Chapter 78: The Black Ash Shores, The Lifesteal Marathon
The *Wraith’s Wake* hit the shoreline of the Midnight Continent with a heavy, wooden crunch. The ship literally ran aground on the jagged, pitch-black sand.
Levi didn’t wait for the skeletal crew to drop the gangway. He vaulted over the wooden railing and landed squarely on the black ash.
The second his boots touched the shore, the entire environment reacted. A thick, suffocating purple fog rolled out from the treeline and completely enveloped him. The VR engine instantly simulated a harsh, stinging sensation in his virtual lungs, making his avatar cough violently.
A massive, jagged debuff icon instantly appeared on his UI.
[Curse of the Long Night]
[Effect: Drains 100 HP per second. All healing effects are reduced by 50%.]
Levi stared at the red text. His eyes went completely wide.
[-100]
A massive red number floated above his head. A second later, another one popped up.
[-100]
"You have got to be kidding me," Levi yelled, quickly opening his skill menu.
He toggled on his [Siphon Aura]. The green light wrapped around his boots, but it was incredibly dim, heavily choked by the purple fog. The skill was designed to heal him for 15 HP every second while in combat. Because he was actively taking environmental damage, it triggered immediately.
But the math was horrifying.
The curse explicitly reduced all healing effects by 50%. His 15 HP a second was instantly cut in half to exactly 7.5.
Levi rapidly processed the net loss in his head. He was losing 100 HP every second to the poison fog. He was only healing 7.5 HP back.
100 minus 7.5 meant he was taking a net loss of exactly 92.5 HP every single second.
His maximum health pool was 5,480.
5,480 divided by 92.5 meant he had roughly 59 seconds to live before his health bar hit zero and he permanently died on the beach.
Isolde stepped off the ship, her gray cloak completely ignoring the purple fog. The debuff didn’t even register on her UI. Her Anomaly code rendered her totally immune to standard environmental status effects.
She walked up to him, her blank eyes scanning his rapidly dropping health bar.
"You are currently taking fatal environmental damage," Isolde stated in her flat, robotic voice. "Calculations indicate you will expire in fifty-seven seconds. The logical choice is to return to the ship and abort the objective."
"I just paid ten thousand gold for this boat ride," Levi snapped, gripping his scythe. "I am not leaving."
"That is mathematically irrational," Isolde replied.
Levi ignored her. He looked around the shoreline frantically. He couldn’t just stand here. If he didn’t find something to hit, he was going to die. He needed to trigger his weapon’s 10% Lifesteal to counteract the fog.
About forty yards down the black beach, a massive patrol of monsters was wandering out of the dead treeline.
They were towering, shadowy figures that looked like twisted wolves walking on their hind legs. They carried jagged obsidian daggers and practically blended into the purple fog.
[Shadow-Stalker]
[Level: 50]
[HP: 40,000 | ATK: 1,500 | DEF: 500]
Levi didn’t hesitate. "I need to hit them. Right now."
He burned 50 Mana. "Hollow’s Traverse!"
His body dissolved into a tunnel of dark light. He completely bypassed the physical distance, instantly teleporting directly into the dead center of the Shadow-Stalker patrol. There were exactly four of them.
He ran the offensive math in a fraction of a second while coming out of the teleport.
He was Level 35. The monsters were Level 50. That was a fifteen-level gap. The Level Suppression penalty was a completely absurd 75%.
’Their Defense is 500,’ Levi calculated rapidly. ’My scythe ignores 20%. That drops them to 400 effective Defense.’
His Total Attack was 1,080.
1,080 minus 400 left 680 raw damage. Now, apply the brutal 75% suppression penalty. He was only going to deal 25% of his actual damage.
680 multiplied by 0.25 equaled exactly 170 Final Damage per basic strike.
’A hundred and seventy damage per hit is trash,’ Levi thought. ’Let’s check the skill.’
He dumped 100 Mana. "Hollow’s Guillotine!"
1,080 Attack multiplied by 3.5 gave 3,780 raw damage. Minus the 400 Defense left 3,380. Apply the 75% penalty, and the final skill damage was exactly 845.
He swung the scythe in a massive ten-meter cone, hitting all four Shadow-Stalkers simultaneously.
[-845] [-845] [-845] [-845]
The skill damage was low, but Levi didn’t care about killing them fast. He cared about the Lifesteal math.
His Gold-tier scythe granted 10% Lifesteal on all physical damage dealt. He just hit four targets for 845 damage each. That was a total of 3,380 damage dealt.
Ten percent of 3,380 was exactly 338.
But the Curse of the Long Night cut all healing in half.
