RETURN OF THE SHADOW - Chapter 203

In another fifteen minutes, Shadow was back at the temple on the way to meet the deacon. He quickly exchanged the supplies that the town head and given him and was given the rewards of his quest.

“Temple of the twelve reputation points +20;”

“Temple of the twelve contribution points +50;”

“Experience points + 5000;”

The experience points put him through another level making him a level 18 player. He needed to increase his levels to have a decent chance against the knuckers. There were dungeons available for him to participate at this level, but he didn’t want to work on them. He needed experience the most as he was sure that he wouldn’t be able to spend his time in the game later. He had quickly allocated his free attribute points.

Character: Shadow Tyrant (Human)

Affiliated Village: Black Rock Village.

Affiliated City: White Hear City (Capital)

Title: Kade’s apprentice, First Citizen of White Heart City, Dwarf’s friend.

Hidden Title: Negotiator

Job: Assassin

Level: 18

Exp: 2310/19000

HP: 7500/7500; MP: 335000/3350; SP: 3800/3800

Physical Attack: 210;

Defense: 98; Attack Speed: 134; Movement Speed: 136; Willpower: 74 ; Balance: 77; Focus/Search: 102; Reflect Damage: 6; Magic Resist: 40; Luck: *; Charm: *;

Attributes: Strength 98, Agility 95, Endurance 67, Intelligence 60, Vitality 62, Perception 57.

No Special Racial Attributes or weakness.

Free Attributes Points: 0;

Though the quest took a lot of time to complete and caused him a significant amount of tension, he was quite satisfied by it as he not only got the contribution points and reputation from the temple, but also got half of the required town reputation and the option to go to the coastal guard station as frequently as he wanted.

He first thought of going ahead and accept the forging services quest. It will not only get him acquainted to the mainstay armaments of the coastal guard but also grant him experience and free money or contribution points whichever he desired. But he remembered the main reason for coming to the town which was to kill Knuckers. He needed the antivenom to be able to concentrate on an isolated knucker as he remembered that it would usually call upon fast moving smaller animals for support. So, he went to the tamer for the blood.

He got the blood from the secretary at the tamer’s place and then he decided to work on the four beasts that he had taken as pets recently using the tame beast skill. The four were in his pet pouch whom he summoned out to check their condition. Pets take almost triple the time to recover, if they are in a basic pet pouch. There would be advanced pet pouches that he could get which would increase the recovery time of the pets, but in almost all kinds of pet pouches the recovery times is less than that the pet would have outside.

The snake had already recovered from its injuries, but its health was still low. Its body was already in mend. The lizards on the other hand were all crippled before being taken as pets. So, he had to perform a bit of first aid and reconnect the crippled parts properly according the instruction seen in the book given to him by Kiran.

Just like the monsters, the pets also tend to cure themselves when given time, but it is much slower if they are not given proper food. Even the beasts that are crippled in the wild wouldn’t heal faster if they didn’t get to eat anything. That is the reason, tamers were in high demand in the game. They could use their mixtures and pills to heal and speed up the beasts, but they required a large amount of land to raise the pets. Technically, even alchemists could do that, but most of the alchemist were focused on creating consumables for their players and didn’t have much time to focus on the pets.

There were a few who managed to accomplish both, but alchemy was a very time-consuming secondary profession and they would lag behind. Forging and engineering could be sped up with the right tools and experience players would be much faster but making potions and mixtures by its nature required more time to create as faster stirring or improperly mixed substance would be very dangerous and fail. Even most tamer players depended on the healing skills of their occupation and forging to become higher level tamers.

So, Balthazar had always wondered if it is the right thing for him to pursue this field along with forging and alchemy. But he realized that he already had two most important parts of the field covered and it would be a waste to deny the experience and benefits that came along with it. He could just be a tamer apprentice all his life, but it still was better than not pursuing it entirely.

The main problem was that a compound profession like tamer was much more harder than engineering and it required a proper safe space to practice. Unlike the engineering, forging and alchemy associations which require a smaller space with workshops for individual engineers, forgers or alchemists to work, the same isn’t enough for a tamer.

Tamers need large spaces enough for their pets to be trained and treated. In later stages of the game, the pets would increase in size and hence small places wouldn’t be enough for tamers. So, tamers association are usually only present in cities and they are placed at the edges of these places as they require a large space and the inherent security issues that come up with having so many beasts in a place like a zoo.

In fact, Balthazar knew that some guilds used their tamers to buy land and use it as a zoo or petting zoos in guild cities to attract players to see and know about them while collecting fees. This was useful to many new players and most of the rich people who wanted to experience the beasts would also be attracted to such spots. As the game included all the animals that were actually found to have existed since ancient times, including prehistoric ones like dinosaurs, such petting zoos would become wildly famous in the game.

Balthazar didn’t care about all of this, but he did need a place for his pets. He also hoped that he could leave the two horses in some place and grow them up. There weren’t of much use to him at this level. He couldn’t even use them as mounts but only for transport of goods. So, he had plans to leave them till he increased his level. So, he decided to ask the secretary.

“Do you provide any services to hold and take care of other’s pets,” he asked the secretary.

“We do. We have a charge per day to hold beasts at our farm or stables. Their food and other necessities would be taken care of,” said the secretary. “But Tamer Kiran informed me to not let you avail these services. You are his student. So, you can use the infrastructure, but you need to take care of all the animals that you leave here.”

That was both a good and bad thing for Balthazar. It gave him an opportunity to practice taming and it would allow his pets to recover faster. But it would also require him to take care of them frequently. A pet needs proper food and elixirs at proper intervals if one intended to increase its level and skills. So, it would require him to get back to the taming place at least a few times per day, if he wanted to maintain them as pets.

