parentshiftbook Chapter 393 Is this all an illusion?
Chapter 393 Is this all an illusion?
'First the quests, now the stats...' I thought to myself in the short moment of break I allowed myself from the task of spotting the starlit zones. 'Just what the hell is going on with my system?!'
[Level: 250]
[Strength: 40]
[Agility: 40]
[Wisdom: 40]
[Intelligence: 40]
[Endurance: 40]
[Aura 258]
[Usable points: 0]
All the stats were exactly the same as when I brought them all the way up to the former maximum.
In other words, assuming the limit of my power grew exponentially with each rank as it happened so far, I boasted merely half of the strength that a supreme of my kind should be able to.
All my stats were capped at ten while I was a mere mortal. They went up to twenty when I became an ascender and then to forty upon becoming a promoted ascender.
'Assuming there's no step that everyone skips and the rate at which my limits grow remains the same, all my stats should be capped at eighty points each.'
I did the calculation for the unkempt time, making sure I didn't make some silly mistake somewhere along the line.
But the math was simple and straightforward.
Every realm that I've crossed would double my limits. And if such was the case for a supreme as well...
Then why did my stats refuse to grow? Or what was even worse, the usable points that I could assign to my stats refused to grow too, as if their growth back when I first stepped into this mysterious place was but a memory implanted in my brain rather than what actually had happened.
'Hell, this really doesn't make any damn sense.'
'The space bending, the distances mismatching, the system not recognizing the influence of the light of stars upon my aura weave and core...'
I counted up just the most prominent of the inconsistencies that riddled this strange land. In reality, there were many more small points and issues that only arose when we entered into the plain but they didn't appear significant enough for me to even think about them.
"We still have two hours left, so how about we just keep going?" I suggested before looking out in the very direction I wanted us to go. "Who knows, maybe there will be a lucky pass through the mountains somewhere due west?"
As little as I trusted it, the onboard compass continued to claim that we were going west, even though it pretty much broke all the physics and math that I knew. For how else, if not by breaking the most basic rules of how maths worked, one could travel in a straight line while remaining parallel to the curvature of a massive circle?
In the end, given how little to no better choice we had, no voice of opposition arose to challenge my suggestion. And before we could even properly stretch our limbs out, we got ourselves back to our usual spots before resuming the travel...
Travel that only lasted for an additional hour, where one, extremely significant change forced us to tread a lot more carefully than before.
"Peter, can you see it?" Fay asked in what I could only consider as just another, extremely ordinary moment.
We weren't any closer to the actually massive mountains than we were before. And what was even worse, the edge of the starlit zone didn't seem to curve at all, turning into a straight line that barred us from using the easiest possible route for passing through this massive chain of oversized mountains.
"See what?" Weirded by how Fay would be the one to initiate a talk while driving, I looked out and stretched my vision as far as I could...
Only to fail to notice anything out of the ordinary.
"Don't look on the ground, look up," Fay suggested, even going as far as to lift one of her hands from the steering wheel and point out into the sky, pretty much in a line perfectly aligned with the direction we were going.
Following Fay's instructions, I looked up... Only to end up with the exact same result as before.
"What do your fox-like eyes see, Fay?" I asked, mimicking the legendary quote from a movie series that has long since earned the accolade of being the greatest movie ever filmed before the era of social unrest that brought an end to creativity and proved the author of the story behind the movie right in his quote of how evil cannot create anything, but only parody and destroy what good created.
"You seriously can't see it?" Fay, for the very first time since she first sat on my lap behind the wheel, turned her eyes away from the path without stopping the car.
"See what, dear?" More annoyed with myself than at Fay for her insistence, I tried again only to fail just as I did before.
There was nothing in this damn sky that was out of the ordinary!
"Look closer," Fay requested, fixing the position of her hand to point me out to what she was talking about again. "Just below the clouds."
Finally, with all the hints dropping and time passing, I managed to catch on to what Fay saw quite a while ago already. And it was also Fay to finally name her finding.
"It's smoke!"