After a long first day with a total playtime of ~3 hours and 15 minutes, we log back in to the middle of a Maple Boys party. Unfortunately, it's Boss Reset day today, meaning that I'm going to be spending most of my time tonight on my main, killing the same twenty or so bosses as always to make money. This takes up a lot of time, meaning that I'm not spending that much time on Magilia as a result.
Maple is a balancing act if you expect to have any kind of reasonable balance in your life, and it's important to be able to prioritize what to do in a day. We could press onward with our journey by doing the level 205 area now, but there's nothing particularly noteworthy down that road so there's no real reason to.

Wait, so we're
not going to keep running down the Arcane River?

Well, I mean, we'll do it
eventually, but: hear me out. You ever heard of 'cultivation?'

Cultivation..? We're growing plants now?

Not that. Self cultivation. We're focusing on our mind and soul to train for the journey ahead. From a… let's say, from a 'Reverse City' level of cultivation to the 'Chu Chu' level.

Those are just arbitrary names, aren't they?

Eh, everything's an arbitrary name if you think about it enough. And it's that kind of wisdom we'll be pursuing.

Why not? A day off can't possibly hurt.
With a shorter time period than normal, efficiency is key. Thankfully, Nexon has our back.
Yes, that confused me a little to say, too. But seriously! It's time for more of that GO WEST! quality of life tech.
To start with, we're able to accept all of our Arcane River dailies in one place by selecting the Batch Accept Arcane River Daily/Weekly Quests option at the top of our quest list. Doing so will automatically have us accept every single Daily we qualify for at once.

Goals
…Yes, there is only one for right now. Still, believe me when I say that this is actually an amazing feature.
Next I pull up Spiegelmann's Diary, a leftover event from the Tera Blink. To grant additional guidance to people who are just starting out, it gives a number of things we can do to gain additional bonuses. Vanishing Journey Research is our daily, of course, and the Daily Gift is just the daily gift from the DREAMER event. The others are slightly more interesting.
Anyways, it's time to get to work grinding out some kills… and with something particularly nice appearing: A Rune of Giants.
The Rune of Giants is both a completely worthless Rune for farming and also my favorite Rune in the game for farming.
When activated, it gives us the +100% EXP buff that all runes do, and leaves a potion behind. This potion is completely worthless to any character trying to maximize their gains, as it'll actually slow down their kill rate.
We will be grabbing the potion, because it's not about gains.
It's about sending a message.

Wooah! Now
I'M burly!!

Go get 'em, Angelic Buster Magilia EX!
The potion turns us into a giant who can run into enemies to damage them, but this isn't the best attack in our arsenal. Instead, we want to jump. Our jumps release a shockwave on landing that will instantly kill any mob around us.
By holding down the up key and jumping, we also can jump extra high to get to platforms that'd otherwise be out of our reach—our skills are sealed off while we're gigantamaxed, so this is the only way to get around. This up+jump combo also does not work if playing on a controller using Maple's own inbuilt controller support, so if it's not working that's why.
After a short while I realize that I still can't oneshot these enemies outside of giant form, so as all things do…
We return to crab. Alternatively I could have set up my nodestones and we'd be fine, but I didn't want to do that because I was in a hurry and nodestones take a while. I'll probably give them a whole update or something when we get there, they're that important to 5thjob.
Anyways, we return to the grind. Our rotation is a simple circle, moving clockwise as if to swim through life at a regular pace. Monster spawns happen ~once every seven seconds or so, so any rotation is considered optimal if it kills all the mobs on the screen in a seven second period. On smallish maps like this one that's pretty easy, but as we go maps get bigger and I stop caring enough to do the optimal strats.
As long as you're doing something, you're moving forward. Whether it's killing all the mobs but one every rotation, or writing something that turns out to be a mistake, or wasting ten years in a dead end job that throws you away because your shoulder gave out from working too quickly in their poorly designed POS system while they promised time and again to promote you and time and again went for people whose numbers were worse but were more willing to hobnob with the top brass, passing you over for even the interview process… nothing is worthless.
So long as you are acting, you are doing something. The doing is enough, and anyone telling you otherwise is trying to sell you something. What lessons you'll need from what you've done, it's impossible to really know half the time.
Everything comes back to gaining experience. The bar go up. The number get bigger. As long as you can move, there's something more to learn. To apply. To become.

Uhh…. I'm done over here!
We stop at 1000 kills because that's when we get our bonus reward for killing 1000 enemies as an Angelic Buster from the related event… and then some random extra soul seekers take out another two just for good measure.
Total Kills: 5003
We've also acquired a VIP booster, a special item dropping in this event that will give us 100 seconds of bonus enemy spawns that give increased experience. I don't actually remember if I used this or not, but these were a rare drop throughout the event so finding one is pretty lucky.
Anyhoo, we turn in the quest for 10 Vanishing Journey Stones. This is also our second time doing the Vanishing Journey daily this week, meaning we qualify for diligent research rewards.

