With another flip of the human-skin book, Abel found a spell rune for a new spell. The name was “clay stone guard,” which was what the grey-hooded priest used to guard against spell attacks.
“I’m pretty lucky today, huh.”
The “clay stone guard” was a summoning-type spell. That much was clear, but the book didn’t talk about how it should be turned into armor. It didn’t matter, though. All he had to do was to summon a clay stone guard from the ground.
While it wasn’t the most powerful summoned creature, the clay stone guard had the spell ability to slow down its target. The effectiveness of this ability would be determined by the stone guard’s overall rank. It would be -11% of the total speed at the start, and -63% at max level. The stronger the clay stone guard was, the more broken it would be at decreasing the frequency of an enemies’ attacks.
As Abel drew a spell rune in the air, death qi started swarming out of it and went directly into his body. It wasn’t a lot of effort to neutralize it. Soon, a stone guard made of clay appeared from the ground in front of him.
The clay stone guard didn’t have very defined features. It had some holes for eyes and nose, but they weren’t really there for any sort of practical reason. If it wanted to figure out what’s going on in its surroundings, it just had to sense the earth, dust, rocks, and dust that were around it.
A symbol of a stone man appeared on the Horadric Cube’s skill tree. The cube just learned a new skill. If Abel wanted to improve the rank of this spell, he should try to summon the clay stone guard for as long as possible.
Or, he could just use the soul potions he had in stock. He wasn’t really sure about it, though. He wasn’t sure if the clay stone guard was suitable for combat, so using the soul potion on it might just end up being a waste. Also, he hadn’t mastered the “command stone guard” spell yet. It’d be very easy for the clay stone guard he summoned to be destroyed.
After thinking for a while, Abel decided to give up on the thought of ranking up his clay stone guard. It was not like he was short on his soul potions, but there was the need to save it for his other summoned creatures. It was probably the wise choice not to commit too much into the clay stone guard.
Abel decided to put the human-skin book into his portal bracelet. As gross as it was, it was a pretty useful book that was full of various content on using various spells.
He decided to look further into the portal bone ring. Apart from some daily accessories that he decided to ignore, he realized that there was a small box that was lying on the table. It was an old-looking box. From its design, there was no way that it was made by the Orc Empire.
Actually, he recognized the patterns on this box. It was the same as his hanging fort. This box was from prehistoric civilization. There wasn’t any lock on it, but as hard as he tried to open, he just couldn’t separate the lid from the box’s body.
“Is the lid stuck because it’s been too long?”
As the box zoomed up in Abel’s sight, he began to realize the small details that were on it. He was starting to see some peculiar patterns, which appeared to be some sort of code. They looked pretty complicated. Without finding the right line with his power of the Will, it’d be impossible to open the box correctly.
Abel’s head was starting to hurt. He could use the world stone fragment to help himself with this, but it would still take about a day to get this solved. He tried to cut the box open with his “steel” sword, but as soon as he did so, a white light came out and neglected all the impact of his swing. The box was also starting to shake in a very violent way and was making him very worried.
While it might be possible to pry the box open with a few more hits, Abel was worried that he would destroy the content that was inside. He could try to cut the edge with his power of the dimension, but unfortunately, he had already reached his daily limit by using it on the grey-hooded priest.
As it turned out, the only option was to solve the puzzle properly. After sheathing his “steel” sword, Abel reverted his attention back to the box. There were a lot of patterns that he didn’t know about, so he decided to go with the simplest solution there was, and that was to insert all the possible solutions.
As simple as this method sounded, it wasn’t something that anyone could do. Not everyone had Abel’s brain did. The miracle spirit might be able to do this, but to be fair, it was just too hard to get access to a high-tech device like it.
Without doing anything else, Abel decided to put all his focus into the small box. It was starting to get dark, but the orcs had yet to find where he was located.
He wasn’t even trying that hard to hide from them. He was just taking a break inside his seclusion circle the whole day. He actually just forgot about them and went on solving the puzzle that was on the box.
Speaking of which, this was the first time that Abel used the stone world fragment for this long. His head was really starting to hurt, and he was seriously malnourished after using too much of his body’s energy.
After drinking a whole bottle of the blue howling rabbit’s “ration potion,” all the pain and hunger inside his body started going away. He tried to scan the box with his power of the Will again, and after doing so for an entire day, he was finally able to find the right way to open the box.
He started drawing a line with his finger. While doing so, he started injecting his power of the Will into the box.
