Tangye Opera Shapeshifting.
This was an Earthfriend sub-style of the ten Tangye Opera styles, a family of group-combat-oriented arts practised by the Tangye Clan, who governed a province in Danji, Basindi. These styles were all renowned for their rapid tempo and grand, showy, coordinated manoeuvres, the original founders being a vagabond troupe of theatre performers.
A distinctive feature of the Tangye Opera styles was their being specialised for an exact group size of ten – with one sub-style for each member. This number was unusual because Saana's abilities were optimised for six people and multiples thereof. Clan Tangye had broken the convention as an adaptation to Basindi's unique political situation.
The region's natives never engaged in internal wars. Instead, a party seeking power could challenge anyone a single political rank higher than themselves to a fight over their position. The challenged, in turn, held the sole right to determine the maximum number of combatants that each side could field, ranging anywhere from millions down to one. Thus, many of Basindi's leaders, rather than amassing armies, had specialised their forces towards niche group-sizes.
This meritocratic promotion system, which had made Basindi into a breeding grounds for martial arts, was enforced by the region's reigning God-Emperor, who destroyed any rule breakers.
Henry, while on a business trip in Danji, had witnessed a Clan Tangye challenge-defence. Their skills, their speed, their coordination, and their pizzazz had thoroughly impressed him.
Using his previous drill design experience, he created group-combat scenarios for rehearsing The Tangye Opera. The Shapeshifting sub-style was a disruptive tank hybrid. By proportion of each Nature Energy type gathered, it mixed 72% Fauna, with 9% Flora, 3 % Celestial, and 16% Elemental. At Tier-0, Henry lacked the majority of the required spells, but he approximated them with his Spelltomes by drawing from Miracleworker tomes for analogues to Flora, Arcanist for Celestial, and Shaman for Elemental.
Despite the cumbersomeness of Spelltome juggling, he enjoyed playing the Shapeshifter. Group-combat with its additional complexities stimulated his senses much more than the boringly-simple 1v1; in fact, the excitement almost matched that of his heart-stirring conquest of liter—
…
He'd continued throughout the previous eight and a half digital years to investigate the mysterious Nature Energy Grass.
When he couldn't germinate a single seed in his island's local soils, he'd decided it was necessary to shore up several holes in his understanding of the planet's plant life.
Boarding up his farm and re-hibernating the livestock, he'd travelled to the fertile region of The Three Rivers with its towering Treant Colossi guardians, where he'd built a bungalow in preparation of a long stay.
Then, he'd become a Floating Leaf scout once again. Combing the region's diverse ecology, he'd extracted its secrets, collecting leaves from its every tree and petals from its every flower. These samples, he'd analysed in on-site laboratories.
As with Cooking, Farming in Saana was more intricate than its IRL equivalent. Since the game's elemental table numbered in the thousands, there were orders of magnitude more minerals for plants to metabolise and for Farmers to worry about. Soil microbes had magical properties that amplified their importance, and there were monstrous pests, diseases. Messing with the balance of any of these factors drastically affected a plant, changing when it seeded, enhancing or diminishing Planar Attributes, etc. Hence, the difficulty for him of attempting to grow the Nature Energy Grass in soil thousands of kilometres away from its original habitat.
Whenever the winter winds had blown the trees of The Three Rivers naked, he'd migrated south-west to the balmy Bamboo Jungle, where he'd built yet another research site.
…
Snackman's Immaculate Arrow.
This was the game's most popular art for solo and six-man archers. Its creator, Snackman, was a Bowman player from Austria, who'd been the ninth-best duellist in Saana II. An Orc player, he'd blended Perfect Shot, a long-range bow style of a Plains Orc tribe, with Brutal Spear, from a tribe of Cave Ogres. Due to his wild popularity, his fans had imitated him, and, because his style happened to be effective, it had spread to become an archer staple.
Snackman also bore a slight grudge against Henry. This was because Henry, to persuade the guy to duel him, had pretended to be a buxom goblin girl and lured them out to a remote location for hanky-panky. Then, revealing his true identity as none other than The Cripple and duelling Snackman, he'd tricked the enraged Bowman into entering the nest of a giant man-eating centipede colony. In the end, Snackman had lived to up to his name, becoming a man snack, a snack-man.
Henry'd earned a lot of hate for concluding the footage of the duel on that atrocious pun.
Now, he learned Snackman's Immaculate Arrow to know his noob enemies better. For those like himself with crippled reaction speeds, Bowmen were problematic duelling opponents because of the instantaneous reloading of
Snackman's Immaculate Arrow, being player-made, was riddled with flaws. After 2.8 years of training in it, Henry unintentionally increased its efficacy in 1v1s by 72%. Naturally, he had no plan to disseminate this improved version, lest he arm his enemies against himself.
