John looked at the figurine on the table. It wore the same dress as Aclysia did right now, the small changes she had made to it notwithstanding. It was black and something between a French and a goth maid outfit, without the apron. It was an over designed piece, with feather-esque decorations at the elbows, large padded shoulders and a window that allowed everyone to see a bit of cleavage between flower like lines of cloth, all of it ending at a turtleneck.

The side of the short, frilly skirt was slit open, revealing a pure white leotard as the underwear. Even as a plastic figurine, the character had a great ass. Right now, John was pointing at its thighs though. “You see that?” he asked Rave, who was kneeling right next to him.

“Ya mean that thigh squish?” his similarly perverted girlfriend asked. What she was describing was that area were the stockings were pressing into the meat of the upper legs. Pure glory. Although John wasn’t quite sure if this counted as stockings, as they were made from leather (a wide area at the upper edge being the exception) and part of the high-heels it was wearing.

“Yesssss,” John said, both of them continuously marvelling at the figurine.

This was over a week after that busy Friday. So far, everything had gone great. Scarlett had not baited any one of them into a death trap, although there had been some fake clashes between Rave and Thorne security. Nothing that the Lightbearer couldn’t win quite easily; however, it made Collide look more intimidating and Thorne weak by comparison.

People from the Enclave had gotten employment in the Mine, Mana Factory and Farm. For the moment, John was just bunkering up the mana batteries, but he was happily selling the metals from the Mine for minimal gain, meanwhile the Farm just did what it was supposed to do. He did spend the last four Room Slots he had on extending it with a chicken coop, a basic greenhouse and a cowshed, last of which had cost him two.

While that did provide a nice array of fresh ingredients (and entertainment from cows just walking out of the shed, much to the surprise of everyone present because that was a thing that wasn’t supposed to be possible), at this point, that side of the island was getting seriously cramped. John was considering adding more landmass to the barrier.

Regarding himself, he had spent the time grinding away. He was now level 131, which was about one level every two days (keeping in mind that he was with Magnus as his timesaver most of those days). That was slower than he would have liked, but he still wasn’t back to Assaults, so it was also expected.

He had arrived at 250 Intellect, which was why his mana had jumped. There was also the new synergy bonus.

Third Eye sounded kind of underwhelming at the face of it, but John had the feeling that this was a case of ‘this skill that starts underwhelming becomes bonkers later’. Not that it was bad right now. It manifested as a simple vertical line of arcane azure hovering in front of John’s forehead and increased the amount of information he was able to perceive by quite a bit. It didn’t help with the processing, so the first few times it had happened had overwhelmed John somewhat, but he was slowly getting used to it.

There was also the new stuff he got for getting his Agility up. He was currently focusing on getting that to 100, Strength being the priority afterwards.

These bonuses were great because they were all around positives. John seldomly encountered pain he actually wanted to scream from at this point, but better to have it than not. By logic, the last synergy perk between Agility and Endurance would be tolerance of all pain.

“So now we have the easy half for a new Artificial Spirit,” John said, poking the figurine. It had taken until today for it to arrive via mail. Buying it off the Auction would have been an option, but he didn’t see the need for that. Especially since… “We still need a new crystal.”

Unlike the first time, where Gaia herself saw it fit to place an Artificial Crystal, or the second time, when the Horned Rat became a benefactor of his loot system before that came with announcements and warnings, this third time no crystal had been conveniently placed on John’s path. He had been looking all over dungeons for a new one, but no luck so far. Again, he could easily buy one of the Abyss Auction, but the good ones (Aclysia level) went for 500 million upwards. He didn’t even want to look into what something of Momo’s quality would have costed.

He was able to afford it right now, but only under the sacrifice of one and half months’ worth of monetary gains. Alternatively, he could buy a low-quality one of the kind that was in Rave’s battlesuit, but that was unacceptable when thinking about bringing a new girl into this world.

‘Wow, I have been back in America for a while,’ John realized as he pondered about this. Not a lot had happened, even the days on the cruise had been more eventful than this. He also could have been way richer by now, were it not for Aclysia munching down on an absurd number of items he produced. How much money she had shredded through this endeavour, John guessed to be between one and two hundred million.

On the other hand, he would be able to extract about 5 kilograms of Baelementium from her each day, once she had transformed enough of herself into the material that she could use all of it for combat purposes. That didn’t offset the losses completely, but it went a long way. Although he would need a serious amount for another project he had in mind.

On the plus side, the metaldermis she now produced pretty much acted like her strongest material in combat, so she didn’t have to switch between an in and out of combat body-mix anymore. It also felt like the smoothest of smoothest skins. It was amazing. However, he was getting side-tracked.

‘I should give mom a call,’ he thought and made that a priority for when he next had the time. Originally, that had been something he wanted to do immediately upon landing back in the US but, even though they had been pretty monotone, he had spent his days busily.

“So, how do we go about this?” John wondered. “We can just keep grinding and look out for enemies that might drop one, that’s probably our best bet. That and searching Treasure Rooms.”

“Or that,” John accepted the quest. Craft and Enchant were dead skills to him anyway, particularly the latter one, so he had no problem with replacing them. Although this meant that he now had to spent at least a few days continuously grinding them. Well, maybe he could find a way to shorten that.

