Guild Wars

Chapter 1296: Returning To The Scrivener Tradeskill

That's right, Draco had almost forgotten about this. He had accumulated three chances already, all from different sources that were very important.

The very first was achieved when his Inner Moon evolved to the Divine Realm along with Eva's Inner Sun and Shuangtian's Inner Planet, forming the Starry Sky Array. At that time, they should have naturally upgraded to the True God Rank with authentic Divine Laws and Divine Source Origins, but they had resisted it, causing trouble for the AI.

In the end, the AI acquiesced by allowing them to stagger their Divine upgrades up to a certain limit since the Evil Trio were obviously not willing to ascend yet while also wanting to raise other fields to the Divine Rank.

The second was alchemy, and the third was blacksmithing. With Magical Engineering also being stacked, the number reached 4/5, which meant that Draco had only one more chance to stack an upgrade to the Divine Rank, so he'd have to choose his next tradeskill carefully.

After assenting to the upgrade, Draco did not feel any significant changes. Rather, he curiously checked the blueprints that came with the Divine Realm, only to find out that there were… none!

Well, it made sense. The designs one could buy at each rank were to foster promotion and give one a starting point at their new level. Once one reached the Divine Rank, that was the theoretical end of the road, and the Origin God behind your tradeskill should even personally contact you to recruit you into their faction.

If they kept giving you free designs and methods to grow, wouldn't it be a joke if you surpassed them?

Draco chuckled and began crafting a slew of Void Rings and Portable Time Chambers, using a month to create hundreds of thousands of each. He didn't put them up for sale externally but linked them to the guild shop for Umbra as well as Vita's internal sale channels for the citizens of Vita and the soldiers/guards.

Of these 13 months, he had strictly maintained his habit of spending 12 hours a day practicing Refinement, which led to a growth of 197.5 units of Mind Force. Coupled with his initial amount of 100 units from the breakthrough plus 1 unit from testing, this made for a total of 298.5 units.

In this year, Draco's Mind Force crystal had basically grown almost three times stronger! Since he wasn't fighting or using this power for anything but Refinement, the raw effect of this growth couldn't be seen. But if 10 units could slap away Eva and Shuangtian while giving them serious injuries, then this amount was frightening!

Of his remaining Mental Power cloud, there was only 90% left initially after breaking through to the initial Mind Force level, and another 0.1% had been consumed in testing. Of the remaining 89.9%, 19.75% had been consumed to foster this progress in Refinement, leaving 70.15% left.

Most importantly, his Refinement progress over this time was initially 30% of the God stage, heading toward Semi-Origin when he first broke through and gained Mind Force. Then it became 30.2% after testing. In this time, he had gained 39.5% progress toward the Semi-Origin stage, which made a gross total of 69.7%!

He was more than halfway to becoming on par with Norma when she died!

Well, not really, since Norma was at the peak of the Semi-Origin stage and simply lacked something needed to break through to become an Origin Goddess. But the technicalities were not enough to dampen Draco's excitement.

Hmm, as long as he dedicated another year to working on Scrivening and bringing it to the Divine Rank, he would not only max out his True God slots but also be able to produce Divine items on the spot while being able to learn and replicate Semi-Origin materials!

Being able to freely replicate Semi-Origin materials meant that one could attempt to actually make them, and at no cost!

If Draco could sufficiently craft a Semi-Origin item and prove to the AI that he was capable of this, it wouldn't be able to restrict him from accessing and using Semi-Origin items freely, like those from the Tower of Babylon or the Divine Dragon Treasury!

Being able to use Semi-Origin items…

The benefits could not be explained in one chapter. According to the growth of his game character thanks to the Dragorugio set, he was supposed to become Semi-Origin at Rank 6 and Origin at Rank 7. To become Rank 6, he had to clear the entire Grey Rot of the Divine Realm according to the AI, which was an event locked away for the Evil Trio.

Being able to use Semi-Origin items greatly alleviated Draco's trepidation toward the source of the Grey Rot, which was likely the great raid boss of the late mid-game process and the entirety of the 'Divine Realm' arc for players.

A boss that was meant for millions of Supreme Law True God players to come together and fight while dying profusely was not something Draco wanted to face unprepared, nor would he let his core members grind the Grey Rot slowly.

He could just split up with Eva and Shuangtian and continuously drop their celestial bodies on the land to rapidly clear the Grey Rot and then fight its creator. However, that would not be ideal assuming anything went wrong, so he naturally patiently waited ten years for the core members and the other players to catch up first.

Since then, more time had passed, leading to almost a year and a half of Boundless time. In this time, the expert members of Umbra should all be ready to advance and assist the core members, while the core members should be halfway through the Law Ranks.

The advanced members of Umbra should now be early Rank 7 and the basic members late Rank 6, while the top players outside Umbra should be early Rank 6. The average player worldwide should now be middle Rank 5 after Umbra's various welfare policies over the years.

