Before the Adventurers' Guild closed for the day, Gauss headed to the branch to ask about rank promotions.
To go from Bronze 1-star to 2-star, you not only have to reach Class Level 2 but also accumulate enough completed quests.
After checking with the front desk and confirming that the winter hunt had met his quota, he booked a rank evaluation for the next day.
Once the evaluation was done, another little six-pointed star would be added to the badge on his chest—he'd be rid of the "lowest-tier adventurer" label.
A Level 2 professional isn't anything special in itself—just a bit stronger than Level 1, not a true qualitative leap. But getting to Level 2 quickly versus taking ten or even dozens of years means very different things. For the former, Level 2 is just a rest stop on the way upward; for the latter, it may be the end of the road. Late bloomers exist, but they're rare. True powerful people usually show their edge early.
He grabbed dinner at a street stall; night had fully fallen by the time he got home. After a night's rest—
The next day, at the Adventurers' Guild.
Alia watched Gauss disappear through the testing room's door, her eyes full of envy. She'd become a professional earlier than he had, but he'd overtaken her on the climb to Level 2. She was genuinely happy for him, yet a faint pang still crept in. Realizing that, she took a deep breath and reset her mindset. Lately she could clearly feel herself improving faster; as long as she compared herself with herself and made progress every day, she was on the right path.
Creak—
The door opened.
"How'd it go?" Alia stepped up to meet him.
"Passed without a hitch." Gauss smiled and solemnly hung the badge back around his neck.
On the indigo metal, two delicate six-pointed stars now sat side by side, reflecting a ghostly green phosphorescence in the light.
"Congratulations!" Alia said from the heart.
A 2-star means you're out of the newbie tier and starting your climb. Even if you wanted to join another party, it's much easier than as a 1-star—hard proof of strength. And for their current team, his upgrade still mattered: out in the wilds, if strangers saw the 2-star on his chest, anyone with ill intent would think twice.
"You too—keep it up," Gauss encouraged her.
They walked side by side to the market district.
Besides the evaluation, they were shopping today.
First stop: the skills shop.
After learning Goodberry, Alia had time to pick up another cantrip. As for Level 1 spells, unless she advanced to Level 2 she likely couldn't learn any more.
Gauss, on the other hand, headed straight for the Level 1 shelf.
The stock wasn't too little or too much; a few copies of each spell lay there. Compared to last time, some were gone and some new ones had appeared.
Weave Shadow: wraps a semi-transparent shadow over your body and grants the following—light distorts and refracts around you, making ranged attacks harder to aim and lock on; in dim light or darkness, if you keep still or move slowly, you can briefly turn invisible.
Comprehend Languages: for the spell's duration you can understand spoken or written surface meaning, though not hidden subtext or esoteric knowledge.
Feather Fall: the chosen target's plummet slows; they take no fall damage and the spell ends upon landing.
Fog Cloud, Identify, Grease, Cleanse, Witch's Arrow, Deadly Ray…
Each had its uses, and Gauss wanted almost all of them. Comprehend Languages would let him read more books and parse other races' speech on the road.
Cleanse was also handy—Prestidigitation could fake cleaning if spammed, but it wasn't built for it and wouldn't match a true cleaning spell's effect.
Identify would help him recognize unfamiliar flora, fauna, ores, and items in the field so he wouldn't miss valuable finds.
And so on.
He couldn't buy them all, sadly. Forty-plus gold sounded like a lot, but it would only cover about four Level 1 spells—and he wouldn't have time to train them all anyway. Better to cut the non-essentials or those a cantrip could substitute for.
He looked at Identify, thought it over, and chose that one. For now his attack spells were sufficient, and many of his offensive tools still needed practice to raise their mastery—like Burning Hands, which had just reached Lv3. An attack spell shouldn't just be "usable"; it should be drilled until it's second nature in live combat.
The Brute Force skill also needed training. He'd been busy with the winter hunt and, after returning, focused on reaching Class Level 2, so it had sat on the back burner. Time to move that long-owned, seldom-practiced skill onto the schedule.
Thanks to the Adventurer's Manual, Gauss's attributes would outstrip peers at the same tier; not leveraging that superior physique would be wasteful. And who knows—if a non-caster skill like Brute Force got high enough, it might trigger a second class?
He'd sounded out intel on multiclassing. In theory, everyone has potential, but in practice it's hard. Once your main class is fixed, training other class skills gets much tougher; even if you grind them to high mastery, you still might never trigger class attunement.
And if you do clear those two hurdles, multiple classes split your finite time and focus. So multiclassers are rare; most people stick to their main.
Gauss only entertained the idea because, with his "panel" advantage, his skill progression was decent. But he wasn't fixated on it—paired with his physical gifts and tools like Basic Swordsmanship, Brute Force, and Enhanced Leap, his combat performance was already strong.
After weighing it all, he bought Identify—at least then he wouldn't worry about missing materials in the wild.
Price: 11 gold.
After paying at the counter, Gauss's savings stood at 32 gold.