Quest Complete!
[DEFEAT THE BBEG]
Oh no! A group of amateur Revulsion Cultists have unleash a horde of Blight Creations upon the town of Blossomfell! You and your allies have defended the townsfolk admirably thus far—but watch out!
The big, bad, evil Guildsmaster approaches, and what happens next might shock you…
-Rewards-
> Guaranteed Level
> Title
> High quality Awakening Gem of Lightning
-Penalty of Failure-
> Destruction of Blossomfell
> Personal Injury and Potential Death
You have leveled up! You are now level 39!
+15 stat points.
+10% core progression.
An Awakening Gem of Lightning Gem has been added to your inventory.
You have earned a new title!
[CHAMPION OF THE GATES]
Successfully defend an entire settlement from direct attack by willingly planting yourself in the path of the enemy and refusing to yield.
-Effects-
> Gain +10% to the effect of all core stats while actively defending a settlement from wholesale attack.
Due to your demonstration of might, Power has increased by 10.
Power has reached 253.
It took Zoe a lot longer than usual to read through her latest system notifications. An additional level was always welcome, and the title was nice, but she was most pleased by the awakening gem. She herself had no use for it at this point—she’d already completed that stage of Advancement not too long ago—but those gems were supposed to be quite expensive. An especially high quality one should fetch a decent amount of money, then.
With her property now burned down and Blossomfell overrun by monsters, Zoe welcomed the unexpected windfall. She still had plenty of savings, true, but it wouldn’t last forever—especially if people kept destroying her shit.
Ugh. Time to see what’s actually going on now, I guess. After sitting up, it took Zoe a while to clear her eyes and make sense of her surroundings. She appeared to be resting in a bed of ivy, covered from above by a canopy of vines. It was dark—very dark—but it wasn’t hard to tell that they were still near the town square—and there was still a lot of activity going on.
Zoe also realized the only clothing that had survived the fight was her stupidly named cloak of the ‘hunter forest animal.’ The wolf cloak, basically. Everything else must have been reduced to ash, assuming it even stopped there. Zoe keenly remembered how her hellfire had reduced even ash, to well, something that wasn’t even ash anymore.
It wasn’t as if the cloak was unscathed, though—it was in pretty bad shape, burned and ripped and covered in all manner of filth and soot. But, Zoe realized, it was slowly repairing itself—very slowly. At that moment, she recalled that it was supposed to be a ‘living item’ that would progress alongside her.
It even had its own stats, and while none of them were quite as high as her own, they were far from nothing.
[CLOAK OF THE HUNTER FOREST ANIMAL]
Rank E
…
-Stats and Bindings-
> Power 65
> Perception 60
> Acuity 50
> Durability 100
> Vitality 70
…
That Vitality stat must be how it’s repairing itself, Zoe thought. The fairly high Durability doubtlessly contributed to its survival up to this point. Zoe’s own Durability was ‘only’ twice that, and considering the fact that she gained both a huge number of stats from her high rank classes and the fact that she seemed to now gain three times as many stats per level as a regular Human—well, it was actually quite high.
There were also the four ‘effects’ listed below that—quite reminiscent of Zoe’s own skills, actually, but she hadn’t explored them yet.
…
-Effects-
> Lonesome Recovery
> Winter’s Embrace
> Earthen Resilience
> Howl on the Wind
I wonder what they actually do? Something to worry about later. Zoe needed to know what was going on outside of the makeshift tent woven out of plants—Stella’s work, there was little doubt.
There was one slight problem, though—Zoe really didn’t like her only clothing being the special cloak. I should really get some cheap, spare outfits to keep in my inventory, she decided. With that thought came the realization that she was seriously under-utilizing the ability as a whole. The amount of storage was far from infinite, but it could hold a lot.
That didn’t help her with her current problem, though, and Zoe settled on first poking her head out of a gap in the greenery.
Huh. It seemed like she was on a roof, or at least a balcony of some kind. Interesting. It was also obvious that they were still near the center of Blossomfell. Sighing, she prepared to just go ahead and do it.
Lesser Disguise!
Mirage!
Faking proper clothing with her disguise skill was still challenging—totally possible, as she’d proved very early on—but she didn’t care about looking ‘normal’ at the moment. She just wanted to be somewhat decent. The result was that she could make it far more simple and efficient by just fusing the effect of the two skills to form a hazy, swirling darkness around herself. Eh. Good enough.
Mirage has reached level 11!
