Even though she had clearly not fared very well so far, she had also earned enough points to grab two more upgrades for herself thanks to the number of players running the dungeon. Lucas knew it was rather easy to avoid her section entirely by going through the gates and then fighting his previously inept guards, so the fault was more likely a traffic issue than an actual combat issue. He also would have to do something later to change the layout so that players would be forced to engage her. Since he only had six points at the moment, he decided to put the first one into Strengthened Silk, which cost 1 Evolution Point. When he clicked the upgrade, he saw a notification appear.

Due to the quality of goods improving, your income from trading silk has gone from 31.6 gold to 47.4 gold per month.

This was massive and made Lucas want to dump more points into silk-related upgrades, especially since that income increase would change his new monthly gain after expenditures from 5.6 gold to 21.4. This would allow Lucas to upgrade his guards’ training from Minimal to Basic and still have 11.4 Territorial Income left over every month. Without hesitating, he grabbed the training upgrade right away, and the training stat bonus jumped from +1 to +2, but they would still need much more time to finish the upgrade. This meant that most of his guards would have combat abilities over 10 even if they didn’t level up while he was gone.

Then, after thinking about the possibilities of how to use his Territorial Income, he looked back toward the options that had appeared after he gave Saba’a the Strengthened Silk upgrade. The first of the three options was Sticky Silk (5 Evolution Points), which caused the webs to be more susceptible to fire, but also made them incredibly sticky, binding to whomever or whatever they were stuck to. The next one was simply Swordproof Silk (50 Evolution Points). Considering the average price of evolutions, Lucas’s jaw almost hit the floor when he saw that evolutionary point price sticker, but the description was clear: “Only the truly strong or the wielder of elements will ever be able to break this silk.” It caused Lucas, who had just been salivating over a mere 15.8 net Territorial Income, to go wide-eyed with hope. Yes, my income will be massive, but I’ll need to save for that, Lucas thought, his heart set on Swordproof Silk as he gave a cursory glance to the last option that had opened up, Long-Range Weaving (2 Evolution Points), a skill that gave Saba’a and her spiders better control of their webs, allowing them to more accurately manipulate them and to shoot them farther.