Logan sat with his legs crossed in a lotus position, meditating and dragging qi from his surroundings into his core. As he pulled more and more qi into himself, he slowly shaped it to resemble a vortex, slowly yet inevitably spinning and pulling more qi into itself. To him, time was nothing. Hours passed like minutes, days like hours. Any monkeys nearby would see a pillar of rapidly revolving qi, Logan as its anchor. One of the furry creatures decided to investigate the source of immense power it was feeling.
As it got closer, Monkey 23 found its fur being pulled towards the now opaque pillar. Once it was one meter away, it hesitantly reached out to touch the pillar, in hopes of getting a weapon, as it had seen its brethren do. Monkey 23’s arm got ripped off the moment it was ten centimeters away from the pillar. When it tried to turn around and run away as its instincts told it, the danger ape found itself unable to do so. The pulling force of the pillar increased, and soon the agile being was just powdered bones and a cloud of blood, tinting the pillar red. This happened much more than once.
The pillar vanished. Logan opened his eyes at last, after half a year of sitting alone. It took him a full 3 months of trial and error, every single second, just to figure out the basics of creating a technique. The rest of the time was spent perfecting the use of qi. With the system’s gifts, Logan was the first cultivator in existence to have created an absorption technique.
I will call it… Qi Void. It sucks qi toward itself as if there was an empty space that the world needed to fill and all the surrounding qi rushed towards it, only fueling the technique further.
***
Monkey 24 was having a nice day, strolling through the endless field of swaying grass. Occasionally it would find a flower in the deep ocean of green. Adorned with three different colors of flowers, Monkey 24 felt like it could do anything. The green one allowed it to manipulate plants, an astoundingly powerful ability for an environment like this. The blue flower allowed it to summon water to keep itself hydrated, and the red flower allowed it to summon and shoot fire blades which cooked monkeys and allowed it to have a meal every day. How anyone would survive without these wonderful abilities left the creature stumped.
Although the monkey wished for nothing less than a life of luxury and power, it still had to do some work by itself, while its monkey servants were gone. Monkey 24, self-proclaimed best monkey heard a rustling in the grass ahead. It crept forward, stopping any movement from the grass using its green flower. Slowly, it started summoning a silent fire blade in its left hand. The heavenly messenger blinked in the corner of its vision.
New Quest: Defeat User Logan!
Rewards: [+10,000 xp], [Rainbow Flower]
The monkey instinctively understood the words in its vision, and felt a tingling feeling crawl up its spine. A rainbow flower? What could it do with that? Monkey 24 abandoned all thoughts of stealth as it saw the Logan sitting in the air. A white flower perhaps? One that allowed control of air? Or could this be the power of the rainbow flower, control of the power of the world itself?
Monkey 24 pounced at Logan.
***
Logan felt a disturbance in the qi around him. A shuffling noise to his left alerted him of a creature, and for the first time since arriving in these infinite plains, he detected a foreign type of qi. Back home, in the sect, disciples were taught how to detect traces of others’ qi just like they were taught to absorb qi from their surroundings. Even the disciples inducted by selfless sect elders.
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The source of the foreign qi, three types actually, was rapidly accelerating, giving up on its plan of stealth. Could it have discovered that it was detected by Logan? Logan shook his head. If something powerful enough to be able to sense discovery would have killed him already. Only the sect leader could do something like that. The monkey pounced.
Logan uncrossed his legs and stood up. A projectile of fire, in the shape of a wide curve, flew at him from the monkey’s palm. Logan jumped to the side, as he would have if he was back in his small sect’s town, chased by angry shopkeepers. The sect robes covering his legs started blackening and sizzling, but didn’t catch on fire. Logan was surprised as the heat from the fire blade did nothing but provide a little warmth. His training paid off, even if done mostly out of boredom. The monkey, surprised, looked up at him, and Logan saw that it had three flowers on its forehead. One red, one green, and one blue. They emanated intense qi of fire, plant, and water affinities respectively. The monkey realized that he was looking at its flowers and that seemed to enrage the monkey even further.
The imp-like creature tried to pool together its elements, and Logan saw the beginning of a technique building up inside the cupped hands of the monkey, but he wasn’t in the mood to let it unleash it. Logan decided that his current situation was the perfect time to test out his Qi Void technique. He stretched out a single hand, fingers spread and palm facing the slowly growing technique in the monkey’s hands. He flexed his fingers and curled his outstretched hand into a fist.
***
Monkey 24 saw that its usual sure-fire technique didn’t seem to do any damage, and decided it needed to try something new.
Subquest: Tri-Elemental Blast Skill
Kill User Logan using the Tri-Elemental Blast skill.
Reward: [Tri-Elemental Blast Skill]
Monkey 24 felt information rush into its brain. It cupped its hands and summoned all three flowers’ magic into the small hollow sphere it created. The coalition of power told it that this Logan would be seriously injured if hit with the powerful skill. With this, Monkey 24 would become the strongest monkey! It coul-
Monkey 24’s eyes widened as the hand that the large, hairless, ape had stretched out tightened and the mana from around it was sucked towards him. The ‘ultimate’ skill in its hands turned into thin lines of color, soon losing all saturation and turning pure white. Monkey 24 felt itself being pulled towards the growing white ball. It tried to back away, but its legs wouldn’t move, instead opting to bend the wrong way to be sucked into the white ball. Soon after, the rest of the monkey followed.
***
Logan looked at the display with fire in his eyes. The creation of the technique had worked, far better than he had ever hoped. It was like there was a small area with an absolute lack of qi, which pulled everything that contained qi. He looked down, and to his surprise about a hundred cubic meters worth of grass and earth was sucked into the white technique, now gone.
After sucking in enough qi, the Qi Void technique expanded slightly, then collapsed in on itself, leaving the surrounding qi to rush to fill the void.
Wow. I really need to make more techniques! First, I’ll collect the flower artifacts from the monkey.
Logan walked over to where the hole was before, and realized that he had no way of retrieving things he sucked into the technique. He shrugged, and lied down on his back, staring at the ever-present night sky.
Overriding permissions… Accepted.
System will now display prompt notifications regardless of the user’s preferences.
Message from system: You’re never leaving the tutorial if you keep going like this…
Choose a reward:
[move to stage 3 of tutorial] [move to final stage of tutorial] [move to stage 3 of tutorial with difficulty increased to III]