Consciousness returned to Logan as quickly as it had left. He rolled his head around, stretching his neck’s muscles and analyzing the moist stone which surrounded him in a cubic prison. Logan instinctively understood the task ahead of him, probably due to the system’s interference. He needed to kill one thousand of the creatures the system called “vile beasts.” A slight issue that he discovered with this task was that they were all upgraded to the rare rarity, since the tutorial was on the third difficulty setting. Logan assumed that was the highest it went, since that wind blade would probably have killed him if the power behind it was increased by even thirty percent.

Before taking any action, Logan whispered “Status.”

Status for user Logan:

Approximate Level: 80

HP: 2230 / 2230

STR: 281

DEX: 192

INT: 120

WIS: 435

CHA: 131

VIT: 223

The system chimed, signaling that it wasn’t finished with him yet.

Achievement! Jack of all Trades:

Achieve a score of at least 100 in each stat.

Rewa- Error… Wrong system… Aborted.

It seemed the pesky system had changed its plans, since the old ones of offering gifts didn’t work. Now it dangled something in front of his eyes, and then took it away and promised it if he joined its clutches. His system didn’t force him to abandon qi, which made it the better system, even if it didn’t offer as many rewards as the other system. The other system still tried to invade his mind daily anyway for some reason. Another thing he disliked about it. It was too pushy. It didn’t listen. He had asked his cultivation system to silence the other one, yet it seemed like it still had enough power left for him to attempt to sneak past the better system’s defenses. At least it didn’t try any methods as underhanded as filling his mind with its heretical terminology again.

Logan thought his rate of gaining stats would massively slow down when he left the tutorial, if the immortal and bad system were to be believed. His mind was already working on forgetting the details of his two-year training session. Logan shuddered. He would never do that again. As if on cue to end his temporary trance, the wall in front of him shattered into sand, and then disappeared.

A long hallway revealed itself in front of Logan. The end of the hallway was shrouded in shadow as if beckoning him to see what the tunnel held. Quiet and unintelligible noises could be heard near the end covered in a harsh shadow. The rapid clicks down the hall signified that the source of the noises was likely insects or something similar. Logan squinted, being able to barely make out long, wriggling appendages that bent slightly. They reminded him of the dust bugs he saw sometimes out on the streets in the sect.

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Logan approached the obscured part of the tunnel, his qi-honed senses endeavoring to find the source of the commotion, and hopefully, a thousand easy targets. The heavens seemed to take that personally, removing the barrier of shadow, which Logan realized wasn’t to protect the centipede-looking demons from him, but him from them. The giant skittering mess of insectoid legs and antennae rushed at him like a muddy flood of insects.

Shuddering and slowly turning, Logan clenched his fist, pulling the qi behind him into a swirling vacuum of pure white qi. He found that compressing a small bit of qi until it was smaller more times than he could count, the vortex began pulling things without qi as well. When he tried it for the first time, the bad system said something about a god of gravity, whatever that meant, warning Logan about encroaching on his domain.

Whatever. Who cares if a god is mad at me. If the system is to be believed, and it hasn’t lied, gods can’t directly harm mortals. And I’m mortal, according to the system.

He had always hated bugs. They just disgusted Logan for some reason. Logan didn’t exactly find their appearance revolting, but something about how they moved, how they acted triggered a hate he had reserved just for those things.

Logan’s mind snapped back to reality as the Qi Void dissipated. The insects seemed to be smart enough to be afraid, but they were clearly still stupid since anyone would have recognized that as a technique requiring a lot of qi. Logan would know, since his Quivering Core was only around four fifths full of qi. An entire fifth of his qi stores had gone into that attack. Logan decided on attempting to create another technique, one that took less qi, as soon as he got close to leaving the tutorial. Not any time soon, he thought.

[81/1000 creatures killed]

Logan began laying out the process of how he wanted his new technique to work. Before that, he needed some ideas. Most qi-cheap techniques, according to the sect library, created some kind of small projectile out of qi, usually a sphere of some sort, and added their will to change how it worked. Nobody had used much will when they created their path’s techniques, since their path already tinted the projectiles with the desired qi type.

In Logan’s case, he could change his projectile to be anything he wanted to be. The Great Ei Garou used a wave-like prismatic projectile that could warp through space to appear inside of the target. That only worked once cultivators reached the Quivering Core stage, of course. Logan tried experimenting with some projectiles in his head, but decided against it after they all worked. It was his head, his thoughts, of course any projectile would work! He needed something that worked in the real world. Then, Logan had an epiphany. A realization. An enlightenment. It didn’t matter if the shape of the projectile would work in the real world, it was qi! The building block, the foundation of the world itself. Pure qi was the closest to governing the world out of all qi types from what he heard in the library. He merely needed to imprint it with his will.

A spiraling column of qi slammed down from the heavens around Logan, who embraced the opportunity from the tutorial. He contributed his will to the vertical vortex as it provided him with more than double the qi he would normally need. An idea for a projectile appeared in the back of his head, and it slowly developed further. It morphed into diagrams which showed how the mini vortex of qi would pull the qi in front of it and pull itself forward through that. Then, his diagrams evolved into a fully colored scene of the vortex flying and embedding itself in a humanoid. The qi inside the humanoid was highlighted in blue as it rushed into the vortex and expelled from the humanoid’s body, leaving behind nothing but a shriveled husk without any muscle or qi.

Once the little demo finished playing out in an imaginary plain, the qi pillar surrounding Logan crashed into his dantian, completing the technique creation. He didn’t expect to create the technique so soon, but if anyone was complaining it certainly wasn’t him.

A small scuttling erupted behind him, and his smirk turned into a feral grin.