EXP Is Golden: Volume 4

1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-7183-5658-0
Verlag: J-Novel Club
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 250 Seiten

Reihe: EXP Is Golden

What self-respecting Lord of Destruction doesn't want a two-headed dragon? Not a beast of nature, but a monstrosity stitched together through unholy alchemy. Fresh from perfecting her dungeon gauntlets, Leah turns to a darker craft: forging her minions into hulking abominations. Towering undead colossi, a walking temple wrought in metal stone, and crowning them all...the dragon with two heads and one destiny-world conquest.

But what's the point of building nightmares if you can't test them? The elves of the Kingdom of Portely raze a Hilithian town under Leah's protection, and from the heavens descend an archangel and its zealous, seraphic kin. Perfect challengers; perfect prey. Leah will crush them all on her way to becoming the greatest villain the world has ever known.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Harajun

Weitere Mitwirkende

Fixro2n

Chen, Dawson

Leseproben

Chapter 1: Fortune and Misfortune

Three weeks after the implementation of the teleportation service in game.

Leah, Lyla, and Blanc had just wrapped up an elegant tea-time-slash-information exchange. For now, they parted ways, each with a few matters to attend to, but they’d agreed to regroup soon in Trae Forest, where Leah had headed directly. All were eager not only to hear more about Blanc’s theory on monster fusion, but to try a few experiments themselves.

The tea table had seen its fair share of intriguing revelations. Leah had contributed some crucial intel—though she’d kept far more to herself—while Lyla offered a moderately useful piece of her own. But the moment that truly stole the spotlight, wiping the smugness from Lyla’s face after her self-proclaimed “vital” contribution, was Blanc’s revelation that multiple entities, when reborn near-simultaneously and in close proximity, could merge into something greater.

The choice of their second rendezvous, Trae, had been chosen to facilitate this experimentation. Truth be told, Leah wanted to dive in right away—forget the others entirely—but that pesky thing, the social contract got in the way. If it had only been Lyla, she might have gone ahead anyway. But the promise was with Blanc too, and you didn’t toss a promise with a friend aside just because you felt like it. Promises with a sister, though?

With the others tied up for a while yet, Leah suddenly had time to do something she’d been putting off for some time now:

Power herself up.

She’d been waiting for the right occasion. To hit a certain amount of EXP and do it all at once. There was no real logic to it. In other words, less “I had a carefully thought-out plan” with her and more “I figured I’d do it when it felt right, and now it feels right.”

“Now then, the all-important question: Which direction should I take this upgrade?”

Early on, the smartest way to spend EXP when it came to boosting stats was to pump it straight into base stats for immediate gains. But past a certain threshold, the efficiency flipped. At that point, passive skills that boosted certain stats by a percentage—such as —gave a better return on investment.

One caveat: Boost skills didn’t apply to the stats granted to retainers through , only base stats did. For any halfway-decent master who relied on their minions, that meant base stats still had to be raised, even if EXP efficiency suffered.

That said, Leah couldn’t make her minions stronger at her own expense, so she opted for a healthy mix: boosting her base stats while unlocking percentage passives. After all, anyone strong enough to challenge her directly would almost certainly have those passives too—and there was no way she’d let herself be the one caught lacking.

With stat increases out of the way, it was time to turn to skills.

First up was what, judging by the name, appeared to be a Queen of Destruction-exclusive racial skill: . It was a toggleable skill, similar to . When active, it granted a considerable bonus to all magical skill checks and effects—while also vastly increasing their MP cost. The flavor text read “You further grasp the laws of the arcane,” suggesting the unlock condition was either learning a set number of magical skills as a Queen of Destruction or reaching a certain INT threshold. There was no apparent downside to taking it, so Leah did.

Immediately, three more “dark lord”-related skills appeared: , , and . All three clearly had as a prerequisite. There might have been others as well, but for now, there was no way to tell.

was a toggleable skill that, when active, protected the caster from all attacks. In short, a damage mitigation skill. Any damage to LP prevented by the skill would instead drain an equal amount of MP. There was no adjusting the rate of reduction, no partial mitigation. As long as it was active, all damage taken would be nullified and redirected to the caster’s MP bar.

