After the first reading, it seemed like some kind of bug that must have emerged in the beta. In contrast to all the others I’d already received, the last Path was nonsense.
Path of the Absolute
Resistance to all damage types increased by o%.
Not counting the zero instead of one, it repeated the first description of Resilience that I saw after unlocking it in the Crypt of the Temple of Nergal the Radiant. Shaking my head, I closed the window and went back to grinding shards.
The Path leveled up extremely slowly. After a few days of uninterrupted farming, I was still at rank one. When I got to rank two, nothing changed in the skill description. Still zero percent resistance. I decided it had to be a development bug, and forgot about it.
I only figured it out when I got the Path up to level ten: Resistance to all damage types increased by 1%. Along with the ninety percent I already had, I d gained a pathetic additional percent. But…
After a month of constant self-torture, that would grow to completely cap out my Resilience, increasing my damage resistance to ninety-nine percent—practically complete invulnerability independent of the Sleepers or the Destroying Plague.
Soon I reached the limit of farming on Kharinza—I had over half a million shards, blit my level was over sixty-five thousand, and shards were no longer dropping. As it turned out, the game mechanics only let them drop when the mob was stronger. I could deliberately drop my level with a couple of death penalties, but two things stopped me: not wanting to lose progress, and the dumb mechanics themselves, which based the shard drops not on my current level, but on the maximum I d reached. Figuring that out cost me around twenty thousand levels. So that was why it was so hard for the beta testers to farm shards.
For a while, I found suitable mobs by swimming away from the shore—local variations of sharks and octopuses, monstrous creations that had morphed and mutated many times. In the depths I met truly nightmarish monsters, and I didn’t just get grabbed many times, but also killed. Yes, killed, in spite of my rank-ten Resilience, and sometimes I couldn’t escape to shore even with the speed boost from Path of Time. Soon it became clear: I had exhausted the island. I was losing levels and not gaining shards.
I had to move on.
Hundreds of islands were spread around Kharinza, if not thousands. Big, medium, little and tiny.
The ocean teemed with massive hungry fauna, so reaching any of the islands was problematic. Swimming, which I had to level up fresh, was at rank two. That meant I could breathe underwater and swim at the pace of a run, but even then, I couldn’t reach another island. After all my invulnerability effects dropped, it took those sharks just one bite to send me back to the respawn point. The problem was that while one chewed on me, the others just hovered around nearby and took no damage from Reflection.
After a series of deaths, just as I was beginning to despair, I finally made it to the nearest island. It turned out to be tiny and lifeless, but not far at all from other islands.
One of the islands was far larger than Kharinza, and home to life. There were not only mobs there, but even a small tribe of reptiloids—not raptors like our Ripta, or snake-people like the Naga, but with bodies almost human. Scales covered them, and their heads were like from a turtle or komodo dragon. The system called them Iizardfolk.’
In battle, the Iizardfolk inflated their fatty collar of skin and spat out something disgusting, aiming for the eyes. Their average level was beneath a hundred and fifty thousand, but that was more than enough for me. More shards fell from them.
I missed communication so much that I tried to talk to them many times, but the wild people aggressed as soon as they saw me. Although they wielded stone axes, spears and primitive slingshots, their damage measured in the trillions. The important thing was to aggro the entire tribe at once, so they killed themselves while my invulnerability was active.
I spent a few days genociding their entire population. Thankfully, they respawned fast. They dropped poor loot, but in the hut of the tribe chieftain, I found a legendary helmet, Helm of the Summoner Father. It wasn’t suitable for me, because it said clearly in the description ’Only for shamans.’ But it did have interesting properties. On activation, the helmet summoned Ghost Snakes, which can’t be killed. Breaking the chain, they disappeared on their own. I decided I’d give the find to Ryg’har, the kobold shaman, if I could get it out of here.
Actually, I had a fun and interesting time of it, then. There were all kinds of curious and whimsical wild snakes, birds, monkeys, tigers, rhinoceroses. Altered by the magical mutations of the beta version, of course. The winged black-green tigers had long segmented tails, with freezing spines at their tips. A far cry from an ordinary tiger. And the rhinoceroses walked on their hind legs. I decided after a couple of tests to leave those alone; their stats were insane, their defenses powerful, and fighting them took a long time and caused me too much pain for too few shards.
By a lake in the center of the island, I met Crystal Turtles— now there was another struggle. The turtles were tough, and they reflected damage just like I did. And even the reflected damage flew back like a boomerang! The trouble was that this back-and-forth only went on for two hits, and in the end I took the damage—and that’s how I died, with my mouth open in surprise. I didn’t
