Hell’s Kitchen.
Calvin walked down the street in such a good mood that even the night air seemed sweeter.
One mission.
It had only been a side-story mission, yet it had already pushed him up an entire level and showered him with useful items.
The rewards from the Special Elite Encounter were especially impressive.
The mysterious creature egg could wait.
Until it actually hatched, there was no point guessing how valuable it might turn out to be.
The Gift of the Departed, however, was obviously priceless.
Its active effect could remove all of a target’s pain and suffering.
In practical terms, as long as someone was still alive, using it could drag them back from the brink and restore them to fighting condition.
Its passive effect was even more ridiculous: it could automatically negate a single fatal attack.
In gaming terms, it was basically a one-use cheat death.
Something like that could quite literally save Calvin’s life.
The encounter also gave him a new theory about how the system generated missions.
If there were elite encounters, then logically there ought to be boss fights as well.
Maybe even faction wars, dungeon instances, raids, or other special events.
That would only make sense for a system that treated reality like a game.
What Calvin could not figure out was why this particular encounter had been labeled a Special Elite Encounter rather than an ordinary one.
Was it some kind of hidden event that only appeared under specific circumstances?
Maybe he had simply gotten lucky.
“Man, I really should’ve found a way into S.H.I.E.L.D.
sooner.
I’ve been wasting my time.” Still thinking about everything he had gained, Calvin eventually stopped in front of a rotisserie chicken place.
He bought two whole chickens and headed toward Matt’s apartment.
S.H.I.E.L.D.
had not finished arranging his new accommodations yet, so for the time being, he had little choice but to keep crashing at Matt’s place.
Besides, sharing some chicken with him sounded like a decent way to celebrate and maybe grind a little more favorability before Calvin used his new lottery draw.
As for why he had refused Natasha’s invitation earlier…
Simple.
No system mission had triggered.
Going out with her would only delay the lottery.
Before long, Calvin reached Matt’s apartment building.
The moment he approached the door, however, his nose twitched.
His cheerful expression vanished.
“Blood.” The scent was extremely faint, barely leaking through the gap beneath the door.
Calvin still caught it immediately.
His sense of smell was sharper than most dogs’.
Instead of entering through the front, he silently backed away, circled around the building, and climbed through a window to reach the roof.
From there, he could enter Matt’s apartment directly.
Calvin landed without making a sound, already holding the Golden Desert Eagle in one hand.
Anyone capable of getting into Daredevil’s home without triggering the human radar system that was Matt Murdock had to be dangerous.
If whoever had done this was still inside, Calvin intended to give them a few hundred rounds of hospitality.
‘Poor Matt.
Hope they didn’t torture him too badly.’ Calvin advanced carefully through the apartment until he finally reached Matt’s room.
There were no enemies waiting inside.
There was only one man dressed in a painfully tight red suit, lying there with so many shuriken embedded in his back that he looked like someone had tried to turn Daredevil into a porcupine.
“Fuck!
Matt!” Once Calvin confirmed there was no ambush, he rushed over and checked Matt’s breathing.
A moment later, he exhaled in relief.
Still alive.
Barely, but alive.
And that meant Calvin could save him.
He immediately retrieved a bottle of red liquid from his system inventory.
[Health Potion: Gradually repairs injuries and restores stamina.] Calvin poured the entire bottle into Matt’s mouth.
His breathing began to change almost immediately.
Once it started becoming steadier, Calvin carefully pulled the shuriken from Matt’s back one by one.
Blood quickly pooled beneath him, and Matt’s body spasmed uncontrollably with every removal.
Calvin counted twenty-seven shuriken in total.
Fortunately, none of them had been poisoned.
Otherwise, Matt would have been in far worse shape.
This was obviously the Hand’s work again.
Calvin had no idea what Matt had done this time to piss them off badly enough to leave him looking like a pincushion.
Still, the fact that Matt had somehow made it all the way home with twenty-seven shuriken buried in him said plenty about the man’s willpower.
There was a reason Daredevil sometimes felt like Marvel’s answer to Batman.
After placing Matt on the bed, Calvin returned to the roof.
Matt’s injuries were severe, but one Health Potion should be enough to handle them.
Calvin could ask what happened once he woke up.
For now, there were system rewards to deal with.
He focused on the single lottery chance displayed on the interface and clasped his hands together solemnly.
‘Lady Luck, RNGesus, Jesus, God, every saint in heaven, and whatever cosmic entity handles good drops…
please give me something broken.’ Then he spoke aloud.
“System, lottery!” [Congratulations!
You have obtained Ability: Sun’s Grace.] [Sun’s Grace: You have received the blessing of the sun.
During daylight hours, all attributes receive a partial enhancement, reaching their peak at high noon.
By comprehending and embodying different aspects of the sun, you may unlock different blessing effects.] [Evaluation: Mercy, protection, pride, liberation, hope, destruction…
there’s a path for everyone.
The only requirement is understanding it—and living by it.] “Sun’s Grace?” Calvin raised an eyebrow.
This was the first time he had drawn an ability of this type.
Judging from the description alone, it was undoubtedly excellent.
A direct increase to his base stats was exactly the kind of ability Calvin liked.
Why bother with complicated mechanics when overwhelming numbers could solve the problem?
Sometimes all you needed was enough power to walk up and punch something until it stopped being a problem.
The part about “comprehending different aspects of the sun” was considerably more abstract.
Concepts like will and conviction were difficult to quantify, much less deliberately train.
Still, even the basic daytime attribute enhancement was already extremely valuable.
