Joseph did not know how to categorize the stories. It seemed like half of them were horrific tragedies of people losing their loved ones and dying, the other half sounded more like people going on some kind of cruise ship for singles.

So, with his luck, he’d die horrifically while slowly going insane.

Based on the reports, he identified three areas he needed to improve to survive.

First, he would need to get some kind of mental shielding technique. He knew the concept was common and hoped that Mo Li Bei could instruct him.

Next, he would need some kind of method to defend himself. He’d need to try different weapons to see what worked for him.

Lastly, he would need some kind of movement technique. After all, fleeing was the best way to not get hurt.

Since he could only address one of these points right now, he’d start with number one. Everybody knew that Ghost types were super effective against psychic types.

“I choose you, Mo Li Bei!”

“Brat, you are getting stranger and stranger every day. And I see you made your way back to society.”

“Well, I have a new challenge ahead of me. Because of reasons I’m forced to enter the death pyramid. Can you help with learning some kind of psychic protection technique? Based on the accounts I’ve read, whispers and similar mental attacks are the most common way for people to die in there.”

“The pyramid of death? That old thing is still standing? Those were the good times...”

The ghost looked genuinely happy for once. It didn’t surprise Joseph at all that he was part of the pleasure and not the pain group.

“Well, I know one that is quite effective. It’s a Buddhist method, so it’s relatively easy to perform. All you need to do is do a daily Buddhist chant and be abstinent, which includes self pleasuring. After thirty days, it’ll clear your head like you’ve never experienced before. But it won’t work if you stop the rituals. As long as you keep those up, you should be safe from most mental attacks.”

Joseph was surprised that he’d gotten such a straightforward answer out of the old cultivator. And the technique sounded somewhat reasonable for once. He wouldn’t even have to suffer like with all the other weird alchemical concoctions the ghost had made him brew.

“That’s helpful. It’s a long shot and I know that you do not have any martial techniques for me, but is there a movement technique you can teach me?”

“Brat, you need to think like an alchemist. Why do you need to learn some technique if you can just create a pill that does it for you? I know a great pill with minor side effects called the Moist Movement Pill. It’ll accelerate your whole body, so you can even use it to fight!”

He knew he would regret it, but he had to ask. “What are the specific side effects?”

“Well, you sweat a lot.”

Joseph threw the ghost a startled look. “Your solutions are surprisingly reasonable today. How come?”

“You aren’t asking for weird extra things for once. I’m a good alchemist, a decent talisman maker and a horrible martial artist. As long as it’s part of my competencies, I can help. So far, all you asked me to do was to cultivate faster. There are little to no easy ways out of cultivation. Either it’ll take time, pain, or both. Better to choose pain and get it over quicker.”

It was the first time that the ghost told him about some other skill besides alchemy. And the talisman making sounded right up Joseph’s alley.

“You’ve never told me that you knew how to make talismans, too. Can you teach me?”

“Brat, you need to be in the energy realms for you to be able to craft talismans. As I said previously, the mortal realms come with only some basic internal Qi usage. All the real crafting starts in the energy realms.”

“But could I activate a talisman while in the mortal realms?”

“Of course, I can teach you how in 5 minutes. You just need to inject some Qi. But if you can’t craft them, you’d need to buy them. And they tend to be very expensive.”

“Are they waterproof?”

“Of course. Any good talisman is waterproof.”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Joseph smiled. He had an idea of how to get two birds with one stone. After all, he still had an outstanding quest he’d need to fulfill, too.

He’d still try to learn how to use a weapon. After all, no plan was bullet proof. He’d need fallbacks if the first solution didn’t work out.

So he asked the servants for an isolated, if well equipped training ground. He was let to a small courtyard that was only accessible from a single door and had higher walls than the others. At this point, he kind of knew that the walls wouldn’t stop any serious attempts at intrusion - he had managed to climb them with only the slightest of advancements - but the concealment would help him to feel less embarrassed.

He told the servants to leave him alone and inspected the provided equipment. There were racks filled with a large variety of weapons, starting with basic swords of different lengths and grips: small daggers, one handed dao sabers, elegant jian swords, two handed jians and even some more obscure types like hook swords.

The staves, spears and pole arms were similarly eclectic: from standard wooden sticks, to basic metal tipped spears over to the glaive-like guandaos and a variety of different pole arm heads with spikes, axes, hooks and other types of implements of murder.

