I got out of the shower just as Hendricks and Young Michael returned. My namesake looked like he was dying. “Rough day?” I asked. They both gave me a look that promised pain and I chuckled. “I couldn’t breathe, my chest felt like it was being sat on. The energy and the monster’s screaming in the distance hurts my head,” Young Michael complained. “It isn’t that bad. You had enough stats to survive,” I said. “Barely,” he complained. “Well, time to make dinner. We only did two zones today to ease you into things. Three zones tomorrow.” “Three,” Hendricks said with despair. “Three. Why do you think you are getting five million points a day each? This isn’t an easy job and you will need the stats,” I replied. “We aren’t going to make it,” Hendricks said with despair. I rolled my eyes. “You are both teenagers. Get a shower, get warmed up, and I will explain how we are going to fix things,” I replied. Hendricks let Young Michael get a shower first while he started on preparing a stew. They then switched off. I continued my hobby of energy manipulation. Finally both of them had calmed down we could eat. “I am impressed both you managed to last that long and traverse the level 7 zone to the next one,” I replied while enjoying the stew. Could use more seasoning, but it wasn’t bad. Hendricks was probably used to rationing supplies more heavily when traveling by cart. “There was no way we would have been able to run or defend ourselves,” Hendricks said. “Well, that much is obvious. Anyways, I was going to spend another two more day’s grinding, and then we can return to New Kochi and give you an advance for the next hundred days. If you both put half a billion points into Body, that should help quite a bit,” I replied. “Wait, you are just going to give us points?” Young Michael asked. “And the catch?” Hendricks asked. “You have to work for the next hundred days, since that is what I am paying for. That would about triple your Body stat for both of you. It is around two thousand,” I said. “It is. But without enough Mind, it will be hard to move. Also, the other stats help in environmental conditions, like Endurance,” Hendricks replied. “I would put it into Body. You would be able to move a lot more easily. You can already survive, it is getting around that is hard. Also, once you leave, Body is the most useful. But it would be up to both of you. And think it over. Your stats are your life. You need to arrange them in a way you are comfortable with. I let my Mind slack for a while, since speed of thought hasn’t been a huge issue. But at your combat level, that might not be the case,” I said. “What do you mean?” Young Michael clearly didn’t understand. “Combat movement requires exceptionally fine foot control. To angle your body to the target. I have been fighting at a high level long enough, that this is instinctive. I can adjust my footing easily and the amount of force I exert without too much consideration. But if you increase your Body stat without the Mind stat, you might run into an issue of control. The percentage gap would be wider at lower stats,” I explained and that seemed to make it click for Young Michael. I insisted that the kids learn about stats and math. That way they wouldn’t be entirely lost when dealing with stats and could put how they worked into words. “So, three zones the next two days?” Hendricks asked. “You can pick up two, I will pick up the last one. Save you a two zone trek, there and back. And then we come back and will spend 25 days at a time grinding, with 1 day off after that. Do that four times for a 100 days,” I explained. “That would be, what 44 billion points?” Hendricks asked. “Yep,” I replied and he looked tired. “I am guessing you don’t get that many stat points anymore,” Young Michael said. “No. There is a reason this is called a grind.” “I am never going to catch up,” Young Michael muttered and began shoveling stew into his mouth. Hendricks just shook his head and I smiled. Once dinner was done, I took first watch as they both passed out. Young Michael was given a spot on the floor to sleep. No matter how much I liked him, I was not sharing my bed. He was also used to sleeping on the ground. He got pillows and a couple of blankets so I didn’t feel that bad. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. There was something that had been bothering me for a while now. At first I didn’t give it much thought, since I was focused on grinding and getting the points in front of me. But the recent conversation made me think I had made a huge mistake in my personal math in regards to stat points. I pulled out a notebook and began doing the calculations once more, starting from a thousand stat points. It took around 2.5 million points to go from 0 to 1,000 stat points. To go from 1,000 to 2,000 stat points it took 7.5 million. Once I hit 10,000 stat points, I went up in 10,000 increments. The first increase took around 750 million points to got from 10,000 to 20,000 stat points. But that wasn’t right. I knew I spent a lot more points to go up. Ten times as much. Then it hit me and so many thing made sense that had been bothering me for a while. Each increase was not just a cost increase, but also an increase in the number of stat points that needed to be purchased by an order of magnitude. That was why I never noticed. I worked out purchases on an individual level in batches of a thousand stat points each. But my long-term projecting, which I didn’t use often, or think that heavily on, was incorrect. I should have asked one of the math people Clarissa had working for her, but that would