“The Golden Experience”

"Foo… foo… hoooo…"

She finally calmed down.

She still retained her frustration and her burning-hot anger. Even now, just thinking about the fight caused her eyes to tear up. However, it was no longer accompanied by an anxiety attack so intense that she couldn't even scream.

She was the type of person to cry whenever her emotions ran high, even if she wasn't in pain or feeling sad. She had always hated that part about herself, and in the real world she did her best to lead her life in a way where she would never get emotional. She had exploded over games many times before, but never to this degree. She couldn't believe even this aspect of herself had been replicated here.

But wow, when was the last time she had broken down this bad? She would absolutely never forgive those players, but it was hard to cry this much in real life given other people's gaze. For that much at least, she was grateful to them. And she had of course already decided how to repay them.

"Woo…ayne—! …That was Wayne, wasn't it. He… I thought I had erased him along with Erfahren… But since he's a player, no matter how many times I grind him to dust, he'll just rez somewhere. He must have turned up outside the capital."

Rare didn't believe that it was Wayne's fault that she died. That was mostly due to Rare's arrogance tempting fate. However, that wasn't the sole reason.

There was an incredible gap in raw power between Rare and those players. But they filled that gap with numbers, items, and strategy. Rare had indeed been careless, and she made a lot of poor decisions, but by the end she had been fighting at full strength. Yet she still lost. While she had some choice words about that "debuff field" thing that she knew nothing about, she wouldn't make any excuses. Rare was the fool for falling into their trap. Thinking over it again, those players' every coordinated action led to that final, momentary opening. Truly a well-constructed plan. There was no other way to put it than "magnificent." Since there was no way they knew what Rare's stats or skills were, by random happenstance they developed the perfect scheme, and by random happenstance they had the perfect items that worked on her, but above all else, they were able to pull it off because they believed wholeheartedly in their gamble.

Each player spared no effort to achieve their one shared goal. Strength had nothing to do with it.

After breaking the one player's neck, Rare had used that player's overall strength as reference when launching a palm strike in order to blow someone away. Despite that, her hand pierced into him instead. Considering that, among all the players who had faced her, Wayne was particularly weak. Regardless, he had still been the one standing there in front of her. Even in death, he had continued to hinder her.

She had utterly forgotten about the player named Wayne until today. He was someone she had killed a really long time ago, and the only player to have ever driven her into a corner. But his actual strength wasn't all that impressive. Therefore, she forgot about him.

Rare didn't believe her death was Wayne's fault. However, he undeniably had a role in the scheme that killed her.

"Gnnngh…"

It was fine. She was calm now. No more crying.

"…For starters, healing magic. Whatever my next plans are, that's the first step."

Whatever came next, she really needed to fix up her face first.

Now that she knew about [Healing Magic], she wanted to get it as soon as possible. Getting the [Barehanded] skill, which improved stats in combat when not using a weapon, along with [Pharmacy] and [Disassemble] unlocked the [Treatment] skill. [Disassemble] was actually a skill the catkin girls all had. According to the forums, it required a certain amount of DEX to unlock. This was why it hadn't been in Rare's original list of learnable skills. Back then, she had dumped all her XP only into MND.

After getting [Treatment], there were no issues with any other prerequisites. With [Treatment] and sufficient INT, she could learn [Healing Magic]. Based on that, she surmised that the effectiveness of [Healing Magic] must scale with INT. If information on this skill had spread in the early game, it was possible that MND could have become a trash stat. INT was useful for both direct attacks and healing, after all. Either way, max MP was determined based on the higher of one's INT and MND. If a player didn't need MP, they could still have viable build while ignoring them both. That said, since Rare knew that INT and MND provided various wide-ranging benefits, she did not plan to neglect either of them.

"Between [Healing Magic] and [Treatment], I wonder which would work better on swollen eyes?"

She didn't have a mirror, but since she was using [Water Magic] to wash her hands, she would clean up her face as well. The towels in the sink area where she washed her hands were sewn by engineer ants. Only five people used this sink, but there were two towels here. Apparently, one was for Rare, and the other was for Kerry and the other catkin girls. There had been vehement opposition to the idea of sharing, with them saying that the swarm boss couldn't possibly use the same towel as anyone else. She understood that they were just thinking of her position, but it still felt a bit lonely to be excluded.

"…Kerry and those girls, I wonder if they'll be all right after suddenly dying like that. I've made them experience something terrible…"

Since her role in this event was someone leading monsters on raids, the catkin girls were going to just be benched. However, since standing by in the caverns the entire time would be boring, the four of them plus Hakuma and Ginka went south to search for the volcanic region. If they happened to run into an invasion event somewhere and couldn't avoid being roped into it, she instructed them to assist the most human-looking side. Meanwhile, Deas was left to babysit the wolf pups. Although young, they were still wolves, so they obeyed the pack's hierarchy, meaning they wouldn't listen to the "weak" ants. They would listen Sugaru and Deas, though, so since Sugaru would be occupied, their care fell to Deas.

