Chapter 525: The Space Between Mortal and Spirit

· Flower: at this class, the individual is a real threat to monsters of this class and the lower class. That is, the adventurers apply this class system to monsters as well, creating a standardized scale that makes it easier to assign contracts and calculate risk. A flower-class monster will find it difficult to defeat a flower-class human.

Flower-class adventurers are categorized mainly by experience and intelligence. They’re not necessarily veterans yet, but reliable enough to assist one when the situation calls for backup, when the veteran needs someone who won’t freeze up at the first sign of real danger. They are someone who can follow orders without panicking and think on their feet when the plan suddenly falls apart.

· Garden: as the name implies, the individuals in this class are a one man army. They are someone who can easily, or not easily, exterminate an entire horde of monsters—sometimes hundreds of creatures that would send a Flower-class adventurer running for the hills.

They’ve reached a level of combat proficiency that borders on artistry, where every movement is deliberate, and every strike carries the trademark of years of practice.

It was stated that this is ill-advised: even if you ARE Garden-class, facing a great number of monsters is normally detrimental. That you may die is not a faint possibility; it’s a very real and present danger that even the most experienced adventurers learn to respect.

Overconfidence kills more adventurers than monsters ever will.

In this case as well, a Garden-class monster can take down multiple adventurers of a weaker class, so Flower and below take precautions when faced with a Garden-class monster.

· Tree: This is the limit of what a human can possess. The absolute ceiling, the pinnacle of mortal achievement, the point beyond which the flesh simply cannot be pushed any further without breaking. But there was an exception IF THEY DO EVOLVE. If they cling to their mortality, they cannot reach a higher class.

In a nut shell, Tree-class adventurers were supermen in the real sense—folks who have trained their physical bodies to the limits of human potential, who have mastered martial arts and many other techniques until they flow from their bodies like second nature. They are now only held back by the difficult-to-cross barrier called "evolution," that final threshold that separates the merely exceptional from the truly transcendent.

Tree-class adventurers basically never die on a mission—not because they’re invincible, but because they’ve reached a level of skill and awareness that makes death almost impossible to catch up to them.

They are seen as the Batman of the monster world—Apex predators whom monsters run away from, or freeze from fear, on sight. The creatures that terrorize villages and slaughter entire parties of lower-ranked adventurers take one look at a Tree-class human and think, "What is this thing that can kill me?"

People of this class could pull out large trees from the ground with their bare hands, their muscles straining against the weight of centuries-old oaks like they were pulling weeds from a garden. They could slaughter a thousand monsters with one swing of a blade—not hyperbole, but a documented fact from the guild’s historical records.

They could hunt and accurately kill monsters from miles away, their senses so finely tuned that distance becomes meaningless, that the only thing that matters is the decision to end the target.

These guys are just mortals in name at this point, seriously. They’ve pushed the boundaries of humanity so far that the label barely fits anymore.

Their willpower is so strong that they can push through injuries that would kill a normal person ten times over. They’re not quite gods, but they’re close enough that the distinction starts to feel academic.

But also, monsters of this class are an absolute red flag. Never approach or try to defeat them. The scroll had underlined that sentence three times, the ink so thick that it had bled through to the other side of the parchment.

A Tree-class monster is not something you fight; it’s something you pray doesn’t notice you.

Nevertheless, the next ones are the real beasts we should fear—the ones that have transcended the very definition of what it means to be mortal.

· Silver: The Silver-class is reserved for mortals who have evolved beyond what their physical bodies can provide.

You see, the flesh is a heavy constraint. I had a massive, astronomical jump in power simply because my spirit level predated my flesh level. If I were to become a full spirit now, that could be interpreted as me being a low-level, bona fide god—a being of pure energy and will, utterly unfettered by the limitations of biology.

But that might also mean I can’t stay in the physical realm anymore, that my consciousness would be forced to abandon this world entirely and exist in a plane where mortals can’t follow. Flesh is the anchor to the material world; without it, you’d likely drift away like a ship cut loose from its moorings.

Anyway, Silver-class folks are NOT like me. They are just mortals who have... let’s say, had their mortal hymen broken—a crude but effective metaphor for that first, irreversible breach of the barrier between human and spirit.

They are now more receptive of spiritual qualities, able to channel energies that would have burned them alive before their transformation.

Technically, they still read as mortal and even human to most detection methods. Their hearts still beat, their lungs still breathe, their blood still flows through their veins.

But their power is nothing like what you would expect from one—they can bend reality in ways that make Tree-class adventurers look like toddlers with sticks.

The instant a person transcends their physical limits and evolve enough to be mistaken for a spirit, they have officially entered the Silver class.

The guild recognizes this transformation through a series of tests that push the adventurer to their absolute breaking point, measuring not just their strength but their connection to the spiritual realm.

Of course, this also applies to monsters: while they are generally closer to the spirit world than mortals, they rely heavily on their flesh to anchor them to the world.

If one comes to learn how to loosen up a bit—to relax the grip that flesh has on their existence, to allow their spiritual nature to take precedence over their physical form—their power would become something else entirely.

If anything, I think fairies would factor into this category. They’ve never been fully mortal, and fully spirit, always hovering in that ambiguous space between the two.