Though he had decided on going to the lunatic's true inheritance site, he wasn't ready to go just yet. Though a lot of it was just him procrastinating, it was also true that going at his current strength could be dangerous. Though that was a reason for him to cultivate. It didn't serve as a good reason to pace around a basement

Will paced around the basement. He was looking at the Information Manual Exchange Marketplace, trying to find something useful. He was finding a lot of not that.

His points had gone up since opening the chest, probably because the trap was deactivated for the next person who found it. Even if the trap could activate multiple times, it wasn't going to activate at all with the chest left wide open. As he thought about it he realized he didn't really know what caused the causal chain to shift. It was somewhat odd when he thought about it. Why would it shift because he cultivated outside? Him going outside to cultivate wasn't really much of a choice. There wasn't really any possibility of him not doing that. Even if he had made a choice, it was a choice between starving to death and touching grass. He couldn't imagine he'd ever pick starving to death. It was like for some reason the causal chain expected him to never do anything and kept getting shocked when he did stuff.

He decided to look at the Help section, and his guess was confirmed just about true. Apparently, the causal chain assumed he would do nothing. When he laid in bed, the causal chain assumed a timeline where he continues laying in bed, perfectly still, and eventually starves to death. When he opened the chest, the causal chain assumed a timeline where he stood there holding the chest lid until he starved to death. It was quite interesting.

Thinking about it, his points going up meant that him opening the chest effected something, which meant that most likely someone would find this place later. He had an idea. He copied the note in the chest, then tried to use the Export function to draw the array he'd bought using the ink that was on the note as a physical medium. It worked, so Will made a new document with just the words “spiritual energy gathering array” inside. He then exported it under the array, using some excess ink from the array drawing. The point change was immediate. In fact, the points changed when he first pulled the paper out and held it where it wouldn't fall into the chest if he starved to death doing nothing. They stayed consistent throughout altering its contents, only changing when he moved it back above the chest.

He pulled it back out, and the points went up again, but only by half this time. Same with putting it back. It seemed like doing the same thing didn't work as well. He pulled the book out of the chest, and the points went up even more than with the paper. Then he put it back, and they went up again. Then he pulled it out again. The points went up half as much. He put it back in. The points went up half as much. Repeating the process, it seemed to follow a pattern of half, one third of that half, one fourth of that third, one fifth of that fourth, and so on, Will assumed, since he didn't feel like doing this anymore.

He could tell by now that the chest had some kind of preserving function. He tried the same thing he did with the note and book with the compass, but the point gain was minimal, probably because it wouldn't decompose like paper would.

Will decided to buy something with all these new points. He looked at the Information Manual Exchange Marketplace. It wasn't much better than before. At least he could afford a recipe for some really good grilled cheese. Though the requirements had a bunch of oranges and a red, which honestly made him a bit curious. He made a document in his Document Storage to remind him to buy it when he was rich.

Going back to the Information Manual Exchange Marketplace, he really couldn't find much of anything good. Even the few cultivation manuals he found weren't good. Almost all of them were either too hard to cultivate, had horrible side effects, were hard to cultivate and had horrible consequences for failing, were downright useless, or were one of the previous and also bad. Though some seemed decent but had black requirements, which he assumed were just ridiculously hard to get.

He decided to give up. He grabbed the compass, considered whether he should take the book, took it to prevent whoever came next from getting it, and left the basement, his points going up a bit as he brought the compass outside. He headed over to his cultivation door that he'd left behind the house. It was working quite well, having been running at the upgraded speed for the entire time he was in the basement. He decided to sit down and cultivate to prepare for his coming journey.

He sat down on his door, feeling the rich spiritual energy. Though there were only a few tiny specks of lifeforce in the area, he could still cultivate in spiritual energy at least. Inhaling, he sent the pure into the middle, and the demonic lightning into the bottom.

As he repeated the process, he sent some of his consciousness into the mind space and played on his phone. After two hours, his Inter-Universal Connection Dimensional Energy Bar ran empty. As he looked at the dantians he had been haphazardly throwing energy into, he found that the middle one seemed to be full. It made sense, since he'd taken all the mouse’s spiritual energy.

