NotEvenMyFinalForm
patreon
Goblin Chapter 152: Transformation
🕑 Added 2025-08-13 15:35:51 +0000 UTC“So hot…”
When he first gained the talent [Quick Digestion], it hadn’t felt anything like this.
This time, as the talent loaded, Gauss stood in the knife-edged winter wind yet felt as if he were shut inside a furnace, heat blazing through every inch of him.
He could clearly sense a surging power racing through his body, remaking it.
His skin changed first—a wave of irresistible itching swept over him; when it passed, his skin seemed tougher, denser, as if a hidden mesh had been woven beneath the surface.
Next the heat seeped inward: viscera, muscle fibers, skeletal structure—everything was scoured by the burning tide.
From inside out, then outside in, cycling over and over.
“Mm…”
Gauss grunted and exhaled.
White vapor crystallized instantly in the frigid air.
For all the area it touched, the change happened fast—barely a dozen breaths in all.
Off in the distance, Alia noticed nothing unusual; she simply thought he was studying the effect of his Burning Hands on the flames he’d made.
When the violent heat finally ebbed and settled into a gentler warmth flowing through his body, Gauss let out a long breath.
He opened his eyes.
A strange new clarity filled his senses.
The world felt… different.
The most immediate change was simple: the cold had fallen away—by a lot.
Before, he’d been toughing it out with eight points of Constitution; now, with the same weather and the same clothes, the bite of cold had dropped sharply.
The icy air filling his lungs even felt invigorating.
His tolerance for extreme cold had climbed dramatically.
It was as if the body’s internal dials had been reset—and even his mana felt unusually lively.
Gauss glanced down at the back of his hand.
At first glance the skin looked unchanged.
But when he drew a nail lightly across it, there was a distinct resistance; when he switched to rubbing with his fingertip, the drag vanished and the surface felt smoother, finer.
So the skin’s protection really had improved.
Most of the time he might not rely on it—there was still the Omni-Armor outside his skin, and sometimes a layer of leather armor on top of that.
But you never know—an enemy might have some trick that pierces the Omni-Armor…
In any case, tougher baseline defense is only good.
And the boosts didn’t stop there.
His sense of bodily coordination was sharper.
Just flexing his fingers, he felt his joints move more freely; even fine control at the fingertips had ticked up a notch.
Then there was the part he couldn’t test right this second: recovery.
According to the description, he could actively spend stamina to accelerate wound healing and tissue regeneration.
That pairs perfectly with the [Energy Storage Gland] talent, which restores stamina and mana via eating.
Stamina converting into healing energy means that simply by taking in food he could repair external wounds and even internal damage.
Which, in turn, bumps the importance of food up another tier.
Among adventurers they say “logistics is the lifeline,” but for Gauss it now matters even more than for most.
Beyond these, he could feel countless small, beneficial tweaks within, changes he couldn’t yet put into words.
After taking stock of his body, Gauss looked back to the racial talent [Reptilian Strain].
There were two ways to improve it.
First, level it by killing goblins.
Say, upgrade from Basic to Elite.
If it mirrored his first racial talent, maybe two hundred goblin kills would push it to Elite?
At that point [Reptilian Strain] might unlock further capabilities.
Second, evolve its quality—
raise it from white to blue.
In his mind, both routes made the talent stronger, just in different ways.
Put simply: the first is like a mage leveling from 1 to 5—vertical growth, steady power gains—i.e., the talent’s degree of development.
The second, quality evolution, is like taking an ordinary Level 5 mage template and upgrading it to Gauss’s kind of over-tuned Level 5 magus template—i.e., the talent’s template upgrade.
Same nominal tier, but a regular caster’s power would be nowhere near his.
Likewise, since [Reptilian Strain] maps to reptilian traits, evolving to blue, then purple or gold would mean swapping in stronger creature templates, yielding far better passive boosts.
So to fully develop a talent, both tracks should advance in parallel.
For now, he lacked intel on how to evolve quality; he’d likely have to push the earlier-unlocked [Elite Path] to later stages to learn more.
At the moment, if he wanted to improve [Reptilian Strain], he could only keep killing goblins.
Goblins meant several things for Gauss:
1. They rank up his title.
2. They level both [Energy Gland] and [Reptilian Strain].
3. They’re everywhere—like stray cats and dogs—perfect for padding the total kill count.
4. The guild pays bounties for them.
Four birds with one stone.
Honestly, you can’t blame him.
Yes, he’d always had a poor opinion of goblins—but the monster index kept nudging things so goblins made up around half of his total kills.
When a behavior that fits your values keeps paying out handsomely, who can refuse?
“Come on—let’s find a spot out of the wind, eat something, then head back,” Gauss called to Alia, buoyant.
He felt like his future had just gotten frighteningly bright.
Since it was only a small band, Gauss didn’t fire a signal flare. He and Alia quickly swept the field, taking what was worth keeping from the ravenfolk charred by Burning Hands—claws, beaks, a few especially tough feathers.
With the loot stowed, they found a leeward nook sheltered by a massive boulder.
Comments
IdolTrust
Grinding on goblins to evolve further
