Chapter 131: Chapter 131

Note: Check the bottom author's note

“Ten days?!” Elise exclaimed.

“Almost ten days,” corrected Oberon. “9 days and 18 hours, to be precise.”

“My last evolution only took 12 hours!”

“Yes, well, it was only a tier 4 evolution, and it was only Legendary rarity. This was tier 5 and Mythic, so of course it was longer.”

“I mean, I knew it would be longer, but I didn’t expect it to be 20 times longer.”

“That’s just how it goes,” he said with a shrug. “My tier 9 evolution lasted almost two years.”

I’m going to need to think more carefully about my arrangements for my next evolution, Elise thought. It might take more than a month, and if I don’t have access to Oberon again, that could get dangerous really quickly.

“Wait, so if I was out for 10 days-”

“-Then doesn’t that mean that class registration starts tomorrow?”

Elise looked down as she thought about her situation. She had originally expected to have a bit more time to experiment with her new evolution before needing to head to Jelor. The school semester wouldn’t start for another three weeks, but she had to be in the city for class registration in order to get the best time slots. It wasn’t a huge deal, but she had promised Sophie they’d do it together, so she couldn’t really miss it. That meant she would need to cram all that experimentation into the remainder of this day.

“I have some questions about my new skills then,” she said.

“First, why are all the royalty related skills talking about peasants? Does that mean they only work on the so-called peasants?”

“It means they only work on those whose social status is lower than yours, which as a princess means everyone except kings, crown princes and princesses, and a few other exceptions. However, it’s also dependent on the status of the kingdom from which you are a princess. So being from Corunia, your status is on par with most nations, but slightly lower than Jelor’s so there may be Jelorian dukes who are resistant to your Skills.”

Wait, but my Species says I’m the princess of the fey, not of Corunia.

She had assumed that Oberon was the king of the fey, and had made her the princess of the fey, but if he was unaware, that only left one possibility: Titania. And if she had done it without Oberon knowing… Well, Elise wasn’t obligated to tell him. It could be a good opportunity to prank him in return.

That did raise a concern in her mind though. Wouldn’t that qualify as aligning her evolution path to Titania’s? Wouldn’t that hurt her chances of achieving goddesshood? In that case, wouldn’t being a princess at all hurt that? She hadn’t considered it before the evolution, but had she accidentally ruined her evolution path with this choice?

“So, it’s hard to reach godhood if you take a subordinate role in your species or class evolutions, right?” she asked.

“Ah, no need to worry there,” said Oberon. “That’s true for subordinate roles, but Princess is not a subordinate role. If you follow the exact path as another god, you may end up lower in status to them, but you won’t end up subordinate to them, and it won’t affect the difficulty of your Divinity Quest.”

“Did I not tell you about those?”

“Not that I can remember.”

“Well, Divinity Quests are similar to tier 7, 8, and 9 quests, but for godhood.”

“Tier 7, 8, and 9 quests?”

“Did I not tell you about those either? I guess not, based on your face. Well, it’s nothing you have to worry about just yet, but when you want to evolve to tier 7 or beyond, you need to complete a quest given by the System. The difficulty of the quests depends on what you’ve accomplished, but even for ordinary people, the tier 7 quest is doable. Tier 8 a little less so, and tier 9s are almost always difficult. They’re always technically possible though. Thᴇ link to the origɪn of this information rᴇsts ɪn NovelHub(.)net

“The Divinity Quests though… Frankly they’re terrible. Most of them are impossible, or at least go directly against a person’s core values. I sometimes feel like the gods pick the Divinity Quests specifically to spite us. But of course, that’s not how it works. It’s related to your accomplishments. The more you’ve done, the easier your Quest will be. And it’s the same with evolutions, so the rarer your evolution, the easier it is to complete those Quests. At least for the 7th, 8th, and 9th tier quests, if you’ve got a Legendary or better Species, they’re freebies.

“So honestly, you don’t need to worry about them at all right now, actually. Unless something weird happens and you somehow downgrade in rarity at your next evolution, but that shouldn’t happen. So yeah, you’re fine.”

“Makes sense. What kinds of things are the tier quests?”

“Well, for monsters, it’s almost always about killing something. Kill a 7th tier as a 6th tier, kill an 8th tier as a 7th tier, or maybe something more specific, like kill an enemy using only ranged attacks or kill a humanoid while pretending to be their family member or things like that. For humanoids, it varies more widely. Like a chef might have a quest to cook a legendary dish, or something.”

