Underworld - Scorching Sun: A LitRPG Series

by Apollos Thorne

  Moving to the third row from the bottom, the price doubled again. The dark jewel was 60,000, the fire was 70,000 and the light one was 120,000. That was 25,000 Minor Orbs if I wanted to purchase them, or 25 Advanced ones.

  When he pointed out the fourth row, I first looked at the price and saw that the dark jewel was 300,000, the fire jewel was 375,000, and the light jewel was 550,000. My eyes glazed over.

  This first row from the top was to show off the best jewels that they had in stock. Looking at their prices, I was thinking they should have a decent increase in enhancement, but I was wrong. The highest percentage was the dark jewel that gave 111% to Dark Magic. The fire jewel gave 108% and the light one gave 106%. The prices didn’t seem to scale at all. The merchant’s explanation was that after an item surpasses 100%, it was already near perfect. Any more than that made it more and more scarce. The premium you pay is mainly because of its rarity.

  “We will take the ones that aren’t sensitive to other alignments,” Shamash said without saying a word to me.

  “Very good,” Mr. Squinty replied.

  I stopped myself from sighing deeply and pulled out 25 Advanced Dark Magic Orbs, handing them to the man.

  “I’ll guide you in how to place these in your body later,” the lich said through mind-speak. “You won’t have to bother with your scepter any longer.”

  I was anxious because it was obvious from our purchases that they were for a Blue Mage. Beyond that, I was excited—like trying bacon for the first time. These jewels would double my item bonuses to Light Magic. I would need to completely recalculate every Light Magic buff. Fire Magic was the main element I used through my Blue Magic, so it should greatly improve my Incubus, Hell Hound, and possibly even Primordial Cat Forms. A Dark Magic jewel, especially one that wouldn’t cause me to have a cataclysmic reaction between my magic alignments, would literally cut the cost for casting my Dark Magic spells in half. Power leveling it would become even easier.

  Why had we limited our purchases to just these three elements though? They had many others for sale. I secretly asked Shamash. His answer was simple. We would save those purchases for later. He planned on getting one of every possible alignment they had in stock but buying them all now would cause too much commotion. I understood this reasoning, but part of me wanted to go up to the counter and pour a thousand Advanced Orbs out to see what kind of reaction I could get out of Mr. Squinty. That would be fun, but I’d also probably end up dead within the next 24 hours, so we’d stick to the plan.

  Our shopping had only begun. Next, we went to the mana orb department. It was the smallest section, but that was only because the specialty orbs there didn’t generally sell in bulk. There were glassed off displays in the center of the room, and cubbies along the walls.

  The main reasons I might want to purchase these orbs was to study the subtle variations between magics that different creatures might possess. This could further my understanding of alignments and get me closer to Grandmastering Light Magic. I could also use them to power level Vampire’s Might, or Succubi’s Caress, but it would be more efficient for me to just continue creating my own orbs and using them. I wasn’t exactly sure why Shamash was bringing me here.

  The lich stopped at the largest display in the middle of the room. There were other displays in that department that had signs advertising that they held cores from different species of monsters, but the floating mana letters above this table were twice as large as the rest of the signs in the room. It read ‘Vampire Cores’.

  “One of the reasons I brought you to Hallow was because they sell certain things that are illegal in the rest of the vampire world,” he said. “Vampire cores are one of those many things, as is vampire blood. I want you to pick up a few cores that have different characteristics from the ones that you’ve found so that you have a better range to study.”

  “Okay…” I wasn’t convinced it was worth the money. Each of these cores cost three times more than what a normal one was worth. He picked out three of them and had me pay for them.

  Before we left, I had to try. Casting Forced Learn on a Gargoyle Core, I found it wasn’t enough to steal its creature essence. It made sense that it wouldn’t work, otherwise I wouldn’t have had to cast it while a monster was in a weakened state and could have just waited until it was dead.

  As we walked into the blood department, there was a part of me that wanted to set off an Alpha Bomb and cast Vampire’s Might. Many of the bottles didn’t hold much blood, but there was the blood of literally thousands of creatures that I’d never seen before. Draining the room would easily give me the biggest take of stats in one go that I’d ever had. Probably double it. The gear department was exciting, and the monster cores were interesting, but this department had me salivating. I suppose that meant I was more like a vampire than I might want to admit, but blood represented one thing in my mind—power.

  I hadn’t been so tempted since I’d first stepped foot in the Underworld. I caught myself daydreaming about blurting out that I’d take all of it so that Shamash wouldn’t have time to stop me. I had the money. I could just make more orbs. But Shamash wouldn’t have tried to stop me even if I did insist on buying everything in the room. He was my contracted lich, not a real teacher, and certainly not family.

  So as to not betray myself, I clenched my jaw and didn’t ask any of the many questions running through my mind.

  I caught Shamash staring at me.

  “Where do we start?” I said, scrambling to hide my brief moment of insanity.

  “It’s common for youngsters new to Hallow to go on a small shopping spree,” his voice sounded in my head. “So browse for a while and make a mental note of some of the more interesting offerings. The most powerful creatures and richest vampire blood they have is behind the counter. I’ll call you over in a few minutes.”