Lesser Disguise has reached level 6!
Lesser Disguise has reached level 7!
Zoe blinked. Lesser disguise had been very slow to level. I wonder why—oh, you have got to be shitting me. It was because of her stupid and quite useful ‘Humanitizer’ title, she was sure of it.
[HUMANITIZER]
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Successfully convince a group of Humans that you are also a Human in order to avoid death. Only counts if you are not actually a Human.
-Effects-
> Significantly increased effectiveness and decreased cost of abilities used for making you seem Human.
She’d earned that particular title on her first or second day after waking up in this world, and that was pretty much the only thing she’d used lesser disguise for since then. Skills seemed to level when she pushed them, though—so if this title was making my constant use of this skill way easier and more effective—did that mean it had the downside of effectively penalizing its ability to level?
She knew that she could lean more or less on her titles in much the same way she could choose to draw more or less on the effect of one of her stats. Neither was a technique she was very familiar with yet, but it was worth experimenting with. Not now, though. She would see about ‘turning off’ the effect of the Humanitizer title at some point once things had settled down a little.
One final thought that struck Zoe was about her cloak again. Since it was a living item that slowly recovered using its own Vitality stat, did that mean Zoe could use a skill like mending touch to heal it? She decided to just try it.
Mending Touch!
She didn’t actually expect it to work—but it did. The skill ‘caught’ on the cloak—that was how she’d describe the feeling—and sure enough, the skill took effect under the system’s guidance and her own intent. All at once, the holes and rips sealed up, and even the burned or torn patches quite literally grew fresh fur. Incredible.
It seemed as if something new and wondrous always made itself known just when Zoe was starting to adjust to things. Being able to heal with a mere touch—something that was miraculous at first—had become a new normal, now as familiar to her as its own limitations. Much like people used to not be able to just shoot fire or ice from there hands, mending touch couldn’t repair clothing. Now it could, though—or rather, it could repair at least one piece of clothing.
_____
Zoe found the town square in disarray. While Blossomfell had successfully weathered the initial attack, all was not well. From the snippets of conversation she overhead, the wider area was still overrun by blighted monsters, and things weren’t necessarily going to improve from there. They may have defeated several of the cult’s leadership—the old guildsmaster, thanks to Zoe and Stella, as well as Mayor Stokes, thanks to the Inquisition.
At least they were good for something after all, Zoe mused. Regardless, the feeling she got was that people—adventurers, guards, minor civil servants, and the like—suspected that there were still a number of cultists who had gotten away.
The horde they’d left behind could potentially become an even bigger problem if it were allowed to spread and take over other settlements. Word needed to spread faster, and a few career messengers and scouts had already been sent out to the closest villages as well as the city of Verdanport.
All of that was bad enough, but making it worse was the large number of survivors who’d been infected to some degree by the Blight. Zoe still didn’t know precisely what ‘the Blight’ was, but she got the sense it was something more specific than a general word for disease and more significant than just a specific disease. The way other people and the system alike spoke about the Blight felt eerily similar to ‘the Infernal.’
“That’s because it is,” Lilith chimed in, finally making herself useful again. “They’re both Primordials, as is the Hallow.”
Zoe listened attentively as Lilith lectured about Primordials and something called ‘the Dyad.’ Her first reaction had been something along the lines of this sounds a lot like you’re talking about Gods, but I thought those were all missing in action. As it turned out, Primordials and Gods were both the kind of thing Zoe herself would have called a gods, but in very distinct ways.
“From what I know, the lost Gods of old were specific personages who ruled over a domain. The Primordials existed then, too, with the crucial practical difference that some of them still remain to this day. The other main difference is that there was never a distinction between a Primordial and their domain. Where a God ruled, a Primordial simply was. The Blight is not the creation of a Primordial, nor even the manifest power of one. It is simply the Blight, where Spirit, Body, and Mind are one.”
It was all very esoteric and wishy-washy, but Zoe still felt like she ‘got the drift,’ so to speak. The problem remained, though. A large number of the people who’d survived the initial chaos were on their way to being taken over by the Blight. When Zoe rejoined the masses, other healers, alchemists, and the like were hard at work attempting to purge the Blight from people before it was too late.
Zoe quickly noted that they were working on the least serious cases first—ironically, the logic seemed to be that starting with the least serious cases gave them the best chance at saving anyone. That specific observation really drove home to her just how serious an issue it was.
