Only I Level Up

Thirty minutes remaining.

I needed to allocate my stats and prepare for whatever came next.

I pulled up my status window at once.

The window had been hovering in front of me ever since I entered the eleventh floor. The contents themselves were straightforward enough: at Level 1, I had three hundred points to invest however I pleased.

The Archetypal Armor and the Celestial Axis Whale Talisman still work the same.

Everything except pure base stats remained unchanged. Gear, tools, talismans, classes, skills—all of it. But right now, I had no class at all.

The reason was simple.

Hidden Classes forged through Great Inheritance!

This was one of the gifts the Angel of Blessing, Gabriel, had granted me after my overwhelming victory on God's Island. It forged Hidden Classes connected to me. When ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠I first left God's Island, it had produced Destroyer and Warlock. This time, after mastering the Star-Absorbing Great Method and completing Cheonma Shingong, it had even forged Heavenly Demon as a class.

It was a genuine miracle. It meant I could obtain every Hidden Class related to what I had done and acquired.

To claim the Heavenly Demon Hidden Class the normal way, I'd have to go to the Heavenly Mountain Cult and be formally recognized as the Heavenly Demon.

I'd have to head for the Heavenly Mountain Cult, defeat the Heavenly Demon, win the recognition of ten thousand disciples, and ascend the throne before I could inherit the class. But Great Inheritance ignored even the prescribed path to obtaining a class. It was the power to create the inheritance itself—a miracle, or a cheat so brazen the word barely covered it.

I could choose any of those three classes whenever I felt like it.

…Heavenly Demon.

Of the three, the name that snagged my eye was Heavenly Demon. Not a bad option. With Cheonma Shingong already in hand, becoming the Heavenly Demon would let me unleash overwhelming martial might. I had seen with my own eyes how terrifying even a half-finished Heavenly Demon—one who had never mastered the Star-Absorbing Great Method—could be. I could become the Primordial Heavenly Demon, the Evil God itself.

And yet.

It doesn't sit right with me.

Maybe it was the memory of the Evil God's thrashing demand that I abandon my humanity. The name Heavenly Demon simply didn't appeal. More than that—

…Even the complete Evil God ended up sealed inside the Cheonmado.

Even the intact Evil God had ultimately been sealed—by nothing more than a single blade. Heavenly Demon was a loser's name. I intended only to win, to press forward without compromise. What I wanted was an inheritance whose name no one could approach, whose sealing no one would even dare attempt. A story that would look down on the world and make it tremble!

I desire it. The inheritance of a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠legacy that surpasses everything.

My true desire for Great Inheritance was only one thing: a succession that would outstrip Randolph's titles of Star's Successor and Supreme Sword Saint. Whether Heavenly Demon truly surpassed those two was, honestly, an open question.

…Whether such a thing even existed, I didn't know. So for now, I left the Heavenly Demon Hidden Class as a last resort.

Right now, allocating stats came first.

The maximum I can put into any single stat is… one hundred.

To properly exploit the Celestial Axis Whale Talisman, Strength had to come first.

I kept dumping points into Strength until it stopped me cold after exactly ninety. Pure Strength at one hundred. Nothing higher. Two hundred ten points left.

I stroked my chin. Spreading the rest evenly was the sensible choice in every respect. There was no such thing as an unimportant stat. Even Intelligence, which most people dismissed as nothing special, played an enormous role—proficiency when learning something new, mental resistance, skill accuracy, skill success rate ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠and duration, and even the hidden option of affinity.

Mental resistance from Intelligence is already covered by the Heart of the Iron-Blooded Lord, so I don't need it for that right now.

I had no grinding to do at the moment, and no need to raise anyone's affinity. None of my skills were projectiles. Intelligence, then, could be set aside for pure combat purposes.

That left Agility, Stamina, and Magic—and the question of how much to put into each.

Done.

I finished the allocation and smiled.

…That would do.

Someone might wonder why I'd raised Intelligence instead of Stamina.

The duration of Heavenly Demon Descent is tied to Intelligence.

Higher Intelligence extended skill duration. Low Intelligence could make a skill fail outright, or prevent it from activating at all. Skill tooltips never mentioned this, so plenty of people never learned it.

Randolph's stats all rose by twelve together every level, so he never needed to invest extra. That was the only reason.

Cases where every stat maxed out with each level-up were vanishingly rare. A lot of people overlooked the need to raise Intelligence. At the very least you wanted Intelligence from your gear—but gear that boosted Intelligence was scarce, and most people hunted for Strength, Stamina, or Magic instead. They never realized that the occasional "skill failure" could mean death. Putting some points into it was simply good sense.

The problem was Stamina. A mere ten—Level 1 territory. Stamina was defense. A single hit would land as a critical.

Then I just don't get hit.

If I never took a hit, it didn't matter. They had far less information about stats than I did. Why the Tower of the War God had bothered to apply the players' system as-is, I couldn't say—but thanks to it, I held the advantage from the start.

