Mornn
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Chapter 682 - All roads lead to humans
🕑 Added 2025-05-23 16:00:22 +0000 UTCAuthor note:
Hi! Unfortunate news, I'll have to take a few days off soon. I don't know when and how many exactly, but I need the extra time to finish book 4's edition for amazon (It was slated to release in January...), so yeah...
Other than that, things are going great though, five more events incoming for this arc, hope you'll enjoy them all, and have a nice weekend ദ്ദി ˉ͈̀꒳ˉ͈́ )✧
[You have selected: Convergent evolution.]
[Your access to mana has been temporarily disabled.]
[Please sit still as we operate on your physical body. You may experience severe dizziness and nausea during the process.]
Reading the messages, Sofia put her half-eaten slice of cake back on the table and sat comfortably in the back of her chair. It did not take long for the world to start spinning around her. She closed her eyes and waited for it to be over.
This is a joke compared to the filters but it’s still much worse than getting a regular skill.
I hope this doesn’t last too long.
This is going to make me throw up…
It took a good minute and a half before everything stopped spinning and the nausea started to calm down. Mana rushed back into Sofia’s body, and she could clearly feel that her mana heart was different, it linked all of her skills togethers in a way that it did not use to instead of simply fueling them.
Woah… Can it still move around when it’s like this?
Oooh, alright, it can, but that sure looks strange. It’s probably best to leave it in its neutral position unless I’m fighting.
Should I try doing a fusion right now?
Name : Sofia Aphenoreth
Age : 21 ♢
Class : [Saintomancer] ♢
Sub-Class : [False Lord] ♢
Level : 250 ♢ (299 EX22)
Health : 1 026 527 / 1 026 527
Stamina : 373 142 / 373 611
Mana : 76 853 / 5 365 182
Divinity: 102 / 102
(Mana Regeneration: (0.16%) + Other sources = 11376/s)
(Mana Regeneration in Sunlight : (0.16%) + Other sources = 27777/s)
Main Specialization : [Eclipse Skeleton]
Alteration chance : 100% (Unavailable)
Secondary Specialization : [Heat Death]
Tertiary Specialization : [Sovereign of Unshackled frames]
Post Racial Skill Awakening Note: Some skills now have an estimated ‘true slot’ usage annotated. More and better estimations will take a few weeks to calculate but un-annotated skills should take around 1 slot each.
Signature Skill (ULTIMATE)
[Awakening of the five calamities]
Mana Heart Abilities (4)
[Infinity Engine] Lv.3
[Relocate Core] ULTIMATE Rank
[Slashing Resistance]
[Explosion Resistance]
Remaining possible skill slots : 6.2
False Lord Skills (2 / 2)
♢ [Singularity edict] ♢
♢ [Paradise Toybox] ♢
Active Skills (8 / 8)
[Spine of the Black Sun] - Level 263
[Summon Odalite Blood] - Level 260 (~5S)
[Graveyard of the Nymphs] - Level 278
[False immortality] - Level 4 (~3S)
[Skull Choir] - Level 295
[Reign over shadows]
[Saintomancer’s Star]
[Avatar of Zeus]
Passive Skills (5 / 5)
[Blessing of the Deep] - (2/4) (0S)
♢ [Vakariazrehafin of Sorrow] ♢ (~3S)
♢ [Venerable physique of the primeval void] ♢ - Peak of Light forging realm (~4S)
[Runeforged Overlord] ♢ - Level 294
[Sixth Melody]
Classless Skills (7 / 7)
♢ [Dreams Of a Demon which Gods Envy - March of the Envoy] ♢ (~2S)
[Summon Self] - Level 57
[Mana manipulation] ♢
[Radiance] - Level 100
[Quintessential] ♢
[One with Suffering] ♢
[Crystallized] ♢
Racial Skills (4)
♢ [Edgewalker] ♢
♢ [Pillar of Creation] ♢
♢ [Mockery of the Divine] ♢
♢ [Convergent Evolution] ♢
Special Skills (1)
♢ [The Book of Skeletons] ♢
Wildcast Skills (~3S)
[Angel’s bolt] ♢
[Identify]
[Call Elemental Sprite] ♢
Summoned heroes (4 / 4)
Lv.299 Pareth (Holy Hellspawn Abomination Eclipse Skeleton)
Lv.293 Alith (Alith)
Lv.299 Book of Skeletons (Book)
Lv.293 Ihuarah (Heartless Shade)
[Mark of Aphenoreth]
Lords… Summon blood takes up that much space?! I knew it was big but… I might have to reconsider keeping it in the long term. Maybe I should start making Odalite Blood reserves in Zangdar as soon as I’m done with this trial…
There are a lot more lock marks than before. And 6.2 free slots, hmm…
Also I gained 2 points of divinity somehow?