“Kill a humanoid while pretending to be their family member?” asked Elise, worried.

“Oh, you shouldn’t get a quest like that,” said Oberon. “With your species, you probably won’t even get a real quest. It will be ‘kill an enemy’ or something like that. As I said, difficulty scales inversely with accomplishment, and having a Mythic Species indicates high accomplishment.”

“Anyway, you said questions, plural, so I assume you have more?”

“Yes,” said Elise, refocusing on the task at hand. “I got a couple skills that I wasn’t able to properly test, and the descriptions are really vague, so I was hoping you would know what they did?”

“Which skills are those?”

“{Royal Presence}, {Royal Decree}, and {Don’t Look At Me, Peasants!}. I can guess what they do, but I wanted to check in with you.”

“Of course. {Royal Presence} is an aura skill that just makes people subtly recognize you as having higher social status. Well, with you using it, it might be a little more than ‘subtle,’ but it shouldn’t be anything too extreme. It won’t make people bow down and start worshiping you or anything, but it might make them a bit more subservient. And since it’s subconscious, most won’t notice, so you might be able to activate it in public without any issues, but I would still avoid it. There will be people at the university who will recognize it.

“{Royal Decree} is like {Command}, but for royals. It is stronger than {Command}, but also has those restrictions we talked about before, where you can’t use it on those of higher social status than you. As a princess of a fairly major nation, this won’t affect you much, but it’s something to keep in mind as there may be some princelings at the university. It’s a very powerful skill though, so it’s definitely something you should practice with before you need to use it.

“And {Don’t Look At Me, Peasants!} is one of my favorites. It should be especially useful for you since it scales based on Charisma. As an aetherborn, this will make you functionally invisible. It’s not the best for stealthy infiltration, since it doesn’t affect recording artifacts, but it has its own advantages. If you’re invisible and you bump into someone, they’ll notice that they’ve bumped into something and get suspicious, but if you’re using this skill, they might not even notice you ever touched them. Similar versions of this skill are a favorite of pickpockets and street scammers.

“Honestly, this should be a really fun skill. I actually really want to see you use it. With as powerful as your aether is, you could probably take food out of a person’s mouth and they wouldn’t notice.”

“I don’t want to take food out of a person’s mouth.”

“It was just an example. If you want to go out and experiment with your skills for a bit though, you’re more than welcome. I will gladly accompany you.”

“Maybe,” said Elise. “So {Royal Decree} works like {Command}?”

“They are the same skill. {Royal Decree} is more limited and more powerful, but functionally, they are identical.”

Elise had read extensively about {Command} in the book about mind control she had gotten from the auction. It was a very powerful skill that, unlike {Suggest}, could force the target to do something, regardless of their wishes. Elise was a bit leery about using it on other people, because she knew she would hate if a similar skill was used on her, but she thought it would make hunting monsters much easier. It could also make a good non-lethal last resort if she failed to set up a deal properly with {Fey Bargaining}.

“But you should be careful because {Royal Decree} uses a lot of aether, so once again, don’t use it too often if you don’t want people to know how much you have. Though then again, it’s also a fairly subtle skill, so they might not notice, and if you’re in a position where you’re using it on an enemy, then you probably have them at your mercy enough that you can memory wipe them. Still, for caution’s sake, just in case you are being watched by someone who understands aether, you shouldn’t use it too much.”

“Yep. Wasn’t planning on it.”

“Any other questions?”

“I also got a skill called {Subtle Royalty}, and it instantly leveled up all the way to the cap. I can sense my own aether a bit now, so I know that my natural presence has been suppressed, but I’m not sure exactly how effective it is. How well is it working?”

“Your aether suppression skill is already at level 100?”

“Oh.” He put his hand to his chin. “Well, it’s not as bad as before… But you still feel like you have around 600 Charisma. That’s nothing compared to your usual, but it’s still relatively high. You won’t be able to completely avoid attention without using {Don’t Look At Me, Peasants!}. But now you’ve got me curious. Would you mind disabling the skill? I want to see what it’s like without it.”

Elise did so, and Oberon’s eyes widened, then he burst out into laughter.

“No wonder you still feel so charismatic!” he exclaimed. “A level 100 suppression skill wasn’t designed to handle this much. You feel like you have close to 7000 Charisma.”

