Infinity Is My Affinity?!?-Chapter 153: Let’s Go Get You Cursed

I sat alone at the massive wooden table.

The mess hall was suffocatingly quiet. Just this morning, this place was packed to the brim with a hundred screaming dwarves. The air had been thick with the heavy smell of fried meat, spilled ale, and terrible body odor. It was chaotic, loud, and full of life.

Now, the long wooden benches sat entirely empty. The room just smelled like ale and impending doom. The silence was so absolute it actually made my ears ring, with the only sound left being the faint howling of the evening wind rattling against the reinforced windows.

I took a slow breath, trying to get the slight tremors in anticipation of what was about to come bleed out of my system as I stared at the window, mentally bracing myself for the absolute nightmare about to hit the camp.

And just as I did-

-Ding!

{You have leveled up!}

"Huh...?" I blinked, genuinely confused.

I looked around the empty room, half-expecting a dead goblin to drop from the ceiling. I had been sitting here perfectly still. I hadn’t shot, stabbed, or frozen a single thing since walking back into this camp.

I mentally called up my status screen to figure out what just happened, watching the familiar blue window pop up in my vision.

-Ding!

{

[Protocol: Chronos]

Name: Nico

Race: Human

Circuits: 9

Affinity: Infinity, Time, Ice, Nature, Metal

Level: 12

EXP: 4 / 135,996

Status: Normal

Stat Points: 1

Stats:

STR: 1

AGI: 1

END: 1

DEX: 1

MP: 65 / 65

MP Regen: ∞

LCK: ERROR

Magic:

Ice Pebble (Common) [2 MP] (Optimal at 2 Circuits)

Ice Reinforcement (Common) [5 MP minimum] (Optimal at 6 Circuits)

Nature Manifestation (Unquantifiable) [Varied] (Varied)

Dominium Radicis (Epic) [2MP minimum] (Optimal at 3 Circuits)

Metal Manifestation (Unquantifiable) [Varied] (Varied)

Skills:

Precognition (Legendary) [2 MP/sec] (Optimal at 2 Circuits)

Temporal Step - Aevum Trace (Rare) [60 MP] (Optimal at 5 Circuits)

Eyes Of Relevance (Epic) [50MP] (Optimal at 5 Circuits)

Gear: Grade 9 Adamantite Khukri (Rare), The Boomstick (Divine Armament)

Credits: 53

Tabs: [Shop] [Inventory] [Map] [Crafting] [Familiars]

}

I stared at the "Level: 12" with absolutely no idea where that experience came from.

[Hey, System...] I thought, leaning back in my chair. [Care to explain the free level?]

-Ding!

{The reason is Nom-Nom. As per the Familiar tether, for every monster she kills, you receive a twenty-five percent share of the generated EXP.}

I snapped my fingers. I completely forgot about the passive income.

While I was stuck playing Among Us in this freezing mining camp, my half-wendigo, half-Greater Dragon familiar remained back in the capital.

She was currently actively working her daily F-Rank adventurer job. She was basically diving into dungeons and acting as a voice-controlled woodchipper.

Eating monsters technically provided a microscopic strength boost to her own strength, but she absolutely hated the taste of raw dungeon meat. So, she just slaughtered them wholesale and tossed them into the inventory instead.

[Good girl...] I smiled, genuinely proud of her work ethic.

But my brief moment of joy vanished the absolute second my eyes tracked down to the actual experience requirement for the next level.

4 / 135,996

I physically winced just by staring at it.

I did the math in my head, and the numbers were laughably depressing. A standard Tier 1 only netted me a hundred experience points. Even a Perfected Stage Tier 1 capped out at four hundred.

I groaned, dragging a hand down my face. I couldn’t even cheat the rules by having Nom-Nom spawn-camp weak weak in a low-ranked dungeon.

The System’s strict anti-farming protocols dictated that killing farming mobs yielded heavily diminishing returns, eventually hard-capping at a miserable ten experience points per kill. Add on the fact that I only get twenty-five percent of what Nom-Nom kills, even she wasn’t a viable option.

It was going to be a massive, brutal grind.

I shook my head, pushing the impossible numbers out of my brain to focus on the immediate problem.

I had a single, newly acquired stat point.

If Mitsuki’s barrier actually dropped tonight, I would have to fight for hours. And my little crutch was infinite mana regeneration, meaning my actual pool had hard limits. I possessed nine circuits. That was the absolute highest number achievable by any mortal.

But Mage’s Folly completely ignored circuit limits. Pumping a massive volume of mana through my body for hours on end worked exactly like pushing a hundred and twenty watts through a basic copper wire rated for a hundred.

Eventually, the prolonged friction causes severe cellular breakdown. It basically gave the caster cancer.

[System...] I asked, looking at the floating stat screen. [Which stat helps the most with keeping Mage’s Folly at bay?]

-Ding!

