Millicent’s Point of View

I couldn’t believe it. I had been stuck slowly leveling up my alchemy class for years. It was to the point I had given up on purchasing the level hundred skill, there just wasn’t a way to earn it and level fast enough to not be an old lady by the time I reached the uncommon class rank. That was until he showed up and started selling herbs for far cheaper than they really should be.

I managed to gain the eleven remaining levels to reach level one hundred, and I did so at such a pace that I decided to purchase my level one hundred skill. After I gained levels rapidly, it wasn’t until he showed up with that new herb that I almost wept at the speed my alchemy leveled. I had grown back up to level thirty, but sussing out the uses for the brand new herb got me dozens of levels for both its uses.

The herb had two uses, which would fundamentally change how many deaths happened during the early levels of adventuring. The first was a healing salve. The plant could be mashed into a paste that would rapidly seal and heal wounds that would normally require a healer to take care of. It also had a nourishing effect, but that was secondary.

The second usage was as a potion. It was weak, at least compared to even the weakest potions alchemists could make already. The key difference was that it restored health, mana, and stamina. It meant that the extremely expensive potions most adventurers only started carrying in case of an emergency had become much, much cheaper.

Once the price of these finally settled, it would be less than a twentieth of the price of one of the health, mana, or stamina potions, making it far more cost-effective after the initial wave of high prices went away. It meant that the very uncommon potion sickness from chugging too many potions would become far more common. And you know who normally treats that sickness? Alchemists.

Now… What did I get for discovering the two uses for this herb? Max level again. I had gone from level thirty back up to level one hundred and gained my uncommon class in a single day. I almost wept in joy from the sudden boon I gained from marrying him. This was ridiculous, and my leveling speed would only continue to go up.

The problem with alchemists is the expensive ingredients. The months it took him to painstakingly grow the rainbow grass, light shade, and wizardbeard herbs would only provide me with a day or two of work as I turned the herbs into potions. It meant that my leveling was heavily lopsided, where I would get most of my levels in that time period, but that would no longer be the case.

The new herb was so plentiful that I could make potions until the next batch of herbs would be created. I had gone to uncommon, but had already gotten to level ten a few times to purchase the new skills available to me. I was looking forward to going into the dungeons as well. The stat boost he provided made me even more resilient, smarter, more agile, and just better at everything. The standout stat increase was for luck.

Luck was by far the hardest stat to increase; most people didn’t even get an entire point of it from leveling up from common to uncommon in rank… And I just got more than two points of it. I also knew one thing others might not have known. Besides our resilience, one of the reasons gnomes survived more often than not was because of our unusually high luck. What would normally cause the death of a person might leave a gnome completely unscathed, just from the sheer luck we had… That was a point higher than normal… So what the hell does over-doubling my luck do?

I now knew why he had gotten so lucky over and over again. The women he slept with were in the same boat, the increasing luck most likely making it impossible for anything to break them up. It was like two magnets attracting each other; they wanted to stay connected. Things that shouldn’t work out, like ten women all falling for the same man, suddenly worked.

How much has his wives improved from this bonus? From this unfair luck? I knew I was going to take complete advantage of it by attempting things that shouldn’t work and hoping they would to level far faster in alchemy. Risky, expensive potions might become my bread and butter for leveling even faster than I was. I was really looking forward to it.

…

3rd Person PoV Tʜe sourcᴇ of thɪs content ɪs NoveI-Fire.ɴet

Waves of monsters slammed into each other as a miniature war broke out on the border of two dungeons. One side was a mixture of different monsters, crocodiles, giant slimes, and thousands of hand-sized mosquitoes. The other side was a single monster, dragonized lizardmen. At first, the fight seemed even, both sides having casualties.

While far more of the mixed army were dying, they severely outnumbered the lizardmen. The mosquitoes were doing most of the work, as there were so many, but it was impossible to ignore them. Each bite numbed the limb of the lizardman it attacked as several swarmed the corpses of the lizardmen, drinking their fill of blood before exploding into multiple new mosquitoes.

That was until the second wave of much stronger lizardmen entered the battle. All of the lizardmen who died so far were fodder, while the second line had jobs. Lizardmen mages burned the mosquitoes out of the air while their healers fixed wounds and raised the dead from the ground. Something that shouldn’t be possible for low-level dungeons to be capable of, yet it was still happening.

The armored lizardmen champions, even larger than the original troops, rushed past, cleaving through the opposing army as if they weren’t there. It forced the losing dungeon to send their remaining monsters; most were similar, but some were more advanced versions, which included the swamp dungeon's boss monster. He was a gigantic ape, with a dozen smaller apes as backup.

As if the opposing dungeon had waited for this moment. It sent forth its boss, a dragon abomination. Dungeons couldn’t make dragons; it was impossible for them to, unless the dragon allowed it, which had never happened before. The abomination of flesh, vaguely in the shape of a dragon, was a threat. If any human saw it, their first mission would be to warn the rest of the kingdom so they could come and squash it before it became a bigger threat.

The abomination thrashed at the line of the army, killing not only the enemy army but some of its own. It opened its mouth as it used its ‘dragon’s breath’ attack, spraying out acidic blood from its maw, burning and melting the monkey boss. The corrupted dungeon had already destroyed three other dungeon cores in this direction, dozens altogether surrounding itself.

Soon, it would break through the dungeons that encircled it, allowing it to finally begin invading civilized territory.