Two hundred days of grind took me to get where I wanted to be. It was a terrible time for me and a great time for everybody else. Since after being able to kill the orc boss, and with the evolution of Tihana's 'Shadow walker' class, they were able to hit a few spots on a single day, which drastically increased the number of points everybody had.

I could see it in the architectural changes in the city when suddenly people were able to build nice homes for themselves. It made me realize that after little above two years, Petrograd started to slowly turn into a paradise.

People now were strong and happy.

I was sad on the other hand because I had very little time. To the point, I only was able to force myself to clear the twelve best hunting grounds. Like that, I accumulated 76 111 244 200 points, and 5 415 class points.

Most of them went to fully upgrade 'Master of automaton creation' class. I wanted to get the next evolution of it, the 'Automaton perfectionist' but I couldn't afford it because of the class points required. I only had slightly above half of what I needed, which meant easily over another hundred days of grind.

So yeah... That was the straw that broke the camel's back. I decided to do something I didn't want to do before. I needed to be sneaky about it, so after I upgraded the class, I left, to return the next day, after midnight, when everybody was asleep.

I pulled one of the crystals from Loistavadvaar and sold it. With that transaction, my account hit 292 561 947 183 220 regular points and 18 833 class points. Enough to get me the class, and a bunch of additional upgrades. Still, I felt guilty about it.

But there was a very big chance that if I wasn't to go overboard with the points, nobody would ever notice. After all, they didn't have a single idea how many hunting grounds I was clearing a day, because only in the past few months they began clearing beyond just orcs' territory.

'Automaton perfectionist' gave me access to the following skills: 'Design IV', 'Engineering IV', 'Core infusion III', 'Super-advanced protocols', 'Mana circuits II', 'Modular design II', 'Spark of life'.

The only new skill was quite simple. It went beyond just protocols and allowed the golem to become partially sentient. It would get conscious about itself, and able to make its own decisions, going above what was programmed into it, but still would remind as a servant to its creator.

Still, that wasn't enough for me, the greed has woken up a bit.

I upgraded every skill for that class to the eighth level because I didn't want to risk getting my abilities too powerful too quickly. The price tag on that was 77 777 777 000 points.

Then I fully upgraded 'Artificer' for 55 000 000 000 points, unlocking the next evolution. The 'Master artificer'.

It gave me access to the following skills: 'Infuse IV', 'Shape IV', 'Mana IV', 'Breath of life II', 'Entangling infusions II', 'Master infusions', and 'Artificial intelligence'.

'Master infusions' were just a stronger, more complicated type of infusions that could do really ridiculous things. No fancy-schmancy elemental bullshit, but rather something really powerful, like for example calling a bolt of lightning each time you would hit somebody, to hit the same target. I'll just add, that it would be one of the weakest things you could do with those infusions. Unfortunately, even after later upgrading this skill, I couldn't entangle those infusions because they were just too complicated.

'Artificial intelligence', contrary to what you might think didn't allow the cars to drive themselves, or chat nonsense pretending to be a human on the internet. It also didn't create art from the text, of learning how to play games. It just meant talking weapons. Yep. Talking weapons.

But to make an existence trapped in an item made me sick of even thinking about that, so I immediately decided to not play around with that skill.historical

Once again I got them all to the eighth level, for only 77 777 777 000 points. The greed still wasn't satisfied, though, so I got some more new stuff.

Still, it didn't make my greed go to sleep. It wasn't satisfied, which meant I needed to get more. I decided to upgrade some of the 'Runic blacksmith' skills, and by 'some' I mean all of them and fully. Which unlocked me the access to 'Blacksmith of legends' class. I immediately unlocked that too.

It gave me access to the following skills: 'Legendary understanding of metal', 'Legendary metal manipulation', 'Legendary craftsmanship', 'Legendary knowledge of runes', 'Legendary runification', 'Legendary rune-graving', 'Creation of legends'.

All the legendary skills were just better, but the 'Creation of legends' skill was not only new but also interesting. It made me able to crank up a particular quality, characteristic, or whatever-you-want-to-call-it of a particular piece I made, to the extreme. For example, a blade that would never break, or an edge that would always stay sharp, no matter what.

I also upgraded all of those skills to the eighth level, then checked my account balance. I still had 292 207 091 852 220 points, and 6 833 class points left. It didn't seem like the number really budged, but I knew that going any further would be asking for everybody to suddenly notice the strange increase in my skills, so I decided to not go any further. Especially not to upgrade the device.

Instead, I bought some quality materials for 50k. Quite a lot of them actually, then headed back home. I really wanted to go to the workshop, but I would wake up everybody in the city if I were to start working at that hour.

The next best thing I could possibly do was to get some well-deserved rest before spending a lot of time working on the first golem, which would change everything for me.