So, after checking in with Stella, making sure Sasha and Millie were still alive, and squaring things with Lilith, Zoe set about trying her own hand at removing the Blight.
Surgeon’s Eye!
Zoe took the opposite approach as everyone else by starting with one of the worst cases. The man almost looked like he was already dead—more than dead, really—but her skill assured her that he wasn’t completely gone. If she could somehow both remove the Blight from his body and heal his grievous wounds—that was a big if, but Zoe was determined to try.
Rejuvenate!
Life Ray!
Mending Touch!
Zoe didn’t hold back, using all three skills at once for the most potent effect. While life ray didn’t seem to actually heal people, she certainly remembered the effect it had on the fungal ghouls down in the mine. She hoped it would help rid the man of the Blight while her other skills healed him.
Life Ray has reached level 6!
It was working—but it also wasn’t enough. Damn it! The problem wasn’t so much ridding him of the Blight—the problem everyone else seemed to be having—no, her own problem was stopping it from vindictively taking the host with it. Given the feedback from applying the trio of skills, from the information provided by surgeon’s eye, and even just from using her eyes, horns, and drawing upon her high Perception…
It seemed like the Blight was aware of what she was doing—and not only that, it was petty. If it couldn’t have this flesh, then no one could.
Surgeon’s Eye has reached level 21!
…
Due to your insight, Perception has increased by 10.
Perception has reached 210.
Oh, nice—no, don’t get distracted. Zoe continued fighting it, doing everything she could think of to stop the Blight from killing the man even as her own vital mana burned it away. It’s almost gone. Just a little bit more, and she would—fuck! He was dead.
Fucking damn it. Zoe was pissed. The failure stung, and the sheer, petty, sensless cruelty pissed her off. She swore she wasn’t ascribing intent to something that wasn’t there—what Lilith told her about Primordials certainly fit with the alien will she swore she had felt herself battling against.
This won’t be the end. Firming her resolve, she moved on to the next patient. Everyone in this particular, almost shunned corner of the square was close to dead anyway—everyone else had pretty much given up on them, aside from the tired guards waiting to put down anyone who rose again as a ghoul.
“Let’s try this again,” Zoe muttered. This time, though, she added a fourth skill into the mixture. It was one of her oldest skills—one that she’d never even used, let alone leveled. It was also one that she didn’t understand—and beyond even that, it made her nervous.
-General Skills-
…
> Hallowed Touch (Tierless)
It was a result of the influence something had tried to exert on her all the way back during her first few hours after awakening in this world—much like Basil had tried to control her as a demon, something had tried to exert influence over her through the High Paladin—and her Outsider title had pushed back, but not without that thing leaving a mark. The Hallow.
The fact that it remained in her status spooked Zoe a bit, but if it was there, she should at least try understanding it—and that meant using it. Here goes nothing. Zoe had already bested one Primordial—so what better way to fight against another with the stolen power of the first? Placing her hand against the chest of the sickly, blight-infected woman, Zoe committed.
Rejuvenate!
Life Ray!
Mending Touch!
…
Hallowed Touch!
A terrible, white-hot flame exploded through her spirit, threatening to burn out every single mana channel like too much current through the filament of an old, incandescent lightbulb. Zoe gasped.
To say it hurt was a gross understatement. The Righteous fury of those Purifying flames threatened to cripple her entire foundation in mere moments—but before she could wrest control away from the rogue skill or fight back with her own control over mana, an old and usually quiet part of her status roared to life.
[WARNING: Core Violation]
An Aspect of the Hallow has reasserted control over a component of your core.
Your title: Outsider has blocked this action.
Divine Authority denied by System Core.
Core protections applied.
Determining consequences.
The pain vanished—but the white fires didn’t. Instead, they flowed with her mana, out into the body of the unconscious woman on the ground below her. Zoe blinked. What just—Divine Authority? It was the same thing that happened so many weeks ago, back in that strange, underground temple. The same words, even—but I thought Lilith said that a Primordial was different from the Elder Gods?
Consequences for this incident have been determined by System Core.
Skill: Hallow Touched has become skill: Wrath of
Zoe blinked again. Yet another blast from the past—those pieces of information that seemed violently excoriated from the system itself. Can’t you just tell me what—oh.
New Quest!
[LOST AND FOUND]
Rediscover the true name of
Consider those as hints, Scion.
-Rewards-
You have to know in order to succeed.
Zoe scowled. “Well that’s not obnoxiously fucking cryptic.”