Unable to make much progress thinking about it, Calvin opened his status panel instead.
[Strength: 9 (3+6)] [Constitution: 9 (3+6)] [Mind: 10 (4+6)] [Remaining Free Attribute Points: 3] He placed one point into each attribute.
The moment the allocation was confirmed, Calvin’s body underwent a visible transformation.
A deep, rushing sound rolled through him like a river surging through a narrow channel.
It was his blood.
His circulation accelerated dramatically, every heartbeat driving more vitality through his body.
At the same time, his muscles and bones trembled faintly as they became denser and stronger.
His thoughts sharpened as well, his mind clearing until everything around him seemed slightly more vivid than before.
Within seconds, his entire body had completed another small evolution.
Conservation of energy clearly had no authority over system attribute points.
That was what made them so powerful.
The system only displayed three attributes—Strength, Constitution, and Mind—but each one represented far more than the name suggested.
Strength was not simply arm strength or grip strength.
It improved his musculature, skeletal structure, and every physical system involved in generating force.
In simple gaming terms, it governed his raw offensive power.
Constitution covered physical durability, resistance, recovery, adaptability, stamina, metabolism, energy reserves, and plenty more besides.
If Calvin had to reduce it to game terminology, Constitution affected everything from his health bar to his stamina bar.
Raise it far enough, and it could even extend his lifespan.
Mind did not represent intelligence or IQ.
It governed mental energy, perception, mental resistance, and similar qualities.
In game terms, it was closer to mana, magical resistance, and various mental stats combined.
All three attributes supported one another.
Calvin could emphasize one over the others, but the gap could never become too extreme.
This was reality, not a game where he could dump every point into one stat and expect his body to function normally.
An enormous imbalance could potentially cause his body to collapse under its own capabilities.
That was why Calvin had always distributed the three points he earned from every level evenly.
His current numbers might not look especially impressive at first glance, but the scale was deceptive.
At first, Calvin himself had assumed attribute points were merely a useful little bonus.
That changed once he passed five.
Five represented roughly the upper limit of an ordinary human.
Every point beyond that threshold provided an increasingly dramatic improvement.
That was why Calvin had been able to restrain himself during S.H.I.E.L.D.’s assessment and still register a six-ton punch.
Even he could not precisely quantify how much stronger each point made him.
The easiest comparison was brutally simple.
After increasing his attributes, Calvin could comfortably beat the version of himself from before the upgrade.
That was all he really needed to know.
Some of his abilities also scaled directly with those attributes.
Wind Technique, for example, might technically be called swordsmanship, but what it really amounted to was a form of nature magic.
Its power depended heavily on his Mind stat.
If Mind climbed high enough, Calvin could imagine eventually swinging a blade and unleashing hurricane-force winds.
And unlike the sorcerers of Kamar-Taj, Calvin did not need to draw power from some external dimension to fuel his magic.
He had his own mana pool and used it to manipulate natural energy directly.
Much cleaner arrangement.
Once he finished allocating his attributes, Calvin retrieved the mysterious creature egg from his system inventory.
It was roughly twenty centimeters in diameter and formed an almost perfect sphere.
Its shell was as dark and deep as a star-filled sky, while shifting rainbow light shimmered faintly inside.
Whatever eventually hatched from it, the egg certainly looked appropriately impressive.
Calvin used the Adaptive Halberd to nick one finger and allowed a single drop of blood to fall onto the shell.
The egg trembled.
His blood vanished into it almost instantly, and the rainbow light briefly brightened before retreating deeper inside.
Calvin set the egg safely aside.
Then he took out the Physical Enhancement Serum.
His original plan had been to drink it and see whether it could improve his attributes even further.
The moment he saw the serum itself, however, that enthusiasm disappeared.
“What the hell did they make this stuff out of?” The liquid inside the vial was cloudy and thick, with a sickly yellow-green color.
It looked disturbingly similar to pus draining from a badly infected wound.
Simply looking at it triggered an instinctive sense of revulsion.
Then Calvin remembered the system’s warning that the ingredients might give it an unusual flavor.
A horrible suspicion formed in his mind.
He took a deep breath, held it, and slowly removed the stopper.
The faintest trace of odor escaped.
“OH, FUCK!” “Ugh—!” Calvin slammed the stopper back into place.
“What the hell is that smell?!” His eyes were watering uncontrollably.
His stomach churned so violently that he doubled over dry-heaving.
It was beyond disgusting.
Calvin could not even properly describe the odor.
There was something rotten and putrid about it, yet mixed underneath was another disturbingly organic scent that somehow made everything worse.
It smelled like a sewer left baking through the hottest week of summer, except even that comparison did not capture how aggressively his body rejected it.
He had only inhaled the tiniest amount, and every cell in his body seemed to be screaming at him to get away from the vial.
“Are we absolutely sure this isn’t a biological weapon?” If the system’s descriptions were not reliably accurate, Calvin would have assumed someone had bottled industrial-grade chemical warfare.
He admitted defeat.
He could not drink this.
His willpower was simply not strong enough to overcome the sheer biological revulsion.
This serum had beaten him.
Still, leaving something this valuable sitting unused would be wasteful.
Calvin stared at the vial for a moment.
Then an idea struck him.
His own body could continue growing through attribute points.
He did not really need external enhancement serums.
But someone else might.
And a system-produced enhancement serum with no side effects sounded like an excellent gift.
Calvin smiled slowly.
He had been trying to push someone past ninety favorability for months.
Maybe this revolting little bottle was exactly what he needed.