Initiating Zodiac Bloodline System...
ERROR: Forceful transfer between entities by outside actor
Transferring existing progress...
ERROR: No compatible mortal bloodline found...
Finding closest matching bloodline...
The blue boxes appearing in front of his eyes had taken Joseph right out of the celebratory mood.
On top of his previous meta trope knowledge about the world and his pocket grandpa, he had gotten a third cheat in the form of a system. No protagonist got three actual cheats.
And a snake that had slight draconic features, dying shortly before he gained a new cheat?
It gave his pet theory a lot more weight: Maybe the body he was inhabiting did have the ability to absorb the cheats of slain enemies. If it continued like it had so far, he would amass more and more cheats.
He sighed.
Those kinds of advantages tended to create more trouble than they were worth. Cultivators coveted things they didn’t have and wouldn’t stop for anything. In the end, any cheat would just paint a target on his back. He hoped he could evade all that trouble and advance silently without causing a ruckus. But only time would show the full extend of his current situation.
A new screen interrupted his musings.
New bloodline assigned: Lineage of the Celestial Masked Bandit
RESTART: Transferring progress...
Joseph wasn’t too familiar with System Tropes and he’d never heard of a Celestial Masked Bandit. None of the Chinese zodiac animals were known for their tendency to steal or wear masks as far as he knew. He wondered what it would even mean to get assigned a bloodline. Did it mean he would get animal traits? He hoped not. After all, he was already out of his furry phase. Well, maybe some ears and a tail weren’t that bad...
Somehow, the focus on his bloodline brought up a new screen.
Status:
Zodiac Sign: Rat
Bloodline: Lineage of the Celestial Masked Bandit - Rank 1
Skills: Wash Shinies
80/100 BLP to next rank
Next Skill: Domino of the Night Sky
The status answered none of his questions and raised even more. What kind of rat was known for stealing? Well, all rats living close to humans technically stole, but that wasn’t really how one would describe a rat. And what type of rat was known for washing things?
Wash Shinies: Like all racoons, the Celestial Masked Bandit washes its food before consumption. Unlike normal racoons, it also likes to wash its loot after a heist or battle.
Washing objects increases the effectiveness of items and resources by 10% and removes all forms of tracking.
At least he’d gotten an answer. The Celestial Masked Bandit was apparently a type of racoon. Racoons weren’t rats. Joseph was mostly confused. Racoons were closer to bears and cats than rodents.
Also, why a racoon? It wasn’t even close to any zodiac animal, and it made no sense. According to the system, it was the closest match based on whatever weird criteria it was using. Did Jing Bao look like a racoon? He always thought the guy looked like the default face in the character creator of some cultivation game. Well, it was his face now.
The skill he’d gotten sounded weak for a full-blown cheat system, but the removing of tracking could come in handy, and a ten percent bonus to all his tools and alchemical concoctions was still a strong boon.
Next, he checked the skill he’d get for ascending a rank.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Domino of the Night Sky: Wear the night as your mask.
While having the Domino of the Night sky equipped, be exempt from all forms of identification and tracking, fully hiding the identity of the wearer.
The skill sounded useful if he were a spy or a thief. But as it was currently locked behind the next rank, it had little relevance for him right now.
He’d need to ask Mo Li Bei about the bloodline as soon as they were alone, since he might have some additional information about the type of beast. He would keep the existence of the system itself hidden, since it would lead to even more exhausting questions.
Quest recovered: Collect 10.000 kero nuts - 8798/10.000 Nuts collected, Reward: 10 BLP
Initiation finished successfully. exit(0)
Joseph sighed. The quest had been inherited from the snake and if the quest and the progress were accurate; it made sense why the snake had stayed in the basin. The nuts were plenty and getting an army of squirrels to collect them for you would be faster than searching for them yourself.
Mo Li Bei had even told him that the snake should’ve left the basin long ago since it couldn’t advance further with the Qi density of the crater.
He would try to finish the quest before leaving. After all, it was free blips.
