My Dungeon Life: Rise of the Slave Harem

The next day went about smoothly. I did my best to prepare the army. There was actually very little I could do. Everyone already had their jobs and was going about it. It seemed like working on my combat ability was the best thing I could do. I didn’t want to put myself in a dungeon where some random event could happen and I end up stuck there for a month, so my best bet was to continue to use the underground fighting to help develop my combat ability.

Rather than working on pure strength, I started trying to unequip jobs and make use of the skills without having access to the lore. Although few books in Aberis understood the lore as deeply as I did, I had come to have a confident understanding of just how the job system worked. Jobs were essentially redundant lore that attached themselves to the souls of people who were moving down a certain path. As they grew more experienced, they grew closer to the lore, deriving more benefits as they level. These benefits came in the form of status increases, skills, and bonuses.

Once reaching enough understanding, these fragments of lore could in turn attract new fragments of lore, which is often what I understood as second-tier lore and on. Equipped lore was lore that you pushed closest to your soul, allowing you to read it directly, while unequipped lore was nearby and accessible, but too distant for you to read it. It was sort of like the difference between having the memory in ram and having the memory in the hard drive. You could store a lot of memory in hard drives, but any memory you wanted readily available required the use of the ram. In that respect, 2nd and third jobs were like getting an extra ram slot.

That exhausted all I knew about computers. I had a cousin who was somewhat skilled with them and tried to show me how to build them, however, that felt like an eternity ago. Anyway, that analogy failed, because by repeating skills endlessly, I could make them a part of my lore permanently, and then I could use the skills even when the job wasn’t equipped. This was ultimately my goal over the next week. Since I had to fight people back-to-back who were inferior to me, I chose to handicap myself in this manner, trying out and practicing different methods of fighting. I wouldn’t say my levels went up particularly quickly during this period, but I did feel my comprehension did.

I had read about a condition called experience exhaustion. It was a point a lot of dungeon divers and adventurers, the type who tended to level rapidly would experience where the higher they leveled, the smaller their experience would become. Of course, when your experience increased, the obvious option was to fight more difficult enemies, but you eventually reached a point where the enemies outstripped your ability to defeat them. Thus, fighting the top enemies you could handle, you earned piddling experience and your leveling stalled.

I had mostly avoided that by having experience multipliers that overwhelmed such an ability. Adding my body and soul upgrades, I had managed to level steadily without issue. However, at some point, my leveling might stall, and that came when my levels exceeded my comprehension. No matter how powerful someone was, if they didn’t understand how to use that strength, they could only fight weaker enemies that didn’t help them gain any experience. Of course, I even had a cheat here too. Advanced Learning allowed me to accelerate my comprehension, so even after a few days, I had a much better handle on my levels. I felt like I wouldn’t bottleneck in the near future.

Not only did I defeat the enemies one after another, but my ranks steadily rose as well. I was on my third day, having reached the Silver Rank when my next opponent surprised me.

“Deacon the Dragon versus Queen Lionness!”