Chapter 263 Stats Farming 1
Of course, with the advent of having his genes perfected by Porunga, Dante could not be on downtime for too long. He spent some time with Beatrice while she was recuperating and then returned to his residence in the school.
It was still within the month of December, and those kids would not be coming out of the Zero Gate anytime soon, so the school - at least for Dante - was terribly quiet. Thinking about how excited those students must be to know he wasn't in the same realm as them, allowing them to compete normally, left him amused.
Dante logged into the Etraverse and headed to the section for the school's worlds. There, he opted to enter the Apocalypse World once more, curious to see how far he could raise his stats before he needed to consider energy consumption.
After all, Dante could definitely try to raise his stats past the current amount Portia had, but he did not have her Gluttony or Devour abilities that allowed her to literally eat the entire energy of a star during its lifetime and digest it for energy to sustain herself.
Damn. Just thinking about it again made Dante feel overwhelmed. While you were out there getting full from eating a pizza box or a big burger with fries, someone was eating literal stars.
Anyway, Dante would have to find his own sweet spot. A place where his stats perfectly matched his consumption ability. The good news was that his Spirit Sense increased with his Intelligence, so the higher his stats, the more hellfire he could release, and the faster Gluttonous Inferno could refine energy for him to live.
It was a positive cycle, but it had diminishing returns at a certain point. The long and short of all this was to find that point of diminishing returns and try to achieve equilibrium between power and energy consumption.
You know, Dante was feeling a bit poetic even. He decided to drop on the city he first landed on when he first arrived in this world, which was called Fallout Shelter. Like always, his character spawned randomly in the wild with Quantum Entanglement and Absorption together.
There was no Nanite Resonance or Quantum Core because he had not registered those superpowers with the school. Anyway, he directly descended on his virtual body right away and overwrote it with his power.
The moment his Quantum Core power activated and connected with the world, Dante's face changed greatly. He looked up with cold eyes, finally learning and understanding how this world worked and why it was so special.
It was like he thought, the special nature of this world was facilitated by a superpower, and one that was lower ranked than his Quantum Core. In fact, he knew that this superpower belonged directly to Lara Sanguis and was stuck at the SS rank.
No wonder!
No wonder that Mutation Cores in this world could only raise powers up to the SS Rank and everything after that was useless. The limit was literally set by the superpower that controlled it!
However, what made Dante wary was that he still sensed a strong suppression from the superpower behind this world despite having his Quantum Core at EX Rank while it was at the SS Rank.
This could only mean one thing... higher-dimensional being!
Lara Sanguis already had a higher-dimensional being supporting one - or maybe all - of her superpowers!
No wonder!
No wonder she could dominate others and act like a grand ancestress within the universe. Literally no one else had even raised their superpower to the EX rank, much less begun to contact interested higher-dimensional beings for 'sponsorship'.
Damn!
Dante was annoyed because it meant that Lara probably knew a lot of his secrets since a great majority of his rise was related to his escapades in the Apocalypse World. While he did not fully intend to antagonize her, his relationship with her was not benevolent either, and he considered the fact that his ambitions would cause them to fall out in the future.
So having her know so much about him while he only knew bits and pieces of her left him feeling very troubled and annoyed.
Dante seemed distracted for a second as he cocked his ear to one side, like he was straining to hear something far away. After a minute or two, he sighed with relief, as he had received a message from the cosmic tree that basically said that his true body descent ability had long been masked by it.
As for asking how this happened, it was redundant. Dante had already clued together that the Cosmic Tree was likely sitting at the top of the hierarchy for higher-dimensional beings, so doubting its abilities would be weird.
Relieved, he checked the area to see that he had spawned in a ruined city this time. There were tall buildings for commercial purposes on either side, telling him that he was in the business district.
He released his spirit sense to scan around and found that the monster presence was quite high, but only full of F-rank or so monsters. There were very few E-rank ones, and the entire large city only had one D-rank monster in the center, acting as an overlord.
As someone who had slaughtered S-rank monsters like they were toys, Dante could not help but feel amused. He simply entered sub-space and cast down the 3rd Rank Cosmic Nova on the city.
The huge beams, the size of SpaceX rockets, lanced through the city from above, causing the entire world to tremor and shake. When Dante stopped the spell, there was only a gigantic crater big enough to form a new sea if filled with water left of the city.
Knowing that doing so would increase his Supercoin payout, he naturally did so. Even though he still had a huge amount left, he wanted to farm more and make the school feel endless regret and fear as to the day he would try to cash out on it.
He then opened a portal and left the area, heading towards an area with S-rank monsters and above. On the way, while he teleported using space magic multiple times, he used replicated Mutation Cores to raise Absorption to the SS Rank.
