Within the next four hours of slashing monsters, Vivi obtained four skill wisps. Two common, two rare.

  The common skills were essentially useless. One of them was another Basic Ascension, and the other was Voice Amplify, a skill that did just what its name implied. It was essentially a voice amplifier in skill form, and very much useless, considering Lucius could already amplify her voice without the skill. He said its sale price was around a thousand ether, which was low enough that Vivi left the skill out in the desert, not even bothering.

  Basic Ascension could sell for twenty thousand ether if she got lucky, which was also an insignificant amount, considering that a single monster she killed in the desert already dropped two thousand minimum, and her runeswords sold for millions. But she kept the ascension skill solely so that she could donate it to someone who Coshi deemed would use it for the city’s benefit.

  The first rare skill was arguably not quite grand either, but Vivi saw some potential. It was called Shield Of Nature. Upon activation, it spawned a see-through ethereal shield in front of her and in the air, similar to Lucius’s spirit-shield when he transformed. The shield was sizable enough to block light discharges of ether.

  The skill sounded quite proficient to her, until she put it to the test against a dread-raven’s peck. The shield stopped the beak for a whole quarter second before the raven thrust right through, cracking the shield. Vivi killed the raven normally and with much more ease.

  She spawned the shield again and frowned at it. “So is this skill just weak, or am I missing something?”

  “It can be evolved,” Lucius said. “At higher levels, you can add more ether into it yourself to strengthen it.”

  The last time Lucius had used the word evolve regarding a skill, what he really meant was that Vivi just had to find a different pathway within the skill’s ethereal structure. So this time, Vivi did the same, looking into the skill’s ethereal structure. Shield Of Nature wasn’t nearly as complex as Ascension Of Divinity, but it still had five different pathways, which spread out into lesser pathways. Common skills tended to only have three pathways at most with little branching off.

  Activating the skill normally, all five pathways lit up normally, but the smaller diversions were all dim. Those, Vivi guessed, must have been the “evolutions,” though Vivi would have had to guess how each one of the lesser branchways actually affected the skill.

  “Trial and error it is, then,” she said, and began casting the skill with all of its different pathways. As all the main pathways filled up, Vivi pulled the flow of ether into the first lesser branch of the leftmost main pathway.

  The shield spawned to her left instead of right in front of her.

  Interesting. So the first main branch probably dictated the location at which the shield would spawn. Vivi kept fiddling around with it. The next branch made it spawn to her right, one behind, and another above. Another branch after that made the shield seemingly not spawn at all, until Vivi glanced below and realized that the shield spawned underneath her, inside the sand.

  She also played around with the branches while the skill was active. This allowed her to move the shield rapidly around her, flicking it from one side to another. And if she pulled ether into two of the directional branches, left and up, for example, the shield tilted left and up, in between those two directions.

  Lucius watched in amazement beside her. “How? You’re already evolving it!”

  “You should know what’s happening by now, Lucius,” Vivi said.

  “You’re doing something weird with its structure thing, aren’t you,” Lucius said. Vivi couldn’t tell whether his pout was closer to a frown or a smile. “The skill’s runes.”

  “Yes. The directions are simple enough. I just need to memorize which branch does what. But directional control isn’t going to be useful if the shield breaks apart. I’ll need to strengthen it.”

  Vivi took a closer look at the main pathways. Specifically, she looked at anything that had a lot of flow runes. She found that on the fourth main branchway, which must have been the ether enhancing pathway. Vivi summoned the shield again and activated a side branch that looked to have a lot of flow runes.

  Immediately, the skill took in more wisps from her core, pushing it to the shield, which grew in size. Its rim expanded in all directions. It kept growing, until the tip at its base poked into the sand. It kept growing, now taller than Vivi.

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  It didn’t seem to be getting any stronger, or more concentrated with ether, though. Vivi tried pushing ether into a different branchway above this one—a larger one with multiple even smaller pathways within the diversion.

  Finally, she got the result she’d been looking for. Ether flowed from her core, through the enhancement pathways, and then into the shield, where it gained a glow, filling up with ether. It became clouded, losing its transparency as more ether strengthened it. It also began leaking ether. Not catastrophic amounts, but the shield was far from a perfect inside-carved one.

  “Wow,” Lucius said. “Just like that, it’s evolved.”

  “It still has a lot of other pathways to try out,” Vivi said. “For now, let’s see if it’s any good against monsters.”

  She quickly found another dread raven for a rematch, summoning the shield as the raven attacked. The shield survived for longer, perhaps half a second, before cracking again. Vivi was forced to kill the raven before it killed her.

