Reshare
Resharing Skill Predation, the skill received from the shadow beast Leo.
It worked.
The reshare of a skill he had picked up almost casually had succeeded without a hitch. This is huge. It really was an enormous win.
As long as I have Skill Sharing, I can lay hands on skills I was certain I could never own.
After receiving Leo's skill, Jin-soo reshared it and succeeded in seating Skill Predation on both his holy-attribute status window and his dark-attribute status window. A skill from a unique-grade class—one only a single person in the entire Tower was permitted to hold—had multiplied into three.
Most of the people with unique-grade classes or skills sit at the very peak of the Tower. The Dragon Lord, the Death Lord, the Moving Fortress, the Holy Saintess, the Dark Saintess—every one of them owned a unique-grade class or skill.
And if I could receive their core skills? He could not even begin to gauge how much stronger he might become.
Of course, unless those people have lost their minds, they are not going to share their main skills with me. They called it skill sharing, but in practice it was closer to Jin-soo unilaterally copying the other person's skill. The gain was his alone. For the player who permitted the share, there was nothing but a one-sided loss.
Not a physical loss, granted. Simply having to use a skill one had kept entirely to oneself alongside someone else was already as good as a loss. No one in their right mind would allow it.
If some complete stranger walked up and asked me to let them copy Shadow Summon or Army Summons, I would refuse. That much is obvious. No—it would not stop at refusal. The odds were high they would become an enemy on the order of a mortal foe.
It might be possible if I could offer compensation on that scale. But Skill Sharing was something only Jin-soo could use.
I can designate who I share a skill with. I cannot designate who shares a skill with me. In short, he could not even trade on the terms of I'll share one of mine, so you share one of yours.
And these are not people hurting for points. The holders of the skills Jin-soo wanted were top-tier players, few enough to count on one hand across the whole Tower. What could they possibly lack that would make them let him copy their skills?
I cannot simply take them by force, either. Where Garamikan the Death Lord was concerned, he fully intended to deliver a proper reckoning the moment they met. Crushing an opponent with raw power and receiving a skill from them, however, were entirely different matters.
They could refuse to the bitter end. Or they could deliberately share some worthless skill. Then Jin-soo would be the only one who lost.
Another thing that snagged at him was that the Blessing-exclusive skill he possessed was Skill Sharing, not skill copying. At the end of the day, it is the idea of borrowing something and using it together. That was why the level of the skill borrowed from Leo was such a mess, and why a skill shared from his holy status window into his dark status window kept its original level unchanged.
Put simply, if the misfortune of the original owner's death occurred, there was a high chance the skill Jin-soo had received would vanish as well. Forcing a share would be meaningless. There was no telling what a resentful opponent might do, and if he killed them to cut off later trouble, the skill he had gone to such lengths to obtain might disappear.
I need a test. The problem was that burning his scarce remaining uses of Skill Sharing on an experiment felt far too wasteful.
Wait. Then it struck him that Leo was a summon. Leo is a magic beast called from another dimension. Reverse-summon him, and he would return to the dimension where he had originally lived.
Can I use a shared skill while Leo is reverse-summoned? It was the best method he had—no risk at all, and a clean way to test the limits of a shared skill.
"Leo."
"Nyaang?"
"I'm going to reverse-summon you for a moment."
"Nyaaaang! Nyang! Nyang! Nyaaang!"
A fierce refusal pulsed through to him.
"You only need to be gone for about thirty seconds."
"Miyaooong! Kyaaaak!"
Whether he had failed to grasp what thirty seconds meant or simply hated the idea, Leo made his rejection unmistakably clear.
"Step away for a little while, and I'll have delicious drake meat waiting."
"Nyaaang? Nyang! Nyaaang!"
Leo hesitated a moment, then pressed his refusal even harder.
"I'll feed you nothing but drake meat for three days."
"Nyang? Nyang…… nyaang!"
Leo accepted Jin-soo's terms.
"See you in a bit, then."
Jin-soo reverse-summoned him. In that instant Leo's body blurred, then vanished altogether.
Will I be able to use them, or not? Leo had gone to another dimension, so Jin-soo thought it might still be possible.
Huh?
The moment Leo was reverse-summoned, a major change took place. They've gone inactive.
The three skills received from Leo had lost their light and sunk into a deep gray. Skill Predation and Stat Predation, seated in his holy-attribute status window, were no different.
Shadow Step. He tried the skill on the off chance, but as expected, it refused to activate. If a reverse-summon does this much... What would happen if the one he had shared from died?
They would turn this same deep gray and become unusable. Or they would vanish outright. Either way, the result was the same. Jin-soo would be unable to use the shared skills.
Summon Leo.
Jin-soo called him back.
"Nyang?"
Summoned once more into the Tower, Leo startled, glanced warily around, and found Jin-soo.
"Nyaang!"
Then he scolded him to produce the promised goods at once.
"Good work. Eat plenty."
Jin-soo hauled a heap of drake meat out of his inventory.
"Nyaang! Chomp! Chomp! Chomp!"
Delighted, Leo dug in with noisy gusto.
"Kkaak! Kkaak! Kkaak!"
Watching him, Kkami wailed in bitter misery. At the same time a fierce demand drove itself into Jin-soo's mind: do not play favorites among your summons.
