Master Garlou led me across the grounds past the pagodas where the other Elders led their disciples. We ended in an open training field that was surrounded by a wall. There was a single house, which looked a bit worse for wear. Master stopped in the middle of the field and said, “Wait here for a moment, I will get a few things.” She quickly disappeared with an inhuman speed, although I could still follow her movements. After only a few minutes, did she come back out, with a folded piece of paper and a black plaque with golden letters on it. She handed me both and said, “This is a map and a token that signifies your status as my personal disciple. It allows you to buy things within a monthly budget and gets you access to some facilities. Don’t lose it. I won’t teach you much about cultivation, since that is not what I am good at. Instead, I will be assigning you missions, after you properly started cultivating.”
She then grinned and continued, “But I will still give you a rundown of how cultivation works, and after you return from each mission, will I discuss every one of your decisions. But first do you have any immediate questions?” I thought for a moment and asked, “Why did the Grandmaster say, that you were better suited for me than he is? Shouldn’t it be in my interest to study under the strongest one around?” She began to laugh. It took her a few moments to calm down, and a slightly crazy smile remained on her face before she responded, “This is the attitude I had expected from you. You don’t have any respect for any of us.”
I thought about denying it, but she interrupted me before I could say anything, “It’s fine, that was why I took you in. You were sent to me, because I have achieved the most with the least amount of talent. I grew up on the battlefield and was there until recently. I have barely any talent for cultivation, and yet I am here. Being close to dying pushes you forward. This is a truth nobody can deny, but it is an unnecessary risk for the talented. After all, why risk your life on the daily if you can achieve the same results just a few days later?” I began to grin, the Grandmaster had indeed been correct to leave me with her. I would risk my life as often as needed even if I were to only achieve more power a singular second earlier.
Master cleared her voice and waited for a moment, in case I had other questions. She then said, “Since you have no further questions. I will explain your results from the aptitude test to you.” She handed me another paper. I glanced at it and saw nine lines. The first line read “Neutral Qi 134” The second read “Earth aptitude 100” and after that it was a line for fire, water, lightning, wind, darkness, light and space. Each of these had the number eighty next to them.
Master then explained, “These are the results of your aptitudes. Ignore the neutral Qi for now. You have a perfect aptitude, that is why the other elders were so interested in you. All your other aptitudes are also above average, but you will probably ignore them, since it would be inefficient. So, there exist two choices for you. Either you become a body cultivator or an elemental one. If you become a body cultivator it will convert your elemental aptitudes into strength for your body.”
She then took the paper back, glanced at it and continued, “Your aptitude for body cultivation, would surprisingly be exactly the same as the one you have for earth.” I grew curious, as this was the first choice the god had really offered me in this world. So, I decided to ask, “I can guess that body cultivators, use the Qi to strengthen their bodies, but are they as strong as elemental cultivators? I imagine that being able at range, would be vital.” Master just pulled out a small metal ball and flicked it in a casual motion towards the wall. I heard a gunshot echoing through the field and then a loud explosion as something it the wall. It took me a few moments to realize that the woman in front of me had just casually thrown something faster than the sound barrier.
I glanced at the wall and saw not a single scratch on it. Master then said, “There are advantages to both, but there is no strongest element nor is there a stronger option between elemental or body cultivators. This will be your first lesson. Be prepared that your opponents can handle with all situations in some way, otherwise they would have died. So, you also cannot expect an elemental cultivator to have a weak body and so on. This world is fair, everything has upsides and downsides.” I nodded and thought for a moment, before I asked, “Then what exactly is neutral Qi? Shouldn’t I follow that as my element since it had a higher number? Also, could I become a dual cultivator and convert all but one element into strength?”
She sighed and answered, “Neutral Qi is not an element or something like that. It is something every cultivator can control. It is used to gauge how much Qi others have, how they control it, later on it will be used to create a field in which you perceive things with an additional sense, and it is used for most treasures. It is something vital to every cultivator. For your second question, yes. I can believe that there is such a manual. Someone was probably crazy enough to create it, but it will have drastic downsides, since it would be strong. Like I said earlier, this world is fair. I can ask the Grandmaster for you, if he has something like that. Now go to the library and pick manuals that you feel would fit you.”