[Superpower Name: Absorption
Superpower Rank: SS
Superpower Description: Allows the user to absorb the energy of a defeated foe, increasing their own SDI by an epic amount.]
At the SS Rank, Dante gained 1280% of the absorbed stats, which was basically 12.8 times. Yeah, this was just how nonsensical superpowers could be when raised to the higher ranks.
Being 'buffed' like this, Dante zeroed in on his target, an S-rank water element called the Overlord Killer Whale. It lived in a place that students and natives of this world did not dare to go, which was the deep sea area.
Players only found its information due to someone completing a 'dungeon' near the continental shelf area of the sea, which was far less dangerous, in which they gained information on many sea behemoths.
That player naturally sold the information for Supercoin and cashed out big. This student had done this long before Dante's time, probably becoming an old alumni by now.
Well, now it would benefit Dante. He first entered subspace and plunged into the water, but it was really no different for him than being on the ground or flying through the air because he was not physically in that space and could not feel the water pressure.
One thing he did notice with a frown was that his spirit sense was greatly suppressed in the water. Well, this was quite obvious since his spirit sense was birthed by the Limbo Enkindling flame and his Inferno Ascension technique overall, which was a fire-type Internal Art.
He was even lucky that his fire sub-type was hellfire, which was notoriously hard to extinguish with water or anything else, so it was only suppressed and not outright destroyed.
Well, it didn't matter anyway. The sea was large, sure, but the target he was looking for was large as well. Given that its area of activity had been narrowed down to here, all he had to do was search, and he would eventually find it.
Luck was clearly on Dante's side as he soon discovered the humongous white-colored what with reddish-black spots. It was casually moving through the water, every swing of its tail taking it hundreds of meters away at speeds beyond the fastest sea vehicle known to man.
Seeing it, Dante cycled through his powers and decided to use lightning magic since they were underwater. Unfortunately, he only knew up to the 2nd rank for lightning spells, so he chose the strongest one he knew.
Lightning Bolt!
A bolt of lightning with the size and circumference of a handle used for household mops was shot out from Dante's hand and struck the monster right near its blowhole, causing it to writhe in agony.
Even worse was the reaction from the ions in the seawater around that surged with energy from the bolt and feedback the charge, causing the entire sea area around here to light up with power.
If Dante's first strike was considered direct single-target damage, then this aftermath conduction was damage-over-time AOE. Unfortunately, while it caused his target pain, it did not one-shot it since it was only a 2nd rank spell, and Dante did not have any lightning spiritual cores, so no multiplier.
Normal 2nd rank spells were meant for wizards with 2 spiritual cores of 100 Intelligence each, meaning a total of 200 Intelligence. Putting aside its Constitution and Vitality, which were above 1500, the whale had more than 400 points of intelligence on its own.
However, the consumption of spiritual power was low for Dante, who was at the 5th Rank with 5 spiritual cores of 500 intelligence each. So, like a machine gun, he kept hurling 2nd rank Lightning Bolts at the whale, crippling it due to the stunning and paralyzing effect of electricity while benefiting from the active ions in the water.
After about 30 minutes of this, Dante had to stop. After all, the beast was thoroughly dead, and he didn't enjoy beating corpses. He simply collected the corpse into his quantum space and then left the water with a casual Short Blink spell.
With this experience in mind, he naturally decided not to bother with any water monsters henceforth since that was not the kind of battleground he could enjoy fighting in and left using a portal.
He was targeting the next S-rank monster as he wanted to accumulate up to 10 corpses and then absorb them at once for maximum effect!
His next victim was naturally a land-based monster, one that was basically a giant Tyrannosaurus rex. However, unlike typical rexes, this one had perfectly long and functional arms along with powerful legs that could likely sprint up the side of a mountain if given the chance.
In fact, when Dante appeared, it was currently massacring a herd of wildebeests the size of small houses each with its claws, grabbing them up and tossing them into its maw jovially. It probably wasn't even really hunting, more like snacking.
It was akin to a human who was watching a show while sticking his crummy fingers into the Pringles can for another chip. The same way those Pringles chips magically avoided one's fingers was similar to how the wildebeests futilely tried to scatter and avoid the Tyrannosaurus' claws.
The wildebeests needed a hero, one who was strong, one who was fast, and one who was fresh from the fight. Luckily, they had been blessed with the best possible option in the form of Dante.
For while the Tyrannosaurus was about to grab another wildebeest with a look of playful greed in its eyes, it was suddenly blasted away and sent flying through two mountains by a small figure radiating a blood-red aura full of martial power.
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