Ronan roared as he reached the end of his swing. The conjured sword felt weak in his hands, but it had played its part. Another goblin fell to the ground, dead.

A fist smashed into his stomach, knocking him a step backwards. He gasped for breath and blew a hastily-formed mana bolt in the direction of the punch. A goblin's screech followed the spell's explosion.

Forming another shortsword, Ronan tried to push the boundaries of the skill, extending the blade and compressing it. A sharper edge, a greater heft.

His attempts were mostly futile, but he could feel the small improvements his struggle made. The next swing sliced clean through a goblin's neck, halting at the spine. He activated surging strikes, and two ethereal blades echoed his initial swing. The second finished the job, sending the misshapen green head flying into the dirt.

A horn sounded in the distance, right as an arrow tore past his shoulder, narrowly missing him. Shoulder barging the closest goblin out of the way, Ronan looked towards the centre of the goblin city, where a group of at least twenty goblins decked in leather armour and carrying an assortment of steel weaponry were rushing through the buildings towards him.

He hadn't even had a moment to assign his free stat points. He'd gained plenty of levels while fighting but stealing even a single breath of respite was nigh-on impossible with how ferociously the goblins fought to defend their home.

Knowing the system worked on thought, he used this current lull in the action to split whatever points he had between wisdom, strength, and agility. Stamina was a renewable resource for him at this point—his plethora of skills allowed him to restore it when he fought. However, mana was not. Even with a healthy investment in regeneration, it didn't regenerate faster than he spent it. Sorcery was expensive work.

Despite constantly using his healing skills, Ronan quickly found himself on the losing end of the battle. There wasn't a cooldown on any of the skills, but he discovered that the more he healed an area that had been previously wounded and then healed, the less effective the skills were at healing it. That was an unforeseen complication.

Whether that feature was ubiquitous to healing skills or it was simply due to the low rarity of his, Ronan wouldn't know until he got better ones. A problem to solve in the future.

Another goblin cut into his stomach, this time piercing something vital as a flood of crimson poured down his abdomen. For its troubles it earned a punch in the nose and an explosive mana bolt to the chest, but Ronan knew he wasn't going to make it. In this situation, there was only one way to proceed.

Take down as many of the little green shits as he possibly could before his health reached zero.

Iteration 48 analysis:

Highest level achieved: 31

Highest class achieved: Healer (Common)

Highest fortune achieved: 9 Bronze Credits, 406 Copper Credits

Stats gained: 425

Cultivation stages achieved: Mind (Quartz ★★★), Body (Stone ★★), Energy (Pulsing ★), Soul (Red ★★★★)

Inventory value accumulated: 16 Bronze Credits, 794 Copper Credits

Chrono Enhancement Updates:

Experience gain multiplier has not increased

Credit gain multiplier has not increased

Experience gain multiplier has increased from 17.813 to 18.238

Cultivation talent multiplier has not increased (2.9)

Cultivation progress has been reset, maximum stages reached have been locked

Mastery progress has been reset, maximum tiers reached have been locked

Class has been reset, class skills purged from status

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Chronos merits have been acquired! All four paths of cultivation have reached at least the first realm! Inheritor possesses 35+ skills or traits! Access to chronos clan ancestral grounds granted at the first threshold

Seeing the analysis, Ronan realised how different the harder difficulty tutorial really was. While he'd had moments to use his myriad skills tomes and endless treasury tokens, there had been almost no downtime for things such as cultivation. That meant he was still lacking in terms of his mind and body cultivation.

Which, considering the multipliers he had to those two, was a travesty. He would need to rectify it soon. In fact, he felt it might make more sense to head back to the normal difficulty tutorial to obtain the requisite shards so that he could push them up to the fourth or fifth realm, or possibly even above the first threshold.

Not only would that give him a boost to his stats, but it would award him at least two more chronos merits. That would, in turn, allow him to increase the tier of his enhancements—hard work bears fruit could do with another tier or two. He was already over the cap for more than one stat.