[This is a result of our mana heart starting to awaken from the fight against Tartaros]
[I expect it to keep going up as we progress toward leveling up]
[Seek out as many fights as possible, we are still a long way from full awakening]
Hey this takeover was smoother than before, at this rate soon you will be able to send me messages like this whenever. Thank you for the update. Now let’s get fusing.
Hmmm… I do have a few ideas but let’s see, maybe I should figure out which skill would have the best overlap if I want to save more space. Some skills are bound to have a better natural compatibility than others…
Sofia closed her eyes again and focused on her mana circuits.
What a mess…
The demon form spells are partially there, it feels like they take up a bit more space than they used to… Probably because the skill is going to evolve soon. Hopefully it will let me transform whenever. Let’s see, my classless skills in particular could use some refreshing…
[Quintessential] and [Mana Manipulation] have a lot of similar pathways. Messing with quintessential is a bit scary considering it does most of the heavy lifting for the range of my aura… But I should trust my new racial skill, right? Nothing better to do until we get the results from the casino anyway.
Now how do I do this? It should be just like when I made [Dodge - Me], I think?
Sofia’s mana senses faltered as she started to mess with her mana circuits. There was no system help, just her own mana heart now being capable of shifting and fusing her circuits with ease instead of life-endangering difficulty.
Even with the help of the racial skill, it took Sofia a good hour of painstaking rerouting of her mana circuits, sometimes having to blindly follow the mana flow without knowing what it was going to do to the fused skill, for the two classless skills to properly fuse together. The results of the trial were still not in, and the cake was completely gone.
Sofia checked her status.
Remaining possible skill slots : 6.9
All of that for 70% of a full slot… My mana senses feel the same as before.
The skills was blank, currently, it took a few seconds for Mr.Scribe to come up with a proper name and description.
[Essence Resonator] ♢ :
Aura +10% per possessed divine essence.
Manually altering your mana circuits is around 8% easier per possessed divine essence.
That’s pretty good? The effect descriptions have been rewritten but it’s just the same things they were before. Except that the alteration part from mana manipulation changed from ‘double’ to 8% per essence. So I’m at 152%.
That should make future fusion 52% easier? Am I understanding that right? That was a good starting point.
Ah, wait, Mr.Scribe, the classless says 6/6 now? Did I just screw myself out of a classless slot?!
[Our system classless allowance is actually at 9, independently from the number of slots, so we could learn an extra 3 right now.]
Wait, really?!
Good to know.
… We have the potential to do something really stupid right now. Imagine if we take a few new classless, fuse them, and keep going until we have some sort of ultimate classless skill. Nothing is preventing us from doing that right this instant aside right? Aside from it being a stupid idea?
[Indeed.]
Too bad we can’t afford to do that… It will still cost me the slots no matter how well I fuse. Still, maybe I can get a new passive right now? Or should I try another fusion since it looks like we have some time…
[Radiance] is prime fusion material, it’s got so many overlaps with my other skills, I could fuse it to practically anything.
I almost want to just slap it onto the unlife runes but the prospect of potentially ruining the runes is a bit scary, especially since I still haven’t bought any of the skill’s optimization upgrades. Maybe I keep this fusion in mind and try it after buying the upgrades. If it could finally allow me to heal through the unlife runes…
What else…
Sofia peered through her mana circuits for a while before she realized that two of her classless had an unexpected similarity. [Crystallized] and [One with suffering] each had a whole sub-section that looked completely mirrored from one another.