338 divided by 2 meant he actually healed for exactly 169 HP.
A bright green [+169] popped up over his head. It completely erased the 100 HP environmental damage for that specific second, actually pushing his health bar up slightly.
"Okay, I can live," Levi yelled, entirely out of breath. "But I can’t stop swinging!"
The fight instantly turned into a desperate, frantic marathon of survival. If Levi stopped attacking for even a single second, the 92.5 net health drain from the fog would start eating him alive. He had to maintain a constant, aggressive flurry of attacks just to stay above water.
The Shadow-Stalkers snarled and lunged at him with their obsidian daggers.
Levi used his 341 Speed to physically weave between the massive monsters. He couldn’t afford to get hit by their 1,500 Attack. He just dashed around their legs, spinning his scythe like a madman.
Because his swing timer was so fast, he was landing four basic strikes every second. 170 damage times four hits meant he was dealing 680 DPS to a single target. Ten percent Lifesteal of 680 was 68. Cut in half by the fog, he was healing 34 HP per second from basic attacks.
Combined with his Siphon Aura’s 7.5 HP, he was only healing 41.5 HP a second. The fog was still draining 100.
He was slowly dying.
"Isolde!" Levi roared, his health dropping back down into the 4,000s.
Isolde stepped up from the shoreline. She didn’t use any flashy animations. She just raised her wooden staff and pointed it at the nearest Shadow-Stalker.
[-5,000 True Damage]
The corrupted red text floated into the air. The monster’s health bar took a massive chunk. Because Isolde was dealing true damage, she didn’t help Levi’s Lifesteal, but she was rapidly pushing the mobs toward the execution threshold.
Levi had to drag more targets into the fight. He used Hollow’s Traverse to blink across the black sand, intentionally pulling another pack of four Shadow-Stalkers into the cluster.
With eight targets surrounding him, his Hollow’s Guillotine hit eight times. The AoE Lifesteal finally overpowered the fog’s drain. His health violently spiked back up to full every time he dropped his skill.
"Keep blasting them!" Levi yelled, spinning his scythe through the massive pack.
The combat loop was absolutely exhausting. The VR stamina engine was screaming at him, but he couldn’t take a break. He had to treat the entire coastline as one massive, continuous combat encounter.
Isolde systematically blasted the Stalkers with 5,000 True Damage hits.
When a Shadow-Stalker’s health hit exactly 8,000 HP (20% of its maximum), Levi dumped 50 Mana.
"Soul Harvest."
The massive spectral guillotine dropped, instantly executing the beast and refunding his teleport. He immediately blinked to the next mob to keep his basic attack momentum going.
He slaughtered the first eight mobs.
He didn’t even have time to pick up the loot properly. He just ran over their dissolving polygons, vacuuming up whatever they dropped while actively sprinting toward the next pack of monsters.
The system notifications pinged his UI.
[Item Acquired: Uncommon Cloak of Shadows]
Levi remembered this item from his past life. It was the entire reason players farmed the shoreline. If you combined enough of these cloaks, you could forge a piece of gear that permanently negated the zone’s toxic curse. He needed exactly 27 of them to push the rarity up to Platinum.
"Alright," Levi grunted, chugging a mana potion on the run. "Twenty-seven cloaks. That means a lot of dead wolves."
For the next two hours, Levi did not stop swinging.
He dragged massive packs of Level 50 Shadow-Stalkers together, relying entirely on his AoE Lifesteal to survive the brutal -100 HP/sec environmental drain. The 75% suppression penalty made his damage laughably low, but Isolde’s artillery support carried the DPS check perfectly.
He executed target after target. The massive XP multiplier for the fifteen-level gap was completely flooding his progression bar.
After slaughtering exactly eighty Shadow-Stalkers and gathering his 27 cloaks, his XP bar finally overflowed.
The blinding golden pillar of progression light crashed down, completely illuminating the dark, purple-fogged beach. His health and mana snapped back to full, and the burning exhaustion in his arms was instantly erased.
[System Notification: Level Up! You are now Level 36.]
Levi finally stopped swinging. He backed out of the aggro radius of the remaining mobs, staring at the system prompt. He had survived the beach landing.
He quickly opened his menu. He had 5 new free stat points. He needed to swing his scythe even faster to increase his Lifesteal frequency in this zone.
He dumped all 5 points directly into Agility.
His Agility bumped from 321 to 326. His derived Speed stat jumped from 341 to exactly 346.
He closed the menu, his virtual lungs heaving as he stood in the toxic fog. He couldn’t stay still for long, but he had the materials he needed. It was time to fix this stupid environmental hazard permanently.