“Maybe even higher. By the time you reach the tier 5 level cap, you might be effectively over 9000!”

“This suppression Skill is barely useful at all then! Won’t I still seem like I have over 2000 Charisma by then if the Skill stays at this level?”

“Yes, but this might be grounds for a powerful Skill Quest. When you go above and beyond with a Skill, you tend to unlock Skill Quests for the next step up. I would assume that’s how you unlocked {Forced Feeling}, right?”

“Right. So something similar might happen here. Especially since, as you said, it leveled up to the cap almost immediately. That Skill is certainly working overtime trying to keep your presence as muted as possible. Doing that much might qualify you for the next Skill Quest, even if you don’t do anything else.”

Oberon’s words made sense. Both of the Skill Quests that Elise had discovered had resulted from her pushing her skills beyond their intended use. With {Mana Circulation}, she had gotten it because she used {Mana Sense} with extreme intensity to affect her own body’s ability to handle Mana. With {Forced Feeling}, she had pushed {Suggest} to its limits, basically using it as a weaker {Forced Feeling} until she got the true version of the skill. If something similar happened here, she would be more than happy.

“Any other questions?” asked Oberon.

“No,” said Elise, reactivating {Subtle Royalty}.

As she did, she wondered why Oberon didn’t question why {Subtle Royalty} was affecting him, but she decided to keep it to herself. If it was as she suspected and Titania had secretly upgraded her species without Oberon’s knowledge, that might clue him in to something being wrong. More than likely, he just wasn’t paying enough attention to notice, and had missed it. Calling attention to it would make it more likely for him to think about it more deeply.

“Then want to go out and have a bit of fun?”

“Only if I get to decide what the ‘fun’ is,” she said, activating {Fey Bargaining}.

“Bravo!” he said as the deal was accepted. “Then let’s get moving! I’ve already thought of ways to test all your new Skills.”

The Everspring Lounge saw all manner of customers. From poor commoners spending a lucky windfall to powerful nobles, or even royals, hoping for a relaxing meal. After working there for almost three decades, Francis thought he had seen everything. Royals having affairs, syndicate bosses spending illegal money, terminally ill commoners spending their savings on a final vacation, and more… But he had never seen an angel before.

He didn’t know if it was an actual Angel, the title given to 9th tier Ainar, but he was certainly going to tell his kids it was. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his entire life, with golden hair and blue eyes and wings as white as snow, and from the moment he laid eyes on her, he knew she was important. Possibly the most important person who had ever entered the establishment.

That’s ridiculous, he told himself, shaking his head to clear it.

He recognized what had happened. She had some kind of aura skill. He had been the subject of countless in the past. While he had no way to gauge exactly how powerful she was, he knew that it had been a long time since he last felt a presence . If she wasn’t an Angel or a royal, she was close in importance.

She was, at the very least, high-levelled. Francis saw the way that the heads of everyone in the building turned to stare at her the moment she appeared. There were many other powerful people present, but if they were all being influenced, then she couldn’t be weaker than high 7th tier, and he was willing to bet his life savings that was the lowest estimate he could give.

“Welcome, my lady!” he said, rushing to greet her. “How can I help you today?”

As he moved, he suddenly found her location strange. She was right in the center of the lounge. How had she gotten there without him noticing? Invisibility? Teleportation? Something else? Regardless, the fact that she had made it this far into the establishment without being noticed was an additional indicator that she was powerful.

“A private booth,” said another voice.

Francis did the smallest of double takes as he realized that there was actually someone else beside the Angel. It was a relatively short man, dressed in a black suit with a thin mustache and a monocle. Compared to the Angel beside him, he had almost no presence whatsoever, but despite this, he seemed mildly offended at having been looked over.

“Of course, sir,” said Francis. “Right this way.”

As he turned to lead them away, he silently thanked the gods that today wasn’t a busy day. He wouldn’t have wanted to be in the unenviable position of needing to either turn them away or tell the occupants of a booth they had to leave. He quickly led them to the back of the restaurant where they had private booths warded and soundproofed by a tier 8 craftsman.

“Is there anything I can get you?” asked Francis as the two sat down. “Would you like me to go over the menu for you?”

“No, we’d like some time to peruse it ourselves,” said the butler. “You may leave. Return in five minutes.”

“Of course,” said Francis, bowing deeply, unbothered by the authoritative tone.

