A Black Market LitRPG

Feldon’s peaceful snoring pierced the stillness of the air in the large cavern filled with the remnants of rock spiders and burnt marks of Soren’s lightning arc scorching the ground. Kyle felt slightly exposed in the area, as exhausted as he was. I should find a safer area first instead of doing the race evolution here first. Who knows if another System user rushes in?

Terminal? Kyle suddenly had a holographic arrow just above his vision, indicating the path to go. It led towards the exit passageway, which he had just returned from. Kyle surmised that it must be one of the locked rooms which he passed on the way while fighting off Soren.

Better than nothing. Kyle hoisted Feldon on his back, carrying him down the exit passageway, but not before collecting the three slovesa cores that were dropped from the trial.

The arrow led him to a heavily damaged metallic door, which was slightly ajar. Kyle placed Feldon on the ground before forcing the door open, its electronic movement long deteriorated with time.

The room was fairly small, with a single human-sized chamber in the middle with multiple computers attached to it, none of which were powered on. There were minimal signs of degradation, albeit with a few tendrils of vines growing through the cracks in the metallic walls, feeding off the radiation that was emitted from the residual materials around.

Dust coated the transparent monitors that were clearly linked to the chamber, with no sign of any mechanical keyboards or interfaces. Kyle sighed, knowing how much confidence the A-class states had in their electronics to survive, some even claiming they could last a hundred thousand years thanks to extensive testing in a time anomaly. Except they never accounted for the fact that their power source might be completely crippled.

The chamber, too had no buttons whatsoever, only a single handprint groove on the side along with a single thick power cable leading to it. Kyle examined the room a bit more, but there were hardly any clues left for him to discover about the origins of the dungeon.

Kyle noticed that the holographic arrow was very clearly pointing towards the handprint groove on the side of the chamber. But before he placed his hand on it, he readied his warhammer in the other, prepared to chop off his own hand in the event of an infection or a genetic corruption. It wouldn’t be the first time it has happened to him, either.

Not yet. Kyle meticulously scoured the room for anything active, along with any possibility of traps. He checked each crack to ensure that a rock spider would not suddenly burst through and kill him while he was unconscious. Playing it safe, he unplugged every cable that was connected, breaking the connection between the chamber and the monitors, as well as the thick power cable. Don’t want anything in this room suddenly powering up at all.

Next, he lugged Feldon in and placed him in a nice corner before glancing around for a sharp piece of metal, using it to carve a message into the ground in front of Feldon. Otherwise, he’s going to freak out and draw attention.

Arranging the food and water that miraculously survived in Feldon’s pockets despite him being impaled, he dragged the metallic door close to a small gap, supplementing the door by shoving the chamber all the way to the front, blocking anything from breaking through. At the same time, the air still flowed freely in the room.

This was as much as Kyle could do now for now. He had no idea how long the race evolution would take, so he had to prepare for any eventuality. What he could not prepare for was Agent Black – if the Nest hitmen were led here by Soren, it would be game over for him.

Kyle finally sat cross-legged on the ground, ready to proceed. Chugging a copious amount of water, he mentally prepared himself. Let’s do this.

Interesting, I’ve never got that warning before. Does this mean my class and subclass are reversible? That’s interesting. Kyle had already understood that the classes were more like arctech engravings that the System had engraved into his body physically. No doubt that if the System were to modify his race on a genetic level, it might be pretty much impossible to revert to being a human.

Finally, three races and their skills appeared in front of him, allowing Kyle to finally select the races.

Boneshifting already looks like a monstrous ability – but I’ll have to see if the others are better. While the second skill intrigued Kyle, the first skill hardly impressed him as optical illusions were already available. Granted, it did not require arcia energy to channel and could be done nearly instantly without having to prepare different suits altogether, but Kyle was already planning to improve on the optical illusion engravings and bring them closer to Galactic Era illusion technology.

Let’s see the next option first before dismissing it.

Kyle was shocked to see the race appear. After all, he was complicit in the creation of this variant, he himself being the biggest funder of the entire research project. Did the A-class State that built this System steal the information from us?

However, he was not enticed by the prospects of becoming a slovesa hybrid – he had seen the shortcomings of it in the various field tests and in the liberation war. Unlike a true slovesa, these hybrids can’t survive in space, but they can’t survive in a normal human environment as well without proper support.

The energy core required intense radiation, making it such that the hybrids could only live on moons or planets with low magnetic shielding or staying close to radioactive sources. The hybrids could also not integrate exotic materials in the same way that the slovesas could naturally. Kyle was not planning to limit himself in that way – there were hardly any radioactive sources found here yet.

Next.

The viral immunity is good – it might work against Agent Black or the debilitating poison. However, I’m not convinced that it is worth going down this racial upgrade path. The issue with the skills was that all of them could be obtained if he had access to Galactic Era tech. If he had remained unaware of the Galactic Era factories that could produce replacement parts for the cyborg Rayner, perhaps he might have placed the race even higher.

The three races shown so far had promise, but Kyle felt were a bit lacklustre. There are plenty of human variants designed for different environments out there – I just need to find one that matches what I intend to do.

Kyle needed a race that could complement his aspirations to be the largest criminal organisation on the planet as of now and eventually off-planet as well. If he were to return to the Galactic Era, he should consider right now how the race would affect that goal.

There’s plenty of discrimination among human variants to each other. A criminal organisation naturally does not care about that, but choosing a dangerous one like the Vicronoth would result in it being harder for me to establish diplomatic relations in the future.

Kyle was, of course, more than willing to resort to brute force, but if something could be achieved by a simple talk instead of expending resources that could be otherwise invested into other areas, he would naturally lean towards that route.

Let’s see the next few.

Telekinesis? Kyle was shocked. Humans had never really obtained the true power of telekinesis, even through genetic manipulation, when he was still alive in the Galactic Era. Just how far have I travelled into the future that an A-class state is able to do it?

He suspected this race might be a complete overhaul of the human genome. From what he recalled of the Orisians, they had a hidden requirement of having to stay near an equally psionic active exotic that seemed to work a completely unseen type of wave, analogous to how dark matter was viewed in Ancient Earth. Have they finally cracked the code?

Kyle was a bit wary, not wanting to be solely reliant on the exotic. Every Orisian prisoner captured from their homeworld away from the exotics eventually went braindead even if they willingly left their home planet, but not before causing an absolute disaster with their raging telekinesis abilities.

Let’s keep this in view for now. Next!