Everyone would try to scam him, just as the man had said, but at least he would get some money here, and he was pretty aware of its value.
When passages to other realms first opened, the laws of physics changed. The world became larger and more fantastic. "Arch-humans" began to appear, with the unique powers of their prime vestiges, plus the ability for their souls to grow beyond mere human limits.
But Freddy is at the bottom of the heap, working a dead end job from an apartment that envies shoe boxes for at least being clean. Until he nearly gets killed by a new passage, and gains a vestige that might lift him out of the gutter and give him a better life. Provided that more powerful interests don't kill him and take it, of course.
1% Lifesteal
is a Web Serial Novel published by Robert Blaise on Royal Road, starting in 2023 and regularly updating as of March 2024.
Accept the power of these tropes into your soul:
- Acquired Poison Immunity: Body-tempering techniques work by damaging the body in some way and letting it adapt. Since Freddy can heal fast, he chooses the nasty-but-potent Hundred Wet Hells technique, which makes all the water in his body turn against him when activated. It's deeply unpleasant, but results in benefits such as resistance to nausea and pain, reduced bleeding from injuries, and generally having no substantial weak points on his body.
- The Ageless: It takes a while before Freddy starts to notice any visible effects of his power. Once he reaches a point where it's clearing up old acne scars and resculpting him, however, he realises that the slow start was caused by it fixing everything wrong with his body, including all the micro-damage associated with ageing. So long as he keeps causing enough "harm" to things around him, he can remain in prime health indefinitely.
- Attack Its Weak Point: Theodore's power lets him see weaknesses in people's bodies. Thanks to Hundred Wet Hells, though, Freddy barely has any.
- Blood Magic: The Kraven clan specialises in blood affinity, especially its patriarch, such as being able to turn his own blood into a weapon. Which makes him very interested in Freddy's unique remnant, embodying the concept of bloodshed, and he arrogantly considers it to be automatically his property.
- Boring, but Practical: Freddy doubles the income of the delving team he joins, not because of his unique Remnant, or the spiritual scythe that lets him collect essence faster, or the Flowing Water martial arts that magically move the fluid in his veins to empower his strikes. No, he's tremendously valuable because he's strong enough to carry multiple bags of loot at once.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: Freddy is tortured for months in an effort to make him reveal the location of his unique Remnant. The knowledge that he can someday heal all the lost fingers and toes and teeth helps him keep silent.
- Cruel Mercy: Freddy's resistance to torture and interrogation eventually sees him placed on a list of 500 prisoners being transferred elsewhere. The person managing the list considers slating him for execution, but decides that selling him into Indentured Servitude would be a better punishment.Had he cooperated, he would have been granted the mercy of death a long time ago.
- Elemental Powers: Each prime vestige grants an affinity (or in rarer and more valuable cases, more than one), allowing its holder to consume matching wisps of power to fuel their soul and cast spells. 1% Lifesteal carries the water affinity, which is mediocre on offense but good for healing and reinforcing the body.
- Elite Mook: "Deviant" monsters have different affinities and abilities from regular ones. Often they're stronger, but even just being different can be enough to take the unwary by surprise. Freddy is in a pattern of easily ambushing and harvesting gorels, but when a deviant gorel with blood affinity and stealth turns up, he's seriously injured right through his armour before he can fight back.
- Heart Is an Awesome Power: Healing is great, but those who hear the description of 1% Lifesteal often dismiss it for being too weak to be useful. Only healing when you damage things, but too slowly to keep up with the damage you'll take in combat in return? Pointless. Except, as Freddy discovers, it doesn't have to be combat; he can do things like exercise himself to exhaustion and then cut grass for a few minutes to fully recover, or practise a full-power punch against a tree until he shatters bones in his hand, then use the other hand to cut leaves and branches off the tree to repair it. And the healing quality is Supreme, able to bring his body from crippled to absolute peak condition if he uses it enough. It even fixes a heart defect, regrows limbs, and reverses the effects of ageing.
- Honest John's Dealership: Freddy isn't exactly impressed by the broker he finds to sell his farming-based prime vestige, but he has limited options. When he realizes that three affinities make the vestige quite valuable despite its non combat power, the guy openly admits to having tried to cheat him by offering to trade it for a vestige that gives a rat tail. Still, the broker's final offer, of the 1% Lifesteal vestige plus cash, does make sense. Until Freddy later learns that the broker paid him $30000 and then auctioned it off for over 75 million.
- Indentured Servitude: The miners in the realm of Faralethal are mostly people working off various debts to the Kraven clan. Freddy is sent there fraudulently, by treating his unique Remnant as if it were stolen Kraven property, even though they have no genuine claim on it — and he's pretty sure that even if he somehow worked off a $13 million debt, they would find a way to avoid letting him go.
- Irony: As the discoverer of the shortcut passage to realm C-000421, Madam Morleppe assures Freddy that his name will go down in history. He's later fraudulently sold into Indentured Servitude in that realm, because the patriarch of the Kraven clan wants to steal the Remnant that he gained from his discovery.
- Life Drain: The power of the 1% Lifesteal vestige is that every time Freddy damages living things, he regains a fraction of that damage as health. Even breaking tree branches counts. It's too slow to make much difference in combat, but given time, he can repair any injury, even lost limbs, just by cutting loose in a forest with a machete. He gets a small healing pulse by eating raw fruit, and cured a headache by being impolite to customers.
- Magic Harms Technology: Existing technology mostly stopped working when physics changed. Electrons are still believed to exist, but they don't behave in the same way. By the time of the story, magitek has achieved many of the same things, but Freddy still finds the old accounts of cars and airplanes fascinating.
- Power Fist: By the time Freddy needs to seriously consider a weapon in order to make full use of his abilities (specifically, Crimson Mercury, which forms weapons from blood), he's more accustomed to fighting unarmed. So he settles on making himself some spiked knuckles.He barely had to change his style, and such a brutal appendage was perfect for maximizing the effect of 1% Lifesteal.
- Training from Hell: Freddy is alarmed and ashamed to realize that despite his hard unpleasant life, he hasn't really developed mental toughness, he's just gone with the flow. He uses his healing ability to throw himself into training, deliberately injuring himself to inure himself to pain, such as punching trees until his fists are pulped. His trainer uses it to accelerate his progress in unusual ways, like teaching him to do the splits by intentionally pushing him too far and tearing his muscles, then healing them and continuing. The first time Freddy activates his Hundred Wet Hells body tempering technique, it affects something in his brain and he immediately passes out; that doesn't repeat next time, though, so he's fully aware of how his blood is raging against his veins and his stomach is rebelling. All that work does pay off, though, when he's able to shrug off pain and injury that would incapacitate most people.
- What Did I Do Last Night?: Freddy only remembers as far as having several drinks, then the rest of the night is a blank. But his team leader's ex-wife is naked in bed next to him.
Hundred tropes ye bring unto the wiki, one trope ye shall receive.