But whether it made sense or not wasn't important. He needed to find a way to continue cultivating. There obviously was one. He couldn't imagine that the cultivators of this place just filled their dantians over a few days or so and then just stopped there. Even if his cultivation speed was fast, Will had no illusions that he'd reached the peak of this world with just two days of cultivation. He knew how strong it was, and it wasn't that much. It was strong, sure, but it wasn't even at a supernatural level. There were bodybuilders in the other universe that were stronger than he was currently.

As he examined his middle dantian closely, he noticed something. The spiritual energy he got from the mouse was denser than the rest. So he just needed to condense the energy. That wouldn't be hard at all. Will moved to condense the spiritual energy. He didn't do it gracefully or carefully, he just relied on brute force to squeeze it really hard. It didn't work very well. As soon as he let go, it all just expanded out again. He really didn't know what the mouse had done to get its spiritual energy to stay like that.

Then, Will had a realization. Sure, the spiritual energy didn't stay dense, but he could make it dense. It seemed that the problem he had wasn't a problem at all. That he could force it to be denser meant that he could just shove more in and it would get denser, since the walls of his dantian took up the role he was taking when he actively kept it condensed.

Will got back to cultivating. He inhaled, sending the demonic lightning to the bottom and the pure to the middle. It went exactly the same as before his middle dantian was full. He repeated the process for a while, waiting for his Inter-Universal Connection Dimensional Energy Bar to refill. While he waited, he played with the Appearance Alteration Menu making his face look all funny in the preview it gave before canceling it and doing it again. After the fifth funny face, he checked his Inter-Universal Connection Dimensional Energy Bar and found that it was a little under half full. He continued cultivating while playing on his phone for a little less than an hour until it ran out.

Phone gone, he checked his middle dantian again. It was barely different. He hadn't really expected to achieve that much in only a bit more than an hour, but he was still a bit annoyed at the lack of progress. Turning his attention outward, he noticed that the spiritual energy on his cultivation door was higher than it was before. Will was ticked off by this. It turned out that the door he was sitting on cultivated faster than he did.

Will calmed down from his irrational anger as he remembered that he could just cultivate his spiritual roots. And so Will set about doing that. Unlike regular cultivation, he could cultivate his spiritual roots all day without getting bored. He'd never really understood the idea of cultivating for days straight like he'd heard of in novels, but once he tried it himself, he started to get it. The feeling of getting stronger really felt satisfying. The only issue was that Will was used to rapid progress, and when it wasn't rapid he got bored easily. But when it came to cultivating his spiritual roots, the exponential growth always felt just as fast.

So Will cultivated his spiritual roots. He did so for six more hours. Then he felt how tired he was. Being two years old now, he needed naps, something he had been putting off for a while now. It seemed like a good time to switch to regular cultivation. He needed something to occupy himself with while doing regular cultivation, and sleep was something that could occupy him.

Will inhaled, throwing the demonic lightning into the bottom and pure into the middle as always. He left all but a sliver of his consciousness to continue doing so as he let the rest drift off to sleep.

—

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Will was awoken by the sun shining in his eyes again. As he woke up he suddenly noticed the level of spiritual energy was lower. It was closer to the level the hut had before he started cultivating. He was surprised. It only took him a bit of cultivating his spiritual roots and he was already able to surpass fifty of the array he'd bought.

Checking his dantians, his lower one was close to being full, while the pure spiritual energy of his middle one appeared to be twice as dense. It was a great improvement.

But judging by the spiritual energy density around him, he wasn't going to be able to keep it up. Then he had an idea.

He was able to use the ink on a paper as a component to write something else, then putting more arrays on his array door was likely possible as well. He went back to the kitchen, pulled off the other cabinet door, and got to work.

He first tried making the exported arrays thinner so he could fit more. The previous door’s arrays were a half millimeter thick, with a half millimeter of wood between each one, and they costes one point each. He found that he could shrink both down to an eighth of a millimeter each, for ten points. After that, the cost skyrocketed. Though he could afford it, the whole point of making them smaller was to fit more, and he wouldn't be able to even get fifty at that cost.

Will first placed fifty thin arrays on the second door. After a few minutes of blowing on it, he eventually got them all running. Testing it, the thickness didn't seem to effect the power of the arrays.

Will put one hundred fifty more arrays on the second door, then replaced the fifty arrays on the other door with two hundred small ones. After some blowing, he had four hundred functional arrays.

