And then I got to it. The shards wouldn’t farm themselves. A minute later I was already fighting a yard-long Golden Hardtail, a long-snouted fish as flat as a board…
Shame I couldn’t move my respawn point right to the shore. On the other hand, I was lucky that I had it on Kharinza at all—at the place of power where Behemoth’s temple stood in the other Dis. Deaths happened—the sea creatures didn’t just tear me to pieces, they put debuffs on me too. As soon as Diamond Skin fell, I died. It took time to run from the respawn point through to the jungle to the ocean, but at least it added some variety to the monotony of farming.
There were other fish apart from Spotted Blowfish in the shallows, but I needed more aggressive mobs for my purposes. In the small bay on the other side of the island, I found just what I was looking for. The Rock Grabbers there were similar to the Stone Grabber’s from Tremitelle, only forty thousand levels higher. Little fish around a hand long—fast, nimble and with huge toothy mouths disproportionate to their bodies. All I had to do was throw a stone in the water and it started to boil. I needed as many grabbers as possible to attack me while my invulnerability was active.
As if it weren’t enough that every trip boosted my level sky-high, I even fully leveled up Path of Equanimity on the same day. Up to my waist in water, I just stood there while the creatures killed themselves against Reflection. Equanimity and Diamond Skin gave three and a half minutes of full invulnerability in total. When it had thirty seconds left, I ran back to the shore, leaving hundreds of grabbers floating belly-up behind me. Fortunately, I had Magnetism, otherwise I don’t know how I would have picked up all the shards by hand—especially considering how dangerous it was in the water.
The problem was that the grabbers didn’t always drop shards. From a hundred fanged fish corpses, I got around forty or fifty shards. This unpleasant discovery was balanced out by the fact that the beasts never ended. Either they respawned instantly or there was an enormous amount of them in the bay—I’d never figured out their secret in all my time on Kharinza.
To level up rank four of Resilience, I chose the Path of Torment, and it took me four days. I still didn’t realize what principle the game used to calculate pain experienced, but after every trip into the water, my new resource, Vessel of Torments, filled up by fifteen to twenty percent. Then I could empty it by converting it into a single stat point, which is what I did, deciding to level up my physical stats in balance: strength, agility and stamina. By the end of the Path, the conversion rate was ten times what it started as—a full Vessel gave me ten stat points.
It’s hard to imagine a duller grind. I wasn’t even fighting, just standing and gritting my teeth through the pain of infinite tearing bites, my eyes locked on the timer so I knew when to run. Deaths took away time, already in short supply. The Rock Grabbers inflicted a Bleeding debuff, and it was important to make sure the DoT ran out before Diamond Skin.
When I’d completed the entire Path of Torment, two more paths for Resilience unlocked: Path of Time and Path of Desolation.
The first sped up perception. It slowed the entire world around me, and the more damage I took, the more the world slowed down. I didn’t notice much of an effect at first, but at maximum level, the storming mass of Rock Grabbers seemed as if moving in slow motion. I was moving as usual, and that opened up a new style of fighting—dodging. I never used to care about that; with Destroying Plague Immortality, I never worried about taking damage. On the contrary, I tried to ‘suffer’ as much as possible. Now it became fun to remove my hand an instant before the carnivorous little fish sank its teeth in. The miss put a second-long Confusion debuff on the fish—that promised to be a huge advantage in future battles against more serious opponents.
Path of Desolation unlocked yet another new bar— Hatred points. When it filled up, I transformed into a real Hulk—absolutely all my stats, including my health and mana, my base damage, defense parameters, dodge, critical damage, movement speed—all of it was multiplied by ten. Not right away, of course, but only when the Path was complete. The ability lasted exactly ten seconds.
The growing numbers in my profile offered me some entertainment, but they were useless in battle. I was still far lower in level than even the smallest fish.
No matter how badly I wanted to save time, sometimes I couldn’t help but take a break from farming and do something else. Cooking, for example. I even managed to invent lots of new recipes, although unfortunately, none of them could help me farm more shards. Only one seemed useful— Burning Reaper Chili Deviled Sea Soup. I wandered into the Burning Reaper Chilis in the northwest part of the island when I noticed some shapeless smoldering flower buds. They grew on a strangely perfectly round meadow. The flowers turned out to be chili peppers, and soup made with them turned ‘hellish/ And it changed the dish’s effect too; instead of +20% movement speed, it tripled the duration of buffs. Shame I hadn’t found this pepper sooner; it made my fanning three times faster because I could stand in the water with invulnerability for over ten minutes.
By the end of month two, I’d collected a third of the shards I needed and gained nine levels of Resilience. I had to level up Stealth again, since Beta had managed to steal it from me, but it didn’t take much time.
My ninth path was the Path of Sacrifice, useless for me because I had no friends with
