Jake had stayed at Shine city for 1 week now.
In just one week, Jake had gained 606 Click Points.
This was much faster than Jake had anticipated.
Jake's click points income looked like this:
25 from green-tier monster core absorption over this week. The taunt quest NPC contributed 212 click points. 123 from Nathaniel's dishonest deal. And 246 from Nick Roger's 3 yellow-tier cores.
The tiers of click point income probably looked like this:
Yellow-tier Items > Taunt Quests > Green-tier Items
Regarding skills, Jake's detection skill increased by 1% over practice.
His Nautilus Body Refining Guide increased by 0.7% over daily practice. If Jake wanted to quickly level this up through practice, he'd probably need to do the exercise-eat-sleep loop. Way too time consuming.
Artifact Crafting skill increased by only 0.25%. It's stuck at 3.1% now. Studying blueprints barely helped now. Maybe a more challenging blueprint would help.
Clicking to level up would be easy. However, gaining click points was not that easy.
Trigger more taunt quests from the taunt quest NPC? Jake highly doubted that could happen now.
Absorb yellow-tier items? Hard to obtain.
Also, there wasn't that much green-tier monster cores on the market. By the looks of it, the big guilds were hording this resource as well.
Build high-level items and exchange them for yellow-tier items?
Thinking of this, Jake lightly shook his head. The more Jake got into this industry, the more Jake realized how difficult his dream was.
Build silver-tier equipment? A feat like that could be easily accomplished? Only a newbie artisan would believe that.
'In this era, getting to the other side is much harder than I expected...'
'However... Given enough time, with this system, I will have no roadblocks!'
With his mind, Jake clicked onto the [+] button after his artifact crafting skill.
[ Would you like to level up skill - Artifact Crafting for (100) Click Points? ]
[ Artifact Crafting - Entry Level (3.1%) => Artifact Crafting - Entry Level (13.1%) ]
[ Your Balance: 606 => 506 ]
[ Y / N ]
'Only 10% I see.' Jake nodded at himself, accepting the situation. 'However, putting things in perspective, I only have 3.1% in progress at the moment.'
'It's good to get a feel at this investment.'
'Yes.'
Jake blankly stared at the wall for a second.
Blinking a few times, Jake's wondering mind had returned.
If this was an anime, a light bulb would have popped up above Jake's head.
In an instance, Jake had an 'Eureka' moment.
Everything made sense now. Jake suddenly felt that artifact crafting was actually pretty easy.
Design ideas, crafting techniques, understanding of runic characters... Jake felt as if he'd suddenly remembered this burst of information.
Gaining new clarity in his understanding of this craft, Jake sighed.
Looking back, Jake bitterly chuckled at himself. 'Looks like I'm no genius after all.'
Jake suddenly felt that his previous techniques was inefficient and stupid.
Some information seemed to be 'certainly correct'. So Jake had never bothered to question these information. Looking back, his fundamental understanding contained so much errors.
'So this is the power of clicking to level up.' Jake nodded, accepting the situation.
Jake stared at the 13.1% in progress for a moment.
'If just 13.1% contains this much information, how oblivious of the craft do I have to be?!'
'Looks like I'm just a normal person with extra steady hands after all.'
Jake took a deep breath and calmed his feelings.
'Nevertheless, looks like I've made a worthy investment.'
'Given enough points, crafting advanced talisman won't be that difficult.'
[ Would you like to level up skill - Artifact Crafting for (100) Click Points? ]
[ Artifact Crafting - Entry Level (13.1%) => Artifact Crafting - Entry Level (23.1%) ]
[ Your Balance: 506 => 406 ]
[ Y / N ]
'Yes.'
Jake leveled up his artifact crafting skills 2 more times. Now his artifact crafting skill was at 33.1%.
He got about 350 click points from the Rogers family. Spending 300 click points to help them in return seemed right.
Jake closed his eyes and went over his crafting knowledge.
If crafting had grades, Jake would be at elementary school, no, maybe daycare at 3.1% mastery.
At 31.1% mastery, Jake just graduated with a university bachelor degree. Yep. The gap was that big.
'Looking back, do I really need to be that serious when writing talisman characters?'
To make sure that he wasn't delusional, Jake took out his red artisan pen.
Jake casually drew out strokes. At 1.3% understanding, Jake wrote runic characters with printed strokes.
Now, at 33.1%, Jake went with a casual and cursive style. No defined strokes. Just very smooth and connected.
In less than 10 seconds, Jake had finished a blob of a character.
In response, that runic character self-folded into a glowing chip!
If an aspiring artisan saw this, that artisan's world view would probably change.
'Oh. I'm not delusional.' Jake nodded at the result. 'Good.'
Just to make sure, Jake practiced over the seven other runic characters.
Two hours quickly passed...
After a knock on the door, Jake had returned to the front hall.
The crowd surrounded a fragile-looking young man at the moment. A rather pale face. Even in this cool environment, this dude was sweating. Politely nodding around, this dude seemed to be stressed out about the crowd's enthusiasm.
This branch master wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. Taking a glance at Jake's door, seeing that Jake was out, this young dude subtly sighed in relief.
"Ah. Master Collins, I heard that you wanted to do the certification exam now."
"Sorry about the trouble." Jake apologetically nodded.
"No. This is no trouble at all." The branch master seemed genuine about this statement. "I'd be honored to witness the certification of an aspiring artisan."
"However." The branch master's expression became serious. "Master Collins, are you certain you want to do the exam at this hour."
"There is no hurry."
"If you happened to fail by a bit, you will have to wait one month before trying again."
Hearing this advice, the smile on some people here quickly faded.
"It's fine." Jake nodded.
The smiles returned.
Nathaniel's expression changed from concerned to a faint smile. This older son subtly sighed in relief.
Nathaniel fixed his suit a little and looked at Jake with smiling eyes. Too young. Too naive.
What were the odds of Jake succeeding now? In this condition...
It's his victory in the end. Only he could bring his family to new heights!