Inside the cave, the content of the Spatial Bottle was poured into the tub. The opening on the bottle was around the size of a thumb, but the water came gushing out at an impossible rate. The tub was quickly filled to the brim with fresh water from the stream. The tub had mostly been empty, Max had used the bulk of the water to clean himself before putting on his new magical clothes.
Next to it, sat the smaller bucket that he had used to fill up the tub the day prior. It took him five trips to fill the tub with the bucket. It looked to him that the bucket would hold two gallons of water, which would put the tub’s capacity between eight to ten gallons. Next to the wall of the cave, a small mark was made to keep track of how many times the tub was refilled with the Spatial Bottle.
Since Max had reached the 4th Stage of Body Tempering and gotten rid of his Weakened Body debuff, his eyesight had improved significantly. His Perception stat had increased from 14 to 18. The cave was no longer shrouded in darkness. He could clearly make out objects, the only thing that was missing was colors. His vision was on a grayscale while in the cave. With this new Perception, he would also be able to see in the night even if it isn’t a full moon.
‘Hmm, I wonder if my night vision is as good as the little wolf’s now.’
Before he had entered the cave, he had caught sight of the columns of smoke from the direction of the town. It no longer looked like a faint haze.
‘It’s too dangerous now, but I want to see what the town looks like with this higher Perception.’
…
Earlier today, after he had exited his spirit space, Max had spent some time trying to unlock the information the Ye couple had left him. But aside from the relatively small details of the items, he hadn’t been able to access anything else. His teacher, Ye Mao likely had shared with him some things about formations and Ye Zhong had gifted him a martial arts manual and a map.
Taking off his robe and shirt, he checked his shoulder for the mark that two eccentrics had left on his shoulder for any clues. The mark wasn’t there, there were a few small blemishes from the fight from Rik-re, but nothing else.
‘Hmm, I am pretty sure this was the shoulder that had the mark.’
Just to be safe, he checked the other shoulder as well, also nothing.
‘Don’t tell me that was all a dream…honesty, this whole new world thing could be a dream or one hell of a hallucination.’
But thinking about the description from the items, Max didn’t think that was the case. Sitting and closing his eyes, he tried imagining it. There was a vague feeling that something was there, in the corner of his mind. In total, three balls of light floated there, one was ginormous, whereas the other two were roughly of equal size but much smaller. Apart from their relative sizes, when he tried to reach out to them, there was a metaphysical weight to them similar to gravity. And just like how gravity pulls things towards the object’s center, these balls of light did the same. Suddenly, he felt like he was catapulted forward.
In the next instant, Max found himself back in his spiritual space, floating in mid-air and with clouds underneath him. Unlike the last time, his spiritual body was already fully clothed. It was the same set that he was wearing on his physical body and the one that Teacher Mao had gifted him. On his left shoulder, he could see the mark that the Ye couple had left shining through the robe. It looked the same as before, a cat holding an unfamiliar tool in one and a hammer in the other.
The last time, he didn’t get to examine this place before the Ye couple had showed up. This time, he could do some exploring. He was certainly still floating in midair and it looked like he was high up in the sky. There was no sun acting as a light source. Instead, the light was coming from all around him. Max tried moving upwards to get a better view. The last time, when he tried to move was when Ye Zhong had called out to him. He had turned around so fast that the momentum continued to spin him until the old man had stopped him. So this time, instead of making any drastic movements, he just did a light hop. His spiritual body started slowly floating higher.
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But not long after his ascent started, he hit his head on something, it didn’t hurt because of how slow he was going. Reaching up, he laid a palm on what his head had hit. It felt smooth, like glass, but not cold to the touch. It also wasn’t completely flat, there was the slightest bowed outwards. When his hand approached the glass, there was a reflection of it, but only when it was mere inches away.
“Hmm, this place might be a lot smaller than what I initially thought”
Max followed the ceiling, after some time, it started curving downwards. It had become more of a wall than a ceiling. Soon later the wall started to lead downwards into the layer where the clouds were hovering. His visitability became limited. Passing through one of the clouds, he noticed that the inside of the cloud had a purplish tint to them that couldn’t be seen from the outside. The wall turned into a floor and about the same time later, back into a wall. Max came up from the cloud layer and back into the sky.
