What Loki said made the man laugh out loud. After laughing, he said, "You're right about that. Unfortunately for you, I am not desperate, and you don't have anything compelling enough to exchange with me for my skill."
To this, Loki said, "I will be back."
Then he turned away and left the man.
As he left, the man glanced at him before shaking his head and saying, "So much hope for the future. It reminds me of my past. I wonder how long he can last before his hope is worn down."
On the other side, Loki completed his tour of the market. Then he spent the rest of the day in the gambling dens.
He didn't gamble at all. He only watched the people gambling and used them to gain experience.
There are many kinds of things that people gamble on. There is betting on beast fights, the gambling on Metac lodes, and the lottery. They are all popular but extremely difficult to earn money from.
The betting on beast fights is straightforward. One only has to pick a beast to win, and whoever wins would win if their beast won the fight.
But as simple as betting was, winning, on the other hand, was more difficult because the fights are not among two beasts, but can be between ten beasts fighting for supremacy. This has reduced the chance of picking a winner from 50% to 10%.
Gambling on Metac lodes was even more difficult to win because the stones said to contain Metacs can be fake and are usually empty most of the time. Rarely does anyone manage to pick a Metac lode, open it, and find a living Metac inside of it.
What most people find in the Metac lodes are usually dead Metacs or even completely empty stones. Out of a hundred, he only saw there people win. So the chances of success are at best 3%.
Then there is the even worse lottery. The one he saw involved picking a fish out of the ten thousand fish in a barrel. Then thousands of grains are poured into the barrel of fish.
The person who picked the lucky fish that swallowed the special grain will win the lottery. So the chances of winning are even less than 1%.
One thing that he noticed, though, was that the poorer the chance of winning, the higher the reward for winning. For example, beast fighting has a maximum odds of 10 and is usually 5, while the reward for gambling with Metac lode can be 10 to 100 times the amount used to gamble.
As for the lottery, the reward can be as high as 1,000 times the cost of gambling. This is the case for picking the lucky fish out of the ten thousand fish in the barrel. Unfortunately, he didn't see anyone win this.
Loki watched and learned until he had to leave the market. Then he returned home to cultivate.
He went into the bedroom and sat on the simple bed with his back to the wall. Then he concentrated his mind into his energy well.
It was nighttime, so it was dark outside. It was also dark within the house. But he had a small fire lamp to produce enough light for him to see.
The sight that appeared to him was a slight white wall. The parts of the energy well that were white were only a thin layer on the inside of the energy well, and it was only an area that was less than 10%. According to his Power Identification Ability, the true progress to the next stage is only 2%.
Since he had to make the whole energy well white both on the inside and the outside, until the entire round ball made of what appears to be glass is completely foggy, before he could reach the middle of rank 1, the little amount of white he saw in his energy well meant that he still had a long way to go.
According to Muni, the talented ones among them who have a potential of 50 and are properly diligent with cultivation, should be able to advance to the middle of rank 1 in two months. This is without the help of any resources like energy stones.
He has 77 potential, three times as much, 100 energy stones, and a lot of willpower to ensure diligence, so he should be able to advance to the middle of rank 1 in a month. So he should have nothing to worry about concerning the end-of-the-month test, in which the worst four will die.
But instead of focusing on his energy well and trying to nurture its walls, he shifted his focus to the energy chambers in Fenrir and began nurturing them. This is because the cultivation of the energy chambers can be brought back with him when he rewinds time.
Since he wants to be able to get Slav regardless of Slav's awareness of the danger and no matter what Slav does to avoid them, he needs to be strong enough to subdue Slav the moment he awakens his energy well.
Another reason he is focusing on the energy chambers within Fenrir is that the energy within them is what Fenrir will use to traverse the River of Time. So he needs to prioritize the cultivation of Fenrir above the cultivation of his energy well.
Of course, he will still need to refine his energy well, too. This is something he has to do before he can advance to rank 2.
To top it off, he has to refine both the energy chambers in Fenrir, too. So he has to do three times as much work as others before he can advance to rank 2.
This is just for now, when he hasn't reached the limit of how many Metacs Fenrir can devour and fuse with. So the number of energy wells that he has to refine in the future will only increase, not decrease.
He is going to have to do a lot of work to advance to rank 2, but this much work didn't faze him at all. After all, he has a lot of time to do the work.