Second Genesis

"Hey! What the hell!?"

Grey rolled back and then jumped to his feet, waiting for a second attack that didn’t seem to be coming.

"Sorry, sorry, I got a little too excited." Ji giggled like a little girl. Almost a bit too literally. "Forgive me, forgive me."

There were actually quite a few hints of surprise in Ji’s eyes. He was both surprised and thankful that Grey had dodged. Otherwise, the punishment he would get wasn’t small.

Well, he had received a punishment anyway, but the blood coming from his severed tongue was directly swallowed up by him.

Grey didn’t know how he was supposed to react to this. Who was this maniac, really?

"What you should do is sell all of the Vector Class materials. You will likely need the Proving Class ones, and the Established Class ones quite soon. The Vanguard ones are too valuable to sell right now and you should keep them in your possession until the appropriate currency is made available for them."

"... How much would that be?" Grey asked.

"Still quite the substantial amount. Probably around 90 million or so."

"So not enough to buy every Proving Class treasure you have."

"How could you even use that many in the first place?" Barkeep Ji asked with a smile.

Grey stood in silence for a long while. He stared at the barkeep as though he wasn’t on a time crunch. He just felt like something was... off.

"What changed?" Grey finally asked.

Barkeep Ji’s grin widened. Were frogs even supposed to have teeth, let alone jagged monstrosities like this? Grey had no idea. But whatever he knew about frogs probably had no reason to translate to this humanoid version of them.

"You should be careful about the questions you ask, Grey Temolt. They could get you killed."

Grey’s eyes narrowed. Then he flipped a palm over and produced a crack pipe.

"Do you know who sent this to me?"

The barkeep smiled, but didn’t say anything more.

Grey frowned. He had asked the question to know how much the barkeep had changed in terms of how much he was willing to actually say. He hadn’t brought it out actually thinking the barkeep would know. What he actually expected was for the barkeep to say "I don’t know." That would have been confirmation enough to him.

But instead, the barkeep just gave him a smile. As though he actually did know but couldn’t say.

’In that case...’

Grey brought out the Blood Witch Tome, stepped forward, and slammed it down.

"How do I maximize the use of this? I feel like the abilities I downloaded from it can make my Vampire Lord Frame a lot stronger, but I don’t have the time to figure out how."

The barkeep chuckled. "Downloaded skills are a lot like abilities. If a certain sync isn’t reached with them, they won’t display their true might. Open to the skill you most want to integrate."

Grey instantly opened to [Branching Blood]. He knew for a fact that [Branching Blood] was a far more powerful application of Heart Lance.

Both of them were abilities designed to take blood and strengthen it into a weapon that could be turned against enemies.

"The page markings didn’t even react to you. Your sync is not even at 1%."

Grey’s lips pursed. Well, in reality, the reason he had downloaded it in the first place was as a decoy. He knew the producers were watching him so he wanted to throw them off his scent.

How did you deal with an entity that could watch your every move? Basically the only place he had to himself was his mind, and even that he wasn’t completely sure of.

If there were abilities that could manipulate his emotions and a system that reacted to his thoughts and intentions, who was to say they couldn’t read his mind too?

Grey shook his head and pressed the feeling down.

"Then what differentiates an Ability from a Skill?"

"Nothing really."

Grey’s eye twitched.

"A Skill is just an Ability by a different name, usually passed down in a legacy like this. Once your sync rate reaches 100%, it will either become an Ability or fuse into one of your existing abilities.

"The level of the resulting Ability will depend on how strong the Skill and its imbuer are."

"Then how strong is this one? It doesn’t say."

"It does say. You just can’t read."

Grey was speechless. "And here I thought you had finally decided to stop the coy act and start being useful."

The barkeep pointed at the sigils that made up the Skill. But Grey noticed that he made a point not to actually touch it.

"Every one of these strokes means something. It’s an ancient language known to have a particularly high sync rate with Neural Frames."

"Huh?"

"Sigils come in various language types. How good a Syllogism is depends on how well its markings can be translated innately by the body. Basically the better the Syllogism, the less energy it requires to download a Skill of an equivalent level, and the faster one can understand what is downloaded—talent being equal.

"As far as Syllogisms go, the Blood Witches are pretty good. You probably won’t run into any glaring issues until the Command Tiers."

Grey blinked. So much for going to a library, this guy just wanted to dump everything on him.

"Then what will happen once I reach 100%?" Grey asked.

"The weakest Skills in here are all Vector Class. Even a 1% sync rate would make a huge difference. If you reached 100%, if your stats could withstand it, you would immediately gain a Level 30 Ability."

"Well I’ll be damned." Grey clicked his tongue. There was a huge leap every ten levels. A Level 30 Ability was on a completely different level from anything he was used to. "Then what’s the best way to increase sync rate?"

"You should probably start by actually reading the sigils instead of just downloading them and calling it a day."

Grey felt like those words were supposed to embarrass him, but he just shrugged.

"Alright, then. I’ll sell all the Vector Class items and keep the rest. I’m going to need some Cyber Cores in return. Also..."

Grey brought out Joaquin’s things, including the bent Enchanted Spear.

"What can I get for these?"

"You probably shouldn’t sell that either." Barkeep Ji said slowly, looking at the spear.