Then there were flails, maces, bows, nun chucks and many others he didn’t even know the names of. How they both had such a variety of weapons somehow just lying around and squirreled away into some far off courtyard was a mystery to him, but he wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

At this point, his eyes started to glaze over. The variety was overwhelming and he would rather try some practical exercises instead. His plan was simple: Try a variety of weapons, see what felt like something he could learn in a reasonable amount of time so it would look he knew somewhat what he was doing, get a manual for the specific weapon and try his best to learn some basic martial arts that were better than randomly flailing a piece of metal around.

With slight hesitance, he picked up a saber. The first thing he noticed after taking the dao into his hands was the fact that it wasn’t a blunt training weapon, but a sharp weapon meant to kill. It reinforced his belief that most cultivators were slightly insane. Who would leave an armory of real weapons just lying around for guests to use?

He moved the weapon through the air, but the curved blade felt off. He struggled to keep it straight. Still, he wanted to see if it cut well. Next to copious racks of weapons was a conveniently placed dummy, ready for him to slaughter.

With an overhead strike, he tried to hit the dummy into the shoulder. His blade alignment was off, so instead of creating a nice clean cut, the weapon twisted, which made him lose his grip. The blade spun through the air, and Joseph reflexively jumped back to protect himself.

The blade stuck into the sand with a muted thud, sinking in by a hand span. Instead of creating a nice cut in the dummy, he had managed to hurt the ground. This was starting out great.

He tried a variety of other blades, but whatever he did, there was something close to a supernatural phenomenon that kept making him fail. Whenever he tried to strike, it wouldn’t cut properly, somehow making him loose his footing, or the weapon would slip.

When he moved on to the other types of weapons, whatever he tried, it all failed. The spears would miss, creating scratches instead of proper punctures. The pole arms seemed to magically fail and flail around. It wasn’t mere ineptitude; it was some form of divine weaponized incompetence against himself.

There was a higher chance of him hurting himself than harming the dummy. In the end, he was standing in the middle of the courtyard, the dummy close to pristine, and he was full of new scratches, bumps and bruises.

He was somewhat stumped. It looked like it was impossible for him to learn about any weapon properly. He wondered how he had managed to kill the snake at all. That must’ve been one lucky strike out of a thousand.

A slow clap was coming from the top of one of the nearby walls. Joseph turned around and spotted his uncle.

He instantly felt embarrassed. “Since when were you here?”

“When you grabbed that spear? Nice performance, by the way. I didn’t have such a good laugh in a long while.”

Joseph started to sweat. If he made even one wrong move and couldn’t weasel his way out of this one, it would be game over.

“But as I keep telling you, a real man uses his fists. Our family isn’t suited for fancy tools. We always met any challenge with only our body. I don’t know why you keep trying. First, all that stuff with you playing around with swords, even going so far as handicapping yourself by using one in a duel. It’s smart of you to finally try something else, but you know it in your heart that the fist is the only weapon for you. You’ll always fail at using anything else. It’s the family curse.” His uncle nodded as if he’d told him some kind of divine truth.

He relaxed slightly. His cover wasn’t blown. And he had gotten an explanation on why his skills with weapons were so abysmal. If it was some weird supernatural family curse, he could accept that this was outside his responsibility.

But using his fists? It sounded a lot more dangerous than a proper weapon. He’d have no distance, would always be forced to move in close, his body in the direct line of any and all blades. Then, even if you hit, you’d feel the crunch of their body under your fingers, which seemed disgusting to him. He saw himself as somewhat of a civilized man, not some meat head whose first solution to any problem was to use force.

Still, he grabbed a bow and some arrows. He had done some archery as a kid with his dad, but beyond knowing the basics, he wasn’t what he considered good. It was the last weapon he wanted to test anyway, so it wouldn’t hurt to try. Even if he failed, it might be entertaining.

He stepped a few meters away from the dummy, knocked the arrow, drew the string back, waited for a moment until he was breathing out, then released the string. The bowstring whizzed past his face, releasing the arrow.

Somehow, the arrow had veered off course. Instead of going straight, it missed the dummy completely. When it zipped past his target, he resigned to learning how to use his fists to bash heads in, but then something surprising happened. The arrow hit a shield he’d forgotten to pick up, bounced off and hit the dummy in the back of the head, embedding the tip deeply.

Joseph and his uncle were both silent from shock. After about five seconds, his uncle finally spoke.

“Huh, that’s new.”