  “Well, that’s a problem,” Vivi said. “The shield takes too much time to power up. Using it reactively is problematic.”

  “You could try to evolve it further by pushing more ether in,” Lucius said.

  Vivi felt like the word evolve had really lost its meaning here, but she allowed Lucius to use it, since he seemed to understand it a lot better. She did as suggested, and forced a lot more ether into the enhancement pathway when summoning the shield.

  It did help. The shield was immediately far more concentrated, though there was a limit on how much ether the enhancement pathway could take at once, and there was a maximum limit as well on how strong the shield could get.

  The shield wasn’t looking very promising, but Vivi kept fighting with it from there, testing it against different monsters. In melee combat, it proved to be pretty terrible, only getting in Vivi’s way as she tried to swing. If she got attacked from multiple sides, she could summon the shield to one of her sides to throw off an attacker, since the shield stayed in place even if it was pushed, but other than that, it wasn’t very good.

  Against ranged attacks, it was very useful. Vivi fought a cactus monster that could shoot spikes at her, similarly to the gnolls in Zand, though the cacti had much more powerful projectiles. The spikes still couldn’t pierce the shield, and Vivi was free to slowly advance closer, until she could call off her shield and simply kill the cacti.

  Her defence was still quite low, so to have something to protect her from ranged attacks would end up being very useful. The skill was also more convenient than keeping an inside-carved shield in spatial storage, for example, at the cost of taking up one of Vivi’s skill slots.

  I think we can keep this until we find something better, Vivi thought. It’s more useful than Basic Ascension.

  “Definitely,” Lucius agreed. “But it’s also a sub-optimal skill for us. It’s a nature type skill. That means it doesn’t have a synergy with Ascension Of Divinity, which is a divine skill.”

  Skills have types? Vivi asked.

  “Yes, and they’re mostly irrelevant,” Lucius said. “But exalted ascension skills all have synergies with rare skills. Those rare skills just need to be of the same type. Veronica’s exalted skill synergizes with her halo of daggers for example, letting the ascension skill also ascend the daggers.”

  So… since our skill is the wrong type, it’s just a rare skill with no further improvements.

  “Yes. We’d need to find a different ascension skill for that. Coshi already had Ascension Of Nature, but that’s also only a rare skill.”

  Well, the shield is still better than whatever else we have, even if it’s just rare.

  She continued fighting monsters for another ten minutes, until a shadow assassin of sorts ambushed her. It dashed from underneath a trapdoor within the desert. Vivi called the shield in the direction by instinct and activated Ascension Of Divinity, realizing that this monster was too fast to keep up with at just five thousand ether.

  Fast! Vivi thought. And strong! It must have at least a million ether.

  The fight reminded Vivi of her time trapped in Zand’s main dungeon, where the assassin skeletons gave her trouble. Just like back then, she struggled to see the shadow assassin, whatever this monster was. She had just enough time to react to its attacks, but it jumped back with its daggers before Vivi had time to kill it.

  In Zand, she had dealt with the assassin by throwing Lucius’s claws around. She grinned, thinking of a similar idea.

  She filled the shockwave rune of Dawnpour, then threw a wide slash all around her.

  Attacks suddenly stopped coming, and she turned her head to see the shadow assassin very much dead. It was apparently a tough boss monster—a calamity in some parts of the world—as Vivi collected the second rare skill of the day from it. She placed Shadow Swipe into a skill container and picked it up. She de-activated her ascension skill.

  “Ooooh!” Lucius gushed. “That’s a good one. Momentum Leap. A gap-closer skill.”

  “A gap-closer?” Vivi asked.

  “Yes, see that monster over there?” Lucius asked, pointing at a skeletal goat with red eyes three hundred or so feet away. It seemed to be wandering around aimlessly, munching on the ground like some cow eating imaginary grass. A calm creature considering its appearance.

  “Look at it and focus on it,” Lucius said. “Then activate the skill. You’ll know what it does. Just keep your sword ready.”

  Vivi batted an eye, but decided to do just that. She went into stance, focused her ethereal senses on the monster, and activated Momentum Leap.

  Her footing disappeared, and in an immediate rush of adrenaline, Vivi found herself in the air, flung straight at the monster with insane speed, which had now spotted her.

  “It closes the gap between you and the monster, as you can see,” Lucius said. “Though, at its unevolved state it’s a bit unpredictable.”

  Yelling out, Vivi pushed ether through the shockwave runes and desperately slashed at the skeletal goat.

  The goat’s aura exploded in a cloud of thousands upon thousands of void ether, and a halo of five swords of pure darkness straight from the void appeared around it. One blocked the shockwave, and four slashed down at Vivi.

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