It wasn’t obvious because they were so far apart but the more I look at it the more the look alike. I just need to flip one around and I could make these two sub-sections completely overlap. That would be a great fusion, wouldn’t it? I could gain a lot of space!
There no telling what fusing these two skills might do, though. Especially with such a large overlap, one function from one is likely going to be replaced by the other… I’m not quite at the level where I can predict what that would be…
After giving it some thought, and finishing her slice of cake, Sofia went ahead with the fusion.
The trial results came up midway through this time, but Sofia ignored them and just kept her mind on the fusion from her bed, while Bookie had to explain by himself to Mornn and Kuli what was going on.
Remaining possible skill slots : 7.7
[Crystallized Suffering] ♢ : For each % of Health lost during a singular battle, your body will produce a suffering shard. Gain 1% increase to Strength, Agility, Speed and Processing for each suffering shard until the end of combat. When you reach 500 suffering shards or the battle ends with at least 100 suffering shards, stop producing suffering shards, and all shards gather to form a suffering crystal. Consuming a suffering crystal grants a temporary Processing multiplier of 1% per shard contained in the crystal but also inflicts immense debilitating pain and soul damage.
That’s… Uh… Well losing the mana regeneration part is not too bad considering I no longer needed it. And I get the Processing during battle now, which is great! Not sure how I feel about the suffering crystals though, or even the shards, for that matter…
Sofia finally opened her eyes and sat up on the bed. The others had left the room by now, even Pareth. Bookie was the only one still there, playing some kind of board game with the room’s Odon shopkeeper.
“Hey Lepo. Any new items in shop?” Sofia greeted.
“Hi! I do have a few new things, but no uniques except the one you unlocked as a casino prize. Congratulations on that. You’re the second person to grab this one earring actually, but as you can guess the other person did not end up buying it.”
“Can I know who that was?”
“Forbidden information, sorry!”
“Alright, thanks for confirming it’s there, I guess.”
“Sofia! Do you want to play with us?” Bookie asked, turning back.
While Bookie was not looking at the board, Lepo moved one of the gamepieces, giving a wink to Sofia.
“I’m good Bookie, maybe later, depending on how much free time we get.”
“Oh… Alright…” Bookie answered a bit miffed, he turned to the board again and immediately noticed Lepo’s trick, “Hey! What happened to my knight?!”
“Ah! He must have fallen from his horse while you weren’t looking, that’s unlucky,” Lepo said, barely suppressing a smirk.
Sofia left them to their game anb checked her own things. First she looked down her shirt, finding that the weird blue-purple scar the pearls used to grow from had become a much fainter and smaller reddish one.
At least this one looks a bit like a real battle scar instead of a weird blue patch… No longer having damn pearls growing from there is nice, those were really awkward. Hopefully the size of the scar is a good sign and the crystals won’t be too big… Now let’s see how many points we got.
[Gambler’s end - Second Death Casino : Event rankings]
[Rank 1 - Historic 3rd - Eternal Lights]
[Rank 2 - Historic 4th - Hero’s Journey]
[Rank 3 - Historic 8th - Obsidian Mountain]
[Rank 4 - Historic 16th - Holy Human Empire]
[Rank 5 - Historic 19th - Gurudur’s Golden Gals]
[Detailed results for Eternal Lights:
Tier 3 event - Maximum point reward : 50 000 000 TP
Retrieved item value :
Special prize - 777 777 777 TP
Precious metal - 8 553 242 TP
Secrets of Chronomancy - 13 666 TP
Total value : 786 344 685 TP
Total earned (MAX): 50 000 000 TP]
‘You have received rank 1 reward : Ark’s Gold Star Pin *1!’
‘You have received 50 000 000 tournament points!’