{Endurance (END). It increases tissue density and overall cellular stability and durability.}

"Then let’s go with that..." I muttered to the empty room.

I mentally dragged my single stat point directly into Endurance, bringing it from a one to a two.

And the very next second, a brief rush of heat spread through my veins.

I could feel my body getting stronger somehow, leaving me feeling just a fraction more solid in my chair.

Confident in my newly leveled tissue density, I reached down and pinched my own thigh to field-test the upgrade.

"Ah...!" I winced, jumping in my chair as a sharp spike of pain hit my leg.

I vigorously rubbed my thigh, frowning at the blue screen.

[Does it take a while to fully take effect or something?]

-Ding!

{No. You are just too strong.}

I innocently blinked. "Really?"

A heavy, judgmental silence immediately echoed across the mental void. I could practically feel the System giving me a massive side-eye, silently asking if I was actually stupid.

I flushed with sudden embarrassment, coughing into my fist.

Bumping a stat from a one to a two obviously didn’t mean I was an armored tank now. I was still basically made of paper compared to the real heavy hitters.

[Look, in a normal game, a hundred percent increase to a base defensive stat usually means you can take at least one extra hit without dying,] I tried to justify my idiocy to the glowing blue box. [I just wanted to see if you operated like that two.]

The System didn’t even dignify that with a response. It just let my excuse hang in the quiet room, making me feel even more like an idiot.

Desperately needing to change the subject in my own head, I opened my Party Module and navigated over to the Shared Inventory.

It was a grid-based spatial storage system linked between me, Nom-Nom, and Peko. The digital grid slots could store an infinite number of items of the exact same category.

And as I clicked on the monster carcass slot, my jaw dropped.

It was completely packed with a massive mountain of monsters.

Nom-Nom really didn’t hold back today. But then again, she finally got the chance to let loose with that new sword I bought her, and she clearly got a little carried away down in the dungeon.

Whatever the case, this fits exactly according to our business plan.

Nom-Nom farmed the dungeons, we sold thirty percent of the haul to the Guild for physical cash, and we aggressively liquidated the rest for System Credits to buy my ultimate goal.

I mentally highlighted the massive excess pile and instructed the System to liquidate the lot.

-Ding!

{Mass liquidation commenced...

Credits earned: 37,865

Total Shared Party Credits: 93,250}

I stared at the massive jump in the Party Module’s bank account, then back at my personal wallet, which still sat at a measly fifty-three.

"Noice..." I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth, letting a genuine grin spread across my face.

At least someone was doing what I should’ve been doing, instead of whatever the hell I’m doing here.

[Man, this whole little adventure had been one bad thing before a worse one...]

But still, that massive payout put me a huge step closer to finally buying the Heart of the False Martyr for Peko.

I leaned back and stared at the ceiling, running the numbers in my head.

The Heart was an obscenely expensive, one-time-use artifact that’d take on the Blood Pact on Peko onto itself.

[If Nom-Nom keeps up this level of absolute ecological terrorism down in the capital...] I thought, doing the quick math on her daily haul. [I can probably afford the Heart much sooner than I thought.]

I had barely sighed that thought away, when the steel door of the basement suddenly clanged open, breaking the silence in the mess hall.

Garek walked back upstairs before setting his eyes across the room at me, and then checking the fading light through the grilled windows.

I could see a faint, almost eager smirk tugging at the corner of the massive Cultivator’s scarred mouth.

"Sun’s got about twenty minutes before it drops..." Garek grunted, gesturing toward the doors with his thick neck. "Let’s go get you cursed."

"Man, you are actively wishing something goes wrong tonight just so you get an excuse to punch me." I chuckled as I stood up, slinging the shotgun over my shoulder. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

Garek clicked his tongue as his smirk vanished instantly, replaced by absolute, deadly seriousness.

"If anything goes wrong tonight, my wife’s life will be directly at risk. As much as I desperately wish to punch you... I will not wish for anything to happen to her."

I gave a slow nod, genuinely respecting the raw honesty.

"Look at you..." I deadpanned. "Aren’t you a cheesy romantic."

Garek caught the glimpse of his eyebrow twitch before he turned back toward the exit without another word.

We walked out of the reinforced living quarters together, stepping back into the freezing basin.

The sky showed a deep orange bleeding into dark purple, marking the absolute last stretches of daylight before the outsiders came out to play.

The wind howled through the camp, kicking up small clouds of dust around our boots as we headed straight for the exposed dirt crossroads.

Squinting through the long shadows, I spotted Mitsuki kneeling perfectly straight in the dead center of the dirt path.

She wasn’t holding a stack of paper talismans like I thought she would.

Instead, resting comfortably across her lap was a long-necked, guitar-like wooden instrument.

I blinked, completely caught off guard by the setup.

[Wait... is that a shamisen? What, is she going to put on a concert for the Goddess?]