Left alone, I racked my brains to figure out what to focus on with my stat points. At the same time I thought ahead, realized I’d be playing without the abilities of the Destroying Plague. It was obvious that I had to level up perception to make Sleeping Vindication more effective. Every extra point in the stat increased the ultimate ability’s range by a yard.
There was the hitch. When I lost Immortality, I’d need a lot of endurance. I needed to put particular emphasis on the physical attacks of Unarmed Combat, which meant I needed plenty of strength, and increased agility wouldn’t hurt either.
In the end, I distributed them all roughly equally between strength, endurance and perception until I got even numbers of them all. A small remainder went into agility.
Unfortunately, the racial penalty to charisma worked even on the points from the adepts of the Sleeping Gods, but, surprisingly, in the end it resulted in a perfectly round number.
Not counting equipment bonuses, but with the boost from Unity of one thousand, nine hundred and eleven adepts to the Sleepers, these were my stats: Primary characteristics
Strength: 1300.
Perception: 1300.
Endurance: 1300.
Charisma: 1000.
Intellect: 555.
Agility: 720.
Luck: 3198.
Secondary characteristics
Health points: 3,962,326.
Mana points: 845,154.
Vindication points: 2,197,000.
Plague Energy points: 2,200,000.
When I got my human form back, the penalty to charisma would be gone. Then I’d use Grain of Transformation to redistribute my stats toward strength and endurance.
“Are you done?” Crawler asked, seeing that I d stopped staring into space.
“Yeah. Let’s go,” I answered, standing up from the table.
We left the tavern and formed into a circle: me, Crawler, Bomber, Infect, Irita, Gvula and Patrick. Fortunately, instances outside the sandbox accepted groups of up to ten, scaling up the mobs within depending on how many were in the group.
Without Tissa, we didn’t have any strong buffs, and we used other means at our disposal to protect the new players from the climate debuffs. Crawler gave Patrick and Irita potions that slightly lowered damage and increased resistance to frost, along with an Elixir of Regeneration, which restored one percent health per second. That should be enough to stay alive on Holdest for at least long enough to enter the instance, where the temperature wasn’t as extreme.
“My God…” Irita whispered, chinking down the potions and licking her lips. “Now this is what I call hitting the ground running! Yesterday I was in Tristad, today I’m on the way to Holdest!”
The buyer of the Portal Key to the continent was still unknown.
“It’ll be fine,” I reassured her.
“We’re good at that,” Infect grinned happily. “When I…”
The bard didn’t have time to finish speaking; Crawler had started casting his teleport a couple of seconds earlier. The usual process stretched out a little—I’d noticed that the actual distance to the destination affects the time Depths Teleportation takes to reach it.
Cartography skill increased: +1. Current level: 10.
Now you can create even more detailed maps of unexplored lands. You move faster in previously mapped areas. From now on, you can see hidden entrances to dungeons, treasure troves and caches.
Quality of maps you create: good.
I waved away the notifications, looked around. The wind howled and huge snowflakes whipped my face. We stood up to our knees in a snowdrift at the top of a high hill, and it felt like the blizzard could cast us off it at any moment. I couldn’t even see the outlines of my friends in the white mist, but I could make out the gleaming veil of the instance’s entrance, set in a broad crater. The portal curtain glimmered, seeming to stretch out space, flowing with color like an oilslick. The crater sloped sharply down.
“When I first went along with Scyth…” Infect said, stubbornly continuing the story he’d begun before the jump, raising his voice to shout over the wind. Crawler interrupted him:
“Patrick, Irita, hold on to me. Hurry!”
The mage disappeared through the portal with them. The others ran in after, and I followed.
Once inside the instance, I heard teeth chattering. The shivering first priest, dressed in low-level plate, raised his helmet visor and rubbed his reddened nose. Barely in control of his tongue, he muttered: “I think its time this world invented fur coats and hats.” He cast a worried glance at Irita. “Don’t even think about licking your helmet! Your tongue will get stuck!”
“I wasn’t planning on it,” the girl answered from beneath her visor, her teeth chattering. “But tell me, whose bright idea was it to go to the South Pole in armor instead of warm clothes?”
“This’ll warm you up.” Bomber offered them two flasks of hot tea. “Take it!”
Patrick and Irita’s health indicators blinked orange: another tick or two of the frost debuff and both would have died. Stephanie’s tea restored their health, and the debuffs ended as soon as they were in the dungeon. And Infect sang a stirring song, giving everyone vigor.
“This is the first time in my life I’ve seen real snow,” Gyula shared. “Well… I mean, only sort of real, but still… Brrr… I can’t imagine how people live in places where it’s cold all the time. Crazy!”
“You’re undead!” Patrick said skeptically. “You don’t feel a thing!”
“I forgot to switch off my thermoreceptors.” The builder shrugged and rubbed his hands. “If I were in power, I d outlaw snow!”
In an instance for the first time, Gvula’s head span with interest. After the jump to Holdest, he seemed to leave behind all the bad and began to show interest in life. Now the builder, who had mysteriously become a Demon Hunter, looked with a warrior’s eye at the enemies in the dark tunnels and held his crossbow at the ready.
Essentially, the most difficult part was done. The instances were designed for levels ten and fifteen, and the first one, Kar’sanmai Lair, took us a quarter of an hour. We would have been faster, but we stopped to pick up some resources we found: Polar Honey and Snow Lichen.
The