‘Current balance : 218 577 021 points’
[Tournament activities will resume at 6:00 am tomorrow, please enjoy your break exploring the Ark!]
Somehow, I feel a bit disappointed…
Comments
A.V. Anderson
DO YOU BELIEVE IN PREORDAINED FATE? ALL IS WRITTEN, FREEDOM IS FAKE! If the enemy is Scripture, does this mean that Scripture is way more powerful than at first thought? The power to preordain Fate by simply writing it down, that's huge!! Somehow I think the death of Time is related and maybe the Copenhagen versus De Broglie view of quantum mechanics (Chaos versus Ordered).
Michael Gordon
I vote dodge me combine with runic overlord. That would be very interesting imo
Clara
That's... Prooobably an oversight?
Clara
With how this trial is doing copies of people, obviously it's gotta be a mirror match with a copy of herself
Matt Grayson
Amythyst
Oooh good catch! from chapter 490: Clint scratched his beard, "Well, no need to look at me like that, half of yall were there to see this shit happen. The Lord’s rune spread as a byproduct of the forging, since she used that essence. Still have a hard time trying to wrap my head around that, by the way. But yeah. Shit reacted with all the mana and collapsed into a tiny little miniature black hole," he said, while gesturing with his hands, mimicking striking with a hammer, |Or basically, for those who don’t understand the words I’m saying, space broke and it sucked the lil’ lassy in, that being usually pretty bad." "More than pretty bad," Sun commented, "There’s-" Richard stopped Sun, slapping a skeletal hand on the Godesse’s mouth, “Hoy hoy, careful now, not everyone here is a God or an ascended.”
Matt Grayson
Ahah! Richard shushing SUN when they were discussing Sofia's close personal encounter with a Black Hole (which was NOT practicing safe gravitational collapse) and he said "Not everyone here is a God or an Ascended". She was going to let the big secret out!
Clara
It's probably a good thing in the end, since it means it wasn't bought out yet previously
Clara
That'd be cool and I hope she can, but we also do know specializations are extremely complicated, to the point of comparison with summon blood, which we know Erredis has trouble figuring out how it even worked. So, if she does achieve the fusion, it'll probably be when she's got much more processing
Lollo
The only question I have about this is why her blessing is not locked, Shaily has both her name and the skill she got to replace the blessing ([Hand of Ordinance]) double locked, while Sofia doesn't. Is it a difference between being blessed by the Ordinator vs. the Inquisitor or something else?
E
This new racial skill is a convenient way to deal with conflicts such as the recent DODGE-ME aura issue. What to combine DODGE-ME with... The thinking speed is something she'll want to keep. Maybe combine with Avatar? The "false god" ability could become something interesting if the passive side of DODGE-ME wins out and turns the new skill into a passive effect. You could keep it as a dual passive state that swaps based on lightning usage.
Amythyst
Now that she has free fusions and extra space, could she get the Sculptor classless and merge it into Sovereign of Unshackled Frames for even better control over bones?
Admiralthrawnbar
I does feel slightly BS for a single reward item, presumably the earnings, to be worth more than 15 times the maximum amount possible to earn. Especially when the book, an even harder thing to get is less than 1/100th of that. Also, if 2 teams historically ranked higher and only 1 got the earrings before, would that mean that another team picked the other earrings or that they somehow beat her score without them?
Malphir
Just realized Crystallized Suffering doesn't lose potency of the buff when healing, meaning she doesn't have to trigger her False Immortality marks to overclock it anymore.
Walter Kowalski
No, Saria was knocked down to historic 5th, but historic 1st and 2nd would be unchanged.
Lazy Monster
Wasn’t Saria’s team stated to have gotten historic 3rd? I get Soifa and Ezerid knocking them down 2 spots but there have been 3 more crazy gamblers in the short time between Saria and Sofia each taking the trial seems odd.
Cyclone001
There is a serious flaw in the event scoring though. Someone sufficiently rich can basically get any score they want by trading gold for tokens and not gambling at all.
Cyclone001
I was hoping that our hero's buxom bussom would become unblemmished again after the fusion. Progress not perfection is fine though. :) Time to hit more of the secret shops I guess.