I looked at the map and oriented myself with the help of the towers. I thought about going to the library first but quickly decided to go to the cafeteria first. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to make any good decisions if I was as hungry and exhausted as I was. It took me around twenty minutes to reach the cafeteria, mostly because I was too hungry to walk faster. When I entered the building did I get hit with the smell of nice food. There was barely any line, since it was probably not lunch time yet. While I waited for the few moments, did I go through the moment, until one item caught my eye. The nourishment pill.
When I reached the front of the line, did I ask the staff member what the pill was and he answered with a bit of disgust, “Like the name suggests, one pill gives you enough nourishment for a whole day.” I pulled out the token Master had given me, before he could continue and asked, “Can I have twenty of the pills?” He sighed and glanced at the token. He immediately performed a bow and looked scared. He began to put something in a bag and placed it on the counter a few moments later, “Here are your pills, Ma’am.” I grabbed the bag and looked inside. There were a bunch of small round pills. I swallowed one and walked away from the counter, thinking if I should put the bag into my own bag or keep it somewhere else. In the end did I not find another pocket and placed the bag of pills in the bag the god had left me.
I went to refill my gourd on a marked section of the wall. It must be one of the treasures Master had mentioned. I found how to activate it but realized that I still couldn’t use it, since I had no Qi yet. I asked one of the nearby workers for help and left the cafeteria shortly after. The library was in one of the nearby pagodas. I entered, showed the librarian the token I had received from the Grandmaster and asked, “What exactly can I access with this token and which areas are restricted?” The librarian took a glance at the token and then explained, “You can freely take any book from the first floor. Some books have locks on them, if you want to read such a book press your token against it while you do.”
With that did the librarian turn back to her work leaving me alone. I continued my questions and asked, “Can you tell me where I can find manuals for body cultivation and earth cultivation?” The librarian looked up again and answered in the same disinterested tone, “Shelves forty to forty six are for body cultivation. Shelves twenty seven to thirty two are for earth cultivation. Do you also want to know where you can find dual cultivation manuals?” I nodded and added, “But only if its dual cultivation for body and earth.”
The woman sighed and said, “There are no such manuals on the first floor.” I was a bit dejected but decided to trust Master. With that, did I begin my search for the shelves the librarian had pointed out to me. I began with the body cultivation manuals. The first that I opened was titled “Manual – Battle God Cultivation” I read through the first page to understand, which described how it worked. The body of the user would get stronger if it bathed in the blood of strong beings that were killed by the user. The only downside was that it made normal cultivation slow. At first, I almost just took it, but then I realized that I would mostly want to experience life and death scenarios in one versus one fights to prepare for the end. And this would not allow me to bathe in much blood at all.
This manual was better for war mongering cultivators or a cultivator with a really strong background that could feed the user strong creatures on the verge of death. I continued my search while making sure to be as careful as possible to not miss any problems that the manual would make me specifically. As I went through the manuals, did I get a basic understanding how body cultivation would work. It would break your body down and then rebuild it stronger than it was before. This included bones, organs, blood vessels and muscles. I didn’t even realize how much time had passed, but by the time I reached the forty fifth shelve did I feel a pang of hunger again.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
I had picked out three manuals I liked so far. The first one would make the body itself not as resistant to damage but allowed for more strength. The second one was the opposite and focused on making the body as tough as possible. The last one was just a middle ground between the two extremes. I popped a new nourishment pill into my mouth and continued looking. I then found a manual which was locked. I had encountered a few during my search, but they had mostly been uninteresting ones to me. The only common thing among them was that they required the user to do something kill, torture or do some other violent act to get stronger. They also tended to drive the user mad.
