At the ninth level of the Tower of Truth, the realm of wind element class change is a place of fierce battles.
"Windstride Slash!"
A streak of light flashed as Mike easily defeated a giant wind elemental wolf. An F-grade wind elemental core dropped and was picked up by the Cerberus Phantom, who brought it back to Mike's side.
In his left hand, Mike wielded the Force of Nature, and in his right, the Thunderclap Hammer, wreaking havoc among the wind elemental monsters. For a moment, it was hard to tell who the real monsters were.
As this was a realm for wind element class change, the use of skills unrelated to wind was prohibited. Skills like Charge Up, Thunderclap Strike, and Ignite were all disabled.
Fortunately, Mike had mastered Windstride Slash, enough to handle various situations.
At level 60, Mike's attributes were top-notch, far surpassing his peers. Even without using lightning magic, just using his staff for regular attacks, he could easily handle these monsters.
After more than half an hour, over a thousand F-grade cores, and over a hundred E-grade cores.
Mike noted as he looked towards the center of the realm where something like a trophy floated in mid-air—the Skill Melter. Placing elemental cores into it allowed for skill smelting.
The melter had a capacity limit; after a certain number of cores were placed, it would automatically generate skills. It could also be reset infinitely, each reset costing half of the cores while also increasing the upper limit of elemental grades the melter could accommodate.
Essentially, resetting was a form of refinement. To create an SSS-grade skill, numerous resets were necessary!
Resetting skills became increasingly challenging and the skills stronger as one progressed.
Mike approached the melter, grabbed a handful of elemental cores, and threw them in. After devouring the cores, the melter glowed faintly.
"Generate skill [Wind Howl], F-grade, learn?"
"No, reset!"
...
"Generate skill [Wings of Wind], E-grade, learn?"
"No, reset!"
"...."
"Reset!"
After several resets, Mike had used up all his accumulated elemental cores. The latest skill generated had reached A-grade!
For ordinary participants, an A-grade skill was satisfying. But for Mike, who aimed for an SSS-grade skill, there was still a significant gap.
As the continuous slaughter went on, the monsters kept respawning, but their strength also increased. From being able to smash a monster to death with a staff, it now took three swings of the Thunderclap Hammer to achieve the same result. The dropped elemental cores also increased in grade!
...
"Generate skill [Wind Burial], A-grade, learn?"
"Generate skill [Hurricane], S-grade, learn?"
"....."
After continuous resets, the melter emitted a dense blue glow, almost overflowing.
"Generate skill [Interdimensional Hurricane], SSS-grade, learn?"
After 18 resets, Mike finally generated an SSS-grade skill!
"It took over three hours to generate an SSS-grade skill, not easy at all." The difficulty of the ninth level was greater than Mike had anticipated.
The Tower of Truth only allowed six hours of activity per day, which was extremely precious. If Mike couldn't create a suitable skill in the wind element change class realm within six hours, the next time he entered, all progress would be reset, and he would have to start from scratch.
Many powerful human beings were stuck at certain levels for life because they didn't have enough time!
Human will is infinite, but potential is always limited.
Before Thor appeared, even if one adjusted their state to the extreme and executed every step of the strategy perfectly, some levels were still impassable!
Now, Mike faced the same dilemma—time was running short!
It took 42 minutes on the eighth level, and 3 hours and 7 minutes to reset 18 times to refresh an SSS-grade skill.
Before entering the Tower of Truth, Mike had also delayed a few minutes.
[Countdown: 2 hours 3 minutes 8 seconds] A red countdown timer appeared in the lower right corner of Mike's vision. Based on the current situation, Mike quickly adjusted his target.
First, conquer the wind element change class realm. Lightning and fire element change class realms will be dealt with tomorrow!
As long as he conquered the wind element change class realm, the progress would be saved and not reset. If he couldn't refresh a suitable SSS-grade skill today, Mike would have to waste today's opportunity and come back tomorrow.
But time was pressing, and Mike didn't know when the demon god's storm would appear; he had to enhance his strength as much as possible before that.
Clarifying the current situation, Mike focused on the newly created SSS-grade skill.
"Interdimensional Hurricane?" Mike glanced at the skill description and immediately chose to reset.
