Quill lay curled up on the floor slowly rallying himself over the torture that he just endured. He could do this. He had faced beatings before, this wasn’t any different. Just repress those emotions and repress those memories. He could do this. He’d done it before.

  He kept repeating that mantra over and over again as he took out another health potion and chugged it. He was already healed when he drank the first potion after she had released control of his body. This was more to try and potentially deal with the phantom pains that weren’t going away.

  “ So have we learned our lesson?” Greys voice bore a deceptive innocence that made him frown in how disarming it came off. If he didn’t know any better he would have completely dropped his guard around her.

  “Yes”

  “ And that lesson is?” she responded clearly wanting him to elaborate.

  “No more secrets from you.” he responded again. He almost started his split thinking again. Just to keep a secret from her out of spite but held off. He would find a way to get rid of her, and he'd do it without keeping any secrets. So when he did finally break free from her it would be all that much sweeter because she would have to see it coming and not be able to stop it.

  “Aw! Oh how I love that cute little defiant Spirit of yours. It'll do us well later on once you've accepted everything. Now on to business, the tutorial will be ending soon. Something to look forward to right?”

  He knew she was just trying to distract him but at the moment he could use the distraction. Especially if it meant he wouldn't have to deal with her.

  “ No need to be rude about it, but I can see you're a little upset over your punishment so I will let things slide for now.” She responded and he pulled up the timer for the tutorial countdown.

  time remaining before Tutorial ends

  2 minutes, and 32 seconds

  He tried to suppress the shiver of the fact that Grey held him for several hours to do what she did and instead tried to focus on the timer itself.

  He wouldn't have enough time to try and meet back with Ssevinac so they were almost certainly going to end up in different places when the tutorial finished. But it shouldn’t be too far in theory.

  “It won't be so bad if they are a bit of a ways away. Just means we can spend more time with each other.”

  “And what makes you think I want to spend time with you after everything that just happened?” his voice came out bitter and she huffed and response

  “ oh you will get over it. I could have gone and done a lot worse you know. Your punishment was me being merciful.”

  “Sure as shit didn't feel like mercy” He grumbled back, the phantom pains seemingly aching from her voice

  “Oh come now Quill, you are much smarter than this. Out of everything you have seen me do and everything you know I am capable of. Do you really think I'm not capable of doing way worse to you if I wanted? It's a good thing I don't want too, and you are smart enough to understand that you messed up, so there is hardly a need to go further than I did.”

  He swallowed at that, she was right in the sense that he knew she was probably capable of doing a lot more worse to him and she probably had been merciful in her eyes. So he instead just kept quiet.

  Continuing a conversation with her was just not something he was mentally capable of right now. Instead he just watched the timer slowly ticked away to zero which she thankfully let him do in peace.

  As Quill watched the timer hit zero, he had expected that would just allow him to exit through the actual exits within the train station. Instead what happened was his entire perspective shifted and he now found himself sitting within a white void. Before Quill could even question it a system prompt suddenly appeared in front of his face.

  congratulations! you have earned the achievement “Nightmare dungeon raider!”

  Not many are brave enough to raid a nightmare level dungeon. Fewer still are lucky to get out alive.

  1 point has been distributed to body, mind and soul.

  Error! Could not distribute too soul. Redistributing evenly to body and mind.

  Before quill had even had enough time to finish reading that prompt a second quickly appeared in front of his face.

  Congratulations on Surviving the tutorial! You are one in 5,893,419,558 of the local populace to have gotten through! You have been awarded the achievement “tutorial survivor” for your efforts. You may now spend your accumulated tutorial points for Rewards from our tutorial Point shop That you collected through your time and achievements in the tutorial!

  Your current tutorial points have been added up to a total of 772,142

  What the hell were tutorial points?? And what the hell was this about a tutorial point shop?

  As if to answer his question another screen appeared in front of his face with a giant headline on top saying “tutorial point shop!”

  It took a couple of seconds for Quill to go through everything but he got the gist. Apparently he could buy these random things in the tutorial points store which he assumed would allow him to carry said items over into the real world.