  I didn’t delay doing exactly what he said. Starting on the inner wall near the entrance, I began scanning the cubbies there. Flesh-eating Moth, Puss Fly, Fire Wasp, Beaver Spider, and Cliff Roach were among the first couple rows of cubbies. The names didn’t do all of them justice. The outline of what the creature looked like hovered over it with the price. Just like most of the insectoids I’d run into, they were all many times the size of surface insects, ranging from the size of a house cat like the Puss Fly, to the size of full-size SUVs like the Beaver Spider. Out of all the insects I’d seen in my life, the Beaver Spider was the most frightening. Not only was it ginormous, but it had teeth like a beaver and liked to chop up its food into chucks to make it easier to feed to its baby spiders. At least, that’s what my imagination was insisting. It also had evil tilted catlike eyes with dozens of smaller eyes surrounding its main ones.

  As if the management was going out of their way to stock the shelves by starting with the things I most hated, snakes made up the next section. Blood Viper, a smaller ten-foot-long snake, was the first on the list. It was blood red and had a third tooth that jutted out of its throat when devouring its prey. This allowed it to drain its victims of blood while it went through the long process of swallowing them. I made myself look through this section even though it made me want to kill something. I didn’t fear snakes and spiders. I just had a natural inclination to slaughter every one of them that dared to show itself in my presence.

  The next section was much more to my liking and filled with wyverns. The first thing that caught my attention was how many different varieties of wyverns there were. I counted 203 that they had in stock. There were empty cubbies at the bottom of the shelf, which meant that they were leaving room for more. What made them so diverse was that they weren’t limited to one Alignment, but often had two or even three. Their size was just as diverse. In this variable they resembled the insects.

  Lizards were next. Some of them were armored or could breathe fire, poison, and the like out of their mouths. One even had spikes it could launch from its back like a turret.

  They had a good representation of almost anything you could
imagine. Almost any beast or humanoid could become a were-creature, so a large section of wall was taken up just for them. Because this blood was tainted, they separated it from the blood of non were-creatures.

  Moving on to some of the major categories. There were canines, felines, rodents, equus(horses), and many others that fit into the mammal category. Some of these seemed almost too surface-like, but others more mythical.

  One of the categories I hadn’t had much experience of within the Underworld were birds. It seemed they were far more common on the Cavern Level. There was the siren, phoenix, and roc for a start. There was even a note that mentioned that the blood of these three mythical creatures wasn’t perfect, and for purer samples to come to the counter in the back.

  I didn’t run into any sentient humanoid, beast, or monster blood until closer to this back section. The largest sentient section was of human blood. There wasn’t a single section larger in the entire department. It was also the busiest section. It stung, but I took some time to take it all in.

  Human blood was priced depending on the level and alignments of the person the blood had come from. As I was browsing, Shamash explained things from a vampire’s perspective. “Usually, when they drain someone magically or literally the stats a vampire can receive are limited. At first, they receive quite a few, but the more they drink the less they will get until eventually they receive nothing. This is universal except in the case of sentients. That group is made up of humanoids, beasts, and monsters, but also some of the more powerful creatures like dragons, phoenixes, behemoths, primordials, etc. But not all of them possess blood. These legendary creatures can also have sentience. Some are born with it and others developed it over time.

  “The exception is that there is never a maximum to the number of stats one can receive from these kinds of creatures. They do follow the same pattern, where you get many stats at first, but that number quickly decreases the more you drink, but it never truly caps out. The reason for this is twofold. First, even though it slows down substantially, the diversity of sentients greatly exceeds normal creatures. Secondly, sentients never stop growing. It may take more human blood, and higher level blood, but one of the reasons vampires are so fond of human blood is because it’s even more diverse than all the others.”

  Many things popped up in my head to say, but none of them were appropriate, so instead I said simply, “I understand.”

  I got a better idea of the differences between elves and dwarves. They had many similarities with humans, but there were also some minor differences and even major ones.

  When it came to the sentient beasts, like the minotaurs, dragonkin and were-sentients, I found myself thinking them less than other sentients. It was mostly because of how they looked. I had the same ideas about some of the monster races. I wanted to sit down and talk with each to get to know the differences, but if I were in my human form, would any of them even dare? Perhaps that was the very thing that made us different—better. If it wasn’t intellect, and looks didn’t matter, then our ethics were really the only things separating us. That and our natural tendencies. But didn’t having sentience, at least in the way the word was being used, mean that we had the ability to use our minds to control our base instincts and choose to be different? Was it really only humanoids that thought this way?

  After I’d made my way around the room, Shamash called me over to the counter near the back. An attendant was there waiting with him. This guy was the first vampire I’d met that had the creep factor I’d seen often in movies. His eyes were overly wide and unblinking. I wanted to blow in his face to see if it caused a reaction. Instead, I nodded to him in greeting.

  “Have you decided?” the man said.

  “Go ahead and list twenty of the better ones you saw,” the lich said using mind-speak.

