One Last System

It's been three weeks since I left the Sect. Or rather, three weeks since I last partook in activities of a general civilization.

All the trouble that I had when the journey began now felt meaningless when compared to the insane loneliness of my current life.

Three weeks into my journey, I finally finished the one thing that I believed to be the most important point of my progress.

By advancing to the eleventh stage and even pushing my progress up to nearly... half of a percent, I finally became strong enough to sustain my Mage's Tower.

And it was this notion that finally allowed me to expand my capabilities.

[Congratulations!]

[Your main class job changes from military mage to tactical mage!]

Was the one message I could recall from the moment of my breakthrough. Yet, outside of the change of the name for my main class... it did absolutely nothing.

Or so I would think if I couldn't turn my mage's tower into another skill, I could constantly keep on.

'Now that I think about it, it's not even a skill on its own,' I decided after taking quite a long time to analyze the situation. 'It's more like a catalyst that boosts my control over all the tools I amassed,' I thought before taking a sip of the bear.

"So, what do you think? Isn't this a great offer?" a man sitting in front of me asked, his face filled with excitement.

"I'm sorry, brother, but I'm not interested," I replied grumpily before taking another sip.

Right now, I finally managed to get a bit of interhuman activity. The only reason for such behavior was the fact that I finally found an Inn in this god-deserted place!

Only now, three weeks into my journey, I realized just how massive this continent was. And what was even more humbling was how the distance I was traveling through right now was nothing but a small speck on the map of the entire thing!

'Isn't this place way bigger than the earth?' I asked myself, once again ignoring whatever the man on the other end of the table was talking about.

"Right, man," I said, finally losing my patience with the speaker. I then reached out to my pocket and pulled out one of the cores of the stronger monsters that I kept on hunting. "Tell me about what I want to know, not your sexual escapades," I said, rolling the core towards the man.

This was the one pragmatic reason I found to sit down in an inn and waste time. It was the opportunity to learn more about my own situation and hopefully gather some news about Tuxi Outerpost, where Mia resided.

"The enlightened stage, isn't it?" the man smiled mysteriously before raising the cup to his face and taking an impressive sip. "There is quite a lot of perks to it," the man said, refusing to just simply elaborate.

He had to play the game of a mysterious figure first.

"What I wonder, though," he took another sip, "is why you are looking for this knowledge."

Even on the road, people were still people. And I could bet this man was already looking for ways to exploit the vulnerability that I exposed with my question.

"I just graduated from the contract with a sect," I explained with a small smile. Whether the man would take my word for it or not was outside of my sphere of influence.

But the sheer fact that he knew not if I was lying or not made my worst completely and utterly worthless for him.

"I went out to see the world in hopes that it would help me break through to that legendary realm," I said while constantly juggling my bolt and warden ability in the neverending dance of a grind.

"I see," the man muttered, taking another sip of his drink. The interest in his eyes faded away, proving that my excuse turned out to be quite common in this world. "Well then, you definitely have some things to look forward to once you reach a breakthrough," he said, leaning back in his chair.

"First off, your lifespan doubles," the man said after taking a moment to think. He then looked at my face before releasing a small laugh. "Not like it matters for a youngling like you, he added with a delicate sneer.

"Who doesn't want to live longer?" I replied softly, only pretending to care.

Right now, I was still too young to bother with how long my life would be. Learning that it would now be twice as long as I could initially expect was nice...

But that was generally all.

"As for the other stuff, it's said that the enlightened cultivators have the depth of their power furthered," the man said before taking a long sip of the drink. "No one will ever explain it to you... But their power changes. It as if..." the man hesitated before looking away, "as if their power no longer belonged to this world."

I didn't bother replying to the man's explanation. Even though he kept going for quite some time, I didn't hear anything even remotely interesting.

Not a single suggestion struck a chord with me; not a single idea appeared in my eyes from the combination of my unique approach and the common sense of this world.

Because the only thing that I learned from the man's words was a thing that I already knew.