have been embarrassing. The Emperor couldn’t do math, he really was just a dumb brute would have been the real joke. So, while the average cost for every 1,000 stat points between 100,000 and 200,000 stat points was 750 million. Purchasing those stat points would be 75 billion points on average. It was stupidly obvious in hindsight, but I never noticed. Since I never took my long-term projections and averaged them out to an individual grinding session and didn’t really share them with other people. The difference would only become obvious at the larger amounts, specifically once I crossed the one million point threshold. I used to make fun of people who couldn’t math, but there was a certain challenge with large numbers. You truly did only master things when you taught them and were forced to explain them. This also threw off my understanding of how high level stats actually worked. The most update n0vels are published on 𝔫𝔬𝔳𝔢𝔩⁂𝔣𝔦𝔯𝔢⁂𝔫𝔢𝔱 At the low amounts, it was clear things were based on order of magnitude. But I had always found it suspicious I was able to fight level 7 and level 8 monsters. Sure there were notes from Jacob that Clarissa had passed onto me that the energy levels were dropping and monsters were getting weaker, but that explanation, just seemed off to me, or it wasn’t the entire story. The reality was far more complex than I could have imagined, since I had made a mistake when making long term projections. The total cost from jumping up an order of magnitude was multiplied by ten twice. Once from the increase in the cost of stat points. The second from the increase in number of points purchased. Going from 1 million stat points to 2 million stat points would cost around 7.5 trillion points instead of 750 billion like I had been thinking about. I chuckled at myself as I set down my notebook. It didn’t change anything, except how I thought about things. Such a simple, yet profound mistake had created several misconceptions in my mind and fixed several discrepancies I had observed and couldn’t explain. It was something I hadn’t done in a while either. There were always other things to focus on, other than math. This huge mistake was comforting in a way. It showed that the stats weren’t messing with my head in a weird way. I was not some super computer calculating away. I could think quickly, but I could still make mistakes. This more than anything else convinced me that the stat points weren’t some insidious way to slowly change me mentally. It appeared that the System actually did respect peoples’ free will. For something with so much power it was impressive. Unfortunately it didn’t award me a meta-point for my sudden insights. It also made the meta-point much more valuable in my eyes. The cost of stat points would keep going up and the meta-point would keep increasing in value. I knew this before, but it was even more obvious right now, that the long term costs of everything had gone up in my mind. I had the math right up until I started hitting the hundred thousands and then I forgot about having to purchase more stat points. I was kicking myself in the rear about making such a mistake, but I had corrected it before anyone found out. That was the most important thing, not suffering critical embarrassment. Young Michael would probably look at me in shame and tell me to go back to school. Or he might be so impressed that I had so many stat points, I couldn’t work out the math anymore. Emperor Michael, so many stat points, he needed someone to just do his math for him. In the far future, the top grinders would hire mathematicians to calculate progression for them, working out all the zeroes. The number of stat points between 10,000 and 100,000 was a lot less than between 100,000 and 1 million. While the effectiveness of the points had gone down, the sheer number of stat points being purchased would offset this decrease in power far more than I had been expecting. The fact that there were competing forces, with some of they being hard to quantify made it more confusing. The trends at the lower levels had been worked out, but changes weren’t linear. They operated on some sort of equation, which would take a lot of studying to work out. Like observing the planets’ orbit. Even in ancient times, orbits could be worked out through observation. But if you asked them to predict what they would be like in a thousand, million, or even a billion years, the models would fall apart as tiny errors built up. This was the same problem the models developed by my Empire had. We could easily work out the short term and then had to project forward based on that. But they had become wildly incorrect the further they were projected out. And even if Clarissa did pick up on something in our discussions about costs, she might not have wanted to point out my mistake, or not really given in much consideration, thinking I was just saying numbers and that I knew what I was talking about. Looking at the math and thinking about the stat points I had so far, a million stat points for each stat might be the max. Working out the new math, ignoring my meta-point, that would take around 2.5 quintillion points to reach 10 million total stat points. At my current speed of grinding, earning that many points would take around 5,555,555 days of grinding or about 15,550 years. That meant I had only completed about the first tenth of one percent, since it was Day 5,677. Just to reach a million total stat points without my meta-point would take around 23 trillion more points. I felt emotionally tired in a way that was hard to put to words.