The jungle shuddered under her gaze. Lioness 1, Steelpaw, looked around at her miniature army, preparing to plan an attack on the pillar of mana, when it suddenly disappeared. Steelpaw looked at where the pillar was just now, the western part of the jungle, and could only breathe angrily in response. With no plan in mind, she let her anger take over her mind and ran towards where the pillar was, as fast as she could, while generating a wind blade above herself using her [Wind Blade] skill.

***

Knuckles cracked as Logan stretched his hands with interlocked fingers out, palms facing away from his chest. He had always found the motion relaxing, the way the satisfying pops resounded throughout the small spot of land he had to himself in the jungle. He had been passively cultivating the entire time since he was transported to the green field of grass after being struck by lightning. That qi had stacked so much that he had, unknowingly, become the first cultivator that had amassed such an astounding amount of qi before the Steel Core stage.

The familiar sound of a disturbance in the underbrush to his right and a fluctuation of qi, mana as the system called it, alerted Logan of a being rapidly approaching him. It also seemed to be initiating the use of a wind qi technique, seemingly in the shape of a stilled slash, like the monkey from the previous stage.

Logan’s chest rose and fell in a sigh. Over the past week, he hadn’t been able to rest for a single twenty-four hour period (since it was constantly night) without being disturbed by some kind of creature. Logan had determined that he was on the edge of the jungle, since the beasts only came from one direction. He made a temporary home in his little clearing, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t explore the jungle.

Almost a year had passed since he arrived in the third stage of the tutorial, and he hadn’t been able to find the condition that needed to be fulfilled before moving on to the final stage. Logan really wanted to leave. He had gone on multiple expeditions, leaving behind small puddles of pure qi where he left footsteps in order to find his way back. The intelligence stat had been doing wonders for Logan’s brain. The little boy back in the sect would never have thought of something like that.

The approaching creature stopped moving as quickly, crawling forward while developing its wind blade technique. It must have thought it went unnoticed. Logan decided that now was a great time to find out the capabilities of the investigation technique the immortal imparted to him. He willed as thin a strand of qi as he could, and was amazed to sense bits of information flowing towards him from it. The system decided it wanted to interrupt his excitement by pulling up a new screen with a beep.

Name: [Lioness 1] Titles: [Steelpaw, Boss] Level: [80]

Logan checked his own ‘approximate level.’ “System, pull up my level,” he whispered.

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Approximate Level: 70

Logan looked in the direction of the approaching lion beast. It released its wind blade. It passed so quickly that Logan thought that it was a fluke, but then looked down to see the upper half of his already torn robe had been reduced to little more than shreds, limply blowing in the wind around him. The wind blade had not only torn his robes, made to be slightly resistant to qi, but also created a shallow cut across his chest. Blood sprayed freely from the cut as Logan grunted.

Logan began charging his Qi Void technique. The female lion’s eyes seemed to widen as it began charging its own technique, what looked like a much more powerful blade, made of sword qi instead of wind this time. Logan thrust his clenched fist, and by extension his technique, as he had learned to do recently, at the lion. The miniature void of qi sucked the lion’s front jaw toward where he suspected its dantian was. To the lioness’ credit, it managed to avoid being pulled by the technique, unlike the ground, for the first few seconds it was active. The same could not be said for the technique that the queen of the desert was building above its body.

Only moments after the fight started, Logan had already destroyed half of the feminine feline’s body. Soon after, the rest of it simply fell over, and Logan’s power-hungry body acted on instinct, erasing the vacuum before the rest of the stage boss’ body was devoured. He leisurely walked up to it, and put it in what the system called a ‘Qi Inventory.’ The technique allowed him to imitate spatial rings, something only the elders and their families had back in the sect, and convert items to qi and store them in his dantian. So far, he had stored the following items, according to the system’s interface. The system was actually helpful for once:

[Rare Items]

52x [Rare Mana Stone]

4x [T3 Boss Claws]

10x [T3 Boss Fang]

[Uncommon Items]

130x [Uncommon Mana Stone]

1629x [T7 Mana-Enhanced Grass Blade]

1x [T3 Ancient Oak Broadsword]

1x [T3 Boss Hide (30% integrity)]

23x [T1 Enchanted Pebble]

[Common Items]

1044x [Common Mana Stone]

10x [T8 Ancient Oak Bark]

The system had told Logan that everything system-related was split into rarities and tiers. Any item of a rarity was almost always better than an item of the rarity below it, even if the latter item’s tier was higher. Tiers were used to sort Items within rarities, with tier one being the lowest and tier ten being the highest.

Another thing the system had informed Logan about was the conversion of qi to mana stones. When something was killed by his Qi Void technique, the system counted it as a kill using a skill (the system’s name for techniques). When killing something of a higher level than him, or approximate level in Logan’s case, he received condensed mana in the form of mana stones.

As the unnatural sounds of the jungle quieted down, Logan cracked open a common mana stone, just to see what would happen. A trickle of mana filled Logan, slightly filling his core. His intelligence stat told him to keep the mana stones instead of breaking them, since there was a chance that it could be used as a currency later on.

Congratulations! You completed stage 3 of the tutorial by defeating the boss!

Teleporting you to the final stage in 1 hour…

[59:59]

[59:58]

[59:57]

…