The manual was titled, “Manual – Path of the inhuman”. I placed my token on the backside of the manual and began to read the first page. Like all manuals, it had a trade. In exchange for requiring Qi to survive, would the user be able to modify their body. The modifications would follow a path laid out by the manual, but the user could also modify their body how they desired. While the trade-off sounded like it would cause a lot of trouble, it would make me stronger than anything else. I decided to take it with me as my choice of manual for body cultivation and decided to ask Master if abandoning my humanity would make any problems.
After I picked up the path of the inhuman, did I still finish checking out the remaining body cultivation manuals. I then made my way over to the shelves of the earth manuals. They were similarly categories to the body cultivation manuals. Manuals that focused on defending, surviving, attacking and so on. Instead of manipulating the body in some of way, did they instead focus on the flow of Qi. It seemed to determine how your cultivation functioned. There were barely any locked manuals and even the ones that were locked, didn’t seem strong to me.
I had only found one manual which I was considering, although I was not too interested in it. “Manual – Earth bounty cultivation” provided a passive ability to cultivate as long as you were in contact with the earth. What constituted as earth would be more relaxed the stronger you became, according to the manual. It also would mean that the regeneration of Qi would be higher during fights. The only downside was that active cultivation was slower. It took me another day, if my hunger was to be believed until I settled on it. Since Master said, that fights would help me get stronger, did I plan to fight a lot. Thus, the less time I needed to spend actually cultivating the better for me.
I went back to the training ground with my two cultivation manuals. Even though she had only asked me to bring one with me, I wanted to hear her opinion on both of them. There may have been something I overlooked or didn’t know and if that were the case I could just take the other one. Master appeared a few moments after me and took both manuals from me reading through them entirely in a matter of seconds. She handed them both back to me and asked, “You brought back only two? Which one do you like more?” I thought for a moment before I said, “I am impartial to which path I will take, so I wanted to hear your thoughts on both. If both are fine, will I pick Path of the inhuman, since I like it better than Earth bounty cultivation.”
I then continued, “Did the Grandmaster have a manual for the dual cultivation I asked about?” She pulled out a worn out booklet out of her inner pocket and said in a slightly annoyed voice, “Yes, I won’t explain what the benefits exactly are or how it works, since I am against you using it.” I was surprised by her rejection of it, but before I could ask any questions did, she explain, “You cannot use neutral Qi after you study it. And I cannot explain to you enough how much of a problem that will be the stronger you will get. At the beginning it will be a minor inconvenience but later on you will actively need worse work arounds. And I believe that there will be a barrier in terms of combat ability that you cannot cross without it. You would essentially be down one entire sense.”
While I could not fully comprehend how it would be to miss a sense everybody else had, I was still curious about it. I didn’t want to waste any of my aptitudes like unused potential, so this sounded ideal. In addition, it would probably be way stronger than either of the manuals I had found. I then asked, “Why tell me that he had it, if you think I shouldn’t use it?” She just sighed and said, “The Grandmaster ordered me to offer it to you as a choice. But since you are my disciple, I will attach one condition on you training it. It will be harder to use, since you will need to endure the pain of body cultivation, while still being focused enough for elemental cultivation. So, my condition is that you do a single fight while suffering from pain.”
Every manual had made it clear that this world was fair, so that meant that this might not even be really worth it. I considered for a moment and said, “Tell me about the benefits of the manual. I cannot potentially waste time, if I can’t judge how good it is.” I figured that there were more benefits than just dual cultivation, since she had made a point of not telling me them. She nodded in resignation, “It isn’t actually a manual in the sense of the others you have seen. It just explains the process of substituting one of your elemental aptitudes with the one for neutral Qi during the conversion process.” It took me a moment to understood what she was implying. I would be able to use both of the manuals I had taken with me, if this worked like she made it sound. With how resigned she sounded, this conjecture was most likely correct.
I looked down on the two manuals in my hand and wondered if the god had any hand in me picking manuals that would fit this well together. I quickly dismissed this thought, as I realized that there most if not every single combination of manuals would have been synergistic in some shape or form. The more I thought about it the more I started to like the idea, so after a few moments of hesitation, did I ask, “Where and how exactly would I do this fight?” She just began to walk to the house, and since I could follow her speed, did I follow her. She led me to a door and then explained, “Inside you will find a humanoid puppet. It will be slightly weaker and slower than you. It won’t have a similar amount of fighting experience. Your goal is to kill that puppet. It will feel like a human, so just use that as orientation.”
