Chapter 79: [79]: The Lifesteal Marathon, Forging the Long Night
Blink. Execute. Slash. Heal.
It was a terrifying, exhausting rhythm. The VR stamina engine was brutal. Levi’s real-world shoulders burned, and he was sweating heavily inside the helmet, but he couldn’t take a break. He had to treat the entire coastline as a massive, continuous combat sequence just to stay alive.
As the monsters shattered into blue polygons, they dropped items directly onto the black sand. Levi didn’t stop to pick them up carefully. He just ran over the loot, letting the game’s auto-pickup feature vacuum the items into his inventory.
[Loot Acquired: Uncommon Cloak of Shadows.]
Levi remembered this item from his past life. The Shadow-Stalkers dropped these cloaks. If a player managed to gather enough of them and fuse them, the resulting item completely negated the zone’s toxic curse.
He needed to gather enough to fuse a Platinum-tier item. Since Boundless Fusion required three items per tier, he needed exactly twenty-seven Uncommon cloaks to make one Platinum cloak.
"Twenty-seven cloaks," Levi grunted, hacking his scythe into another panther. "Let’s grind."
He dragged the fight out across the dunes. He intentionally pulled massive swarms of Shadow-Stalkers, dragging them together so his AoE Guillotine could hit more targets, multiplying his lifesteal return.
Isolde just followed casually behind him. She walked over the black sand like she was on a quiet stroll in the park. Every few seconds, she pointed her staff and deleted 5,000 HP from a beast. She didn’t show any emotion. She just executed her artillery parameters perfectly.
Levi slaughtered them in droves. Ten. Twenty. Fifty.
The XP return was absolutely astronomical. Because he was fighting mobs fifteen levels higher than him, the game applied the maximum possible underdog multiplier to the base experience.
[System Notification: Slain 1x Level 50 Shadow-Stalker. Gained 450,000 XP.]
Nearly half a million XP per kill.
After an hour of non-stop, frantic combat, Levi executed his eightieth Shadow-Stalker. The monster shattered.
The massive XP dump finally flooded his progression bar.
A blinding, glorious golden pillar of light crashed down through the toxic purple fog. The light washed over Levi’s avatar, instantly clearing away his physical fatigue and fully restoring his health and mana pools to 100%.
[System Notification: Level Up! You are now Level 36.]
Levi didn’t stop swinging, but he quickly opened his inventory to check his loot counter. He had exactly 27 [Uncommon Cloak of Shadows] sitting in his bag. He had hit the quota.
He opened his status menu with a quick thought-command. He had 5 new free stat points from the level up.
He needed more attack speed to increase his lifesteal frequency. He dumped all 5 points directly into Agility.
His Agility bumped from 321 to 326. His derived Speed stat jumped to 346.
His scythe moved even faster, becoming a dark blur that easily carved through the remaining monsters. He just needed to find a safe zone to sit down and fuse the cloaks before his mana pool ran completely dry. He was sitting at a critical 200 Mana.
He glanced through the fog and saw a faint, warm orange glow sitting on top of a nearby dune. It was a bonfire.
"Found it," Levi yelled over the sound of combat. He executed one last panther, resetting his teleport. "Isolde! We’re moving!"
He didn’t wait for her to run. He stepped over to her, grabbed Isolde tightly around the waist.
"Hollow’s Traverse!"
His body dissolved into a tunnel of dark light, dragging Isolde with him. They completely bypassed the swarm of angry Level 50 monsters and reappeared directly inside the ring of orange light cast by the bonfire.
The moment they crossed into the light, the purple fog violently hissed and parted, refusing to enter the safe zone.
Levi collapsed onto the black sand. He let go of Isolde and rolled onto his back, gasping for digital air. His health bar was sitting at a terrifying 412 out of 5,480. A few more seconds in that fog and his account would have been permanently deleted.
He immediately pulled two high-tier health potions and a mana potion from his belt. He popped the corks with his thumb and chugged all three back-to-back. The cool red and blue liquids hit his system, and his bars started ticking back up.
Isolde stood up and brushed some sand off her plain gray cloak. She looked down at him.
"Your heart rate reached dangerous parameters," She tilted her head, her eyes scanning his heavily depleted health bar. "The logical choice was to retreat to the ship. Proceeding into a lethal environmental hazard with a zero percent baseline survival rate was a massive calculation error."
Levi groaned, pushing himself up into a sitting position. "The logical choice doesn’t save you, Isolde. Running back to the ship means we don’t get the loot to actually beat the zone."
He didn’t want to argue with a walking supercomputer. He opened his spatial inventory.