  Said shop, judging by a glance at least, seemed to have all sorts of things from materials, skills that he could purchase, various items, and a whole bunch of miscellaneous stuff. Though he did have a question on what would happen to his tutorial points after he left said tutorial.

  Tutorial points will be converted to system credits with a one-to-one ratio.

  Quill just glowered at the screen. So the system could read his thoughts, therefore his complaints, and just continued to be a defunctive piece of crap. Also now he had to worry about two deranged psychopaths reading his mind instead of just.

  “ I take offense to that. I'll have you know that the system doesn't call me insane so how can I be a deranged psychopath? Now you on the other hand.” her voice held its usual teasing tone but Quill elected to ignore it and the comment.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “ for the record, since you are so upset I will allow the silent treatment for now. but if you continue with the silent treatment I might have to start intervening, am I understood?”

  “Yeah. I understand” he tried not to sound spiteful in his response as he refocused on the screen in front of him.

  “Since you are being so helpful, how about you organize this jumbled mess of a store from lowest to highest price” He spoke out to the system and was surprised that it actually did what he asked.

  The cheapest things were only one tutorial point and there were a lot of them. He probably spent several minutes just trying to go down the list of single point costs Before eliciting a sigh and spoke out again “Okay how about highest to lowest. let's try that”

  The screen adjusted again and he looked at the most expensive items that were being held. There were far fewer options but the most expensive items would cost him 100,000 tutorial points which seemed like a lot and it was, but he also wasn't entirely sure how useful many of those items would be. A lot were equipment and weapons and perhaps he was tooting his own horn but most didn’t seem necessary because of his pseudo energy manifestation skill.

  Sure all of this equipment and weapons were apparently in the D-grade, but he felt like he would eventually outgrow those items and he would rather continue to train his skill anyways which wouldn’t happen if he was now relying on a weapon.

  Two items at the top of the list did catch his attention simply because they had an N/A next to them which were upgrade tickets. Using one ticket would upgrade the quality of a specific item and using the other would upgrade its rank. As he looked closer on upgrading the quality ticket item he got a system prompt flashing in front of the tutorial store prompt.

  Please choose the item you wish to upgrade. Price depends greatly on what said item is.

  it was probably safe to assume that the rank upgrade was similar. The reason He was looking at this was because of his village ticket item. He didn't know how valuable it actually was but seeing as how it was the reward for killing all of those cursed sins it had to be fairly good.

  He took the ticket out of his storage ring and chose it so he could see the price of upgrading its high quality to perfect.

  100,000 tutorial points

  His eyes widened at the price of that and just for reference he took out a average quality unranked Dagger from his storage ring and checked that price

  1 tutorial points

  Okay so it was a massive step up in price. He then decided to see how much it would cost to bring it upgrade which he would assume give him a D-rank Village as opposed to an E-rank

  275,000 tutorial points

  He let out a heavy breath at that. Why was it so expensive?? Surely it wasn't that big of a deal to upgrade an E to a D and even if it was it was still almost triple the most expensive item on the list. Sadly he didn't have any e grade items that could be used for comparison's sake.

  “Or, shot in the dark here, perhaps it's because the ticket is just that good and that valuable. You think of that?”

  “Or perhaps it's because the system is a known asshole and just wants to scam me out of all my tutorial points.” he found himself reflexively answering before he could stop himself.

  “Heh. See? You can't stay mad at me. go ahead and continue to throw your little rebellious tantrum. I'll wait.”

  He didn't respond and continued to debate whether it would be worth it too by the extremely expensive upgrade. He really wished he talked to Ssevinac about that ticket before he had left.

  An idea suddenly struck him and he asked The Point store. “Are there any items that can purge or get rid of something that is clinging to the soul like a parasite or something to get rid of an extra entity that is being housed in somebody's being?”

  The tutorial store proceeded to show him nothing available that fit his requests which earned a fit of laughter from her.

  “ Even if it did have something, nothing it would have offered to you would have been enough to get rid of me. Also a parasite? I can't even be offended over such a ridiculous statement. It just looped all the way around to being funny.”

