Golden Coreless Qi Cultivation.

Skill Golden Coreless Qi Cultivation is a Strength, Dexterity, Endurance X2, Attractiveness, Perception, Intelligence, Willpower X2 based skill.

In fact, all of my Qi based skills were as amazing as this one. Each offered to increase my physical body, while improving my mind and Willpower as well. This only further served to make me want to understand this strange energy even more than I already was.

The odd thing was, that the books that my Simulacrum and I read related to these Qi based skills, the ones from the Golden Dragon Library were wrong. Well not wrong, but it was clear that many of the fundamental components referenced in the books were either outdated, or not made for me in mind. I don’t know if it is due to my being a female, and the books clearly being written for a male to utilize, but regardless, some of the facts were wrong.

So, that is one major thing I need to figure out for myself, what exactly Qi is, and then figure out how to teach it to others. I have to train mages that are too superior to me to think I understand spell craft, I have to expand the size of the habitable land we have. Oh, and I need to figure out ways to fend off Blighted animals, while being able to capture, cure, and release as many of the creatures as we can. All while being the main healer.

So yeah, no official tasks that need to get done on a particular day. I make my own hours, go where I want to and get paid in Guild credits. They are just like real credits, but more fun, apparently. This is why, despite my not being Broke anymore, this has not truly translated into wealth, other than I now have a few books worth in excess of hundreds of thousands of gold coins on me at any time. These are of course ancient texts from the Deolar library, which I might have accidentally unearthed first, before the capitol building, thus allowing us to start our guild’s A Land of Our Own quest faster.

To pass the time, I have come up with my own personal schedule, that consists of Qi training and exercises, originally I trained with the soldiers, but as soon as they realized they might be accepted into my first batch of Qi cultivators, things got weird. That is why I generally train alone now, to avoid such situations going forward.

Once my morning training session is over, I then go work with the few mages that wish to learn, and we cast the first of three daily Cleansing Rain spells over the base. Once that is complete, I go out either foraging for Blighted animals to heal, or if there are no animals in my immediate area, I push a few plants to begin growing healthily in an arid environment.

Apparently, there is a hidden quest related to bringing back old elven plants.

Hidden Quest Found: Archaeological Horticulturalists (Limitless First Turn In): You have discovered an extinct plant species and managed to bring it back to life. Find and regrow lost plants to enhance your reward. Current Reward Tier: Bronze. Plants needed until next Tier: Silver (0 / 3). Rewards: Experience, Variable.

This was a quest that many druids would dream of, a scaling quest that gets better the higher up the chain you get with the number of plants you can find and then grow. Oddly enough, I got this quest from bringing back to life an ancient elven grass variant. Yes, literally a free quest, that I never knew existed, and one I was going to get for free by causing daily down pouring of Cleansing Rain to appear and help heal the land.

Then again, I figured the game likely put this in place to reward me for taking the initiative to drive back the Blight from what many could consider to be the very heart of the problem area.

Sigh.

I just begin to rest, it is just afternoon, I have cast my second of three Cleansing Rains, this time out on a previously vacant field. I made sure to run the spell until I ran out of mana, a task that is not easy by any stretch of the imagination, particularly with how fast my mana reserves refill thanks to my enormous Willpower.

Plop.

Mana sweat covers my body, it will soon evaporate in a moment, if my skin doesn’t reprocess the mana back into a useable form of Qi quickly. I try to grab the energy infused sweat, but find it mostly fading away by the time I realize two people have gotten close.

Granted I knew who the two people were, and that they were likely looking for me the minute they got to the edge of the regular guild encampment area and began walking in my still un-terraformed parcel of ground that I was now working on, trying to get ever closer to twenty kilometers reclaimed.

“Told you we would find her if we just looked for the little girl sulking in the rain.” Jackie, no Gwenny, my daughter says. Hearing her, I want to get up and argue, but at the moment I feel my energy completely give way. Oh yeah, as an Ethereal Healer, I can substitute one form of energy for any other, and I also did that with both my stamina and Qi, converting them both to mana as well for my project.

“You know, sometimes I’m thankful I had kids.” I state.

“Sometimes?” Mallory asks, a slight knowing tone to her voice.

“Yeah, because this is one of those other times.” I state, taking a deep breath and forcing my way up to my feet, while I brush off the dirt and dust that I found myself in.

“Even the dirt just falls away from her, it is not even fair.” Gwenny says.

“That is her exceptionally high Social Attributes at play. Right now, she is nearly batting a thousand for her Attractiveness alone, which means dirt wouldn’t even dare bother her.” Mallory says, giving pointers on the Attributes to my daughter. Honestly, I didn’t know about Social Attributes, but I guess what she said made sense. People trusted and wanted to be around people who were clean, rather than those who were covered in dirt and grime, I suppose.

“Unlike you?” Gwen asks.

“Unlike me indeed, though I make sure to go out of my way to bother your mother. It is one of the few ways she knows she is loved here, at the camp.” Mallory states.

I want to argue, but then realize that sadly I do appreciate her odd semi-gaslight attempts to make sure I feel invaluable.

“So what is it this time?” I ask.

“Oh, you are going to just love it.” Mallory states.

“Wait, I thought you said it was exceptionally tough?” Gwen asks.

“I did, that is why I am going to use the guild’s proverbial Easy Button.” Mallory states, looking backwards, towards the reclaimed oasis city that sits squarely in a sea of sand.

“Did you just call me easy?” I ask.

“An Easy Button, it is a slight nuance, but it is still a distinction.” Mallory clarifies, shaking her head. “You know, you are that proverbial Easy Button that every guild leader wants, but so few get. I just point you in a direction, tell you to go, and boom it is done. You are truly amazing, and incomprehensively valuable to our team and organization as a whole.” Mallory states, and I can tell she is getting to that overly flowery language part of her sucking up process. Not wanting to have to endure this any further, I finally ask.

“What is it that you want?”

“Well you see…”