Damon's Ascension-Chapter 81: The Issue With Leveling Up 2

Damon glanced at Ambrose. "... please tell me, you have a solution..."

Ambrose cracked a grin, clearly enjoying the shift in the conversation. "You’re in luck. It’s not like yours is the first race to be cursed with garbage cooldowns. It’s just... with all that talent and absurd toughness, people tend to overlook it. Everyone’s too busy drooling over your potential to notice the drawback."

Ambrose lifted a finger. "Let’s start with the most basic way to deal with the issue, all you need to do is increase your Providence."

Damon’s expression froze. "What... do you mean by that?"

Ambrose blinked, clearly thrown by the reaction. "What do you mean, what do I mean? The Universe Will is literally the entity that controls how Worldly Essence bonds with us and the one handling Level-Ups. The more you invest in Providence, the more efficiently it can handle that process for you."

Ambrose then paused and realized something. "Wait, your race has EX Providence, so how could you be experiencing this problem... unless...?"

Ambrose glanced at Damon’s grim frown with silent shock. "...don’t tell me despite knowing that, you still haven’t invested even a single point in Providence?"

A short silence followed, heavy with unspoken thoughts, until Damon finally spoke, quiet, firm, and clearly unwilling to explain any further.

"Continue."

Ambrose gave Damon the kind of look you’d reserve for a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist mid-rant, half disbelief, half pity. Given what he knew about the young man, unless Damon had suddenly decided to make his own life miserable for no reason, Ambrose guessed the other’s concerns about the Providence stat.

Still, he knew better than to try and change Damon’s mind because he would assume the Universe Will was speaking through his mouth.

"Alright, the second method is investing in Fortitude," Ambrose continued. "I don’t need to remind you that your race isn’t exactly gifted there, F across the board for physical stats. But still, every 5 points in Fortitude should theoretically reduce the cooldown increase per level by 10%."

Damon did the calculations. Currently, each level increased the previous cooldown by 100%, so if he reached 5 points in Fortitude right now, his increase per level would reduce to 90%. So instead of doubling, it would increase by 1.9x.

It was a bit helpful but only cumulatively, and it would mean that he would have to heavily invest in Fortitude to the detriment of all other stats.

Seeing that Damon was not satisfied, Ambrose continued. "Aside from external methods like Items and Abilities, there is only one other remaining way. You pay a penalty."

"What kind of penalty?" Damon asked, eyes narrowing slightly.

Ambrose shrugged. "Everything in the universe follows a set principle of rules. In the case of Worldly Essence, the rule is simple: Your body needs time to cleanse itself after each infusion. If you want to skip it, you can do so by paying that penalty."

"And how much is this penalty?" Damon asked tentatively, his expression wary.

Ambrose chuckled. "Not much at the early levels, simply the same amount you need to level up."

Damon was left silent. To go to Level 8, he needed to wait either 64 hours — now 60 hours — and it would cost 5120 units of Worldly Essence, and he accounted for the penalty, that would be 10,240 units of Worldly Essence.

Damon sucked in a deep breath and lifted his VQD, typing a public announcement about this issue.

Firstly, all humans are strictly prohibited from disclosing any information about humanity’s cooldown to any other species, no matter the reason. Any flouting of this would result in a Tier 5 Penalty according to IUAS laws. (AN: Penalty tiers were introduced in Chapter 35.)

Secondly, all humans were heavily advised to invest in the Providence stat first and foremost to reduce the cooldowns, while secondly focusing on Fortitude to a lesser degree.

Thirdly, all humans would be provided with a welfare benefit of 10,000 units of Worldly Essence per year as long as they were actively partaking in Essence Instances and managed to gain at least 100 units of Worldly Essence per week for an entire year.

With that out of the way, Damon felt extremely tired as he restored the network connection for all humans as the update was made known to them. He did not have time to make another mental broadcast as there were other matters he had to deal with, so he only offered a brief summary of the situation, covering the essentials.

Thankfully, humanity had already connected to the galactic network and began to understand the magnitude of things. Human adaptability was one of its strongest traits, so the thinking of people changed accordingly to match the situation.

