“Aren’t we leveling up just by fighting the zombies?” Nadia asked as a look of confusion filled her face. “But if you say it’s an exploit…” the girl hesitated as she pinned her eyes to the floor for a moment. She then raised her face and looked at Mathew. “Does that mean that we will be able to double our leveling up speed?”
“I like the way you are thinking,” Mathew admitted with a small, proud smile. “And that’s right,” he then added, nodding his head. “Leveling up was one of the main features of this kind of bundle of light in the games it came from,” Mathew explained.
“And that’s the feature you hope you we will get after upgrading it?” Leila asked, looking at the merchant and then around its proximity as if in hopes of finding the light that the topic was all about.
“More or less, yeah,” Mathew admitted before turning around on his feet and heading for the merchant again.
“Wait, I want to…” Daniel appeared to wish to say something right as Mathew reached out and grasped the bundle of shadows hidden beneath the merchant’s hood.
The young man turned his head around to look at the officer…
Only for the shadows to surge forth and cut him away from reality. A moment of swirling around later and Mathew stood within the merchant’s subspace again.
‘Let’s see,’ Mathew thought, ignoring the pillars on his left for the sake of searching through every nook and cranny of the subspace. Yet, no matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t see a single shelf with items that he could potentially buy.
‘Will I have to go back to that evolving merchant?’ Mathew thought, slightly annoyed by the logistic bother of running around just to get to the right merchant.
“I wish to buy knowledge about levels!” Mathew exclaimed.
“Ten cores,” the mechanical voice of the merchant appeared for the first time in a long while.
‘Woah, it worked,’ Mathew thought as he looked around in search of the entrance to his warehouse.
“Can I use the cores deposited in my warehouse?” Mathew then asked out loud, hoping to avoid the bother of exiting the subspace only to pull the cores out and then return.
“Affirmative.”
“Then, I wish to exchange ten cores from the ones deposited in my warehouse to buy the knowledge about levels!”
“Purchase confirmed,” the emotionless voice of the merchant filled the space.
This was the very first purchase in which Mathew didn’t have to shield his eyes from the explosion of the light coming from the dissolving cores. Since he didn’t bring them out in the first place, the young man couldn’t observe the process of them vanishing.
And then, his head exploded.
Not literally, of course. A sudden burst of strange energy penetrated right through his skull and struck down at his brain.
At first, it came as just a bout of massive pain. Then, this pain turned into a weird, bubbly feeling in his head, as if someone rubbed a relaxing cream directly on the folds of his brain.
And then, Mathew became aware.
‘So that’s how it is…’ he thought, his eyes opening wide when his brain simply came to know a lot of things.
Mathew could understand the message by his wits alone at first. He couldn’t explain it, he just felt it. Only after a moment did Mathew’s brain work through the obtained knowledge and started to project it into Mathew’s consciousness.
At first, a massive wall filled with scrambled letters and numbers filled Mathew’s entire vision. Then, nearly all of the text disappeared, leaving only three, tiny lines hidden in three different and seemingly random spots of Mathew’s vision. And then, finally, those three sentences moved through Mathew’s perception only to form a neat, short list right in the middle of his sight.
[System Leveling]
[Progressive Levelling]
[Relationship Leveling]
Each of the lines shone in a gentle, blue light. And despite all his shock, Mathew could still get the message.
On their own, those three lines didn’t tell him all that much. But then, the young man reached out and placed his finger above the topmost line.
[System Leveling:]
[System leveling works on the principle of gathering kill points of the effigies. The stronger the creature, the more kill points will be awarded to the system user, cumulating into a periodical strengthening of the user. Once higher stages of system leveling are unlocked, one obtains the ability to manually designate their growth and later to freely manipulate it.]
Just the first part of the three sets of wikipedia-like pages was enough to send Mathew’s mind into disarray.
‘How the hell could this be so fucking simple?’ he moaned in his mind before moving his finger down one line and pressing it against [progressing leveling].
Yet, even after selecting it, absolutely nothing happened.
‘What the hell?’ Mathew wanted to scream.
Just as he thought that he discovered a cheap source of extremely useful knowledge, it proved to not be anywhere as great as he expected it to be.
‘No, wait, stop getting emotional,’ Mathew warned himself as he started to think deeper. ‘What’s the difference between the system and progressive leveling?’
Mathew allowed himself a short moment to think about the answer.
“How the heck am I supposed to know if I can’t check what this progressive leveling is in the first place?!” Mathew complained out loud, squeezing out a long whine from his throat.
And then he froze.
“Isn’t that the answer?” Mathew asked himself as he looked down at the set of three lines again.
And then, just to test his theory out, he moved his finger down and pressed against the third line.
[Relationship Leveling:]
[A subpart of the system leveling, correlated directly to the nature of the system.]
[Unlocks features of the standard system leveling by exploring, growing, and solidifying the relationship between host and wives.]
[Relationship level of the host: 2]
‘I see,’ Mathew thought, closing the window and taking a deep breath.
Slowly but surely things started to make sense.
‘So that’s why I received new abilities when I fucked Nadia back then,’ he thought, only to shake his head. ‘But there is hardly anything further that we could do,’ Mathew thought as his lips turned into a weird grin. ‘Or am I supposed to convince them for an anal to unlock new abilities?’ Mathew scoffed.
He then shook his head and looked at the three lines once again. This time, however, Mathew could guess why he couldn’t access the one in the middle.
“I used both the system leveling and the Relationship leveling,” he muttered under his nose, using his voice to solidify his findings. “On the other hand, while I do have an access to it, I have yet to use the progressive leveling, making it impossible for me to access its information.”
This was nothing more but Mathew’s usual guess. This time, however, it was backed up by all the things he found out about this world, the merchants, and their modus operandi.
‘If my gut feeling is correct, then that massive list I saw at the beginning outlines all the possible ways to level up,’ Mathew thought as his face tensed up a little. ‘I guess I just don’t have access to them yet,’ he added in his thoughts, refusing to believe that only such a tiny fraction of the system potency would be granted to him.
Mathew then shook his head, clearing it from the stray thoughts. He then raised his face and looked into the place with most of the merchant’s presence in it.
“I wish to buy knowledge about skills!”
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