CH 151

Chapter 151 – I finally did it!

Since processing the Absolute Clear Light Ingots has already killed me once, I decided that I could not let my guard down even after all the ingots were completed.

During the processing, I ended up using all the potions I had in my inventory, so I had to go borrow some more Life Potions from the store.

Steel and Royal Steel items sell well, but ordinary Life Potions don’t sell nearly as much.

That said, as a remnant of the time I was renting out my store to the members of Works during my mini-retirement, I have rented out some space of my store to them, with a few slots being available per person.

After all, it takes quite some time to make gear of the Steel-tier, so I can’t fill up all the sales slots of my store.

Therefore, I’m lending the surplus slots to the people from Works, since my store is the most popular one within our Clan.

Not to mention that top players make up a good portion of my customer-base, so if they see other top-tier items available, even if they aren’t the usual kind of thing I make, those players tend to buy those items too.

The only one who has an overlap in production field with me is Mukaida, but as he works only with Original items, while I barely make any, we still appeal to different customers, so Mukaida’s gear still ends up selling well.

That said, I’m not lending out all the extra space to the members of Works, since I sometimes use the surplus slots to put some misc stuff I made… And this time, I decided to take the Life Potions in those slots back, as I might need them while crafting.

I don’t really have any skills that increase health, so a normal Life Potion is enough to fully recover me.

So, something like the ‘Super Life Potion – Small’ that Mii and Muu have made would be totally unnecessary to me.

Reflected damage doesn’t cause instant death, so I should have no problems with just using normal potions.

That said, since I don’t want to die again, I decided to be extra careful and prepare some gear with Health Enhancement Options in them.

Of course, Options come randomly, so I can’t exactly aim for them, but… I don’t really care for defensive power, so I don’t need high-tier items. I can just mass-produce weaker gear until I get the Option I need.

Therefore, I made many Bronze accessories. I was surprised by how easy and fast it was when compared to working with Royal Steel.

I was able to make plenty of them in no time, and they all had three Options in them.

But there was none with four Options… I wonder if it requires a unique Option to reach four Options?

The Dark Short Sword always had Dark Attribute for one, so maybe it would be able to get four Options.

Well, I don’t have the ingredients to try it out, so that can’t be helped.

In any case, once I equipped all the bronze accessories with Health Enhancement Options, my health has been multiplied by ten, since I only had the starting health.

That was quite something. Maybe I won’t even need the Life Potions then?

… No way. I don’t even know how many Life Potions I used when processing the ingots, so I’ll definitely need some now.

That said, Life Potions have a cooldown to them, so I needed to be careful with how fast as I was processing the ingot, as I would die during the cooldown otherwise.

But now that I have this much HP, I think I should be able to keep on crafting non-stop before the cooldown ends.

Though when I think of it like that, a normal Life Potion would be lacking, wouldn’t it?

Let’s purchase some Super Life Potion – Small from the store just in case, since some of them are still there.

Well, now I have plenty of extra life and some really strong potions too.

I also have a good image of what I want to make, as well as all other materials that I think I will need.

The rest is up to me. This may be an Original, but the shape is the same of what I’d usually find in normal recipes.

So, let’s try not making it more complicated than it needs to be. I’ll make it on the same image of the other products I have made multiple times so far.

Let’s do this!

******

It was definitely the right choice to increase my HP. I would have, without a doubt, died otherwise.

Using the processed ingots in crafting dealt much more damage than simply processing them did. Way more than I expected.

I panicked when seeing how much damage I was taking and ended up using a Super Life Potion – Small instead of the normal Life Potion.

And as expected of Mii and Muu, this was an amazing item. It not only recovered a large amount of health when used, but it also gave me some life regeneration.

Without this, I might have died during the cooldown.

Well, no, I would have stopped processing during the cooldown, but… If I did that, then there was a chance that I could have failed at making the item.

But thanks to the help of this wonderful potion, I was able to keep on crafting without stopping at all.

I did end up using all of the Super Life Potion – Small that I had purchased though, and I still had barely any HP left by the time I was finished.

Dangerous, way too dangerous… I was barely able to complete it.

But the finished product is…

——

Zero Light Short Sword

Short Sword/9*/ATK +188; E: Light; AGI +61; CRT +155; REF +89/Large Light Enchantment/Large Agility Enhancement/Extra Large Critical Enhancement/Large Damage Reflection/Durability: 400

——

I finally did it! An item with four Options in it!

Two of the Options seem to come from built-in properties of the material though.

But considering that I wasn’t able to make even a Bronze Item with four Options in it, then I think four Options might be truly impossible without special materials.

But well, even without taking the Options into account, amongst all weapons I’ve made, this is the one with the strongest offensive power.

Sure, the dolls have a higher attack value, but the way its numerical calculation works is different.

According to Hime’s testing, the ATK value of a doll uses the sum of all their weapons, but this number isn’t taken into account when using it in combat.

Sure, if you do wield all weapons at the same time, you will deal a tremendous amount of damage, but even Hime has a hard time doing that, so… On practical terms, this Short Sword has a higher attack power than the dolls.

Not to mention that this will be wielded by Mika, so it will surely be quite the powerhouse.

Moreover, this weapon can also deal with the Durability problem that people have recently started struggling with.

When you use Party Auto Matching, you aren’t able to return automatically unless you reach the conditions set up in advance. It’s possible to withdraw in the middle of it, but a penalty is applied if you do that.

The condition is usually to reach a certain goal point within the Field Area, but if you fight a lot of mobs along the way, the durability of your gear may decrease fairly fast. Especially when fighting against the stronger mobs of the deeper layers, as durability tends to fall faster when facing stronger enemies.

So, weapons with a durability of 100 or even 200 usually end up not being enough, which makes bringing spares with you necessary.

As for event gear, you usually need to bring five or six of them with you on a single hunting session, as they break much faster.

Due to that, you either need gear with high durability or bring spares with you when hunting on deep floors of dungeons.

And well, this Zero Light Short Sword has 400 durability. It won’t break.

Of course, it still needs to be repaired once Mika does return to the city though.

Currently, people on the forums have been complaining about how they need to repair their gear after each and every hunt.

However, there are also some people who have started raising their Blacksmith level on the side, just to let them repair gear in the middle of a hunt.

After this started being talked about on the forums, more people started catching on to the idea of raising production skills a bit, just to let them do gear maintenance at the minimum.

It does take some time to get the skill to a level where it can be used to repair strong gear though, and the durability recovered by a mobile set is fairly small, so this is mostly a first-aid measure to let people finish their hunts.

Overall, while this first-aid measure is not a perfect solution, it’s much better than doing nothing and letting the gear break or being forced to bring spare weapons with you.

On another note, if you bring the weapon to an NPC blacksmith after you finished the hunt, then the durability will immediately recover, which is something that is helping the NPC blacksmiths thrive.

Sure, new player Pioneers still use the NPC stores, but they’re basically the only ones, as you can only find 3* gear there.

By now, plenty of gear with Options is available on the market, so NPC-made equipment doesn’t sell that well nowadays.

That said, the economy of Frontiers originally kept on functioning even without players being around, so they’ll surely manage.

And on another note, there is no real difference between asking an NPC blacksmith to repair gear or a player Pioneer. Both of us use Repair Stones to restore durability.

The main difference is that mobile sets can’t recover much durability with each Repair Stone. On the other hand, using a proper facility leads to a much faster and efficient repair.

As the NPC blacksmiths always have their facilities available, it tends to be more efficient to just ask them to do it once you come back from your hunt.