Ronan was torn. A part of him wanted to rush right back into the harder difficulty tutorial and throw himself at the goblins once more.

He knew that if he kept fighting without end, eventually he would reach a point where he would be able to fight his way through every last green monster and emerge victorious. However, did he really want to do that?

There were better, smarter ways to go about this. He'd learned that over time. Not only that, but he was already reaching a soft cap in terms of his multiplier growth. While his numerical experience multiplier did increase every time he died, the amount was the same, meaning each death was less of a multiplier to the multiplier.

In other words, he needed to find better methods of increasing his power. Methods that could add one and one to make five, rather than two.

First of all, cultivating. He had made strides in energy cultivation and, to a lesser extent, soul cultivation. However, the first paths he'd stepped onto—mind and body—had been neglected. That was easy to rectify.

With his multipliers and the availability of shards in the normal difficulty tutorial, Ronan reckoned that he could push both mind and body cultivation up to at least the fifth realm in just one or two iterations. That would not only give a direct increase to his stats and combat strength, but earn him chronos merits to further bolster his stats.

Then there was his healing magic, and sorcery in general. That had no time limit. Every single iteration was one he could use to practice. Yeah, slow and steady wins the race.

Mind made up, he decided to turn things down a notch, temporarily, so that he could prepare to completely sweep through the harder difficulty tutorial when he returned to it. Not only that, but collecting a bunch of skills meant he could have a shot at some more skill alloying or forging soon.

Beginning a new iteration, please stand by…

A familiar goblin walked out of a portal. A familiar fist tore through the air at lightning speed towards its face. A familiar scene played out; a surprised goblin caught Ronan's punch to the face, moments before said face exploded into a shower of crimson goop, as though someone had burst a watermelon.

"It feels good to be back," Ronan chuckled, shaking the brain matter from between his fingers.

More than the cultivation he was about to gain, Ronan was looking forward to once more seeing the first partymates he'd made in this fucked up new world. Being able to be a positive influence on Keith, however temporary, was also a benefit.

Seeing the man with Lord Rockmore's goons the few times he'd been in the hard difficulty post-tutorial had left a sour taste in his mouth. Still, there wasn't much he could do about it, and what he could do, he did.

With the goblin dead, he'd earned himself a common skills tome, along with a minute to practice some more sorcery. Moving away from the mana bolt, Ronan decided to start messing with the mana flows he'd felt from his healing skills.

He was under no illusion about how far he might be able to progress in the limited time that he had, but he knew he could make a start. First, he cycled his mana as usual. At this point, while he was still a short step away from true mastery of the Nine Mouths Delta Mystic Energy Art when it came to cultivation, he had perfected the technique when it came to cycling his mana.

One point became… about eight, then rejoined into a single, condensed stream of mana that travelled through his energy channels. To begin with, he wanted to focus on the simplest of his healing spells. Funnily enough, it was the class skill, minor heal, that fit the bill.

Suture wound may have been simpler in theory, as all it did was roughly close a wound, but the process was more complex. Mana wise, at least.

Minor heal was utterly basic. Mana flowed from the heart to the target affliction, removing the damage slowly, until the health points it had robbed from the patient were—mostly—restored.

There was some more complexity in terms of how the mana compressed itself and interacted with different kinds of wounds and parts of the body, but on the whole it wasn't a difficult process to grasp. To begin with, Ronan was only going to try to master healing basic wounds. Something like a papercut. There wouldn't be too much focus or mastery required.

First, he had to actually cut himself. Defeating the goblin had leveled him up and fully restored his body. Not that he'd even hurt himself during the fight, if it could be called that. At this point it was bullying.

Conjuring a small dagger, Ronan drew it across his palm. A thin line of crimson appeared, three small beads of blood appearing along its length. Not painful, aside from a minor stinging sensation, and certainly not life-threatening. Holding his other palm over the cut, he thought back to the feeling of using minor heal and attempted to mimic it.

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