The Ethereal Emporium

Seeing his stat point, he was still uncertain on whether he should use it to power one of his stats or gain an extra 20 emporium shards to help him buy new skills. Nevertheless, he walked in the opposite direction from where he had seen those mini cleavers.

He continued walking for a few minutes time, trying to think about what to do with the stat upgrade he had received but he was then stopped by an odd-looking beast. It was about 5'0 and looked like a human that had been left to starve for 100 years.

Its body was skinny and it had a large, bald head with skin that looked grey and grey just like the cleavers. It had pointed ears and was currently ripping into the flesh of another beast that it had attacked. It was curled right over, revealing its spine along its back. Under the red lights of the glowing stones above it, it gave this beast quite the threatening appearance.

Suddenly, as he took another step, it turned around to reveal its bloody mouth and sadistic gaze.

Rhys was stood in place and readied himself for battle. Looking to the 21 MP that he now had, he closed off the system panels that were covering his view and the beast then charged right at him.

It moved with the speed of the mini cleavers that he had fought before but didn't look as skinny as them. It leaped ahead and clenched its fist, punching Rhys right in his face.

Falling back, he noticed that it resembled a goblin with its facial appearance. It had the body of a cleaver, but the face of a malnourished goblin, and it then rattled off with even more attacks.

Activating Fledgling Blitz, Rhys started to fight back but was sustaining heavy injuries. It had claws that seemed larger than those of mini cleavers, and he was steadily sustaining grave injuries.

His healing factor continued to let him grow, but his lingering hunger was growing.

Blood started to spurt out onto the surrounding rock walls from the goblin's vicious swipes and Rhys was losing HP fast.

However, the beast was also covered in its own blood. Rhys' speed and power was too much for it to handle at times, and they fought as if they were equals. They traded blows with each other and Rhys battled like a valiant warrior, forcing himself through the slashes and agony.

He had almost thought that his death would be impossible but, now that he was fighting his beast, he knew that a wrong step could result in his demise.

He charged forward, and utilised the power of his Fledgling Blitz, finishing off with his Blooded Blow. This added onto the force of his attack and caused him to crack the tough skull of this mutated goblin.

Seeing this happen, he decided to take a gamble and activated his Overdrive skill for the first time. It took 4 MP and 3HP from him, while giving him a 50% boost to strength and speed together.

He could feel the blood in his veins accelerating and his body now was hot to the skin.

The beast tried to blindly charge in, just as it was doing previously, but Rhys landed two punches to its face. His impactful strikes had ruined its game plan, and it was clearly stunned by those punches that it had received.

Seeing this opening, Rhys rushed in and started to unload on it.

His blooded blows had done significant damage, but the only problem was that he couldn't use that skill very frequently from its MP drain.

The beast tried to slash him again, but Rhys knocked its arm away to throw even more punches. The higher blood flow without his body made his body temperature rise quite intensely, and steam started to emit off his skin as he fought.

Dipping quite low, he drove forward a punch to its lack of a stomach and then landed a final whipping hook to its head that dropped it to the ground.

'Phew. Finally...' He said, falling back onto the cave rock behind him to get a rest.

He was quite surprised by the calibre of beast that they were letting attack these random wannabe gangsters. They were all of Class-F dungeon level but were not easy for any person to defeat.

Many people would live their entire lives and just never receive enough strength to take down a Class-D level dungeon beast.

Seeing just how poorly he had done against that beast in terms of durability, he knew where he was placing his stat upgrade. Now that he had been injured so much, his hunger was growing. He wouldn't have much longer before he'd have to get blood once again.

[+1 Durability]

[STATS]

[Level: 4]

[User: Rhys Arkwrighte]

[Titles: Fledgling, Lv.1 Blood Mage]

[Strength (STR): 5]

[Speed (SPD): 7]

[Durability (DUR): 5]

[Endurance (END): 5]

[Species: Vampire]

[HP: 9/17]

[XP: 90/400]

[MP: 5/21]

[Stat Upgrades: 0]

[Skills] [expand]

Walking along the cave, he was hoping that he wouldn't find any form of enemy, because he was in quite the vulnerable position.

Just as he entered a different cave path, he could smell the sweet, sweet scent of human blood. He couldn't locate it right away, but then saw a body deeper in the path ahead of him.

Rushing over to it, it was almost like his legs moved on their own. He arrived by the side of this body in just a second, and dropped down to see that it was the corpse of a young man.

His eyes looked on lifelessly at the surroundings, and his skin had already gone pale.

Deciding that this was his only shot at consuming blood, he dropped down and lifted the man to suck at the back of his neck. His blood had already dropped down to the bottom of his body, and so volumes of blood rushed into his body.

His wounds were sealing up fast, and he almost couldn't stop taking the blood. It felt like a drug and made him feel something that he had just never felt before. Even though it was filling up his stomach, he just couldn't stop.

Forcing himself to remove his fangs from his neck, he looked at himself like a true beast. He was struggling to even control himself, and he had never felt anything like this as a human.

Even though he looked like a human and could act like one, he just felt totally different from them now.

Nevertheless, he could see large amounts of blood still in the man's body and decided to reveal the blood container that he had received.

Just standing there awkwardly, he held the golden orb and looked at the body before looking back at the orb.

"What am I supposed to do here?" He said to himself, taking off the cork.

Taking it off like something magical would happen, he just examined the container that was totally black. It was like once light entered, it just wouldn't come back out.

He even held it closer to one of the glowing stones to see inside but could see nothing at all.

Suddenly, though, as he held it up to the man's wound in his neck, blood started flowing into it.

The inside of the container glowed white as this happened, and the body started looking drier and drier as this happened.

Soon enough, almost all of the blood had been removed and he placed the cork on it, before storing it in his inventory.

[Capacity: 318/400ml]

This single description was placed next to the slot that this item had occupied in his three-slot inventory.

Seeing those slots, he then felt like he could take something out of this dungeon. usually, people would be checked to see if they had taken out any resources and used them against the owner's rules through checking their system, but it didn't seem like there was that much security in this dungeon.

[The user could extract those crystals and sell them for shards on the Ethereal Emporium.]

This assistant was proving to be a lot more helpful than he had wished. When entering dungeons, there would be people called 'scavengers' that would usually head in after a hunter that had done so.

They would take any acquired crystals and return, so the firm that owned the dungeon could sell the items on. However, now, he could just take the crystals and sell them himself.

Rushing back to the zombie goblin that he had defeated, he ripped into some of the wounds left in its body and found its heart that was wedged behind its ribcage.

If not for his super strength, this task would have proved to be quite tough without any form of dagger, and just inside the heart was a white crystal.

The beast crystal was usually held in three different places in a beast's body. The head, heart or abdomen. For stronger beasts, with larger crystals compared to the size of their bodies, they were stored in the abdomen. However, weaker beasts and smaller beasts had their crystals mainly in the brain or heart.

He rushed over to the baby mini cleavers that he had faced before and removed their crystals, that were a dark orange in colour.

He started gathering these crystals together, since he didn't have enough inventory slots to utilise. One of these crystals would take up one of those slots, and so he slotted away the mini cleaver crystal and the zombie goblin crystals in there.