“Can I sell pets to you?” he asked the secretary.

“Sure! The value of the pets depends on the quality and the health of the pets. Kiran also insisted that you sell only pets in a healthy condition,” said the secretary. It was clear to Balthazar that learning taming from the tamer had made him a disciple and he would be bound to his rules in this town. He half wished that he had waited and learned taming skill from taming association in the White Heart city, but that also had required him to complete a bunch of quests to get become a taming apprentice.

He left the beasts that he has collected in a couple of cages, with the three lizards in one cage and the snake in another. He put in some meat from the other beasts that he had killed so that he wouldn’t need to come and maintain them anytime soon. He also bought enough critters to fill his pet pouches before going to the alchemist association to practice on his alchemy skills.

He needed to create both the antivenom and he also had plans to create elixirs for his pets. These elixirs were similar to the antidotes too. Some of them can help a wide variety of pets while others which are focused on a pet or two will be much easier. Both the book from Arius and the notes from Kiran had information on such elixirs which he intended to create.

He had set specific timings for his experiments. His first priority was the antivenom followed by the elixirs for his pets. Both would increase his alchemy proficiency and he had test subjects ready. If he failed to produce a decent antidote, he was going to continue all night long on it, but if he did finish with them, his next destination was the coastal guard. The forging services workshop was very attractive to him as he could quickly gather experience from the place. He was sure that he will get enough to jump to level 19 by the time he reaches the knuckers if he makes good use of the quest.

He took booked an intermediate alchemical workshop from the alchemist association of the town. The intermediate alchemist workshop was quite similar to the forging workshop. It had tools to process various ingredients like grinders, mixers, centrifuges, etc. It also had different kinds of beaker, containers, tools like pipettes which could be used to regulate the quantities and rate of various liquids. It would remind a person of a chemistry lab and it also has a tier 1 mystic fire which could be used for use by the alchemists. The tier 1 fire was called the dusk brown fire.

[Dusk Brown Fire] (Tier 1 Mystic Fire)

Can provide a very high temperature. It can provide a temporary increase in the stability of the items it is in contact with.

This was one of the good mystic fires that could be useful in experimenting in alchemy or even forging. The increase in stability would allow the player more time to experiment in both alchemy or forging of elixirs or equipment. Even if a player assimilated that mystic fire, it would be very useful as all his armaments would have an increase in stability when the player is using it and the durability would decrease at a much lower rate.

He first decided to work on the potions that used the blood of the infected beasts. It was much simpler to create these antidotes, if he had the blood of the infected animals. It wasn’t even a complicated process and within five minutes, his first antidote for the horned toad’s poison was ready. He tested it on a two small critters that he had bought and found it to be fairly effective. He also injected himself with a dose of the antidote to check the duration of the antidote affect by using poison on him while he continued the experiment. As the antidote was recognized by the system, he was given experience and proficiency. As it was made using the techniques detailed in the notes of the battlemage Arius, it was not considered an original creation and was named as horned toad blood refinement antidote by the system.

He continued for another half an hour by increasing the amount of blood and herbs he processed at a time to create multiple doses of the antidote at a time. After an hour, he realized that he was able to concoct up to 10 doses at a time with a decent rate of success, but he also needed more herbs to be collected.

The amount of poison needed to infect a person was lot less than the materials for the antidote, so he had more poison than the materials for the antidote. He also recognized that the antidote would only be valid for about 15 minutes before it is no longer effective. He had also managed to create about 20 doses of the antidote for use an hour before the time he has set to spend on the antidote using the blood. He had enough for himself to protect against the horned toad which were the ones he considered to be most dangerous. These were fast and small which would cause him to be in serious danger when he planned to hunt the knuckers.

After he had managed to create the antidote for the horned toad’s poison from the blood of the infected beasts, he tried to create more from the flesh of the other beasts like the bipod serpent and gharial which lived alongside the horned toads. This method was going to be much harder to get the proper antidote for the horned toad’s poison, but it would be much stable, and it would be effective for a longer duration.

He continued to experiment on with the composition of the herbs and the paste made from the meat of the beasts. He had managed to create an antidote withing 20 minutes which was recognized by the system, but as he tested it on his beast, there were clear side effects. He repeated with small changes to try again, but there ended up being other side effects. This continued for some time with the side-effects usually being varying amounts of decrease in health or mana or even paralysis and blindness.

Uncertain of the effects on the test animals, Shadow had to even use himself as a subject for the ones when he was uncertain of the side effects. Finally, after a period of four more hours in the game, he finally got an antidote that was decent and had an effect which persisted for longer than 40 minutes on him without any side-effects. He continued for another one hour trying to improve the performance before settling on a composition of the recipe. With that, he was quite satisfied with his effort on the antidotes.

He had half a mind to continue with the elixirs for his pets, but he considered the forging service quest more as he needed experience more than increasing the capability of his pets right now. The only pets that he intended to improve were the owl, fireglows and the two horses none of which he had an urgent need to improve. The first thing he required was more experience and probably more people to help at this town.

He first called Rudra and Slaine to talk to them about considering development in the five elements empire in collaboration with the Divine Swords. Knowing the future, Balthazar understood the significance of having control over a few places with the coast. It would provide methods of transport over different places and also several resources that couldn’t be found in other places.

Though Rudra initially felt that it was more than they could digest, upon the insistence of Balthazar, he decided to let a small group from the guild to do as Balthazar suggested, but only that it would be done after a couple of days. It was hard to get reputation or go to another empire. They have put in a lot of effort and he needed to find someone trustworthy who could go to another empire to develop a guild branch there.