This Life, I Will Be the Protagonist-Chapter 320: High Tower·Engineering·Harvest

It took quite a while for a reply to come through.

[Spicy Onion]: Do you remember when we first fought the Flood Dragon and you asked me what my Divine Gift skill was called, and I gave you my answer?

[Pinebloom]: I remember.

[Spicy Onion]: In the upcoming period, if I send you any emails or tasks and they don’t include that answer at the end, don’t trust them.

[Spicy Onion]: Regarding the closure of the instance mirror, I won’t be telling anyone except you and Sanchez for now. We three will take action when the time comes.

[Pinebloom]: Got it.

Perhaps Rita was being overly cautious, but for the next few years, nothing unusual happened.

Since then, Rita made it a point to take on quests by herself, unless Shadow.Q came across a mission with a reward that was too tempting to pass up. Rita began to consciously train Nivalis. They were bound to make it to the world battlefield in the future, and if Nivalis wasn’t good in battle, she wouldn’t be able to take her along. Even if both Rita and Nivalis were willing, Snow Pile probably wouldn’t approve.

When there were no missions, Rita would find a place to rest with Nivalis. She used her intermediate engineering skills to make many toys for Nivalis, while she herself focused on alchemy, organizing her ideas, or using the materials she obtained to attempt creating Gold-Class Assassin and Spring Not Late.

While busy with alchemy, she didn’t keep an eye on Nivalis. After all, if Nivalis got bored, she could always return to the pet space. Rita loved Nivalis, but she wouldn’t let anything disturb her own rhythm and plans.

By the time Rita finished and stepped out of the cabin, she found that Nivalis had taken apart all the toys she’d made and reassembled them into something new.

The original toys were all blue quality, but Nivalis had put them together into a purple-quality transforming race car. The car could even transform and shoot skills as it moved—though the power was weak, it was a feature the original toys lacked.

At that moment, Rita looked at Nivalis with a special glint in her eyes...

Nivalis hugged the little transforming robot she made. "...What are you doing?"

Rita stretched out her right hand and randomly pinched a few of her fingers, saying, "I predict that you’re the engineering star of tomorrow."

Nivalis: "..." Experience more content on novelbuddy

After discovering Nivalis’s talent in engineering, Rita started handing her a bunch of engineering products to disassemble and play with whenever she went into seclusion.

Nivalis wasn’t the type to sit still and study, and Rita didn’t want to force her. She never pushed Nivalis to improve in the past, not wanting to ruin their relationship by making her do something she didn’t like. Now, however, she didn’t want to pressure her either.

Instead, she treated it like cultivating a hobby. Talent was often something unreasonable, but with the addition of interest, it could turn into something amazing.

If Nivalis really grew interested in engineering, Rita would help her gather relevant materials and let her explore at her own pace. Whenever Nivalis encountered a problem, Rita would be there to help her solve it—that was enough.

It seemed Shadow.Q had figured out that Rita didn’t like too much interaction with others, so she only sent solo missions and never asked if Rita wanted to hang out with the others.

Sanchez had stayed with the Just for Money group in the beginning. Three years later, she had a falling out with the Eclipse Vanguard people and sent Rita a message saying that it was lucky she had left early.

[Pinebloom]: ?

[Sinsoo]: Are you concerned about me, or are you just fishing for gossip?

[Pinebloom]: Don’t bring trouble upon yourself.

[Sinsoo]: If you make me a game console like the one Nivalis was playing with, I’ll tell you.

Rita dug through the ground, found one of the game consoles that Nivalis had discarded, and after confirming that Nivalis didn’t want it anymore, she sent it to Sinsoo.

[Sinsoo]: You know those eight people who’ve been coming and going over the past two years? There were people from different teams. Three of them are useless. They just hang out together, excluding others, grabbing good tasks, and then not even doing them!

[Sinsoo]: They’re all trash. I can do the work of three people at the same time.

[Sinsoo]: They criticized me before, saying I was no good. Then after I finished, they called me a Blue Star traitor. They went to Shadow.Q and said I had been assimilated by the Oaken Owl.

[Sinsoo]: Interesting, right? Could I stand this? I killed them all on the spot!

[Pinebloom]: .......Did Shadow.Q cry after you killed them?

[Sinsoo]: No. She didn’t have a good relationship with them anyway, so why would she cry? She just looked like she couldn’t breathe for a moment… sigh, those desk jockeys, their bodies just can’t handle it.

Rita clasped her hands together and prayed to the sky for Shadow.Q.

Shadow.Q, ah, take care of your health...

...

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By the end of 7217, the year before the war ended, despite spending a lot of time on alchemy, Rita had already reached level 72. She had secretly adjusted her attributes here and there, occasionally using Moment of Reversal to change her Divine Gift skills and stats. She had already surpassed the strength of the Oaken Owl who had undergone tens of life level evolutions and was no longer at a disadvantage in battle. Returning to the battlefield now felt as easy as coming home.

Rita noticed something strange: since becoming a Defector Owl, every time the Forest Sea announced that the Oaken Owls had evolved to a higher life level, she couldn’t benefit from it. Shadow.Q, Sanchez, and the others who joined Just for Money later were in the same situation.

Could something like this be deliberately blocked? Rita didn’t feel upset about it. In fact, she felt a sense of relief!

Even though she hadn’t undergone evolution, she was still stronger than those who had.

The Oaken Owls from the Pine lineage no longer insulted her, and there were rumors that there must be hidden circumstances behind the past events. Many Oaken Owls believed that Pinebloom was the true heir of Pine Bloom, as Pinebloom also had a dragon!

But the pursuit had never stopped, and the hunting continued relentlessly.

Nivalis had never interacted directly with Lidian. Pine Bloom and Lidian’s battlefield seemed to belong to another dimension, one Rita and the others couldn’t access. They had never even heard of where it was.

This reincarnation had yielded significant gains.

Her close combat skills had formed an initial system—offensive skills, movement skills, and defensive skills were all well-equipped. Although most of them were B-level skills, her combat ability in close quarters had become strong enough with her high attributes.

Especially her movement skill. With Fox Shadow in hand, as long as her bullets could reach a spot, she could instantly teleport there.

When she first acquired Fox Shadow, the skill panel had shown it as a C-level skill, but below it, there was an experience bar. Every time she improved, the bar advanced, and now it had reached an A+ level.

She could even extract her own experience and turn it into an A-level skill book. However, once she did that, she would have to retrain Fox Shadow from scratch. In other words, her mind would still remember it, but her body would need to relearn the technique.

But if someone else learned Fox Shadow from the skill book, the skill would forever be stuck at A-level.

She realized that skills she had learned and developed herself weren’t bound by their original level. After all, the skill book recording Fox Shadow clearly stated that it was an A-level skill.