Chương 279

The dust over Stormbreak was thick and gray. It coated the back of Rudra's throat with every breath. Rudra stood in the center of the ruined courtyard. He leaned forward, resting both hands on the heavy, dark metal shaft of Extortion. He looked around. The destruction was absolute. The massive stone roof of the Academy had caved in, completely crushing the wooden desks and training yards below. The eastern wall of the Grand Library was a jagged, open wound, exposing ruined bookshelves to the cold wind.

The Alchemy Tower was missing its entire top floor. The Division Barracks and the massive Public Dining Hall were half pulverized. Hundreds of builders, off-duty militia, and ordinary citizens were hauling the debris by hand. They were covered in sweat and soot. Every so often, a worker would drop a heavy stone and violently gasp for air, their stamina completely zeroed out with them having to clean out an entire city. Rudra felt a heavy, suffocating knot form in his chest. He had gotten arrogant.

Ever since he cleared the Ocean God's trials, he had been riding an unbroken winning streak. He thought he could handle anything the world threw at him. When the Devil Monarch's clone bypassed his perimeter, Rudra hadn't bothered to properly assess the threat. He just confidently hit the summon button. He dragged Piaro, Mumud, Elysia, and the rest of his family directly into an unwinnable slaughter.

If the Tower of Wisdom hadn't stepped through that rift, his entire command structure would have been permanently erased. Because of his hubris. Because he thought he was untouchable. Rudra squeezed the leather grip of his staff until his knuckles popped. He took a slow, jagged breath, forcing the panic back down. Guilt wouldn't rebuild the walls. He needed to focus. He swiped a hand through the dusty air and opened his status window.

[Name: Rudra] [Level: 314] [Class: Staff Saint / Deep Sage] [Titles: [One Who Entertained an Absolute] + 35 others] [Health: 370, 400 / 370, 400] [Mana: 998, 200 / 998, 200] [Staff Energy: 3, 500 / 3, 500] [Divine Energy: 43, 500 / 43, 500] [Demonic Force: 153, 200 / 153, 200] [Enlightenment: 10, 500 / 10, 500] [Strength: 4, 103 | Stamina: 4, 033] The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

[Agility: 4, 023 | Intelligence: 5, 516] [Persistence: 3, 891 | Dexterity: 4, 625] [Courage: 3, 506 | Charm: 5, 997] [Dignity: 5, 388 | Insight: 3, 597] [Wisdom: 1030 | Divine Power: 4, 350] [Demonic Power: 15, 320 | Regeneration: 2, 104] [Composure: 2, 182 | Indomitable: 2, 191] [Willpower: 1, 828 | Political Power: 1, 688] [Super Sensitivity: 20. 2 | Good Luck: 90] [Stat Points: 884] He stared at the numbers. His core physical stats had easily smashed past the four-thousand mark.

His strength hit like a falling mountain. His attack speed was already hard-capped by the system at four strikes per second when he used his gloves and started swinging his staff a couple of times and couldn't get higher than that even if he increased his agility stat. He scrolled to his skill notification tab showing the list of his skills which increased over the past week. [The skill [Complete Staff Mastery] has reached Level 4!] [The skill [Mana Heart] has reached Level 5!] …. …..

[The skill [Mind's Eye] has reached Level 2!] Multiple of his skills leveled up, mainly during the fight with the Devil Monarch Clone where he literally got dog-walked by him. He glanced down at his [Super Sensitivity]. It sat at 20. 2. Activating [Godspeed] and completely surrendering his body to raw reflexes during the fight had bumped the stat up by more than two full points. It was a massive leap considering he could barely raise to 20 points after a full year and a half of constant fighting.

But Rudra shook his head. He couldn't rely on it. Relinquishing his own bodily control to micro-reflexes was nearly impossible. Fighting normally was like driving a bike at 100 kilometers per hour—you had strict control, you could see the road, you could navigate the turns, and overtake all the vehicles before you.

Surrendering to [Godspeed] was like driving at 250 kilometers per hour completely blindfolded, relying entirely on the slight whistling of the wind to know when to turn left or right to not give Truck-kun a backshot. Doing that while keeping [Mind's Eye] open flooded his brain with way too much spatial data. It gave him a massive, throbbing headache. It was too mentally exhausting to maintain for a long period of time. He looked back at his core attributes. His mana was sitting at 998, 200.

"Just a little push," Rudra muttered. He allocated his 884 free stat points. He dumped just enough into Intelligence to push his mana pool over the one-million mark. He threw the rest of the points straight into Dexterity. His [Echo Clone]—which had been quietly grinding the [Medical Mastery] on the exhausted and injured citizens—only inherited 10% of his stats. If he wanted the clone to reliably create higher-rated dishes, it needed a much higher baseline of manual dexterity. Ding.

[Mana Points has reached 1, 000, 000!] [You are the first player to reach 1 Million in Mana Points!] [You have acquired the title [Latent Duke of Boundless]!] [Latent Duke of Boundless] [You are the one whose capacity has outgrown all others. A power with no ceiling can also become a hunger that never stops growing. - Limit of all Resources and constraints is increased by 20% - The passive skill [Incomplete Boundlessness] has been created.] [Incomplete Boundlessness] [Passive] [Everything living near you grows faster, touched by a boundlessness that has no shape yet and no way to be aimed.] Rudra stared at the blue window. A wide, genuine grin finally broke through his dark mood. A 20% constraint lift. That meant his attack speed cap just increased by another hit each second. He could swing faster. He could hit harder. He tilted his head at the new passive. There were no hard numbers or percentages.

He hypothesized that the people working near him would just naturally gain experience or skill proficiency faster. He was completely content with that.