Matt Grayson
I'm as numbers-go-up as anyone, but there are five trials still to go, and Sof will certainly manage a few billion TP and trial shattering (and heart awakening) fights in the later innings. It will be great fun. I'm not worried.
Mornn
Yes, the first two teams both got more than 786 million points x.x
Wensber
Thanks for the chapter!
Mornn
⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝♡
Vettu
So does Sofia's group getting historic 3rd mean 1st and 2nd went further beyond the max? Also, I call bullshit. Why can't she have those 700 million points? When did the system ever care about balanced outcomes? 🤭
Daemion
I wonder who was the historic 1st and 2nd... what the hell did they do to rob the casino blind? ^^
Dan N
I'll be honest, it was the delay in the release of book 4 that got me to subscribe to the Patreon back in early March right when you took that break to move. I'm very satisfied with my decision to be impatient and read ahead of the audiobooks cause this is a fantastic story and being able to read a new chapter every weekday is a definite improvement to my mornings especially on workdays. Thanks for being such an engaging storyteller.
Matt Grayson
She did kinda get a level 500 skill out of it, too. And some cake!
Mornn
Yeah I mean the book was not really meant to ever really get picked up, the value is literally a joke, 13 because unlucky number and 666 because... yeah
Mornn
Nope her soul damage protection does not extend to self-inflicted injuries
Joshua R. Lee
Nex not only stole Pestle’s cake but also nerfed her rewards with the equivalent of a participation trophy. What’s the point of the historical ranking if the MAX is so low?
Ceasar Salas
Thanks for the chapter! While I get that the books points value had to be nerfed due to the racial ticket, that was a one time-human exclusive. I feel like the slur was a little too low. Unless the reason for the low value is simply acknowledgment since Sofia did get a physical object from a trial unlike everything else. Kind of like the 10 gold star unique that’s only 1 TP, but near impossible for someone else to ever get
Lazy Monster
TFTC. I’d feel cheated to if 700 million points didn’t count for what was earned. The fusions are cool. And making a super skill seems amazing if not the best idea at the moment. Hey Mornn, is Sofia protected against the soul damage from her own pearls by the mark or otherwise?
Mornn
Wait... True, where tf did it go O_O
Pexezz
huh, that’s weird. if they got the max reward for the event, how did they not get historic first ? or am i misunderstanding something ? xD
Michael
What about avatar of zues?
phantom
'Total value : 786 344 685 TP Total earned (MAX): 50 000 000 TP]' I'd feel disappointed too. She is making her team mates rich though.
Clara
But yeah 500% processing speed crystals sounds actually nuts. That's cheat skill levels of bonus processing, from what we've seen. Oh also the changes to how the crystal is generated solve her upcoming problem, in a few more filters, where her regen would have been high enough that the crystals are just constantly forming lol
Phsteven
I would be disappointed too, she missed out on over 700 million points. Absolute rip-off. And the secrets of chronomancy only worth 13k with it being so hard to get is just sad.
Mornn
Let's hope not x.x
Clara
Oh shit wait hold on. If she can feel exactly how her skill slots are used, and she takes that earring that occupies slots, will she be able to mess with the earring's effects?? Imagine fusing that into [essence resonator] or something
Mornn
Yep they got 50M each
Clara
Also I *love* that [blessing of the deep] is 0S. Rightfully ominous
OmniGlitcher
Ooh nice, a proper slot based status. Those new skills are interesting. I think I'll need some time to assess [Crystallized Suffering]. Of course, the casino cheats her out of the full amount.
Clara
Yesssss weird [crystallized] fusion! Also that thang sounds like a very fun ingredient, wonder what grandma Erredis will say about it
Matt Grayson
ONLY the Max? I am shocked. SHOCKED! This was a group prize, right? Mornn and Kuli got the 50M, too?
Quentin Cozzi
I hope you take some time off after finishing! You deserve it.
Quentin Cozzi
Thanks for the chapter!