  He grumbled and then another idea came to him and he asked the system if there was any item that could restore a destroyed item to its original state. He was asking this because he wanted to return his backpack to him but once again the store didn’t have anything.

  “Are you ever going to tell me what is with you and that backpack of yours?”

  He didn’t respond again and looked back at the point store, trying not to be too disappointed. There were three items that were in the 100,000 Point range that did seem interesting. A seed of a D-grade fruit tree. Each seed would apparently grow into a tree that could bear fruit that would give bonus stats of body, mind, and soul respectively.

  Of course it didn't say how much stats said fruit would give but it certainly held promise and he had enough to buy all three seeds. Sure it might not be that helpful in the short term but it certainly held promise in the long term. Plus just getting those extra stats when those trees would bear fruit would hopefully give him even more of an advantage.

  He was under no delusion that his stats were probably much higher and stronger than other people his level because of whatever weird thing Grey was doing with his soul. If he could just continue snowballing that advantage it would be extremely beneficial. Plus this would hopefully let him become strong enough that whenever the alien invasion did happen he was more prepared.

  Before he had a chance to second-guess himself or talk himself out of it he bought a single seed of each from the tutorial store.

  He hadn't really expected each seed to be the size of his torso though as they fell to the non-existent white void ground with an audible thud. He casted a quick identify on the closest one.

  a seed that grows a tree.

  Quill Just glared at the very obvious description.

  “Your identify skill is pretty low level, and you yourself are only an F-rank. I doubt you'll get much information from that. but that is another thing you can talk to Ssevinac about.”

  Even though it was an item he bought from the tutorial store, the system just wouldn't let him know what the seed was, much less give him any proper information on it.

  Rubbing his forehead in frustration as he contemplated on how he was going to spend the rest of these points. He supposed if he was going in for a penny he might as well go in for a pound.

  Those three seeds were meant to be for the long term so, in theory, a perfect quality D-grade Village ticket would also be a good long-term investment. It's not like he needed short-term power right now anyways. And if he did come across a situation where getting the short-term power would have helped, well he was probably screwed anyway so what did it matter.

  Again, before he could talk himself out of it, he bought both upgrades for his village ticket. Noting that after his purchase to increase the high quality to perfect. Upgrading the E grade to D grade became 350,000. Sure he could still afford it but what the hell?? He could easily see someone getting screwed over by that if they tried to do something similar to him.

  Still he turned it into a perfect quality D-grade Village. Though he still had no idea how he was supposed to use it. But when he met up with Ssevinac he hoped he would get an explanation.

  With that purchase done he shifted through all the other options with the points he still had available. There were plenty of options that seemed pretty good but there was one thing you really wanted. Two things actually.

  he went back to all the 1 cost points and started buying as many food and drink related products he could find.

  “ Are you being serious?” She asked which he promptly ignored.

  “ Never mind, I am not going to be patient. Talk to me now, why are you buying nothing but food and drink.”

  He knew if he continued to ignore her it would probably end badly for him so he let out a sigh and he tried to not to let his voice hold too much contempt for her. “Because I don't know how accessible food will be when I get out and I don't like rationing it. I also don't want to be eating those leftover roaches in my storage ring or any other weird, gross, or icky monster that I might end up killing. This ensures that I won't have to worry about that.”

  After filling up a quarter of a storage ring with nothing but food and drink he felt like he had gotten enough to at least survive a decent amount of time without worry. Plus he ended his tutorial point spending on 20,000 tutorial points being left. Would be a shame if he ruined such a nice round number. Not to mention that 20,000 should be converted into credits, whatever that meant.

  Finished with the tutorial Point store?

  Quill Responded with a yes and waited…. and waited…… and waited. “ Please tell me the damn thing didn't glitch out and now I'm just stuck in a white void forever.”

  “ at least we're stuck together~”

  “System you better let me out this instant! Why am I even waiting!”

  Please stand by

  I’ve been standing by! If you don-” The entire white void shifted before he could finish his sentence and soon he vanished from it.