"Hmm…… do you want this?"
He took ogre meat from his inventory and offered it to Kkami.
"Kkaak! Kkaak! Kkaak!"
Set beside the monster meat Kkami usually received, it was a tremendous delicacy. Even so, it could not satisfy a crow that had just watched Leo eating drake.
"That was a reward for Leo. I can't give you the same thing."
Jin-soo said it while stroking Kkami's head. In his heart, he wanted to give the crow drake meat as well.
But I can't. He could not hand the reward he had given Leo for a job well done to Kkami, who had done nothing at all. That would only spoil his summons.
"Kkaaaak!"
As if deeply wronged, Kkami let out a great cry and whipped its head aside.
"Nyaang?"
Leo, lost until then in the drake meat, glanced at the turned-away crow and stealthily stretched a forepaw toward the ogre. Plenty of drake still remained, and yet he coveted the ogre as well.
"Kkaak! Kkaak!"
Kkami, who had been sulking with its head turned, startled and blocked Leo's paw, laying claim to the ogre meat.
"Nyaang?"
Leo's eyes asked whether it had not been planning to leave the meat uneaten.
"Kkaak! Kkaak!"
Flap! Flap!
Kkami beat its wings furiously, as if to insist that was absolutely not the case, and then—
"Peck! Peck! Peck!"
—immediately set to devouring the ogre meat with diligent pecks.
"Nyaang…… chomp! Chomp!"
Looking regretful, Leo turned away and went back to the drake.
Unbelievable gluttons, the both of them.
With a wry smile, Jin-soo turned to a more serious question. What method might let him receive skills from other players?
With Sua, it seems possible. The problem was that Shin Sua had not yet obtained the keystone class and skills for which she had once been called the Holy Saintess.
The fame she won as the Holy Saintess came only after she met her younger sister, the Dark Saintess, Shin Sujeong. He had heard that the unique-grade advancement book Shin Sujeong gave her had played a major part.
Shin Sujeong cleared a hidden dungeon and came away with both a unique-grade holy-attribute healer advancement book and a dark-attribute healer advancement book. She herself was a player of a dark-attribute healer class, so she took the dark unique-grade advancement book and kept the holy one in storage. Then, when she met her older sister Shin Sua, she handed over the unique-grade holy healer advancement book.
I heard they struggled quite a bit at the start. Of course they had. Advance into a new class, and neutral skills and common skills remained, but every class skill vanished.
Abandoning class skills already leveled into the thousands, then growing an entirely new set from level 1, was anything but easy.
Huh? A thought cut across Jin-soo's mind.
Wait. Can I lock a level-1 skill I have received at 922? And if I can, wouldn't the level of the player who shared it be able to rise as well?
His eyes snapped wide.
If Level Lock could be applied to a received skill—and if, along with it, the skill level of the player who had shared it became fixed as well—
No one could help but be tempted.
Jin-soo's current Level Lock value was 922, and that number could only keep climbing.
Top-tier classes and skills are nearly impossible to obtain on the lower floors. Why? Because advancement books and skills for the highest classes dropped only when the highest monsters were hunted. Absurd luck, of course—or achieving an Impossible Feat, the way Jin-soo had—might make it possible.
But the difficulty was vicious beyond reason.
In truth, all-class common skills such as Inventory carried no penalty at all. Class-common skills were the same, short of an extreme case like a healer advancing into a warrior. Class skills were another matter entirely. Even advancing from a lower healer class into a higher healer class meant accepting the enormous penalty of abandoning the levels of one's existing class skills.
To grow stronger, you have to be ready to grow weaker first. It was a kind of contradiction.
The trouble was that the higher the class or skill, the more brutally difficult it became to raise its level. The Tower had a system, and no matter how vast the gap in grade, a gap according to level still existed, strict and undeniable.
The saying that level is king was an absolute truth.
Because of that, those who held the highest classes had to invest an extraordinary amount of time and effort simply to grow stronger than the lower classes they had abandoned.
You get forced into becoming a late bloomer. The sense of loss, when a class-skill level in the thousands crashed to a mere 1 because one had given up one's old class, defied imagination.
I have been through it myself. In truth, the Jin-soo of before his regression had been lucky. He had obtained the unique-grade class Dark Predator on a mere Floor 149 of the Tower.
When others had to abandon class skills in the thousands, Jin-soo had only needed to give up class skills in the hundreds.
But that is something one can speak of so lightly only when it is someone else's affair. Lucky or not, even abandoning class skills in the hundreds had felt as though flesh and bone were being ripped from his body by force. He could not begin to imagine how much worse the psychological pain would be for skills in the thousands.
Even so, those who obtained an advancement book for a higher class willingly bore that pain for the sake of a future in which they could grow stronger.
The problem is that even then, there is a limit. High-grade skills were already nightmarish to level, and the higher the level climbed, the more steeply that difficulty shot upward.
A skill's level receives experience according to its contribution in combat. The monsters were strong, so no matter how high a skill's grade, a low-level skill's contribution in battle was bound to be small. Raising the level was naturally grueling.
But if I use Level Lock, that can no longer be a problem at all. What if he could fix the level of a received skill? What if that fixed level also applied to the one who had shared it?
That would become an overwhelming advantage.
This could actually work.
A path had opened to receiving the core skills of the very highest players.