And that wasn't the end of it.

I'll take a perfect advantage.

I still hadn't used everything I had. Even setting Hidden Classes aside, there were privileges that connected me to Randolph.

Even looking at it, I almost laughed. …Was there any way to seize a more perfect advantage than this?

The Broken Fragments of the Golden Rule I had left amounted to more than thirteen thousand hours. Using only the Intact Golden Rules, I could buy everything on the list. And that wasn't all.

…Until what I wanted appeared. Until something useful showed up. I spun the wheel the way you'd pull for five-stars in a mobile game. It didn't matter. Ten hours a pop—I had enough left over even after refreshing endlessly. Simple math said I could refresh one thousand three hundred forty-four times.

While everyone else poured their soul into a ten-thousand-won gacha, I was the only one with a hundred million, chin propped on my hand, tapping the button with a light finger.

I don't envy Mansour.

If anything, Mansour might envy me right now. Broken Fragments of the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Golden Rule were treasures that couldn't be converted into mere money.

And the Golden Rule Shop sold every kind of rarity. It didn't peddle Unique-grade items outright, but it sold the materials that could become Unique. I was certain the Empire held Wilhelm's holy swords—Path of Light and Sacred Path—precisely because of the Golden Rule Shop.

Of course, most of those materials that surfaced in the shop were the relics of dead characters. Characters who had died and evaporated—and the countless pieces of gear they had owned. Naturally, Wilhelm sat at the center of it all.

Wilhelm had eight Unique-grade pieces of equipment.

And when he died, the materials broken down from them had all transferred to the Golden Rule Shop. Only two of them had appeared in the world so far. Even if the rest had been sold off in scraps and fewer complete pieces could be made—

I can make them.

…One, maybe two. If I kept refreshing, I could gather them all, couldn't I? Even if luck failed me and I couldn't finish them, it was fine. Along the way I planned to keep buying gear and talismans I could use myself. I was already looking forward to seeing how far I could take it.

A window that appeared with every passing second. Less than five minutes left. But every preparation was finished. I had swept the Golden Rule Shop clean and, at last, completed what I set out to make.

I'm almost starting to feel bad about this.

I shrugged. In the end, nothing about this was equal. I alone had broken the scale—broken the level. Still, throwing every available method into the fight wasn't against the rules, was it?

I took a slow look around. The situation had changed a great deal from the start.

Everyone's clumped up with their own kind.

The clustering was done. Groups of five at the smallest, a hundred at the largest. Almost no one stood alone—and those who did were the kind you could call stragglers without exaggeration. People had packed tight around the powerful and the influential.

With exactly one exception.

A survivor of the Empire's Darkan.

Darkan Territory, where the Empire's Special Auction had been held. But Darkan had fallen—wiped out after failing to hunt the calamity Baal. Even so, it seemed a survivor remained. A blind boy with a patch over both eyes, wearing the Darkan crest. One of the Level 12 powerhouses!

He was nothing like the other stragglers. And yet no one gathered at his side.

"Shouldn't every Imperial citizen gather under the Dercian banner?"

"There's nothing left to see in fallen Darkan. Haha!"

The place Isabella had been born. Imperial citizens flocked to the Dercian nobles. Darkan had been a promising knight house of the Empire, but it had collapsed—so of course people gravitated to Dercian.

"Hey."

That was when it happened. A group approached me—someone finally coming to the side no one else would touch.

…Who was this again?

"Don't you want to live?"

"Who are you?"

"Playing dumb on purpose? You're from Holy City Adrium. There's no way you don't know me."

"Everyone from Adrium is supposed to know you? Are you His Holiness the Pope, by any chance?"

"…I'm Aron, son of Cardinal Johansen."

Ah. I'd heard that a cardinal's son had entered. So this was the one. A man who appeared with some thirty Adrium faithful at his back.

"If you stay like this, you'll be the first to die. That's a certainty."

"Could be."

"If you want to live, hand over your annotated copy of the Sutra of Life and Death. Do that, and I'll take you into my group."

I was mildly surprised. The brat had more of a brain than I'd expected. After watching Raiga's reaction, he'd even thought to extract the annotated copy from me. Willing to take the risk—or just that confident.

There's a reason for all that swagger.

Aron was Level 10. But his group as a whole ran high on levels, and what they carried glittered without restraint—treasures of Myth grade at minimum. The so-called gear advantage was no joke.

Most of them are holy knights the cardinal sent.

You could tell how much the man loved his son. With a roster like that, even if their numbers were smaller than other groups, they wouldn't be eliminated on the eleventh floor.

Then it happened. Aron spread his legs wide.

"Hand over the annotated copy and crawl under me. That's the only way you live."

"…"

"Refuse, and I'll kill you first. Whatever you're imagining—I'll make it more wretched and cruel than that. I'll have you begging me to finish you."