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nAfter our bath and around dinner time, we took a portal back to the house. No use risking getting dirty in a fight with a stray ghost when we could go there quickly. I had experimented with portal a bit in recent days. After my death, I wanted to see to what limit I could push the dungeon points to my advantage.

nThus, after using portal, I did a skill reset. I found that I only got 4 points back. It seemed like if I used a point to activate a skill, then that point would not be reset until the cooldown had passed. I was hoping to cheat the system. If I could reset my points and get all 5 back, it was possible I could bypass portal’s long cooldown entirely. That didn’t seem to be the case. It was one point per portal. I could waste all four free points minus one for reset and still have 4 portals a day, but then I would have no other skills.

nOn the other hand, I could use 4 different skills and only use the point for portal when or if I needed it. The problem was that portal was a bit of an emergency, and it took time for me to reset, reactivate my skills, and then select portal. It’d take 5 seconds normally to cast portal. Doing it that way would take almost a minute. It was not a great method, although I still had returned as another escape method.

nDungeon point skills weren’t the only ones I was testing out. I didn’t want to test any abilities in combat again like I did against that eldritch. At least, if I did, it’d be in a very controlled circumstance. Even though I knew I could be resurrected if I died again, that didn’t mean I liked dying. I wouldn’t use an unknown ability again until I was certain what effect it would have. Skill Analysis went a long way to this effect.

nThe skill analysis simply told me what skills I had. I could do the same to anyone else in my party as well. It didn’t seem to work on monsters or other people. At the moment, I was a level 18 white mage. The skills I had were Weak Heal, Remove, Curse, Weak Heal Poison, Refresh, Group Heal, Divine Aura, Harm Undead, Holy Circle, Create Water, Light, Detect Magic, Sanctify Land, Cure Disease, Mana Up, Moderate Heal Poison, Create Cushion, and Stun Undead.

nWhite Mage seemed to be a class dedicated to fighting necromancers. It could be considered their polar opposite. Most of the new skills are pretty self-explanatory. Create Cushion was a little weird. It created a cushion wall. If a teammate was blown back, or if someone fell from a distance, this wall would make their landing like hitting a pillow. It was very useful, but I found I rarely could cast it in time to do any good.

nHero was at level 13. I had Return, Switch Position, Party Status Up, Give Life, Basic Swordsmanship, Charm Up, Sense Life, Protect, Evil Eye, Skill Analysis, quick attack, and low regen. Low regen allowed me to heal slightly faster, but it only worked on me. Quick Attack was a sword attack that was far better suited for Lydia, although it turned out she had it already. She was delighted I had the same skill that she did. Evil Eye seemed seriously strong, but actually, all it did was allow me to see a monster’s weakness. That was actually a pretty good ability. This world had no system that explained the rules, so any skill that gave away any information without tedious trial and error was deeply appreciated.

nSlave Master was now at 6. This gave me the skills Slave Taker, Order Slave, Punish Slave, Truth Slave, Slave Loyalty, and Slave Status Up. I had really hoped that the Slave Master wasn’t such a brutal job. None of the names in it made me feel good. Order Slave and Punish Slave were two skills I simply refused to use. I wouldn’t even test them to see how they worked. Truth Slave was passive. I could tell when Miki was lying with unnatural clarity. As Lydia was only technically a slave, she didn’t gain the status up boost or the slave loyalty boost.

nAs far as slave loyalty, the only test I could do was equip and unequip the job and ask Miki how she felt. I asked her to think about some negative thoughts about me. In the end, the best answer I could get was that when she thought about monopolizing me for herself and not letting Lydia have me at all, the feelings felt more uneasy when I had Slave Master equipped. It was hard to describe, but she felt encouraged to avoid betraying my trust.

nThe only other skill I had bothered to level a bit was Merchant. It was up to level 4 now. The skills were Haggle, Upsell, and Calculation, with another empty duplicate skill thrown in there, probably Charm Up if I had to guess. Calculation just made it easier to deal with numbers. That meant when I was reviewing my skills like right now, hero and merchant were the best jobs to have equipped, one to let me analyze my skills, and the other to let me crunch the numbers.

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