I've heard that these stones contain a great deal of power. None of us can use them, though, since it's raw Erda energy… so we'll give them to you for a job well done.

So uh, a thought: If you know you can't use them, why can't I just have the entire stock?

Well… We
do really need your help as the only person who can effectively harm these enemies.

Aha! So it's a bribe, then.

I guess that works for me.
This gives us three Nodestones so that we can get some more nodes for our V Matrix.
We're still not messing with those yet, but it's nice to have them.
Next up, we need to do Ursus. Ursus, or "welfbear" as some people call it, is a powerful source of mesos in the early game if you happen to be able to play between specific time windows. It being removed is one of the things that GO WEST! prevented, making Ursus now a GMS exclusive boss. Before we can enter, we have to have killed at least 300 mobs.
Inside, we meet Masarayu. He's an eccentric multi-billionaire who gives out a lot of money for people who get into a fight with a bear so powerful that he calls it "Ursus the Mighty."
What we want to do here is go to Quick Play. This will automatically create a party of 18 people to fight the Bear with.
We wait for the party to fill, hit OK, and wait for everyone else to hit OK. At that point the battle will start… kind of.
See, MapleStory is designed around parties of six. Slapping three of them together and throwing them into a blender makes the game's framerate go to pot for a while and puts us on a black screen that lags for a while. We can hit a skill here and it'll go off when the fight starts (which you can hear using the sound, it's a very distinctive drumming noise), so as an Angelic Buster we always hit Soul Seeker Expertise.
Ursus has a lot of various attacks, but our job here is simply to mash Trinity and deal as much damage as we can as the other 17 people in the raid whittle the bear's HP down to nothing in under a minute.

We're fighting a bear?!

Now your life's in grave danger… and you don't even care.
At the end of the fight we get a dramatic zoom-in on Magilia, and we've been given an A rank. Mesos gained are based on our ranking, and at our current level A is the best we'll do—it can go all the way up to SSS, but that doesn't matter much. Because we've done this at 2x meso time, we get ~26m mesos just from this one fight, and we're allowed to engage Ursus three times a day.
So we do that, raking in ~78m mesos with a very small amount of effort.
Total Kills: 5006
Ursus is a technological marvel for MapleStory, being a full scale raid boss that allows up to 18 players and utilizing a new-at-the-time technology to track movement and damage. Also, Ursus's name used to be Veronica—something that one of the random tips is always happy to remind us.

That was… a little bit crazy. I can't believe there's just some guy out there who's letting us do bear fights for cash!

Yeah, uh, I think that's what's called a "fortunate encounter" in cultivation. Pretty sure.

Huuh… Does that mean I'm attaining enlightenment without even thinking about it?

Supposedly, not thinking about it is the entire point.

Woow..!
Our next target is through the Dimensional Mirror. Every town has a Dimensional Mirror that doesn't transport us to Maple World (That's the Dimensional Portal and there's only one of those!), but instead takes us to a number of useful places. We want to go to the Monster Park.

Wait a second, is that..?

Ah, my little superstar! How's it going, hero?
Spiegelmann?! What are you doing here?!

Business!!
Every day we get two free clears of Monster Park, and can use mesos to buy more tickets in order to get to a maximum of seven total clears. There are various prize boxes for doing Monster Park every day of the week, but none of the things in the boxes really matter aside from the Spiegelmann coins, which can be exchanged for special potions that are vital for bossing.

He has his own
coins?! How is he so cooool..?!

Give it time, champ. You'll get your own coins.
They'll be pink and glittery.

Alright, but I get to finalize the design.
Monster Park itself is relatively simple. We select an area (Vanishing Journey being the highest level one we can currently get to) and go through a series of six stages set within that area, complete with monsters from it. The Arcane Force requirement for Arcane River areas is always locked to the minimum required, so we're functionally invincible here as well.
Each of the areas has a number of enemies inside of it that give a tremendously boosted amount of EXP.
…And it all returns to crab, of course.
Most Monster Park runs are done inside of 2 minutes. Here, we've done one minute and are already over halfway finished with the stages.
The fifth stage here can waste our time a little as the Tranquil Erdas still drop Lantern Erdas when they die, but it's only a few seconds.
The final stage also comes with a boss monster, for a total of 241 kills per run. In Vanishing Journey, that boss is Arma.

HOW DID YOU GET ONE OF THESE THINGS IN HERE?!

Oh, that's the same one! I promised it a rematch if it'd just sneak on into the cage, and here it is!

Well… if it's a butt-kicking it wants!

Get
Busted!