The given explanation was enough to make them understand that revealing such a flaw would result in them losing value, in other words their ’salaries’ and ’benefits’ would have drastically reduced if not for this. With that in mind, how could they still be angry? Rather, people hurriedly checked their messaging and text history to see if any of them had perhaps foolishly revealed any clues, and if so, deleted them quickly.

"You said something about a second thing?" Ambrose prompted when he saw Damon close his eyes to think.

Damon snapped out of it and nodded. "Right, that concerns the establishment and construction of the actual Human Embassy. I wanted to ask for your advice: What would you recommend, should it be a space base that travels in the solar system, an orbital base that orbits our home planet, or a planetary base built on land?"

Ambrose hummed. "Do all three. You have the money and can afford it, so why pick? You Earthlings seem to have a saying on that matter as well, ’Only a child will choose; adults get to pick them all!’"

Damon glanced at Ambrose strangely. The way the Vampire Lord was all over human culture, it reminded him of those people who worshiped Japan but lived in rural America and wore fedoras.

Damon turned to look at the instance portal and decisively left the area, traveling to a place where one of Ambrose’s shuttles could pick him up and send him up to the spaceship in orbit.

Damon barely reacted as the shuttle shot up through the sky, breaking through the atmosphere in seconds. He had done this before, and the feeling of leaving Earth behind wasn’t anything special anymore.

Through the window, he saw the planet shrinking below him, the usual white clouds swirling over deep blue oceans, the continents stretching out like ancient scars on the surface.

It was certainly a beautiful sight, but Damon didn’t feel much since he was now aware that Earth happened to be just one habitable planet in a universe full of them.

The shuttle engines shifted, and suddenly, everything was silent because they had officially entered space.

Looking out from the porthole, he could see that the stars outside were brighter now as they were no longer blocked by the atmosphere.

In the distance, the sleek spaceship came into view, an elegant cruiser floating in the void.

Damon leaned back in his seat as the shuttle approached the docking bay, his fingers tapped against the armrest as his thoughts whirred, especially with what he had just learned.

He had no plans of changing his position. He saw that look Ambrose gave him and understood that he might entirely be wrong about the Universe Will.

However, what Ambrose did not understand was that Damon was not going to bet on a 99% chance of the Universe Will being benevolent, because that final 1% chance could lead to consequences he could not bear.

While he was in transit, he opened his menu and remembered that despite it being bare-bones in a way, it was extremely intuitive and worked with mental commands, as Selie had let him know oh so long ago.

As such he decided to attempt to pay the penalty and saw a prompt appear before him confirming that he wanted to go through with it. After paying, 5.120 units of Worldly Essence were taken away, and Damon felt his body being ’washed’.

It was like the feeling of pouring warm water over your head with a pail when bathing, only that it also passed through his insides, which was not entirely an unpleasant feeling.

Immediately, he felt the familiar hunger that indicated that he was ready to Level-Up once more, making Damon purse his lips slightly. To think, such a method existed, but those foolish vendors wanted to personally negotiate with him?

Then again, the idea was that 1 Unit of Chaos Essence was worth 1 Unit of Worldly Essence and was also worth 1 Essence Coin. freeweɓnovel.cøm

However, in practicality, we all know this was not true. Worldly Essence gained could not be traded and was consumed by the user to enhance themselves while Essence Coins were a currency that could not be destroyed and would always be traded.

A lot of thoughts passed through Damon’s mind, but he still decided to use his Worldly Essence to grow stronger, consuming another 5.120 units, leaving him with 2,865 units, as well as another cooldown.

There would need to be more extensive grinding going forward if he wanted to counterattack the poor ’talent’ of the human race.

By the time he entered the ship, Damon’s body had already been boosted with the extra stat point which he allocated into Fortitude. Now that he knew the ins and outs of leveling up, he knew he had to slightly rearrange his priorities.

As he walked up to Ambrose, who was tapping his feet impatiently while obviously waiting for him to grant the visa, Damon’s eyes moved to his character panel, which had been updated.

[Name: Damon Arnan || Race: Homo Sapien (Pure) || Faction: None]

[POW: 2 || MOB: 3 || FOR: 3 || MEN: 3 || PRO: 1]

[Abilities: Probability Manipulation (EX), Avatar (EX), Devour (EX).]