Ever since I became capable of sustaining the Mage's Tower indefinitely with just my own mana alone, my approach to the magic changed as well.

Previously, my mind was behind all the formations that I held. I only needed to recall their general details, but keep them up and running...

Just the task of supplying mana to each of them was challenging, not to speak about introducing minute changes if the need arose.

In other words, I reached a limit to how useful those formations could be. And no matter how hard I tried to improve beyond that point, my own mental capability turned into the blockade that stopped me.

But this problem didn't exist within my mage's tower.

As if taking all that burden off my shoulders, the Mage's Tower would incorporate all my formations, wardens, and other tools into its own structure. And while commanding the ultimate spell of mine, I had perfect control over every aspect of this combined mess of tools.

'How naive it was of me to think that this spell was weak,' I thought, recalling my initial impression of my ultimate.

Sure, for a skill called ultimate, it wasn't flashy at all. But now that my strength reached a sufficient level, it turned out to be a mind-boggling spell!

In short words, the Mage Tower introduced three changes to the rooster of my skills.

First, it would improve my base skills, turning them into an alternate version. Secondly, it would improve my magic flow and grant me nearly perfect control over the area of the spell's effect. And lastly, it would unite the effects of all my formations and items only to then strengthen them.

'I guess this skill is the very essence of my class,' I thought, standing up as the usefulness of the random traveler I met ended.

There was no use sitting down and wasting my time listening to his rambling.

I left the inn without any spare words left. And in an instant, I turned my mind back to its usual set of split attention.

My flesh and bones moved my body forward, keeping it moving. My soul immersed itself into the portable formation that I embedded into my robes, allowing me to passively cultivate at all times. And lastly, my mind delved into the technicalities of the magic that I discovered in an attempt to finish the one task that kept on bothering me.

The one problem that I have yet to solve.

And it was my speed.

According to the auction hall boss' words, the travel should take me between one or two months.

While it was strange, how could those two places be so far apart when we both only traveled a few days away from the barrier at the very most. Yet, just like I couldn't understand magic to any satisfactory degree, the same could be said about the world in general.

'Trying to figure it out on my own would only demotivate me in the long run,' I thought, ignoring the topic as I focused on the one thing that was important.

Because there was one useful thing that I learned about my current progress.

After three weeks on the road spent mostly on traveling at my top speed, I managed to cover... a quarter of the entire distance.

In other words, if I kept on going at the current rate, then I would only reach Mia's place sometime in the next three months!

And that was something that I couldn't accept.

Not only because I was hard-pressed to reunite with my flame. That alone I could handle for way longer. But since the boss claimed this trip would take two months at most...

Didn't that mean that I could actually end up too late to prevent any shenanigans Lucius would potentially attempt to bring on Mia?

'Fuck it,' I ultimately thought, juggling all the knowledge about magic and formations that I assimilated to that point.

Up to this moment, I tried a conservative approach in coming up with a movement formation. An approach that would be well-suited to this magic-oriented world. One that, even when seen, would make it hard for me to explain it.

But I no longer had the time for that. And as a child of my age, there was one way of acceleration that I was both passionate about and actually quite knowledgeable too.

'Let's see how much of rocket science do I still remember!'

Yet, just as I was about to create a quick set of formations that would use the power of explosions to carry me forward, I took a glimpse at my status.

And my mood instantly worsened.

Sure, I progressed. I did progress by quite a damned lot at that!

After absorbing every last piece of haul that I gathered over the last three weeks, I managed to bring the progress of each of my statistics to between four hundred and five hundred million each.

On its own, this was twenty times as much progress as I had to do to break through the tenth stage!

But when combined all together, it was less than half of the percent of my current requirement to raise my level.

'No, I can't think too much about it,' I forced myself to change my mindset, refocusing my attention on the task at hand.

'Explosive movement it was,' I thought before picking up a few stones from the side of the road.

Once again, those stones would bear witness to the conception of a completely new kind of formation!