_____________________________________________________________________

“This feels like an exploit,” John noted, picking up a bar of Baelementium that Aclysia had pulled out of her stomach. While a bizarre sight, he wasn’t speaking about that. Instead, what he meant was using Craft to form a sword out of said bar, rather the blade of one, and then following that up by using Enchant to throw whatever he felt like on it.

The resulting blade was worth less than the raw material on the Abyss Auction, at least people bet way less on it. Probably because you could do so many better things with the bronze material than the okay-ish enchantments John put on it.

Instead of putting the item he had created up to the auction, he fed it back to Aclysia, who produced him a new, unenchanted bar of Baelementium. That was the exploit. There was no way using an Artificial Spirit to enchant-wipe items was intended. Then again, if Aclysia could do it, it stood to reason that other people working with metals had access to the same possibility – with the dramatic difference that they couldn’t create new items in literal seconds. It probably stung if you fed something you spent hours working on to the shredder.

Anyway, had he figured out he could level this skill this easily in half a day, he might have bothered earlier. So far, there was no reward that fixed his problems with the skills though. If it weren’t for the quest, he would have felt like he was wasting his time.

Working with such a high-level material allowed him to rush through the lower levels, the weaponized maid gained Consumption through the mana he put into the items, and he was losing literally nothing over it. There was something to be said about the clearly increased mana costs he was paying for working with a material above his skill level, but, as a high-level mage, mana was by all means the least of his concerns.

He had started doing this a mere five hours ago, and he was already close to done with the quest. Of course, it would slow once he reached whatever level was actually appropriate for Baelementium, but he expected that to be around seventy, far beyond where he wanted to go. A window popped up, confirming he had reached his goal.

“Okay, so no exploit,” John scratched the back of his head; he didn’t accept the quest for the moment. He wanted to check on the new skill first. “I mean, sure, if you say so, you are the goddess of creation.”

Typical Gaia sass, and he even got a little bit of GP with it.

Crafting was just not the part of his powers he was too interested in. Although it was good to see this was just a fusion of the two old skills, including the skill level. More important to see how this affected the actual mechanic though. “Aclysia, could you make me another bar?”

“Most certainly, Master,” Aclysia answered, and half a minute later he used Create on the bar. What opened was a folding out display of the items he currently had and could use for the skill. The reshaping thing was still there and was still one of the least mana effective skills ever. Most likely because it wasn’t intended to be used in combat. Not that mana was the only limiting factor on using reshaping that way. Repairing was still around, enchanting was also unchanged. All in all, there weren’t a whole lot of changes.

But there were three new things he found while experimenting around a little and they fixed what had been John’s problem with the two old skills. There was a minor inconvenience that was added though.

First was the ability to craft better crafting materials by consuming lesser ones through a process uncreatively called refining. It wasn’t a supremely useful thing: the list of items needed to create one better was usually lengthy, the mana costs high and they even had a timer attached. Instead of just pressing a button and getting an instant result, he would need to wait varying amounts of time. As far as he could see, he could only refine one crafting material at a time.

And that timer was the named inconvenience. Every action now took some amount of time to complete. There was a great number of things that were instant in the lower brackets, but the second he wanted to do something truly worthwhile, be it repairing, creating or enchanting an item, it came with a timer.

Second was recipes, how that hadn’t been a mechanic until now eluded him. Basically put, they allowed pre-defined outcome for an entire crafting process. The quest he was currently keeping open gave him such a recipe, although there was a button to make custom ones as well.

John had a feeling that most worthwhile things to craft in the future would be in this tab. The fact that even basic iron spears were listed here only furthered that. It seemed that Gaia wanted to limit his capacity of mass production but gave him the ability to do some more quality stuff in return.

Last, and most important in his opinion, he could upgrade already finished items. His biggest gripe with Enchant and Craft had always been that items, once they were done, were done. The thing was that most items he could make were strictly worse than those that dropped. The only exceptions to that were if he got his hands on some really awesome crafting materials, but even then they were usually outscaled pretty fast; it didn’t help that he couldn’t make set items.

He couldn’t replace attributes on the item, but he could add now.

No more would that 6/10 on Legendary items tauntingly look at him, saying ‘Look at me, I am not as good as I could be!’. However, as he couldn’t replace these bonuses once they were on there, he would have to think carefully about what he used all this newfound enchanting space for. It didn’t help that things he added could cost more than one of those slots if they were especially potent. Smaller items were affected by this more than bigger items, there was some sort of multiplier.

The need to be careful was more or less true depending on the item. Things like the World Ender set he didn’t see himself ever replacing, the Gamer set on the other hand felt like it was eventually going to be switched out. The bonuses on it only ranged from boring to okay, he just hadn’t found anything better yet.

“Okay, so the course is clear now,” John said and accepted the quest. “We are going to keep a lookout for bosses that drop these essences and the other things we need. Also, I am going to upgrade the worst parts of my equipment.”

“I approve of this plan, Master,” Aclysia said. “However, I should remind you that you wanted to call your mother.”

“Right!” John exclaimed and fished out his phone.

That was long overdue.