267 Intruders

Increasingly depressed, the child had to resolve to watch the two adults become stronger by the hour while his abilities had not changed one iota. Only his Aether of Luck could still be improved, but the number of Aether points required to increase it by a single point was staggering and exponentially increasing. Before, to increase this Aether stat by one point, he only needed 100 Aether points, but to increase from 29 to 30 it had taken him almost 1000.

In principle it was similar to using a higher grade encoding, except that the quality of his Aether had not changed. The 100-point barrier had not yet been reached, but the amount of Aether required for each additional point was increasing substantially. Luck was a mysterious field that did not obey conventional rules.