As a wind element skill, [Interdimensional Hurricane] could summon a terrifying hurricane after chanting, tearing everything apart and causing extremely high damage. For any wind element mage, this was a coveted divine skill.
However, for Mike, its value was actually not great. In terms of burst damage, Mike had [Charge Up] and [Thunderclap Strike].
Then he would add a Lightning group damage, so he had both single-target and overall damage covered. Because of the scalability of [Thunderclap Strike], even when facing multiple enemies, Mike preferred to use Thunderclap Strike.
The most useless aspect of [Interdimensional Hurricane] for Mike was its slightly long chanting time! The burst was not sufficient, and the disadvantage was too fatal, so it was not a good choice.
After resetting [Interdimensional Hurricane], Mike immediately swung the Thunderclap Hammer and attacked the newly spawned monsters.
Time passed quickly, and after forty-five minutes of continuous fighting, Mike had collected hundreds of S-tier wind elemental cores!
Back at the melter, Mike didn't waste a second and started smelting skills! At this stage, every smelting Mike performed created SSS-grade skills!
"Generate skill [Reviving Wind], learn?"
"Reset!"
"Generate skill [Wind Shadow Shield], learn?"
"Reset!"
"....."
Each SSS-grade skill did not meet Mike's needs. There were too many auxiliary and healing skills, which Mike directly ignored. And the damage skills were mostly long-chanting types, with too obvious disadvantages.
After more than ten resets, Mike still hadn't found a skill that met his requirements.
"No wonder the path of Wind Combat Mage is so difficult..."
Mike was able to reset wind element skills to SSS-grade, which was already quite difficult. Especially since on the basis of SSS-grade, he could still reset more than a dozen times.
In three hundred years, probably only Mike could do it!
"If I choose long-chanting high burst damage, that's traditional wind magic, and traditional wind magic doesn't lack forbidden-level damage skills! But chanting makes you immobile, sacrificing the most important mobility of Wind Combat Mage."
Mike analyzed in his mind while using the Thunderclap Hammer to kill monsters. "At the same time, these SSS-grade skills have another fatal flaw—the consumption of mana is too high!"
Even with Mike's top-tier attributes at his level, take [Interdimensional Hurricane] for example. Without considering mana recovery, Mike could only cast it twice before depleting his mana.
If Mike was like this, other wind mages couldn't even think about it! A skill that loses universality and can only be mastered by very few people doesn't mean much to the entire class.
Why is [Windstride Slash] so popular in the market? It's because [Windstride Slash] has extremely strong universality!
Assassins, warriors can all learn it, and even mages who don't stick to their duties come to learn it.
The SSS-grade skill Mike wanted was to serve as the core skill of the 'Wind Combat Mage' class, filling the gap in damage!
In other words, if Mike really created such a skill, he would have opened up a new development path for the entire 'Wind Combat Mage' class! Becoming the mainstream of wind magic in the future is not impossible!
"Continue resetting!"
Mike glanced at the countdown, which had just over an hour left.
...
Thud— The Thunderclap Hammer heavily smashed down, and the wind elemental king fell to the ground, an SSS-grade elemental core quietly lying on the ground.
"The ninth." Mike had reached the limit in the wind element instance. An elemental king core could reset a skill once, and Mike still had nine reset opportunities!
[Countdown: 5 minutes]
Mike rushed to the melter and threw in an elemental king core.
"Generate skill [Summon Wind Elemental Queen], learn?"
"Reset!"
"..."
"Reset!"
"..."
After six continuous resets, Mike still hadn't harvested the skill he wanted!
"Three chances left...." With only a minute and a half left, Mike had no chance to continue hunting the wind elemental king.
"Generate SSS tire skill [Wind's Reach], learn?"
[Wind's Reach]: Deals [2000+1.5*Intelligence+5*past 10 seconds of movement length (yards)] wind element damage to enemies. While dealing damage, the caster transforms into a breeze, able to dash any distance, with the maximum distance being 20% of the damage dealt (yards).
Mana consumption: 400 points
CD time: 10s
Seeing [Wind's Reach] instantly revitalized Mike, sweeping away his previous fatigue. After five hours of continuous effort and resets, it was all worth it at this moment!
"This is it!" This was the core skill of [Wind Combat Mage] he was pursuing!
"Res..no no no..learn!"
"Learning skill [Wind's Reach] successful!"