Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!

Chapter 24 Long list of questionable rewards

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The boss's health bar finally emptied out.

Yet, before Theo could even think about celebrating or, simpler, breathing a sigh of relief... A swarm of messages suddenly invaded, swarming his vision to the point he couldn't see anything beyond them.

'Well, it's not like I could see anything in this perfect darkness to begin with,' Theo thought before sighing and then swinging his pickaxe.

A moment later, he removed the very same stone he used to fully seal his hiding spot in fear of the Oilrat's retaliation. Then, he removed one more stone out of his way, creating just enough room for himself to leave the stone pillar and step out...

Only to realize his mistake when his foot found no ground to rest his weight on.

'Right, the payload was quite a bit smaller than the depth of the hole,' Theo thought, pulling his leg back before leaning out and taking a peek to the outside instead.

With the distance to the roof of his payload now assessed, he slid back into his hiding spot only to go back to the one activity he grew extremely used to. And as he started to dig directly underneath his own feet, he finally allowed himself to start slowly working through all those messy notifications.

[Oilrat (level 147) was entombed within stone!]

[Oilrat (level 147) defeated!]

[Level: 4 > Level 37]

"That's..." Theo muttered while putting a complex look on his face, a series of extremely different emotions mixing in his soul into an unexpected, hypocritical brew.

On one hand, advancing to nearly ten times his former level couldn't be a bad thing!

On the other hand, however...

'Is that all I get for defeating a boss that's so damn stronger than me?'

As great of a growth as getting so many levels at once was... Theo just couldn't help but feel wronged.

'It was almost a hundred and fifty levels strong boss... and I can't even get myself to level fifty by killing it?'

This feeling was likely born out of a total, nearly absolute lack of change Theo could feel about himself.

He didn't feel stronger, faster, smarter, or anything of the likes. And judging by the progress of his mining of the stone... His ability to mine-out blocks or craft didn't seem to be affected at all!

'Well, I guess I can only keep looking through those notifs,' he thought, recalling how—in the recent past—he already encountered a problem of the same kind, where only by actually going through the notifications would he gain the benefits of whatever it was that he achieved.

[Unlocked: Class]

[Class subroutine manual handling blocked!]

[Class: N/A > Class: Crafter]

'I wonder where the downside of this ability is,' Theo thought, before rolling his eyes and moving over.

By now, he managed to deal with most of those annoying pop-ups, happily reading about all the ways in which he grew stronger.

[Achievement Unlocked: Hard Rock]

[Lore: You've found a creative way to turn a big stone block into a potent weapon!]

[Reward: All stone weapons will now have their damage doubled.]

"That's..." Theo squinted his eyes. "That's either insanely overpowered or absolutely freaking useless," he muttered before heaving a sigh. "I guess I won't escape the idea of making a sword for myself, one from stone and the other one from iron, all to figure out which is actually stronger..."

Shaking his head again, Theo quickly moved his attention to the last three notification windows, with the one buried at the bottom just big enough to appear from beyond the cover of the two more recent pop-ups.

[Achievement Unlocked: Edging the System]

[Lore: You've found a way to make use of the causal laws on the edge between physics and system-based rules.]

[Reward: Increased tolerance to edge-case ruling.]

"Okay, now that's as ambiguous as it is stupidly strong," Theo admitted the truth before himself.

The fact that he managed to exploit the gap between how the blocky game worked and how the real world did was but a pure fluke, something he came up with all on his own, without the intent of actually doing so.

And yet, as proven by the very first notification Theo saw, it was actually enough to bridge the gap between him and this overwhelmingly powerful rodent!

'I guess only time will tell if this perk is any good...'

Finally, Theo turned his eyes over to the last of the achievement notifications, already recognizing the marks of the pop-up window hidden below it.

[Achievement Unlocked: Advancer]

[Reward: Innate aura now grows to that of an advancer. Creatures below that level will naturally fear you, while creatures on that level shall no longer consider you an easy target.]

"Finally, something actually good."

Theo breathed out a long sigh of relief.

No matter what, at the very least some of his growth turned out to be actually nice at the moment. And even if the abilities and perks he didn't really see the value of right now would prove to be insanely good later on... It wasn't some distant future that had Theo worried, but the next three months or so!

'Thinking about it, even assuming I somehow survive that long... Am I really ready to go back to civilization after my sentence concludes?'

After taking a moment to walk around the top of his payload, Theo then approached the vertical, stone wall of his trap before digging into it, eager to make himself a way out of the hole. And as he did so, he finally found some time to look at the last, and arguably the best, out of all the notification windows he received.

[Oilrat (level 147)(deceased)]

[Do you wish to loot? Y/N]