She then opened the door, and I saw a mannequin standing in the middle of a rather small room. Master then continued, “You will be continuously burned while inside, but also healed at the same time. If you come out without having won, I won’t give you the manual. Good luck.” For a moment hesitation overcame me, but my feet had once again already moved over the threshold leaving me stranded in the room.
The puppet began to move and assumed what looked like a simple fighting stance. Arms up guarding the face and the feet apart to be sturdy. I ignored the puppet and made my way across the room as fast as possible. Luckily the puppet didn’t attack me as I went to the opposite site of the door. I wanted to make giving up as possible, in case my determination ever wavered. The door had fully closed by the time I reached the other wall, and the air began to feel hot. I decided to not worry about my clothes and wanted to assume a fighting stance as well, but the heat began to burn. It quickly turned from an unpleasantly hot bath to scorching and then I felt pain.
I forced my eyes shut and fell to the ground as an overwhelming sense of fire covered my body. I forced my eyes open to see if my clothes were burning. This was a mistake as the heat continued rising and seared my eyes. I was left in a darkness as heat consumed my body. I felt my skin begin to bubble, as burn marks formed. But my mind barely registered this as pain filled me. Then for a brief moment a cold refreshing feeling covered my body, and I could see again for a moment, before the heat returned. I tried to use the brief moment of cold to stretch my arm out towards the door.
I wanted to leave, I wanted to escape this hell. I must have gone insane, thinking that I could do this. Then I felt something different from the searing pain of the heat. Another kind of pain, the bones in my hand were being broken. I instinctively cradled my hand in my chest, trying to lessen the pain, but the friction of my burned skin and the clothes only increased the pain. For a moment did my mind give in and unconsciousness caught me. I was forced back awake by the feeling of refreshing cold, only to feel a kick land in my stomach. I retched as I curled up. But nothing came out and I took in a deep breath of hot air.
It burned my lungs and my body followed suit. I felt more kicks landing against my stomach and chest, each one forcing my mouth open as air was forced out. Each one burning my insides as a result. I clung to the leg when the next kick landed and tried to hold on. The pain made it impossible as I fell unconscious again. I was pulled out again by the same refreshing cold feeling. I used this brief moment of to see what was kicking me. Only to see the foot of the puppet filling my vision. It broke my nose with the kick and before I could form any further thoughts did the burning pain return.
Still through the pain, did I try to catch the leg again. It took me two kicks before I managed to grab onto it again. In that moment, the cold spread over my body removing the pain and I got a bit of clarity in my mind. I realized just how much this fight was in my favour. I could not lose as long as I didn’t leave the room, since I would just heal. I rolled in the other direction of the puppet, pulling the leg over my body and causing it to fall to the ground.
Through the pain, did I force my body to climb onto the legs of the puppet. I felt it struggle below me, ripping my skin apart and exposing my flesh to the heat. Still, I somehow managed to keep my body on top of the puppet. After a few more moments of my skin being peeled away by the struggle from the puppet below, did the cold return and the pain leave. In the moment of clarity did I crawl onto the chest and laid my hands on its throat as the pain returned. I put my entire being into keeping my fingers closed around the pain returned. I could feel its arms clawing at my arms. I felt more skin being ripped apart under my robes, but I kept my fingers closed.
Its hands wandered to my hands and tried to pry them open, but just like Master had said, the puppet was weaker than me and couldn’t pry my cramped up fingers. From time to time, did I feel my myself being healed but I never allowed my mind to wander from keeping my fingers closed around its throat. I was unsure how long it took, but the healing and pain stopped, and my eyesight returned for more than a few moments. It took me a while to realize that I had done it. My fingers still clasped around the neck of the puppet did I collapse into unconsciousness.