If Draco took another year to work, the only regret was not being able to see his kids a bit more, as well as not being able to indulge in his women. Already a year had gone without them even smelling a hint of his rod, so their canals must be growing cobwebs at this point.

Zaine especially must be going mad, not to mention Rina and Natasha, who were the most prolific in seeking out his services. However, a man had to sit down and focus on the big picture sometimes, even if it meant putting aside happiness and joy for a while.

For the Scrivener Tradeskill, it was not like Magical Engineering that required tutorship. Scrivener, as a tradeskill, required two things: the one penning the skill to be able to write and also create techniques, or at least replicate them.

In fact, Scrivener put more emphasis on one's combat talent rather than one's writing talent. Even though most Grandmaster Techniques for Scrivener in the Tradeskill Library were for writing, like Gaddeus' Theory of Scribing—which increased the speed of writing by 50%, the quality of the penmanship by 20%, and reduced stamina consumption by 5%—or the Insolar Writing Technique—which increased the speed of writing by 30%, the quality of the penmanship by 15%, and reduced the consumption of ink and paper by 30%—it was only one step to create such a thing.

Of course, Scrivener did not break away from the five requirements of the Grandmaster Rank and the three requirements of the Divine Rank. You still had to fulfill those same objectives that Draco just did for becoming a Grandmaster and later a God, but Scrivener had an extra requirement, which was why it was ranked as a Legendary tradeskill and not Epic like Magical Engineering.

Draco moved to his Divine Rank Ultimate Workbench, which could also work for writing, and activated the Scrivener Tradeskill for the first time after so long. While his avatar often entered to write skills and record them, he himself had not done so in years.

Just like old times, a screen popped up before him, one that was special compared to all others because it was specially designed with the faded image of a book and quill in the background. On this new screen, he saw four options: Vault of Techniques, Conversion to Skills, Creation of Skillbook, and Enhancements.

The Vault of Techniques was simply the starting point of this tradeskill, and selecting it led to a subsequent screen that showed the background of a faded-out library with two new options to choose from.

The first was Add A New Technique, and the second was Merge Techniques. The second option was something he had not used much because each of his techniques was distinct and never lacking, not needing to be merged to become better.

Not to mention that merging didn't always mean they came out better. For example, Paragon Sword Skill 359: Overcharge was a sort of limit-break technique you'd expect the hero to perform after monologuing about their terrible past and sharing their bright ideals about friendship, unleashing a blow to blast the evil villain away.

Meanwhile, Paragon Sword Skill 360: Counter Kill was a pseudo-insidious technique that used the enemy's own force to execute an unblockable, unpreventable execution, similar to those found in the early Assassin's Creed games, which was Draco's inspiration.

If the two were to be merged, how would that work? Which parts would be taken and which parts left behind? Could the final combined skill even work?

As such, Draco didn't look at the Merge Techniques option with much excitement like when he first got the skill. Scrivener was a means to allow his people to learn his skills because they were extremely strong when converted due to being created by his Innate Technique Generator.

(Un)fortunately, the benefits that Origin Gods got by gaining free control when he created techniques in their respective combat law/tradeskill were not given to those who bought his skills made by Scrivening, since they were converted to genuine system skills.

Just because you had a system or class skill that allowed you to shoot a fireball didn't actually mean that you could shoot a fireball on your own. Likewise, you wouldn't suddenly grasp the secrets of magic in the formation and control of a fireball instantly just by having it.

However, the good news was that the AI specifically designed it to be such that repeated usage of skills brought familiarity and allowed one to transition into the realm of techniques. Naturally, the more one used a fireball, the more they would learn how to use it on their own one day, depending on their comprehension.

The same applied to Draco's skills. One would slowly learn to activate and develop Control after repeated use over a long period of time, allowing them to take that leap and activate either Fake Tier 1 or full Tier 1 in time, as long as they were players, of course.

NPCs could not obtain or grow Control at all, since only the techniques thing allowed Origin Gods to forcefully activate it, but they had no chance of future growth after that. This was naturally irrelevant for the members of Umbra, with whom Draco, Eva, and Shuangtian had once used brute force tactics to awaken their Control and raise it to Tier 3 back then.

As for the first screen, Draco did not need to add any new techniques right now. His avatar had already input the entirety of the Paragon and Peerless Sword skill sets, along with the Divine Rank Three Pound Origin and the Divine Rank Refined Star Technique.

He could add the Divine Rank Dual-Techno Production technique later. It wasn't important since his library of techniques was already so huge that he could see no end.

You should know, the Paragon Sword skills numbered 360 alone. The Peerless Sword skills took each of the Paragon Sword skills and merged them with an element from subjective magic, resulting in 360 skills per element. The elements were Fire, Water, Earth, Wind, Light, Dark, Nature, Lightning, Poison, Explosion, Magma, Mist, Sound, Psychic, Life, Death, Space, Time, Gravity, Destruction, and Creation.

21 elements times 360, meaning a total of 7,560 Peerless Sword skills!