Ascension of the Master Assassin - Chapter 4: Monster Cores

Rather than feeling excitement and joy, a spine-chilling cold swept through Venn’s entire body the moment he realised the reason why he had received a title. Apparently, the game had determined that he had almost completed reading the books that were currently in Roswell even though he had only just begun playing the game.

How was the game able to detect this?

Could the game be capable of reading his mind?

Wouldn’t the Human Alliance stop the launching of Heaven Descent and legally steal the technology of the game for their own uses seeing that the applications of a virtual world are limitless?

Why would the council allow Heaven Descent to operate?

Just who are the developers of the game in the first place? Their identities were shrouded in secret in the future too.

Venn couldn’t help but worry as mountains of thoughts piled up in his mind, overclocking his brain to its limit.

After mulling over the subject for several minutes, Venn abruptly stopped his thoughts and forcefully calmed himself down.

“It’s no use to ponder about this.” He thought internally as he remained in his composure.

In any case, now was not the time for him to be worried about this. There were more pressing issues at hand.

Throwing away the useless thoughts that were occupying his mind, Venn began to strategize his future path.

Unlike other traditional multiplayer online games, jobs and classes do not exist in Heaven Descent.

What governs the power system of Heaven Descent is the unique game mechanism of monster cores.

The concept of monster cores was originally implemented by the AI as a way to differentiate players’ differing play style and provide a solution to suit their schedule, catering to both casual players and serious players.

Once a player’s avatar reaches level 10, the ability slots to absorb monster cores would be activated. At that time, players would be prompted to make a one-time irreversible decision on how many branches of monster cores they wish to activate.

In the beginning when players had minimal info and were still in the process of exploring the game, it would often lead to tragedies where many of them had to delete their avatar and re-train a new account.

But now that half a year has passed, newbies entering the game have learnt the lessons from the painful experiences of their predecessors, be it through the forum or from word of mouth.

There is a maximum of 5 types of cores that a player could unlock. Doing so would enable them to learn a particular branch of monster skills out of the 16 types.

Having more cores would add versatility and unpredictability to a player skillset, and at any given time, prove to be vital to a player’s success in achieving greatness.

However, there is a major drawback in unlocking several cores.

For every additional core that a player chooses to unlock, the experience points needed to level up will increase by twofold.

In other words, it meant that by unlocking all 5 cores, one had to train 32 times harder than someone who chooses not to activate any elemental core.

That is not all, even if one unlocks the slots, they have to absorb a monster core as material in order to gain a skill too.

Unfortunately, the drop rate of a monster core has an extremely low probability of around one in a million, meaning that the price of a monster core is often exorbitant in the market.

Not everyone could afford to train such a resource-heavy avatar except for those with massive wealth and power.

Nevertheless, despite all the drawbacks, there are countless individuals choosing the option of unlocking multiple cores in the hope of becoming a God in the game.

Many of them are hoping for a miracle that they can make it, believing that they are unique and special, but like the case of the stock market, these short-sighted and delusional people would make up the bulk of the cannon folders that the strong devours.

***

Deep in his thought, Venn’s eyebrows furrowed as he stared at his stats panel. In his previous life, he had very little combat experience since most of the time, he was delving deep in the library because of the limiting contract signed with Azure Corporation.

But that doesn’t mean he is ignorant about the game. On the contrary, because of the nature of his job as a library rat, he currently faces a limitless path of choices on how to progress his avatar.

Precious knowledge about hunting grounds; monster drops; overpowered skills; money-making opportunities and more that he had accumulated and uncovered in the past, had now turned into competitive advantages that he had over the others.

Thus, it was not an exaggeration that he believed that he had the capabilities to climb to the apex of Heaven’s Descent seeing that he could be deemed as a literal walking encyclopaedia!

Finally, after some pondering, Venn’s eyes brightened as he finally thought of the most efficient way of levelling.

He remembered that there was a repeatable errand quest that he discovered back then during the times when he was working in the library that involved delivering letters to random NPCs.

Despite the generous rewards given, the quest was rather simple and was honestly kind of boring to do. The entire quest consisted of him going to the library to pick up a letter and tracking down the NPCs in the city before passing them the letter personally onto their hands.

Other than the strange vibe he got from the NPCs ignoring him or becoming scared of him after receiving the letter, there wasn’t an ounce of fascination about that quest.

As for the issue with the celestial quest, he decided to do whatever he could to grow stronger before attempting it. Mindlessly attempting a celestial quest without any rate of success will only result in death and a 48 hours’ time-out being imposed on his account.

With that being said, he would be a fool not to attempt the quest.