But Will had one last thing to try. He tried using the wood from the wall as a physical medium to put more arrays on the doors by making them thicker. He found out that he could. The issue was that it was expensive. It wasn't as expensive as making the arrays smaller, though. In fact, he could afford to add fifty more arrays per door.

He set about adding arrays. A few minutes later, and a few more minutes of blowing spiritual energy on them to make them work, he had five hundred spiritual energy gathering arrays. And all of them sucked. But together, they were able to achieve something slightly above average. There was a reason the manual was so cheap.

Will brought his cultivation doors outside, placed them on top of each other with the handles to the sides, and sat on top. He decided to cultivate his spiritual roots for four hours, then do regular cultivation until his Inter-Universal Connection Dimensional Energy Bar ran out, which was two hours. After that, he would stop being a little baby and head out. Well, he wouldn't stop being a little baby. That was going to take a few years. But he would head out.

Will started cultivating his spiritual roots. The time passed uneventfully, and after a little over four hours he switched to regular cultivation. He played on his phone for two hours while cultivating. Once his Inter-Universal Connection Dimensional Energy Bar was empty, he finished his cultivation. There wasn't much change, but that was expected since it was a short session.

Will spent a minute convincing himself to stop procrastinating, and then got up. He grabbed his cultivation doors by the handles, one in each hand, and walked to the edge of the array. He spent another minute checking the compass to make sure he was going the right way. He was. Between east and southeast. But he still checked it for a minute anyway. Then he remembered. He had an actual excuse to delay leaving slightly!

He had left the torture book on the kitchen floor. He had been holding it in one hand with the door handle in the other when he entered, but he was holding two door handles when he went back outside. He let go of the door he was holding in the hand other than the compass and headed inside. As he stood next to the book he realized an issue. He didn't have enough hands to carry it. In fact, now that he thought about it, he didn't really have enough hands to carry the compass either. Though he could kind of hold it at the same time as the door it was pretty uncomfortable to do that for a long time. He needed a bag. His head turned towards the bed. He could use the pillowcase. Though it wasn't in good shape, he was only carrying two light things, so he didn't have to worry about a hole being torn and his stuff falling out. He grabbed the pillow case, poked a hole through the sides near the opening, took some strings from the fraying sheet, twisted the strings so they stayed together, threaded them through the hole, tied the ends together, and wore I like a cross bag. It wasn't good, he'd definitely replace it with whatever he could get at the true inheritance site, but it worked.

Will placed the book and the compass inside his pillowcase bag, headed back to his cultivation doors, checked the compass for another minute, put it back in the pillowcase bag, grabbed a cultivation door handle in each hand, and finally exited the array.

It wasn't long before trouble arose. He was just a few feet from the edge of the array when he saw a creature coming over. It looked like a squirrel, except it was bright yellow, with a purple tail and red eyes. It padded down a tree and ran in his direction. Will didn't stop for it. He kept walking.

The creature reached him quickly, but instead of attacking him it just started following him.

The squirrel didn't recognize Will’s existence. It just saw two really good cultivation spots. It didn't think about why they were moving, or how they'd just suddenly appeared out of nowhere. It just followed them.

Though the spiritual energy density created by the array stacks wasn't really that impressive in the outside world, in a forest with no spiritual energy gathering arrays at all, it was incredibly dense. Especially so with the relatively sparse spiritual energy the forest had. And since pretty much none of the creatures of the forest had ever encountered a spiritual energy gathering array, they just saw a good cultivation spot and went towards it.

As such, after just fifteen minutes of travel, Will had five weird squirrels, two weird deer, three weird wolves, and one weird bear following him. All of them with the signature yellow, red, and maybe purple color scheme. Will had managed to figure out that they were probably drawn in by his cultivation doors, but other than that, he didn't really know what was going on. Shouldn't they be fighting? Will thought so, but they clearly weren't, so he wasn't too sure anymore.

The next fifteen minutes invited even more. This time with an even stronger looking bear mixed in with the others. The fifteen minutes after that brought in a giant wolf bigger than both the bears and a giant snake, along with the ten or so other tagalongs. The fifteen minutes after that brought in twice as many critters as the other fifteen minute intervals, with a whole family of mice like the one Will had killed in the hut joining alongside the normal ten. The fifteen minutes after that brought in an even more giant snake, this one big enough to eat the giant wolf whole, mixed in with the others.

