Chapter 1: Fortune and Misfortune
Three weeks after the implementation of the teleportation service in game.
Leah, Lyla, and Blanc had just wrapped up an elegant tea-time-slash-information exchange. For now, they parted ways, each with a few matters to attend to, but they’d agreed to regroup soon in Trae Forest, where Leah had headed directly. All were eager not only to hear more about Blanc’s theory on monster fusion, but to try a few experiments themselves.
The tea table had seen its fair share of intriguing revelations. Leah had contributed some crucial intel—though she’d kept far more to herself—while Lyla offered a moderately useful piece of her own. But the moment that truly stole the spotlight, wiping the smugness from Lyla’s face after her self-proclaimed “vital” contribution, was Blanc’s revelation that multiple entities, when reborn near-simultaneously and in close proximity, could merge into something greater.
The choice of their second rendezvous, Trae, had been chosen to facilitate this experimentation. Truth be told, Leah wanted to dive in right away—forget the others entirely—but that pesky thing, the social contract got in the way. If it had only been Lyla, she might have gone ahead anyway. But the promise was with Blanc too, and you didn’t toss a promise with a friend aside just because you felt like it. Promises with a sister, though?Ehhh.
With the others tied up for a while yet, Leah suddenly had time to do something she’d been putting off for some time now:
Power herself up.
She’d been waiting for the right occasion. To hit a certain amount of EXP and do it all at once. There was no real logic to it. In other words, less “I had a carefully thought-out plan” with her and more “I figured I’d do it when it felt right, and now it feels right.”
“Now then, the all-important question: Which direction should I take this upgrade?”
Early on, the smartest way to spend EXP when it came to boosting stats was to pump it straight into base stats for immediate gains. But past a certain threshold, the efficiency flipped. At that point, passive skills that boosted certain stats by a percentage—such asSTR Boost I—gave a bett
