The thirty-minute exit countdown appeared in the corner of his vision and James was already moving.
[EXIT COUNTDOWN: 30:00]
He crouched beside the nearest goblin body and willed it into the ring and it vanished with a faint shimmer before he'd finished standing back up.
[ITEM STORED: GOBLIN CORPSE x1 — RING INVENTORY: 9/20]
Lars was against a tree with his bad leg stretched in front of him and his sword across his lap, watching James work through the field without saying anything. Sofia stood with her staff in both hands and her eyes on the three reanimated wolves, which were still where James had left them — silent, heads low, waiting.
James moved from body to body without stopping. The System inventory didn't accept dead matter — that was the whole reason the ring existed — so he worked through the ring's twelve remaining slots quickly, pulling in eleven goblin carcasses with the most intact hides and leaving the rest where they lay. That left one slot open, and when he straightened and looked across the field at Hyun-Woo's gear lying where he'd fallen — leather armour torn through at the shoulder and thigh, long sword clean beside it — he walked over and picked up the sword and turned it once in his hand before adding it to the ring.
[ITEM STORED: GOBLIN CORPSE x11 — RING INVENTORY: 19/20] [ITEM STORED: LONG SWORD (E-RANK) — RING INVENTORY: 20/20] [RING INVENTORY: FULL]
He left the armour.
The System chimed and a purple glow appeared in front of him at chest height, pulsing once before solidifying into a circlet — a thin band of pale gold with a single white stone at the centre still giving off a faint light. It appeared directly in his System inventory, not the ring.
[FLOOR 1 CLEAR REWARD — DISTRIBUTING] [TOWER CREDITS AWARDED: 800 TC] [TOWER CREDITS BALANCE: 815 TC] [RANDOM ITEM DROP] [ITEM RECEIVED: APOSTLE'S RADIANT CIRCLET — EPIC GRADE — STORED IN SYSTEM INVENTORY] [CLASS RESTRICTION: HEALER / SUPPORT ONLY] [LEVEL REQUIREMENT: 80] [EFFECT: +40% HEALING OUTPUT | RESURRECT COOLDOWN -30% | PARTY AURA: +15% MAX HP]
James read it twice. Level 80, Healer or Support only, and neither of those things would ever describe him. The System had pulled a reward from a table and landed on an Epic item that he could not equip, could not use, and would never grow into, and the white stone in the centre caught the flat grey light of the floor zone and threw it back clean and bright and completely indifferent to any of that.
He turned it over once and dropped it into the ring.
Sofia's voice came from behind him. "What was that glow?"
"Epic item." He was already reading the next notification.
"Can you use it?"
"No."
She didn't say anything else, and he didn't look up.
The level-up notifications were still queued from the fight and he cleared them in order, reading each one before moving to the next.
[TITLE EFFECTS — APPRENTICE NECROMANCER] [+15% NECROMANTIC SPELL DAMAGE] [+10% MANA POOL — MANA UPDATED: 330/330] [UNDEAD +10% MAX HP] [CALL OF SOULS RANGE: +5M]
[TITLE EFFECTS — NECROMANCER SWORDSMAN — UNIQUE — FIRST HOLDER WORLDWIDE] [PASSIVE: SWORDSMANSHIP (F) — +2% SWORD DAMAGE — SCALES WITH RANK] [PASSIVE: SHIELD INSTINCT (F) — +2% DAMAGE ABSORBED ON BLOCK — SCALES WITH RANK]
[MILESTONE REWARD ACTIVE: DEATH CHAIN (S)] [PASSIVE — AUTO-TRIGGERS ON KILL] [CHAINS 30% KILL DAMAGE AS NECROTIC DOT TO NEAREST ENEMY WITHIN 8M] [COOLDOWN: 4 MINUTES — DRAWS FROM MENTAL STAMINA — USE WITH CAUTION]
[NEW SKILLS ACTIVE] [REANIMATE (F) — 60 MANA — PERMANENT DURATION — CONTRACT SLOT: 1 PER UNDEAD] [DISMISS UNDEAD (F) — 0 MANA — INSTANT — RELEASES CONTRACT SLOT] [CONTRACT SLOTS: 2/5 AVAILABLE]
He stood in the clearing and read through each one before closing it. Swordsmanship and Shield Instinct were both F-rank, which meant barely anything yet, but every skill he had had started the same way and built through use. Death Chain was different — S-rank at Level 5, four-minute cooldown, and the mental stamina warning sitting at the end of the notification like something the System had decided he needed to read carefully. An S-rank passive that drew from mental stamina rather than mana was not something he was going to trigger without knowing what the cost actually felt like, and he filed that away until he was somewhere he could test it without thirty-nine enemies around him.