When he looked up, his mind briefly short-circuited. The Angel’s blank expression had turned into a smile, and it seemed so blindingly bright that Francis didn’t know how to react.

“Thank you,” she said.

“I- uh- I-” stammered Francis. “I’ll return in five minutes!”

He turned to leave quickly to hide the reddening of his face, running into the door frame before stumbling out of the room. He thought he heard a soft snort of laughter from behind and his face reddened even more deeply. Despite his embarrassment though, his spirits were high. The Angel had smiled at him!

“Tsk, tsk, look what you’ve done,” said butler Oberon, shaking his head. “You’ve gone and turned a poor old man into a tomato.”

“This was your idea,” said Elise, blushing slightly as well.

“The restaurant was,” said Oberon. “It was your idea to go all out.”

“Well, I didn’t know it would be so strong!” she exclaimed.

“I don’t think you fully comprehend how much an effective 7000 in Charisma is. Even if half your Skills can only make use of whatever your stat sheet says, the passive effects of having so much are still very strong.”

“I can see that now…”

“Yes, and since we’ve already gone this far, what do you say we go even further? I want to see if you can ruin a play just by existing in the theater. Even a trained actor would get distracted if they saw you.”

“No thanks,” said Elise. “Let’s just eat and head back.”

It had been a few hours since Elise had finished evolving, and she had experimented about as much as she needed to with her Skills. She had shot down all of Oberon’s ideas to test {Royal Decree}, and eventually just had him procure her a few weak monsters to test it on. She would need a proper hunting trip to fully test its limits, but she had gotten a feel for how it worked. Weak monsters could be entirely under her control, and she had briefly gotten to experience being a Disney princess with a small flock of doves at her beck and call.

Next, they had tested {Don’t Look At Me, Peasants} by having Elise don her current ostentatious disguise and go out in public. As Oberon promised, despite her extremely conspicuous appearance, no one even noticed she was there. Their eyes all seemed to slip past her, moving from one side of her to the other without ever stopping on her. She had accidentally brushed by a few people with her wings, but they didn’t even react. She tapped a man on his shoulder, and he didn’t seem to feel it. It felt almost like she didn’t exist. Even when she deactivated {Subtle Royalty} and let the full force of her natural aether be free, no one noticed her.

She had wandered the city for a little while , enjoying the complete and utter anonymity before Oberon recommended they stop for food, since it was close to lunch time. Then, as he said, Elise thought it would be interesting to test out {Royal Presence}, so she activated it at full force when they entered the restaurant. She could have sworn she gave people whiplash with how quickly some of the heads turned.

Throughout the meal, Oberon kept trying to tempt her with more things to do, but she turned him down every time. Having {Royal Presence} active had leveled it up almost as quickly as {Subtle Royalty}, and now that she saw what it did, she had no desire to cause any more of a commotion by using it for the small pranks Oberon suggested. Besides, she had to get to the Grays soon. She wanted at least one night of Oberon-free relaxation before the busyness of school preparation began.

Toward the end of the meal, she began experimenting with combining {Royal Presence} with her other skills. {Don’t Look At Me, Peasants!} was completely incompatible, and wouldn’t even activate while {Royal Presence} was active, but {Subtle Royalty} actually had some very nice synergy. While she could adjust the strength of {Royal Presence} just through that skill alone, by combining it with {Subtle Royalty}, she could have a much wider range of control, and even control the literal range. With it, she found that she was even able to limit the physical range of {Royal Presence} so that it didn’t leak out of the room.

After the meal, they went straight back to the castle, despite Oberon’s pleas, and then Elise immediately began preparing to head to Jelor. Oberon had his private teleporter, so there was no issue with departing immediately, and all of Elise’s possessions were kept either in Astrid’s Star or the spatial bag from the tailor changeling. She still did a sweep of her room, just in case, but found nothing.

Around two in the afternoon, she was standing in the center of Oberon’s private teleporter as he prepared to send her off.

“Thank you,” she said. “For everything. And I mean it.”

“No problem at all,” he said with a smile. “I had a lot of fun teaching you.”

“If I come back for my next evolution, will you protect me again?”

“Of course!” he paused. “Ha! Well done!”

Elise smiled as the icy sensation of {Fey Bargaining} faded.

“See you later,” he said. “And by the way, don’t forget to check your physical description on your new identity before you go out anywhere.”

In a flash, she vanished.