Chapter 25

And so with his Energy Sense speeding up Phesto's progress much stronger than before, Phesto was able to reach level 100 in all energy-related skills within a single week, increasing his strength quickly and forcing him to spend some time getting used to his newfound strength.

He had read how characters accidentally crushed things after a breakthrough or whatnot if they did not spend time getting used to their strength.

Still, there was one thing in his training routine that bothered him. The weapons he smithed were still not magical and no effects were added to the weapons. Though perhaps calling them magical was wrong. After all, Ornn apparently used no magic when crafting, yet all of his creations had special effects. But the question still stood, how exactly did his creations have effects. Sure he could imbue magical energy into them and brute force his way into having an effect, but this would run counter to all the practice he has been doing until now.

The equipment he could craft right now had pretty amazing stats and though they weren't the same as in league he was pretty sure that they were still similar enough to make simple comparisons.

Picking up a longsword he made earlier that day he looked at the systems appraisal.

[Masterful steel longsword

Attack: 75

Durability: 100/100]

The system gave his weapon a prefix by itself. He would have said that that would have been over the top but compared to the swords he could find in other blacksmithing stores this really wasn't too weird.

Longswords without a prefix usually had around 8-13 Attack, quite similar to the AD value of a longsword in league.

It was quite the similarity but it was probably very unreliable. Perhaps knowledge from the item shop would only help for common items, but considering the existence of prefixes and that items had to be balanced in league he was pretty sure the moment legendary or mythic items were introduced any sense of scale would be useless.

Still, this did help Phesto figure out how skilled he was compared to the other smiths in Kahuri and Tuula. But compared to Ornn or the Hearthblood he still had no idea how he would fare when compared to them. Then again he probably couldn't even begin to compare to Ornn, well at least not yet. But the Hearthblood? They were a populace of craftsmen and artisans dedicating their life and passion to pursuing the peak of their craft earning the approval of Ornn, though he was too much of a tsundere to admit it. If they were still alive then he should definitely check it out.

But that would come later, for now, he wanted to train up. Sure there weren't any active disasters like the Darkin running rampant or the void breaking out. But many factions were currently much stronger than before. So to avoid them and possibly defend himself if he were to get into a conflict growing stronger was the simplest answer he could think of and ever since Energy Strengthening reached level 100 not too long ago, his body and magical might have been rapidly improving by leaps and bounds. But because he didn't know any martial arts or secret techniques, brute force was his main choice. Even then, he still needed to practice the skills used to apply that brute force, such as all the elemental control skills.

The question was, however, how strong was strong enough?

Thinking about that question Phesto used appraisal on himself.

[Name: Phesto

Race: Humanoid

Physical Strength: 2000

Magical Strength: 6000

Passive Effects: Elemental Convergence, Ionian Resonance

Elemental Convergence: Your body is in a state where all elements entering are converging. When finished, all converged elements can be freely used without conflict. But during convergence, the addition of new elements will prove much easier. Ending the state of convergence is up to you.

Ionian Resonance: When in a state of harmony your body will slowly be strengthened by Ionias spirit]

Seeing that his stats were well in the thousands, Phesto wasn't too surprised. His body had been capable of superhuman feats such as lifting boulders, shattering hills and recovering from wounds at speeds visible to the eye.

Though it was a bit surprising to see his magical strength be so high. Unlike his physical strength, which was a bit easier to notice and measure, it wasn't easy with his magic. Even when he just reached Ionia using larger magic would greatly disturb Ionia. He could possibly get away with it thanks to his Spirit Attunement skill, but even then he still hadn't reached Nejime's level of being "blessed by Ionia" so he didn't really want to try it.

But even without that considering his magical strength was 3 times his physical strength he considered himself to be quite strong already.

What was the most interesting result from his appraisal was the Elemental Convergence effect. When he tried to feel his body and his surroundings he couldn't feel anything off. Perhaps this was because his body had slowly entered this state? No matter the case this effect clearly showed that it was not yet time to travel and instead to train and try out new techniques.

There were many different skills, techniques, elements and magics he had not touched upon at all yet. Shadow, spatial, time, death, blood, soul, and some he did yet think about. Obviously, some magics seemed a bit riskier and or less interesting than others, mainly death and blood magic.

One of the less interesting ones was definitely blood magic. It was one of the magics often used by the Darkin to reforge their Ascended bodies and Vladimir used it for his eternal youth, but it seemed to require the consumption of a lot of blood.

As for death magic, well he didn't really plan on looking at dead people all day and he never thought necromancy was that cool anyway. Also, the whole ripping people's souls out part looked like it overlapped with soul magic so why not learn that instead.

Other than that the rest he definitely wanted to learn, though some were easier than others. Picking up other elements like ice and lightning should prove to be easier than shadows. Soul, time and spatial magic however seemed much more difficult, but they were also important for him to travel through the different realms, regions between the spiritual and physical realm, where the rules of physics such as time and space didn't apply.

To protect himself from entering a weird realm for a minute and hundreds of years passing in the physical realm, he wanted to learn time and spatial magic. To achieve that Phesto decided to travel Ionia, once his stats reached the 10.000 mark.