Chapter 254 Check out my skillz (1/2)

I'm exhausted and my mandibles are aching something fierce after all that digging, but is it time to rest?

NOPE.

Those d.a.m.n pupae are teasing me with their very existence. The twenty large casings are resting against the side of a chamber, taunting me with their stillness. Within them, the hope of ant kind is taking the final steps of their gestation, turning from a grub into something more, something incredible. The ant species to end all ant species.

At least that's what I'm hoping for. If they suck I'm going to be really disappointed…

It shouldn't happen though! I reinforce my own positive mindset. They are going to be great, I've put so much effort into creating them and into making sure they'll get a solid boost to start out their new lives, surely they'll be great!

The closer this project is getting to fruition the more stressed I'm getting.

Put it behind you Anthony, put all of it behind you!

Focus on yourself for a while, treat yourself. To what should I treat myself? To skill training, of course!

Not only me, Tiny and Crinis have been roped in as well.

After discussing things with Beyn and drawing on his knowledge, our knowledge of the system has greatly expanded and the weightiest nugget of wisdom to come out of that was the importance of skills.

Whereas I had been putting too much emphasis on evolution and the energy within my core, I was ignoring two aspects of the holy trinity of monster power! Evolution! Mutation! Skills!

All things must be in balance, so it is in nature, so it is within the monster. When one tree is watered over much, it does not grow properly, drowning instead of thriving, and the other trees wither. Only when the life giving succour is evenly distributed to all three trees shall the monster truly flourish in all aspects, mentally, physically, spiritually!

I've gone some way to addressing the shortcomings of my mutations but my skills are still lacking. When Beyn had found out that none of my combat skills was of the fourth rank he'd nearly slapped me out of sheer shock and in the process lost his only remaining hand. At least now with Shattering Bite advancing I have one fourth rank combat skill. Advancing skills, fusing them and taking them to their extreme ends is what the surface races spend most of their time doing in the pursuit of strength.

Therefore, the time has come to take part in that most sacred of all system related activities, grinding!

Gonna grind like there's no tomorrow!

The most important thing to grind? Of course its magic!

This was the most frustrating thing that Beyn had enlightened me of. I'd thought I'd made use of an awesome hack in using my free magical affinity gland on gravity mana, and in a way, I still had.

If I'd used it on fire, water or earth or something basic like that, it would have been a ma.s.sive waste since I'm now able to produce those mana types now without too much stress. The problem is that having the gland doesn't give me access to what I really need to make use of it, which is the spell forms. I have the generic spell shapes that I've been using, but according to Beyn, every mana type has particular spells that make best of its attributes, the more advanced the mana type, the more specialised the spells will be.

Even though he'd never seen Gravity magic before, he was sure it was a particularly advanced form of mana, which means that the skill I want, Gravity Mana Affinity, will be deep in the skill tree somewhere.