On Astral Tides: From Humble Freelancer To Astral Emperor

Thirty-Five

The first thing I decided to do was have a nap. My body was rested from my time in the Boundary, but the fatigue was still piling up mentally, especially after all the intensive concentration required to train my Chakras. Setting my alarm for ten in the morning I quickly settled back into my bed and closed my eyes, drifting off into a peaceful sleep…

… To be woken by my alarm what seemed only minutes later, though several hours had passed. Yawning I dragged myself out of bed and had some breakfast. Once that was done I went for my usual jog and then did several hours of practice with my training spear and weights. Once that was done it was lunchtime, so I had some rice balls and tuna, before doing a few more hours of raising aether through my Chakras, as well as gathering what wind energy I could.

Once this was complete I settled down at my computer with a bottle of iced tea and some snacks. It was time to take a risk. Configuring a Virtual Private Network to set my location to The United Kingdom rather than Japan, I opened up a gaming site and registered. Entering my bank details from the account I had set up on my trip to the bank, I transferred out my funds. This was technically illegal in Japan, which had very strict rules on gambling, but I didn’t feel too bad about it, as it wasn’t hurting anyone, and was perfectly legal in my mom’s country. So it is only half a crime at best.

Clicking on the window to load up a roulette application I swallowed down nervous spit and waited for it to start.

Man, this is risky, but if it works…

The key here was my Fortune statistic. When it was at 2 I found it was roughly a four percent boost in games of chance, but now after levelling up my Fae-Bonded class it had reached 5 which in theory should be around a ten percent increase in my chances of winning luck-based games.

Ten percent doesn’t sound a lot, but in games like roulette and blackjack, where the house edge is only a few percent… I would be the one with an edge, so if I kept playing long enough I should show steady profits. Of course, luck was hardly absolute, and spiky clusters of random events did happen frequently, so without huge sums of money to smooth these out I could still lose everything. There are no guarantees. But with success I can cut down the time I need to work dramatically, which allows me more time to train my other skills…

The first thing to do was to take it slow. I had a bit under two thousand British Pounds to play with, with each pound currently being worth roughly one hundred and forty yen. In wasn’t a small sum, but it was one I could afford to lose, even if such would hurt me. Of course I can only think that due to the extra work Hayato-san passed my way…

I had run over the calculations earlier. For example betting on red or black there were 18 numbers out of 37 that would double my money, or a 48.6% chance of winning. This meant the house had an edge of 1.4%. With my ten percent boost from my Fortune though, my chance of winning would be roughly 53.5%, which was an edge of 3.5%, more than twice what the casino enjoyed. On paper this meant I should clean up, but the table limits and capital limitations I had compared to the casino made it anything but a sure thing.

Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I placed five pounds on black and watched the computer spin the ball. The result? Number 8, Black. Five pounds was mine.

A good start. But I am a man of logic. I know that odds-on doesn’t guarantee a win. Replaying the bet I watched the ball start spinning again, taking a mouthful of tea to steady my nerves…

*********

An hour later I was mopping sweat from my brow. My balance stood at two thousand six hundred pounds, which meant an hourly profit of around eighty-four thousand yen, which was pretty amazing. The only problem was twice I had been two failed spins away from losing. With the table limit of five hundred on a double-up bet, that meant if I started with a five pound wager, there were only seven chances to win before I started losing money whatever happened on the eighth spin.

And the other problem was that even when I won on the sixth spin, risking significant losses, the only profit was the original stake, of five pounds. There is a better way, although my chances of losing are higher…

Betting on which third of the table the ball would land on rather than near fifty-fifty bets, my chance of winning with my Fortune was actually 35.6%, to triple my money. The edge was less, so I had more chance of losing, but on each subsequent double wager if I won I would make money only a little less than how much I had gambled, a much higher return. This would in turn allow me to reach my target goal far quicker. Swallowing more tea I moved my shaking hands to the betting chips and I threw down a five pound token and set the roulette spinning once more…

*********

“All right, I’m done.” slumping back in my chair I looked at the funds. Five thousand, four hundred and eight pounds. I had reached my target with a little extra to spare. Doing it had been bad for my heart though, as I was one spin away from defeat once and two spins away a half dozen times. Without my Fortune I was pretty certain I would have been left with nothing, my efforts and money wasted.

In only another hour I had made nearly three thousand pounds, or around four hundred thousand yen! Not wanting to push my luck any further I closed down the application, removing any temptation to continue. Feeling wrung out and drained I decided the best thing to do to clear my mind would be to practice increasing my wind energy again. After all, I am sure Shaeula is hard at work to win. Who knows what she’ll have me do if she triumphs…

Expanding my mind I felt the energy of the wind. It was faint, but ever-present, just as one would expect from an element based on air, which surrounded the entire planet. Drawing threads of power towards me I absorbed them, letting them run through my body until they coalesced around my heart. Each pulsing beat of my heart then dispersed this energy, passing it around until it returned to the heart once more.