“Or more accurately, it’s a damage redirection skill. All damage taken by me goes straight to my MP bar instead.”

As a death-prevention tool, this was massive. But it was no free lunch. Nearly everything Leah could do in her current form relied on MP. Burn through too much and she’d be dead weight. This wasn’t something she could keep on constantly; it would have to be used with care.

This led to another point: Recovering a single point of LP in this game was far cheaper than recovering a point of MP. If all we were talking about was finding a way to use MP to recover LP, there was already a way to do just that: healing. And it was actually way more efficient per point of MP spent. In the world where healing existed, a straight one-to-one MP-to-LP conversion like was almost never worth it. It was always more efficient to take the LP damage and patch it up later—so long as you could survive the hit and had the time to heal. But she supposed that would precisely be the situation where paid for itself, when one had to pull out all the stops to survive to see another day.

Next up was . This skill formed an invisible shield of arcane energy, lasting indefinitely until broken. To break it, you just needed to deplete its LP bar. There was no fixed MP cost to cast; instead, you could invest any amount of MP, and the shield’s LP would match that value. Multiple shields could be created, the number determined by how many “Dark”-prefix skills you had unlocked. In Leah’s case—, , , and —that meant four shields in total.

In essence, this was another flavor of , but with one important distinction: You could stack it in advance. As with , the one-to-one MP-to-LP conversion wasn’t efficient. But unlike , you could create shields during MP surpluses, when that extra MP would otherwise go unused. Viewed that way, it was essentially free LP, making it far more valuable than its raw numbers suggested—and something Leah could, and should, keep active at all times.

Lastly, —an active skill that conjured a weapon from arcane energy. Creating one locked away a chunk of the caster’s MP bar, which would only be restored once the weapon was destroyed. The weapon’s strength scaled with the MP invested; more mana meant a stronger blade. But as creating one would effectively be removing usable MP from her pool—unable to be regenerated as long as the weapon was in use—Leah found the skill underwhelming. As mentioned, MP to her was everything. Like , this was a “use with care” skill.

As she reviewed the four skills, a thought crossed her mind:

“Is it just me, or are these basically passive boost skills with fancier names?”

True enough, the costs and effects were certainly high—impressively so—but stripped to their core, they were just passive stat boosts in thematic dress. They did stack with other skills of the same type, so it wasn’t as if they were ; they just felt a little...boring.

She recalled hearing that Lords of Destruction were a race famed for their solo combat prowess. In that light, the abundance of stat boost skills made sense. Still, it clashed with her mental image of what Lords of Destruction—or Dark Lords—should be. Instead of master sorcerers raining arcane devastation upon their foes, this interpretation leaned more toward the “let me hit you with my mana-infused fist” variety.

She took all the skills regardless, though she wasn’t convinced of their true value in a near-peer fight. It was the sort of thing she’d want to test sooner or later—preferably in an all-out match against someone of comparable strength.

It was then that she noticed a new unlockable skill under : .

Whether it appeared because she’d unlocked or for some other reason was unclear, but its description marked it as a skill that inflicted status effects on opponents. And not just a stand-alone skill, but one with its own full tree, much like itself.

In its base form, inflicted dissociation. Advancing further down its tree unlocked more options—for example, applied the burn status effect, and so on. Spell hit/resist was determined by the caster’s INT versus the target’s MND.

An interesting thing to note was that it cost LP to cast, making it not a spell you could just throw around.

“Hmm... This almost feels less like an add-on to , and more like it’s using ’s framework to emulate a completely different skill.”

If that were true, then there could be players who’d unlocked without ever touching —and perhaps, if they kept progressing down that path, they might eventually be able to emulate in return.

Leah noted, unlocking the skill.

Almost instantly, her left eye began to itch, a familiar sensation. She rubbed at the eyelid, but it didn’t help;...