  I had wrestled back and forth for a while as to whether I should focus on rarer blood types or the most potent ones that would give me the best stats. I chose the best stats for starters. If we were here for a while, I should be able to get the rarer ones later. Right now, I needed the stats for my up and coming fights.

  “Azure Drake, Cobblestone Serpent, Lynx, Phoenix, Roc, Pit Rodent…” I listed some of the top creatures from each category. Each of these had a listed cost of 4,000 to 6,000.

  “And how many bodies of each?” the man replied.

  Shamash’s voice quickly followed where only I could hear. “When purchasing blood, you aren’t buying the bottle on display. The amount you want is measured out and prepared after you make your order. It’s measured in bodies. That’s human bodies. The normal person has about one and a half gallons. So the price is for one and a half gallons of each of the blood types on display.”

  “We’ll take three of each,” the lich responded for me. “We’ll also take three bodies of quarter-blood vampire.”

  The man inclined his head, as if hearing the request for vampire blood was disturbing, but then he glanced at me and looked me up and down before agreeing that it would be done.

  I don’t feel judged at all…

  Quarter-blood meant that a fourth of it was Trueblood. A single body cost almost as much as the rest of the blood I purchased combined. It was 115,000 dark coins… The best blood they carried was Half-blood. It seemed buying Trueblood wasn’t possible. At least not in the common sense.

  “This should be enough to get you to the next Bloodline Rank,” Shamash said where only I could hear. “We will return to the apartment to allow you to Drain your purchases, then head to the arena. Before your first fight, over the next couple weeks you will be living in the arena watching every fight you can. Your biggest weakness is lack of experience. As a Blue Mage, your ability to handle various scenarios is much greater than the average person at your level. But it’s what you don’t know that will get you killed. It’s time for that to change.”

  It only took a few minutes before another vampire arrived pushing a cart with numerous metal cylinders that were about the size of a take-along thermos. I was glad I hadn’t tried Draining the room. I would have gotten kicked out before I knew any better. It seemed in the back somewhere there were probably many metric tons’ worth of blood in storage. If I was going to go Drain-crazy then I needed to find my way into one of those storage rooms.

  As we left, I saw many expressionless pairs of eyes watching us go. I wondered how many of them wanted to kill me.

  Chapter 8 – Hallow Coliseum

  I’d thought I’d grown used to being shocked, but as I stepped foot into the Hallow Coliseum for the first time it felt like someone had taken a hammer to my head, which had turned into a skull-sized bell. The sports arenas on the surface held their own glory that couldn’t be denied, but they were designed for the weak senses of human spectators. They held tens of thousands of people. Hallow Amphitheater held over a million just in the general seating of its stands. The stage was more than a mile in length with a matching width. That was during main events, but now, as normal business was taking place, the entire floor of the arena had been rolled back like a scroll to reveal dozens of smaller arenas with their own seating and stages. Not only were there multiple smaller arenas, but they had been designed so that the outer arenas were lower in elevation than those of the inner ring, with a single arena towering above the rest at the center. It was like a pyramid made up of small coliseums. It took little imagination to figure out that the fights that took place in the outer ring were lesser fights and the closer you got to the middle, the bigger deal the fight was.

  The seating in these smaller arenas was limited, but if you weren’t lucky enough to get your own seat, there were other options. The primary one was flying space. There was a forcefield that acted like a see-through net that spectators could fly above or even sit upon. These flying areas were sectioned off so that those in the general seating, or the small arena seating, still had a clear line of sight. I could only guess how many it would hold during a main event, but during its normal day to day business, it could hold m
illions. What was even more incredible was that the seating in most of the small arenas was packed and even a quarter of the general stands were filled with people. As for flying-only room, it was like an ominous cloud of vampires blotted out the sky.

  Ever since I’d entered the Underworld, I’d seen many things that I’d considered impossible for most of my life. The reality of magic was only the beginning. The undead were real, so were succubi, vampires, and even legendary monsters like dragons, phoenixes, and werewolves. If it weren’t for my growth in power, I wasn’t sure my brain would have survived so many mind-blowing experiences. Despite all of that, those seemed like very small things compared to what lay before me now. I was a surface-size insect in a world of giants. I spotted countless existences amongst the crowd that could end me with but a look. My mission had never seemed impossible before. It would only be a matter of time before I completed it. But now… I knew just how unlikely my survival was. Having a long term approach was the only road to take. There was no hope in anything else.

  I was in a daze as I followed Shamash toward the entrance to the flying-only space above the small arenas.

  “Lift your chin,” Shamash reminded me through mind-speak. “Even if you choose not to follow vampire decorum, you must show no weakness, or you will be eaten alive.”

  I obeyed but found no words to respond.

  Just an hour ago I had Drained a large amount of power-rich blood and was feeling incredible on the way here. How quickly things could change… The number of new stats I’d received had made my purchases worth every orb. In truth, it felt like I’d stolen them, since I could literally create my own money with little time or effort.

  +378 Str

  +446 Dex

  +341 Con

  +212 Int

  +227 Wis