Skill Library Planning

Deep in the Graymist Defense Zone, far from Blackpine Fief, sprawled the ruins of a vast fortress that had been crushed to rubble.

Hundreds upon hundreds of High-Rank Ghouls stood motionless among the broken walls, rusted Chainmail hanging from their shriveled bodies and battered weapons angled toward the ground.

At the front sat an immense figure.

This Ghoul Commander was wreathed in the Blood Moon's dense deathly aura. Great swaths of his ashen flesh had fallen away, and the exposed parts had begun to turn to bone.

In his right claw, he held a heavy broken sword point-down. Traces of Holy Silver plating still glimmered faintly along its fractured edge.

Once a weapon used to slay the darkness, it had become an instrument of his torment. The Holy Silver kept searing his mutated flesh, sending a faint corrosive hiss from his palm.

Yet he gripped the hilt fiercely. It was the last scrap of human memory in his desiccated soul.

Just then, at the far edge of the horizon, a gap tore open in the night.

A faint but pure beam of platinum light shot upward, piercing the Blood Moon's crimson clouds like an upturned sword.

The Ghoul Commander merely raised his head, slowly and stiffly.

"The Sacred Flame... is burning again..."

The Ghoul had actually spoken, and his rasping voice held a sorrow almost too faint to hear.

Three full days had passed since that brutal slaughter.

In any other Long Night Fief, the moment the danger eased even slightly, the Convicts would have been driven by whips to haul boulders and repair the walls.

But this camp was strangely quiet.

Aside from minimal patrols along the perimeter and checks on the Sacred Flame's base, Shien had given only one order: three days of rest for everyone.

Soldiers and Convicts lay sprawled beside the campfires, wrapped in bloodstained blankets and sleeping without a care. Deep snores rose and fell around them.

Over those three days, the brilliant Deep Blue Blessing above the camp had settled into the stillness of a frozen sea.

The soldiers could sleep soundly, but Shien could not.

The backlash from pushing himself to the limit for two consecutive nights still lingered, but he had forced himself to sleep for only one day and night.

As soon as the dizziness eased, he put on his coat and sat at a makeshift desk pieced together from broken crates inside his tent.

Before the Blood Moon Season arrived, he had to turn Blackpine Fief's wasteland into a fortress of slaughter armed with steel, gears, and Poisonfire.

But before he could set that war machine's construction in motion, he needed to make use of what he had gained and plan his next moves.

Shien glanced toward the gap in the tent flap. Ivan's tower-like figure stood guard outside.

Certain he would not be disturbed, Shien drew back his gaze and slowly lowered his eyelids. He leaned his tense back against the wooden chair, and the Canon of Grace and Righteousness opened silently.

Reward Value: 8732.

It was a vast fortune forged for him by the hundreds of Blackpine Fief's soldiers who had survived by the skin of their teeth.

Shien's eyes passed over the costs of copying skills.

An Lv.1 basic skill cost 200 points, an Lv.2 advanced skill cost 600, and an Lv.3 skill required a full 1,800.

Any young knight hungry for power would likely have been in a frenzy by now, eagerly buying Battle Aura and sword techniques capable of splitting mountains and shattering stone.

But as Shien looked at that fortune, there was not a trace of greed in his eyes. Instead, an image flashed through his mind.

Fabien, a Church swordsman who had spent years in the Resonance Realm, had not lasted even a second against that Tier Three Mutant Giant Rat's tail strike.

He had been swatted away like a sack of rags, his breastplate shattered, and had hit the ground coughing blood.

Even if I push my swordsmanship and Battle Aura into the Resonance Realm, how many monsters could I kill during the real Blood Moon Season? Shien calculated coolly. At most, I'd survive a few more minutes in this meat grinder.

He was a lord. Combat strength mattered, but it was not what he needed most urgently.

Shien turned his gaze toward the camp's senior craftsmen and the one-armed old man, Victor.

Copy Victor's [Lv.3 Alchemy of Architectural Constructs] and Mack's [Lv.2 Giant Defensive Fortification Construction].

His Reward Value instantly dropped by 2,400 points.