“Hmm, this place is in the shape of a sphere.”
Due to the reflective nature of the sphere’s surface, it was hard to tell how big it was. If he had to guess, it was likely the size of a two-story house.
“Is that big for a spiritual space? Back up, the more important question is: does size even matter here?”
Having thoroughly examined his spiritual space, Max moved back to the center where he had originally appeared and refocused on the task at hand. The orbs of light had brought him here, so it’s more likely than not that the only way for him to access them would be here, in his spiritual space.
Max first tied tapping his forehead a few times to see if anything would appear. That was where the information had initially dove into him. When nothing came up, he tried tapping the back of his head a few times to see if he could dislodge something. Again there was nothing.
Before he had entered his spiritual space, the information had presented itself as orbs of light.
“Hm, I’ll give that a try too.”
With his eyes closed, he pictured the orbs again. It came naturally to him, it felt like he was walking into a familiar room and knew exactly where everything was. In the room, in front of him was lit up by three floating orbs of light. He could still feel the metaphysical weight coming off of them, but they were no longer pulling him to them. They just calmly hover there. Reaching out his hand to the largest of the three orbs and as soon as his hands made contact, the orb rippled and opened up. The light that was on the inside was blinding and forced him to close his eyes.
When Max opened his eyes once again, he was back in his spiritual space standing in the sky. Before him, was a book, it was about the size of one of his college textbooks. On the cover, in the center, there was a picture of a cat, the same cat that was currently branded to his shoulder. Under the image of the cat, there were characters… that he didn’t recognize. Seeing the unfamiliar characters, he already had a bad feeling about this. Opening the book to its first page, Max facepalmed.
“Fuckkkkk, I still can’t read…”
Flipping through the pages, there was not a character he recognized.
“Oh my god… This was so obviously going to be a problem. How did I not see this coming.”
Doggedly flipping through the pages, Max was surprised when he saw something he recognized. It was the symbol for the Rune of Energy Gathering that was on the formation at the entrance of the cave. On the next page, there was the Rune of Energy Conversion. They were the first two runes in what seemed to be the section of the book that dealt with runes. After a few more pages, the Rune of Camouflage was also found. In total, there were only ten pages of runes, each page had a different one inscribed on them. About half the page was taken up by a picture of the rune and the other half had characters, which was probably the explanation of the rune.
“Finally something I could learn. But too bad there were only seven new runes here.”
Max check each page of the book and made sure that he didn’t miss anything that he could understand. There were some diagrams, but without the context, they were meaningless to him. Once he reached the end of the book, a small sense of disappointment came over him.
“I know it wasn’t going to be easy, but not even able to read anything is such a letdown.”
Turning the pages back to the runes, Max started to memorize them. He began with the third one since he already knew the first two. Setting into another routine, his rune dictionary slowly increased from two to five to seven and finally to ten. Time felt different in his spiritual space, so he wasn’t sure how long it had been. He wouldn’t say, he was a master of them yet, or even a journeyman with the runes, but at least a passing familiarity with them.
Before exiting his spiritual space, he also wanted to check out the other orbs, the ones Ye Zhong had gifted him. Fearing for the worse, Max was pleasantly surprised when he learned that the martial arts manual was more of a picture book than a textbook. What’s more, the pictures in the book also came alive and would move on their own. There were still a lot of characters that were unknown to him, but he was able to easily follow the animated figures. What confused him were the occasional missiles that were shot out from the figure’s fists.
He could see a lump of mass traveling within the figure’s body and then exiting their fist, but where did that mass come from? It suddenly dawned on them that this could be Chi and the missiles were a weaponized version of Chi. Watching the figure closely, Max started to notice some patterns. The mass would travel through the same set of locations in the figure’s body before it was shot out. At the start of each cycle, the mass starts right below the belly button, which Teacher Mao had called dantian. As it flows through the predetermined path, the mass would get larger and larger until it was finally released from the fist.
As the next repetition began, Max followed along with his spiritual body. The movements didn’t seem to be difficult at all, however, he suspected the hard part was moving his Chi through the prescribed locations.
“Do I even have Chi? I am still in the Body Tempering Realm.”
After repeating the movements a few more times, he had them memorized. Once that was done, Max moved on to the last orb, which contained the map.
“Woah…”