Skill Synthesis

What a waste.

The Ant Angler Colony Summon. He'd burned it because he was in a hurry, and locked its level at 122 while he was at it.

If I'd had the leisure, I would have thought it through. He hadn't had that leisure. It overlaps far too much with the Dragon Tooth Soldiers.

If he'd learned it on the dark-affinity status window instead, it might have patched the Shadow Summons' greatest flaw — their lack of numbers.

At the time, it was the best I could do. Without the Frost Dragon Mage's ice-attribute skills and the Dragon Tooth Soldier skill, he never would have survived that crisis. The ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Shadow Summons had been locked behind cooldown, impossible to call.

If he'd switched status windows out of some petty urge to squeeze out a little more efficiency, and the ice barrier sealing the entrance had vanished, he could not have held the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠ant anglers pouring in. That spot might well have become Jin-soo's grave.

It's already done. No point regretting it. Obsessing over what he couldn't change would buy him nothing but gloom and frustration.

I did pick up a fair number of class-change tomes and skill books. The disappointment was that not a single class-change tome met his eye. The Blood Demon Swordsman is due for a swap soon, too.

It stung to throw away the advantages of his current class skills. Still, growth demanded knowing when to discard something without flinching. Well. Strictly speaking, it's the blessings that make that possible.

Jin-soo checked the blessings that had grown.

All of them up to 42.2 percent. And the level locks rose with them. He could now raise 122 class skills, common active skills, and passive skills to level 222.

This is absurd. It felt like only yesterday that he'd agonized over which skills to push to level 22, with a mere two T.O. to spend. That worry was gone. Even if I lock every skill I own at 222, I'll still have T.O. to spare.

A satisfied smile rose to Jin-soo's lips of its own accord.

The equipped-item level lock climbed too — 122 items, up to level 222.

He immediately raised the Ring of Revival and the Radiant Longsword to level 222. The Blood-Sucking Sword had already surpassed level 222 through its own growth, so there was no need to spend a lock on it.

Now it's actually usable. Revival's cooldown had dropped to one hour, and it could mend fairly serious wounds.

When is the Radiant Longsword going to turn into Baekcheonsingeom? He had the feeling it was still a long way off. Still. I've got more skills, and they're stronger. Once the blessings grew further, he could forge it into Baekcheonsingeom eventually. He could afford to wait.

Did I get a new blessing-exclusive skill this time? On the last growth, he'd received a blessing that could lock his one and only blessing-exclusive skill — twenty-two of them — at level 122. If this time that same thing had merely expanded from 122 locks to level 222, it would be genuinely stifling.

Synthesis? Across every memory from before his regression, it was a kind of skill name he had never once heard.

A blessing-exclusive skill.

Jin-soo's eyes flashed. At last, he had one more blessing-exclusive skill.

What does it actually do?

He opened the detailed information for Synthesis.

It fuses two skills into one?

The frightening part was that the skills used as materials were destroyed either way — success or failure.

Level it first.

Jin-soo spent blessing-exclusive skill level-lock stacks and raised Synthesis to level 122. The cumulative stacks jumped to 122, and the cooldown shrank to two hours.

Two other changes came with it.

It tells me the success rate and the result in advance?

He selected Ice Arrow and Ice Barrier as the targets.

Obviously not.

Jin-soo selected No. A success rate of a mere 6.22 percent. Who would take that gamble?

Even if it succeeded, the result looked thoroughly unimpressive.

Ice Barrier Arrow? Does that mean I can fire an ice barrier like an arrow? It didn't look particularly useful.

Let's try something else.

He paired his existing skills and checked the rates.

A hundred percent — and it's still a loss.

Fuse Ice Arrow with Piercing Ice Arrow and get Piercing Ice Arrow? Then Ice Arrow simply vanished, and he gained nothing at all.

Well. The synthesized skill's attack power might rise above the original. He had no way of knowing whether that rise would mean anything. In the worst case, it could match the existing Piercing Ice Arrow, or fall short of it.

Synthesis doesn't guarantee a good result. As with Ice Barrier Arrow, it could spit out something grotesque.

In that light, raising Synthesis to level 122 had been an excellent decision. The stacks and the cooldown had improved, of course — but now he could see the success rate and the result before he committed.

What about this?

The success rate is high. The problem was what Dragon Tooth Soldier Colony Summon actually was.

It'd be nice if I could see the details too. There was no way to.

Hold off. Dragon Tooth Soldiers and Ant Angler Colony Summon were both good skills. A strong result would be a blessing. Anything else would be a serious problem.

Even if it succeeded and the Dragon Tooth Soldier skill grew stronger, what if the cost changed so that every cast consumed the tooth of a dragon-type monster?

That turns into an economic problem. Until Synthesis, a blessing skill, rose in level and gave him more reliable information, holding off looked wiser.

Jin-soo ran the skills he owned through as materials, one pairing after another, checking success rates and the skills that would be created.