…
In this session's tenth year, while analysing soil microbes in the Bamboo Jungle, he identified a symbiotic complex of three bacteria and a fungus living in the Nature Energy Grass's roots that it required to grow. The plant's temperature intolerance seemed to arise from one of the bacteria, which became dormant at temperatures below 22 degrees Celsius. Tests indicated that these microbes performed a similar function to real-world nitrogen-fixing rhizobia, converting something in the atmosphere or the soil into a vital nutrient that the Nature Energy Grass couldn't produce on its own. What that something was, Henry couldn't answer yet.
One of the difficulties he'd faced in this Overdream universe was that it had an entirely different elemental table from Saana's and, in turn, minerals. The Alchemical methods of elemental identification were fundamentally identical, thankfully, but the task was still labour intensive. In the decades he'd been on this planet, he'd only categorised 613 elements, a number insufficient for the task at hand.
Thus, he did a hard-switch from botanical Farming to mineralogical Alchemy.
…
Baby-Faced Hook-Sword.
Baby-Faced Hook-Sword was the style of Qi Masters of the Dao Danh clan of Nuot, Basindi. As with Tangye Opera, it had evolved for fending off challengers, but its specialisation was in single combat.
For 1v1s, Baby-Faced Hook-Sword ranked in Saana III's top 10 martial arts, not far behind Nine Fists. It revolved around the Qi Master coordinating with their flying weapon. Using a hook-sword, they concentrated on binding the opponent's weapons to create an opening for the flying weapon to deal the mortal strike. In of itself, flying-weapon-reliance wasn't an uncommon trait for Qi Master styles; what separated Baby-Faced Hook-Sword from its peers was its ultradifficulty, the move set being executable only by martial geniuses.
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As for the 'Baby-Faced' part, this referred to the style's practitioners wearing masks of youthful faces. Kind of; the history was more convoluted than that. For context, as NPCs climbed higher tiers, they aged biologically at a slower rate; one at Tier-6 had a potential lifespan of three centuries, while one at Tier-8 could live a millennium. Several thousand years earlier, Baby-Faced Hook-Sword practitioners would be exiled from the sect if they didn't advance through Tiers quick enough to outpace the completion of puberty, maintaining themselves in a perpetual state of baby-faced youth. This rule had ensured that the clan's precious cultivation resources weren't gobbled up by the inept. About five centuries ago, though, a global plague caused a two-century-long dark age, which reduced access to the resources needed to sustain this rapid level-up rate. To preserve their style, the sect therefore compromised by equipping its greying, saggy-skinned members with youthful masks and pretending they weren't old.
As far as the 1v1 tournament went, the style wasn't very useful for Henry. Qi Masters didn't obtain flying weapons until Tier-2 and, in Suchi specifically, none of his competitors would be playing the class because three of its five Tier-0 abilities employed outlawed fire magic. But he could not neglect Qi Masters entirely; A Thousand Tools would look mighty suspicious if it were over-adapted for a Tier-0 tournament in the game's worst zone.
…
Incidentally, the literary miracles from this session should bump his Scholar class into the next tier when he awoke. This would finally grant him use of some of Spelltomes that he'd won from Karnon.
In terms of Tier-6 highlights:
From Miracleworkers, he would obtain
The Arcanists would give him
From Shamans, there'd be
And from Bloodmancers, he would receive
Overall, his arsenal of tools would expand quite nicely.
Anyway, as he'd been saying about Late Republican versus Augustan poetry, he felt that one should indeed be wary of overestimat—
…
Speedweaving.
The Speedweavers had been an Elvish sect in Saana II famous for weaving Boost augmentations to weave impossibly quick combos.
At the summit of Saana's duelling scene, a chief concern was how to distribute the Boost resource across aim-assistance, automated dodging, pre-programmed combo chains, and bullet-time. Top players carefully min-maxed their distributions, often with the aid of research teams. The subject was complicated by the fact that Boost costs fluctuated, increasing when one's adversary had a higher Technique stat than oneself and decreasing when theirs was lower.
By Henry's reckoning, the Speedweaving Elves had perfected Boost beyond anyone else, being able to reconfigure their distributions on the fly in accordance with their opponent.
Back in his Cripple days, he'd even applied to study under them. However, they'd rejected his humble request because, like most of their carnivorous race, they loathed humans for eating vegetables and he'd humiliated their sect leader in a duel. With the rude Elves offering him no other choice, he'd been forced to steal their techniques. Ultimately, that venture had turned out to be a bust. The training manuals he'd pilfered consisted of hundreds of volumes written in an Elvish code language, which Henry didn't have the time to waste deciphering nor reading - the gains would have been marginal compared to using that time to instead collect more Legendaries.
In the present, though, he was preparing for a tournament without cheat items, he had Universal Comprehension to translate, and oodles of time.