The next moment, a sudden upheaval erupted in his sea of consciousness, and the pages of the Canon of Grace and Righteousness blazed with brilliant blue light.

A vast flood of information swept through his nerves, forcing the rough experience in Mack's and Victor's minds into his own.

Stone-laying techniques, the proportions for mixing Demon Beast bones and blood into mortar, and instinctive skills for digging defensive tunnels all unfolded rapidly in his sea of consciousness.

At the same time, another set of dormant memories awakened.

Architectural diagrams and popular science books from the shelves of his previous life, along with knowledge from books he had idly read to pass the time.

Under the Sacred Canon's power, those long-blurred fragments were retrieved with precision.

Two utterly different systems of knowledge rapidly fused in Shien's mind.

The stability of triangular structures, basic load-bearing mechanics, cement-mixing ratios... even modern artillery-resistant trench designs and overlapping fields of fire from projecting wall sections began to merge with the Caltrops and trenches of this other world.

Shien slowly let out a breath. He could barely contain the excitement swelling in his chest.

This was an unexpected windfall. The Canon of Grace and Righteousness did more than copy skills; it could also fill in the gaps using knowledge from his previous life.

The craftsmen of this world relied on techniques passed down through generations to stack stone. They often knew what worked without knowing why.

But when Shien copied those skills, the Sacred Canon searched his memories from his previous life for the scientific principles behind them, then fused the two together.

It gave him an advantage from Earth that this world had no way to match.

It meant Shien would possess a system that had never existed anywhere in the Blood Moon world: wasteland construction guided by modern engineering principles.

After a brief surge of excitement, Shien quickly reined in his emotions, focused his mind, and moved on.

Pushing himself to the limit with fine-grained control over the past two nights had shown him the limits of low-level skills.

Maintaining [Lv.2 Battle Formation Command Logic] and [Lv.2 Basic Battlefield Awareness] at once was like trying to count every grain of sand in a sandstorm with the naked eye.

His brain had been forced to run like an overclocked surveillance system. The price was nerve pain that had nearly driven him to collapse.

If he kept that up through the sixty-day Blood Moon Season, his brain would burn out before the Demon Beasts breached the walls. He had to escape that wasteful drain.

The Canon of Grace and Righteousness did not merely list skills in rigid categories.

When the underlying logic of two skills complemented each other closely enough, Reward Value could serve as a furnace, breaking them down and reforging them into a higher-order ability.

Shien fixed his thoughts on the skill nodes.

As 1,800 Reward Value was consumed, the two clusters of light representing perception and command slammed together in his sea of consciousness.

Breakthrough!

[Upgrade complete: Obtained Lv.3 Macro Battlefield Command]

An invisible ripple spread through the depths of his sea of consciousness. Shien slowly let out a long breath.

From that moment on, the entire ruins of Blackpine Fief became a precisely functioning three-dimensional Sand Table in his mind.

At last, he was free of the limits of his eyesight and had truly taken his place as the player moving the pieces.

His technology tree panel had changed. Shien quickly reviewed the main skills on his ability panel.

Combat: Lv.2 Short-Term Battle Aura Burst.

Command: Lv.3 Macro Battlefield Command.

Logistics and technology: Lv.3 Alchemy of Architectural Constructs, Lv.2 Aberrant Material Smelting, Lv.2 Alchemy of Materials, Lv.2 Large-Scale Defensive Construction.

Points spent on upgrades: 4200. Remaining Reward Value: 4532.

Looking at the more than four thousand points left, Shien forced down the urge to buy more skills.

Running out of options was as good as having one foot in the grave.

He had to keep those points in reserve.

Some would be for saving his life. The Blood Moon Season would last more than sixty days, and a High-Tier Demonic Beast could appear at any time.

He needed to keep at least two thousand points for an emergency skill purchase. The right skill at the right moment could save his life.

The rest would be for the arrival of Bishop Castian and reinforcements from his family. He would see whether they brought anyone with rare talents.

With his skill library settled, Shien opened his eyes again. It was time for the next step.

Shien stood and flung aside the heavy canvas tent flap. "Get every craftsman to the square."