Gooooooal!!!
Once we're done, we head to the exit portal and get our prize.
That prize is ~3% of a level, which is considered very good EXP. Nowadays Monster Park has been remastered to give double the EXP per clear but only have one freebie instead of two, so this would be 6%. However, this change was
not implemented in v251 yet, meaning we get the slower leveling rate.
That's honestly fine, we're a snowball's throw away from 212 anyways.
Because I'm in a hurry, I only do the two free runs and head out.
Total Kills: 5448

Thanks for the free publicity, Spiegelmann!

Eh? What do you mean?

You were streaming it again, right? The footage?

Hahaha… you catch on quick, don't you? I've gotta' make my money somehow, after all.

It's a win-win, so of course I'd hope you'd televise my exploits.

Hey, you know, there's a medal in it for you if you should clear the park 77 times for each day of the week…

…I'll think about it, Spiegelmann.
Seven Day Monster Parker, one of the best medals in the entire game, is available here as well if we do MP consistently for eleven weeks.
I have never gotten it on any of my characters, and I probably never will because it's annoying and not THAT much better than another medal you'll get for just doing weekly bosses.

So now what? More hunting?

Yep! But not just any kind of hunting…
Dream hunting!!

Aww yeah! Eat, sleep and breathe your powers in, Tear. That's the best way to get attached to them.
A new day means more dream enemies to take out, and just like before they're worth a lot of experience.
Enough to gain a level not just once…
But twice!
We clear the last enemy at around 20% into our next level, a sizable chunk for the mid-210s.
Total Kills: 6453
And with that there's really only one last thing on the Diary list to do: Normal Zakum.
It's time to fight our first Actual Boss.
When we warp to any major boss, we appear at the room outside where they're entered. This is so that parties can join up, but Zakum is unique in that people will hang out in here sitting on chairs that give out buffs to other players. It's a good hotspot to meet up and get buffed before heading into harder bosses.
…Not that we're doing that today. Instead, we go into this portal and select normal difficulty.
As Zakum was the first true boss MapleStory ever had, there was a long quest involved in getting the item originally required to summon it. Because this is no longer 2004, we're just given the item in question on entry instead.
Upon entry, we're placed in front of an ominous altar.

So I just drop this here, and…

JIMINY CRIMBO!!
Zakum spawns forth a moment after the Eye of Fire is placed down. This fight has multiple phases and a number of instant kill attacks. In the first phase, his arms will swing down on the floor in telegraphed areas, and we have to dodge them or they'll oneshot us.
…Oh. Or we kill it in one punch. That's good too.

What the heck was that?!

Zakum, apparently. Ancient evil tree thing.

But it looked like a statue! What's that about?!

Iunno, I was busy doing ~important spirit stuff~ when this guy was created.
Normal Zakum's drop table includes the first decent Eye and Face accessories we can get our hands on in the game, but neither one dropped here. The only other thing of importance is that giant blue thing, which is a Condensed Power Crystal. These give a set amount of money per boss, which is split evenly among everyone who clears a boss. This means that soloing a boss is important to maximizing our meso gains, and also is why boss mules are a huge thing in MapleStory—the more times we can clear a high-value boss, the more money our account gains per week. With mesos being freely transferrable between characters, this is a huge way to speed up progression.
Total Kills: 6454
With Zakum dead, the rest of the play session is some quick accounting. We unlock the level 210 and 215 bonus boxes, alongside a special chair for our 1000 kills as Magilia.
Chairs are a unique cosmetic item that we can sit on in order to increase our HP and MP recovery, and they have a truly massive number of designs to choose from. They're considered as much a part of fashion as anything else in MapleStory, and some of them are tremendously rare.
Anyways, I crack open the boxes…
Which completes my set of four event rings…
Open another 200 Nodestones (which we still aren't talking about)...
And also five
Experience Nodestones! These give a special node that's used to power up other nodes more quickly—yes, you can power them up. It'll make sense at some point, when I start needing their power.
We're also given a slightly better Soul Ring, giving us more damage for the trials ahead (It's just a little more number coming mostly from a higher tier Potential, there's nothing nuts here).
And I finally end the day by testing out Magilia's new chair.

…Wow… It feels like a lot of things happened in just the blink of an eye.

I'll say. I was hoping you'd ascend to the Chu Chu level, but you're definitely at least a Yum Yum now.

You're just making those words up, Eskalade. They don't mean anything.

Wha-no, no! I will have you know that this is all
very legitimate! I read it online.

I thought you couldn't believe everything you read online?

Ahh, well, you know! D-don't you worry about it champ! Just do your thing, and fight for great justice!

Alright… if my head ever stops spinning. We got so much money and resources just kind of poured onto us… and it barely makes any sense, you know?

I do indeed know. That's why I'll give you a real pro tip. From me to you.

And that is..?

Don't think about it!

…Ahh… I can probably do that.