Nothing I'd actually commit to. It felt like he'd been handed a chicken rib of a skill — ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠too much of a waste to throw away, not enough meat to bite. Then a thought struck him.

Could this work too?

He tried using the Frost Dragon Mage's class skill, Ice Arrow, together with the common skill Magic Arrow.

It works? Class skills and common skills could be synthesized.

Let's do it. Losing Ice Arrow would sting a little, but it wasn't a major penalty. Magic Arrow he could simply relearn by buying another skill book. Those books were quite cheap.

I need a test.

For the first time, Jin-soo selected Yes.

Jin-soo stared at his status window.

Jackpot.

His face brightened.

A separate synthesized-skill window had appeared. Enhanced Ice Arrow sat there — not among his class skills, and not among his common skills.

The level is what matters. Ice Arrow had been level 222. Magic Arrow had been level 2. So what level was the Enhanced Ice Arrow born of the two? It might have been 2. It might have been 22. It might have been 222.

It's 222. It had followed the higher level.

Advance to a higher class, and the old class's skills are simply destroyed. That was common sense.

What about synthesized skills? If they didn't vanish on advancement — if they remained —

That would be an absolute jackpot. No need to abandon the class skills he'd already level-locked.

Put it in extreme terms. What if I turned every Frost Dragon Mage class skill into a synthesized skill, then changed class to something like Flame Dragon Mage? He might be able to use ice-attribute and flame-attribute attack magic at the same time.

And that wouldn't be the end. Even among common skills, some carried acquisition restrictions. The Flame of Purification he'd learned was exactly that sort.

Flame of Purification is a mage-exclusive skill. Change to any class that wasn't a mage, and it was supposed to vanish. That was normal.

What if I made Flame of Purification a synthesized skill, then changed class to something like healer or assassin? He didn't know the result yet. But if it didn't disappear — if it stayed —

I might be able to cast a mage's attack spells while holding a warrior class. And that still wouldn't be the end.

He might be able to hold every other class's core skills at once: a healer's recovery, a tank's protection, an assassin's stealth.

I need to check. Right now. To do that, he had to change status windows.

The Frost Dragon Mage is a class I can keep using for a long while yet. The Blood Demon Swordsman, on the other hand, he'd already been considering replacing.

It's a good match for the Blood-Sucking Sword, so I hadn't been in a rush. If he could keep the Blood Demon Swordsman's core skills intact, swapping immediately would be no problem at all.

Jin-soo switched his status window to the dark affinity.

As expected. A synthesized skill made on the holy-affinity status window doesn't carry over. Because the skill had been born of a blessing, he'd hoped it might persist even after the window changed. Apparently that hope had been nothing but a thief's greed.

First, let's make a synthesized skill.

He set about finding the skill that paired best with Bloodsuck, the Blood Demon Swordsman's main skill.

Not this one. He'd assumed the success rate would be high because they belonged to the same class. It wasn't. He kept trying to mix Bloodsuck with this skill and that.

So the rate between Dragon Tooth Soldiers and Ant Angler Colony Summon really was abnormally high. Most syntheses of Bloodsuck with other skills fell under 50 percent. At best, they scraped around 60.

I thought this would be easy. Still, checking the rates in advance had given him a few pieces of information.

The success rate for synthesizing an active with a passive is nearly zero. Almost without exception, under 1 percent.

Even with the same attribute, if the skill types are too extreme, it drops below 10 percent. Ice Arrow and Ice Barrier had been that case.

The ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠more similar the skills, the higher the success rate climbs. Dragon Tooth Soldiers and Ant Angler Colony Summon shared the trait of being summoning skills.

Ice Arrow and Piercing Ice Arrow differed only in power; they were effectively the same skill. Ice Arrow and Magic Arrow differed only in attribute, and might as well have been the same skill too.

A faint disappointment settled in.

So in the end, the skills I can synthesize are already decided. Mixing flame-attribute skills with ice-attribute skills, or attack skills with defense skills, was no different from gambling in hopes of a miracle.

Maybe it's just because the level is still low. The blessing skill Synthesis was only level 122.

There's plenty of room to grow. It could rise to 222, the way class and common skills did — and perhaps, just as his stats had reached 922, blessing-skill levels could be locked at 922 as well.

If the level climbs higher, synthesizing extreme skills might become possible. Not right now, of course.

For now, play it safe.

Jin-soo kept struggling to push the success rate between Bloodsuck and his other skills any higher.

Bloodsuck is such an unusual skill that it's the problem. Wondering whether he ought to buy a new skill book, he compared Bloodsuck's rates against everything he already owned.

Do I even need to try this one? Only one skill remained whose success rate he hadn't checked. Shadow Summons.

They have nothing in common except that they're both active. At a glance, the rate looked like it would fall under 10 percent.

Still. I should check. It was the last one anyway. Jin-soo pulled up the synthesis rate between Bloodsuck and Shadow Summons.

"Huh?"

Surprise washed over his face.

"Eighty-two percent?"

The probability was staggeringly high.