Naturally, Kerry's group did all receive Greater Philosopher's Stones. Among the top brass, only Sugaru had not gotten one yet; she required far too much XP, so it was being saved for later.

Apparently there wasn't a superior or more advanced race above beastkin, so the Philosopher's Stone only allowed them to reincarnate into other beastkin subraces close to their own. So after reincarnating, Kerry was now a lion, Riley a panther, Remy a tiger, and Marion a snow leopard. There were quite a lot of options, interestingly enough. Rare thought their hair color would change, but she was wrong. Only the shapes of their ears and tails changed a little, otherwise there were no other major changes to their appearances. It was very different compared to when she went from elf to high elf. The types of beastkin available at the start were things like cat, dog, elephant, horse—simple and broad animal classifications, there weren't any more specific subclassifications. If there wasn't a superior race, that meant that no beastkin could use [Subordinate] by default. There was a country with a large population of beastkin, if she remembered correctly, so it might be worthwhile to pay a visit.

Hakuma and Ginka reincarnated into a [Sköll] and a [Hati], respectively. With a little more work, she thought they could even make it to fenrir, but when they tried the other day, it seemed there was an outstanding prerequisite still, so it didn't work. This applied to others as well; unless they had been incredibly weak from the start, if they didn't meet enough conditions, they were unable to reincarnate further. That said, there were also many like Rare and World Tree who, upon consideration, seemed very unlikely to have any higher forms to reincarnate into.

Things were even stricter for items; once a Philosopher's Stone was used to raise a given item's rank, another stone could not be used on that item. Furthermore, if that same item were used in alchemy to produce another item, that resultant product was also ineligible for a rank up using another Philosopher's Stone. However, this wasn't unexpected, so confirming it wasn't much of a disappointment. If the system wasn't restricted in this way, it would have been trivial to mass produce the best possible items.

There was one thing that Rare hadn't tried yet: If she used a Philosopher's Stone on a piece of adamantite to transform it into a higher ranked metal, then combined that with a Knight's Grudge to create a living object-type monster, could this monster use a Philosopher's Stone? She was eager to test it out but, unfortunately, she had no more Knight's Grudges left. She was wondering if she'd be able to get some from the invasion event.

"…I wonder how invasions in other regions went. Let's check out the stickies for the event on the forum… Well, that's no surprise… All the threads are buzzing about the 'server-first catastrophe kill'… Ngh… Well, whatever, I'll look again later."

After washing her hands, Rare returned to the queen's chamber and flopped down onto the throne to think. About how she learned [Healing Magic] just before. And about what she should do from now on.

As long as the conditions were known, it wasn't difficult to aim to learn certain skills. But right when the game first started, that was of course not true. When managing a limited pool of XP, it was better to aim for the most efficient combat or production skills; this was the one of the charms of beginning a new game. At the very start, Rare had boosted her initial XP by purposely taking the detrimental characteristics [Albinism] and [Poor Eyesight]. And make no mistake, her defeat today was at least partially as a result of that choice.

In return for those two characteristics, she had gotten fifty XP. Just fifty. Rare was now a demon lord, a supernatural disaster in the eyes of humanity, and the bounty she had received in exchange for purposely binding herself by those shackles of weakness was a measly fifty XP. That said, without that fifty XP, she also would not have gotten this far. Back at the start, it had been necessary for her to get [Subordinate]; without an extra fifty XP, she would have been short.

Rare's sense of scale had become kind of skewed considering the amount of XP she earned these days, but that piddly sum was without a doubt an essential part of her origin.

In this gameworld, everyone desired XP. With more XP, almost any of your wishes could be granted. After finding herself drowning in XP, Rare's eyes had become shrouded by greed.

Humanity's avarice was terrifying. Particularly the fixation on money, which could incite behavior that completely defied rationality. Rare had seen it play out so many times in the real world that it made her sick. Too much gold drove men mad.

In this world, the same could be said for XP. Rare's entire story could be traced back to a mere fifty XP. Just a single speck of gold dust. She should never lose sight of that. No matter how much she obtained, power was only power, nothing more and nothing less. It wasn't for showing off or abusing; it had to be used correctly. She couldn't let herself be seduced by the allure of the golden experience.

Perhaps it was fortunate that she was forced to stop here and think.

"—Haha, this really was lucky for me."

She stood up from her throne and stretched.

"Well, after all is said and done, I get to use the XP from taking out three cities to learn more skills! If I'll be fighting on the front lines myself, then I need to be able to do everything I possibly can. Even though I became a demon lord, I still haven't gotten [Demonic Eyes] yet. Probably because I thought I would never have to come out from inside Yoroizaka. I got every skill when I reincarnated into a high elf, but there are a bunch of skills I unlocked when I became a demon lord that I haven't gotten yet. So first, I'll get those."

She checked how much XP she would need to learn them all and how much she currently had.

"Ah, that's right. There's one more thing I can't forget. I need to keep a tenth of my XP back, just in case the worst happens. Knowing how to minimize potential losses is essential for investing, after all."