The cycle was repeating endlessly, and not just with the wind energy I drew in. Aether was flowing through me as well, the flow still weak after returning from the Boundary, yet it had strengthened due to my earlier meditation. If the flow of wind was a trickling rivulet, the aether was a babbling brook, thicker yet still weak. Concentrating on these two flows, especially in the area around my heart, I strained all my senses, especially my self-appraisal ability. As I did so the flow of aether began to diminish, absorbed to power my observations.

The flow of aether and wind reached my heart and it pulsed, sending it out again. However with my deep inspection I noticed a discrepancy. The flow of aether had diminished a tiny amount as it spread from the heart, and the flow of wind energy had increased, also by a tiny amount, yet significantly more than the amount of aether that disappeared should create. Hmm, it’s kind of like the aether is catalysing the wind energy. Although if that was the case there should be no loss of aether… Still, thinking along those lines might potentially prove useful to my understanding in the long term. I continued working on raising my levels of wind energy until it was time to sleep.

*********

The next morning my body was humming with aether and wind energy, far more than I would usually have accrued. I wondered if it might have something to do with the Etheric tide, though I would have no way of proving it right now, so I put those thoughts aside.

After a quick breakfast I went for a jog in the blistering heat outside, really working up a sweat. I then ran through my strength-building exercises and combat training, before having a long cold shower to cool down afterwards. I then spent a couple of hours gambling. After a near miss (which admittedly earned me a fair chunk of money) I decided to ratchet down my initial bet from five pounds to one pound, giving me two extra spins before losing, although this would also slow down my rate of profit.

Once several hours were done my pot stood at seven thousand, two hundred and twenty pounds. Deciding to call it quits for the day I continued with meditation on wind energy, until it was time to enter the Boundary…

When I arrived the sky was riven with glimmering flecks of rainbow light, with what looked like coloured lightning shooting through it at a rapid pace. The white flakes were falling like quite the snow-shower, not thick enough to obscure vision, but definitely enough to be distracting. It was certainly beautiful in an eerie way. As I was checking my Territory to see how construction had progressed Shaeula arrived to greet me.

Hmm, it looks like nearly eight Astral days have passed. Time has really sped up here… the secondary queue is complete and the Barracks has just over three days to go. My ether stockpiles have shot up too. Etheric tides are great!

“Akio, are you listening to me-me?” Shaeula grumbled, and I snapped back to reality.

“What was that, sorry? I was just admiring our ether stocks.” I apologised.

“Bah. You should-should listen to me when I am talking.” She complained. “There has been-been trouble on our border with the Raven Knight’s Territory. The Etheric tide-tide has stirred up some predators, and one attacked his lands. They beat it off but it may-may return.”

“I see. That would be troublesome. Do you think we should fortify that border? We can use that as a staging point for an invasion later anyway?”

“I think that would-would be wise.” Shaeula concurred. “I fear the predator is beyond our means to kill-kill right now, so driving it off is the best-best we can hope for. As the tide deepens, more-more may descend as well.”

“Is the tide going to get much deeper?” I asked, interested. Time was tight if my plan was to reach fruition while leaving me time to visit my sis and Eri-chan back home as well.

“Us Noble Fae have a sense-sense for these things.” She replied proudly. “It is a relatively shallow tide, but its peak will be a little deeper, within a few-few days. It will then decline and fade-fade away.”

So if I assume a couple more days of acceleration… hmm… running the numbers in my head I came to a decision. “All right then, time to get building.” The upgrade to the Elemental Silo was next as planned. I then queued in a couple of Defensive Emplacements to be built on the chokepoints near to the graveyard that served as the Raven Knight’s Territory. I topped this off with the upgrade of two of my new Ether Spires, leaving me with just under a thousand ether left in the Silo.

That left both queues running at ten or eleven days, roughly, and if the tide was deepening and I took two more days to return in Material time, they should be finished by the time I made it back here. That was still a little wasteful though. Ideally I could save up enough to queue in one or both of my last two Spire upgrades, to maximise efficiency…

If time is running at roughly four to five times the Material at the moment, that means by morning on Earth two to two-and-a-half full days will pass here. It’s going to be an endurance marathon, but I can do it…

Smiling a wicked grin I turned to Shaeula. “I hope you’ve been practicing, because we are going to be veeeeeeery busy now…”

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