The next three hours passed uneventfully. Not that more things didn't show up, they did, repeatedly, but that was more of the same event happening over and over again. By now, he had a veritable horde following him. Pretty much every creature he walked in range of joined the procession. The smart ones stayed far away. Most of them just thought it wasn't worth it. No matter how good the cultivation spot was, they couldn't use it if they were dead. Only the really smart ones saw what was truly going on. They saw the small unassuming figure leading the horde, and they wanted no part in whatever sinister machinations it had in mind.

A young dragon who had run away from home to see the world returned to it, terrified, and vowed to never run away again. A monkey brought back word to his tribe, and saw the chief look fearful for the first time. A great wise tortoise, who had seen humans before many times throughout his long life, had a good chuckle about it before returning to his cultivation.

Will was starting to get a bit tired. He had been walking like this for over four hours now, carrying two wooden cabinet doors, with his tiny baby legs. But even with his tiredness, he really didn't want to stop. Who knew if his misshapen conga line would erupt into battle if he stopped moving? He didn't know why they weren't fighting. If it was really because he was still moving, he'd end up collateral in a fight between every beast in the forest and every other beast in the forest. It was honestly pretty terrifying.

He had only managed to check the compass to see if he was going the right way by placing both doors on top of each other and holding both handles with one hand. And he had to do it without even slowing down either. He really hoped he got there soon.

Will's hope did not come to fruition. Even after another hour there was no true inheritance in sight. Now that he thought about it, he didn't even know what it would look like. Or if he would be able to see it at all. That really didn't help his emotional state.

Will trudged on for another hour. The horde behind him was still growing. Will was starting to think there were too many damn things in this forest. With all the different things following him, he wouldn't even be that surprised if a human were to join the procession. Every other living thing was doing it. Even plants were following him. Like the thing that seemed like just a big flower that got up and started walking as he walked by it. There was also a giant eagle that was walking like it didn't know how to fly. But he knew that it did know how to fly, because he'd seen it fly over his head before it landed on the ground and started walking.

Will felt like a walking zoo. Maybe it's not that bad, he could walk around the world and charge a fare for the experience. It was more likely he'd just get killed doing that now that he thought about it, but it did give him an idea. He started copying the appearance of everything he could see in his procession into his Document Storage. He added any notable traits they had in the document with them. There wasn't much in the way of notable traits, but he was able to write how a few of them hid themselves before following him, how some moved about in weird ways. He recalled the one thing he saw that didn't follow him and made a document for that as well. Whether it was actually a living thing or just looked like one, he would figure it out later, for now he just added “didn't follow” under it and kept going. It was actually a pretty good distraction. With how many things we're following him it also was taking a bit, which was nice as well.

He spent the next hour cataloging creatures in his procession as they were revealed from behind other things, as well as all the new ones that came. It made him feel a lot better. Now when he saw a new terrifying monster, he got a little bit of satisfaction from getting a new entry mixed in with his fear.

After another hour a human actually came. Well, not really a human, but it looked a lot like one. It was yellow, made out of lightning, and its lower half looked a bit like a stormcloud, but also yellow for some reason. It went in the documents.

He started cataloging the flora too at this point. He'd mostly cataloged everything that was hidden behind other horde members by now and wanted something else to do.

After two more hours, Will felt like something was wrong. He did the complex maneuver needed to access his compass without stopping or slowing down, and found something surprising. He was going the wrong way. By a lot. It was odd, since he'd been going the same direction.

After a very wide turn, he managed to get back on track. He put the compass away, went back to holding one handle per hand, and continued on.

After another hour he decided to start copying surroundings into a map. He'd mostly cataloged all the types of flora by this point, so he was getting bored again.

An hour later, he found out for sure that something was wrong. He was looking at something that looked suspiciously like the path left behind by a giant horde of creatures traveling in a straight line. Like the one following him. He looked at the map in his mind again and saw that it wasn't a straight line. He pulled out the compass and found that it was pointing a different direction than he was going.

Will knew he could just keep the compass in his hand and follow it. But holding the doors in one hand was pretty uncomfortable. After a wide turn back towards the right direction he kept a part of his consciousness watching the map, making sure he didn't veer off. He didn't stop cataloging things while he did so either. He just kept a part of his consciousness watching the map at all times.

After just fifteen minutes, he saw a big spooky red mountain in the distance. A big tacky mountain, in Will's opinion. A sick freak's tacky mountain. And he walked for twelve damn hours for it.