During the frantic, hour-long slaughter on the beach, the auto-pickup system had been vacuuming up the loot dropped by the Shadow-Stalkers. He filtered out the trash items and smiled.
Sitting in his bags were exactly 27 [Uncommon Cloak of Shadows].
"Time to build a jacket," Levi said.
He scooted closer to the bonfire and pulled up the Boundless Fusion interface. The three glowing golden slots materialized in the air, casting a secondary light over the sand.
This was going to be an incredibly expensive crafting session.
He started with the base layer. He dragged the 27 Uncommon cloaks into the slots in batches of three. He hit the fuse button nine times in rapid succession. The interface flashed with a bright, basic light. The torn, flimsy gray cloaks melted together, compressing and turning into nine thicker, slightly glowing Silver-tier cloaks.
"Okay, step one done," Levi muttered.
He dragged the nine Silver cloaks back into the fusion slots, again in batches of three.
The system threw up a red warning prompt. Upgrading to Gold-tier wasn’t free.
[Warning: Fusing Silver-tier items into Gold-tier requires a raw currency fee of 5,000 Gold Coins.]
Levi checked his wallet. He had plenty of gold from his Domain taxes and the World Boss payout, but seeing the numbers drop always stung. He dumped the 5,000 Gold into the payment slot and hit confirm.
Three blinding flashes of prismatic light lit up the bonfire zone. The nine Silver cloaks dissolved completely, the fabric turning into a thick, pitch-black material that looked like woven shadow.
The light faded, leaving three Gold-tier cloaks floating in the air.
"Now for the big one," Levi breathed.
He dragged the three Gold cloaks into the central slots.
The system UI immediately flashed a violent, aggressive crimson.
[CRITICAL WARNING: Fusing Gold-tier armor into Platinum-tier requires a massive systemic overwrite. A raw currency fee of 20,000 Gold Coins is absolutely required to proceed. Do you accept?]
"Twenty grand for a piece of clothing," Levi sighed. "I love being broke again."
He transferred the 20,000 Gold directly into the interface. That was a total of 25,000 Gold blown in less than two minutes. He slammed the accept button.
The fusion process was terrifying. The air around the bonfire physically dropped in temperature. The three Gold cloaks collapsed inward, creating a miniature singularity of dark matter. The digital grinding noise sounded like a massive vault door slamming shut.
The dark singularity stabilized, then burst outward in a wave of completely silent, pitch-black energy.
Floating in the center of the UI was a single, heavily tattered cloak. It looked like it was made out of the night sky itself.
[Mantle of the Long Night]
[Rarity: Platinum]
[Effect: +50 DEF, +50 VIT.]
[Passive: Complete immunity to the Midnight Continent’s environmental drain.]
"Worth every single coin," Levi grinned.
He grabbed the pitch-black mantle out of the air and immediately equipped it. The heavy fabric draped over his shoulders, perfectly matching the dark aesthetic of his Obsidian Carapace armor and his Gold-tier boots.
He opened his status menu.
His base Defense was 299. Adding the +50 Defense from the Platinum mantle pushed his total Defense straight up to 349.
Next was the Vitality calculation. His VIT was sitting at 269. The mantle added a flat 50, bumping his Vitality to exactly 319.
His new maximum health was a massive 6,480 HP.
Levi closed his interface and stood up.
He looked at the wall of toxic purple fog swirling just outside the bonfire’s light. He didn’t hesitate. He took a step forward, walking directly out of the safe zone and back into the thick miasma.
The purple fog washed over his new mantle.
The system logs flashed in the corner of his vision.
[Curse of the Long Night: Nullified.]
His health bar didn’t drop by a single point. There was no 100 HP drain. The healing debuff was completely gone.
Levi let out a massive breath of relief and summoned the Sovereign’s Deathknell. The Gold-tier scythe pulsed with dark energy. He turned around to look at Isolde, who was still standing by the fire.
"I’m off the timer," Levi said, a ruthless smile spreading across his face. "The true hunt begins right now."
**
Updated Stat Sheet:
Name: Levi | Level: 36
Class: [Herald of the Hollow (Unique)] |Talent: [Supreme Harvester (Unique)]
HP: 6480/6480 | Mana: 2060/2060
STR: 380 | AGI: 326 | VIT: 319 | INT: 201 | LUK: 175
Attack: 1080 | Defense: 349 | Speed: 346
Core Skills: [Hollow’s Guillotine], [Hollow’s Traverse], [Siphon Aura], [Soul Harvest], [Hollow’s Ward].