Learning Speedweaving, he integrated its Boost techniques into the previous styles. Thereby, he managed to improve his effective motor skill GQ for each martial art by an average of 17 points when dosed with the supreme power limiting poison and 4 points without it. The discrepancy was due to his unpoisoned state having already performed so many repetitions of the combos as to achieve flawless execution of them, Boost or not.
17 points was a staggering gain. In close-combat situations, sword-to-sword, it raised him from crippled-tier to a respectable, one-in-a-thousand physical genius. This improvement was enough to make his debilitated self the number one duellist on Suchi's 1v1 ladder. However, to preserve the dramatic arc of The Return of The Cripple, he didn't want to hit first place until he debuted A Thousand Tools at the tournament. Therefore, to keep him hovering at rank 100, he created a quarter-effectiveness Boost distribution for outside The Overdream and upped the poison's potency yet again.
…
His hunt for minerals took him prospecting through the fume-spewing mountain range that dominated the continent's interior. Whenever a mountain erupted, it carpeted dozens of kilometres around in thick clouds of suffocating fumes, choking anything living. Transforming into an elemental with his Legendary cloaks granted no immunity.
One year, he found an unusual Tier-0 through to Tier-2 zone tucked deep in the mountain's foothills. It was a marshy land of hot-springs, the heat of which kept its unique fungi vegetation growing throughout the winter, creating a bastion of life in the snow.
Inhabiting the hot-springs were herbivorous sea-cucumber-like creatures who survived the noxious clouds by swimming to the bottom of the springs. They had no defensive or attack capabilities, and they ignored Henry completely - a passivity likely having evolved due to the mountain eruptions eliminating predators. The cucumbers' magical powers were directed instead into creating dazzling, rainbow-coloured, sparkling firework-like explosions, which they jettisoned from their cloacas. Through this act, they impressed prospective cucumber-mates in a sexual selection technique reminiscent of peacock plumage displays. Hence, he called them 'Peacumbers'.
The Peacumbers Hot-Springs…it would have been the ideal location for building a winter resort to relax at during the freezing months if not for the frequent dousing of deadly fumes.
...
The War-Witch's Duty.
This was another Old Rangbitan style, another of the 574 sacred duties. War-Witches were an elite magic-based troop type who stalked solo throughout the battlefield, seeding chaos by cursing high-value targets with nightmarish incapacitation spells, then escaping retaliation through their supernatural agility, slipping through showers of arrows and spells. Their zipping around battle made for quite the spectacle.
The War-Witches were actually still around after the collapse of Old Rangbit, a small sect existing under the care of Sri The Beauty, Zone Guardian for Rempah, Nikrugbeet. A former general of The All-Mother, Sri was a creepy God whose appearance differed depending on who viewed them, each beholder witnessing the most beautiful person imaginable to them specifically - this was true for both men and women, making Sri's gender indeterminate. The Beauty was also a War-Witch.
War-Witches were peculiar for not being any of the game's Martial Classes. Like those dead Gods from The Epoch of Heroes 7600 earlier, before The Redeemer's purges, they derived their power from an unknown source. The Western continent, where the War-Witches resided, had escaped the mad-monkey's genocide, the region at the time being inhabited by a Tier-9 sub-species of Imbahalaala and a native human population that somehow lived under the monsters' protection. It wasn't until The All-Mother devised a method for killing that subspecies, many millennia after The Redeemer, that this part of the globe had been connected to the rest of humanity. The native power-gathering techniques were then lost when The All-Mother hoarded them for herself and executed anyone else who'd known them.
Henry had strong reasons to suspect that Sri and their War-Witches were a remnant from that by-gone era, having somehow preserved themselves. Circumstantial evidence suggested that Sri might be stronger than The All-Mother, given that they'd survived both her purges and later Karnon and company, who'd eliminated The All-Mother's other generals. If this were true, the ambiguously-gendered God could be tens of thousands of years old.
Many mysteries surrounded the War-Witches. Henry, drawing upon past combat experience, his replicas, and his massive Mental Library, hoped to solve them.
And he failed.
It took him less than a week to realise the impossibility of the task.
As soon as he began, The Overdream's feedback scores had reported a normal attainment speed, what one would expect for any moderately-difficult style. What made this noteworthy was that The Cap's percentage scores were based NOT on absolute mastery but on the maximum personal mastery he could achieve with unlimited time. Therefore, him learning The War-Witch's duty at a regular pace indicated, paradoxically, that he would never learn it, that what he presently saw was near the horizon of what he'd ever see. It seemed that he was the missing the correct tools, class, talent, or something else necessary for unearthing the style's hidden gems.
The hiccup didn't trouble him; in a fantasy video game, some things were flat-out fantastical. Minimising his War-Witch training, he utilised this last study period to brush up on the previous 27 styles.