He sighted. The squirrels surrounding him were still cheering, but they had also started to aid their wounded. The adrenaline was slowly fading. He had been lucky. Getting out of the fight without any major injuries was a huge boon. He had prepared for the worst, but this was one of the best outcomes he could’ve imagined. All that was left was to build the nutcracker, but he’d already seen some squirrels use their newly learned spear martial art to crack open the nuts.
Joseph put his focus on his second reward. The draconic snake body was lying in front of him. Jospeh thought back to the discussion he had with Mo Li Bei about what to do in this moment.
“You need to eat it. The more the better.”
“You want me to eat it? That giant snake?”
“How else do you think this works? Impurities are part of the mortal cycle of life. Eating is a mortal activity. Whenever you eat, some of the food gets left behind in your body as impurities. If you cleanse your body while having a mature spirit, the impurities get stuck in your meridians directly instead of slowly seeping through from your body. With cleansed meridians, they’d get stuck in your dantian, with a cleansed dantian, your body stops absorbing them at all, permanently locking you from expanding your meridians or dantian ever again.”
“But how does this connect to the whole essence thing?”
“Essence is the physical manifestation of Qi. What we typically call impurities is just essence, but a mix of so many types that they lose any meaning. It is like painting with a color. If you mix all colors evenly across the canvas, you get a brown canvas. Only by excluding certain colors from parts of the picture are you creating a painting and meaning. You need to do the same with your meridians. Fill them with the correct essence and they’ll absorb its properties over time. Afterwards, you can flush it out, leaving you with fully usable meridians aligned with specific Qi properties. In the case of Dragon essence, all your Qi will have a slightly dominating feel to it, allowing it to overpower most other Qi of the same strength.”
“But how do I eat a snake of that size? It must weigh at least a ton.”
“Oh, I have this neat pill recipe that accelerates your digestion by a lot. It has basically no side effects besides debilitating pain.” The floating head grinned.
Joseph still shuddered in the present, remembering that sentence. He had really angered the old cultivator with cheating him out of his revenge. But even if all cultivation progress would force him to suffer for years to come, it was still better than being forced to kill random people because of some old man’s family issues.
He gulped, then got to work.
First, he moved the snake into a nice clean pile so he could properly dismantle it later. Next, he started building a bonfire. If he was forced to eat copious amounts of meat, he wanted it grilled at least.
He prepared everything as best as he could. The pills had been prepared beforehand, and he had gathered a variety of spices and plants like wild ginger and spring onions. The forest was still an absolute ingredient paradise to him and he had already wondered if he should stay.
He used his crude hatchet to slowly pry the scales off and uncover the meat. After he had gotten a few hand widths of tail uncovered, he tried to cut into the flesh. The meat was nearly as tough to cut as the scales. He needed to hack at it as if he were a lumberjack.
First, he tried his new skill on the piece of meat. He went to the lake and gave it a good rubdown with the water. He didn’t know what to expect, but when some of the water got absorbed by the meat, he knew it was working. It didn’t seem to get bloated. It was as if the water had simply vanished. Since he had no way of measuring quality or observing what a 10% increase meant, he was forced to trust his intuition.
After washing, he rubbed a few spices on the steak. The fire had simmered down to coals, perfect for him to add a thin stone. After waiting a few more minutes, he added the steak on top. The heat made the meat erupt in a satisfying sizzle and dispersed a delectable smell.
Since the first test piece had been quite thin, it was finished quickly. The smell had gotten more and more mouthwatering in the meantime, and according to Mo Li Bei, dragon meat was considered a delicacy.
With his make-shift chopsticks, he picked up the slice of dragon meat and put it into his mouth. An explosion of rich, meaty flavor ignited between his teeth.
The texture was crisp on the surface, shattering like glass, transitioning to a tender inside full of the deep richness present in all meat. At first he could detect sweet smoky notes, quickly giving way to a savoriness reminding him of his mother’s cooking when he was a small child, only to overwhelm him with a juiciness at the end of the bite that had all the slight notes of the herbs he had used.
To put it simply, it tasted like the best chicken he’d ever had.
A sigh escaped his lips. If he had to eat meters of meat of this quality, maybe it wouldn’t be too bad. With anticipation, he popped the first of the metabolism pills into his mouth.