[EXIT COUNTDOWN: 18:43]
White light.
James materialised in his bedroom and the change landed all at once — the damp smell coming up through the floorboards, the water stains spreading brown across the ceiling, the desk lamp still on from this morning with the crack in the laptop screen catching the light beneath it. He was standing in blood-stained cloth armour with a ring full of monster corpses and an Epic circlet he couldn't use, and the flat was exactly as he'd left it.
He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled the shield off his back and turned it over.
[WOODEN SHIELD (F) — DURABILITY: 61/80]
A wide compression dent ran across the face where the wolf had hit it, shallow but set into the wood, and he ran his thumb along it before setting the shield against the wall. Nineteen durability from one block. The shield would not last another floor at that rate without cracking through.
He opened his stat screen.
[NAME: JAMES GANNER] [CLASS: NECROMANCER (LEGENDARY)] [LEVEL: 5 | EXP: 51/800] [HP: 262/262 | MANA: 330/330] [STRENGTH: 12 | AGILITY: 18 | INTELLIGENCE: 25] [ENDURANCE: 16 | LUCK: 11] [UNSPENT STAT POINTS: 10]
Ten points from two level-ups and he'd held them through the floor because allocating under a thirty-minute countdown with wolves still on the field was not how he wanted to make permanent decisions. He did it now, working through the logic before touching anything.
Floor 2 would be harder and he had no way of knowing what the team would look like going in, which meant he needed to survive longer without a tank in front of him and carry more loot out than he had today. Luck paid out across every floor in drop rates and item quality, and the circlet sitting in his ring was proof of that even when the result wasn't immediately useful.
Two into Strength.
[STRENGTH: 12 → 14]
Three into Endurance.
[ENDURANCE: 16 → 19] [HP: 262 → 292]
Two into Luck.
[LUCK: 11 → 13]
Three into Intelligence.
[INTELLIGENCE: 25 → 28] [MANA: 330 → 360]
INT 28 divided by ten rounded down was still two. He needed 30 for the third contract slot and he was two points short, which meant next level without any allocation at all.
He confirmed and closed the screen.
[NAME: JAMES GANNER] [CLASS: NECROMANCER (LEGENDARY)] [LEVEL: 5 | EXP: 51/800] [HP: 292/292 | MANA: 360/360] [STRENGTH: 14 | AGILITY: 18 | INTELLIGENCE: 28] [ENDURANCE: 19 | LUCK: 13] [UNSPENT STAT POINTS: 0]
The ring came off his finger and he set it on the desk under the lamp and went through the inventory in his head.
Eight dire wolf corpses. Eleven goblin carcasses. One E-rank long sword. And in his System inventory, separate from the ring, the Epic circlet still glowing faintly in its slot.
Goblin hides from Floor 1 were common enough that the TRB buyback rate sat low — seventy to ninety Tower Credits each depending on condition, which put the twelve carcasses somewhere between eight hundred and forty and ten-eighty TC. Dire wolf hides pulled better because the fur was dense and the hide was thick enough for mid-grade armour lining, and the TRB buyback on dire wolf sat between a hundred and thirty and a hundred and fifty Tower Credits per carcass. Eight wolves at that rate came out between ten-forty and twelve hundred.
He pulled out his phone and opened the calculator. Materials alone came out between eighteen hundred and twenty-two hundred TC before he walked through the TRB door, and at twelve dollars per credit that was between twenty-one thousand six hundred and twenty-six thousand four hundred dollars from a single floor's worth of hides.
He set the phone down on the desk and looked at it for a moment.
The circlet was a different number entirely. Epic grade items started at five hundred thousand dollars at private auction and moved higher from there depending on stats and the level restriction, and a forty percent healing output bonus with a resurrect cooldown reduction was exactly the kind of thing serious Healer guilds paid top price for on their endgame rosters. He couldn't value it precisely without the TRB appraisal counter, but the floor of the Epic market was five hundred thousand and the ceiling on something with those stats was open.
He picked the circlet up and the white stone was still warm against his palm, which made no physical sense for metal he'd owned for under an hour.
He crossed to the far corner of the room and crouched beside the bed frame. The floorboard there lifted free with two fingers and left a gap between the joists that was just wide enough, and he set the circlet in the space and pressed the board back down until it sat flush with the rest.
The circlet in the floor was worth more than everything he'd walked into the Tower with, and it had come from a single afternoon on the first real floor of a three-hundred floor tower, and he hadn't used half of what he was capable of yet.
He turned off the desk lamp and lay back on the bed without taking the armour off.
The water stains were still on the ceiling. The floorboard was still loose. The heating still didn't work.
For now.