Once the stasis fields dissipated, the guy in front of me rushed towards me!
His sword held high, he attacked with an overhead arc, directed at my head; I dodged with ease.
I'm a martial artist, and now I am a yin immortal as well, but I need to survive these trials to stay immortal.
The guy in front of me doesn’t look that good with a sword, and I am that good with my eight limbs. May the best man win, but I know that man is me.
My opponent composed himself and lunged with his sword to stab me again. I dodged and kicked his right shoulder, which made him take a few steps back.
The last hit didn’t do any damage to his courage, it seems, and he pressed his advantage of owning a weapon again. With a horizontal slash directed at my midsection, I saw what he was doing and kicked the cross guard of his sword.
Which disoriented him briefly, but I followed with a kick to his face, which made him fall back altogether.
I looked to my side. The other yin immortal with the monkey was biting the neck of his opponent, while the monkey distracted him.
I'll have to be careful with that one. We're gonna have to fight.
Suddenly I feel a cold liquid running down my side, and I see my opponent's sword sticking out of my stomach!
Fuck, never take your eyes off your opponent. Luckily, I learned that with yin cultivation you can heal any wound.
I need to get through these two while I'm wounded now, because of my overconfidence in winning this fight.
I took the sword out from my side and jumped back, holding my side in pain.
My opponent rose from his lying position on the floor.
He lunged at me, a big smirk filling his face, and attacked with an overhead arc again.
I sidestep away from the attack, and I kicked the sword away from his hand. The guy panicked and ran after it.
But I jumped on his back instead and put him in a chokehold; a quick struggle ensued, and I snapped his neck.
One more to go…
*****
image [https://imgur.com/XfBSXXC.jpg]
Seph saw the other two guys locked in combat and got an idea.
He needed the heart of the guy who had lost consciousness from blood loss after fighting with him.
So he went back, sat on the ground next to him, bit him in the chest and pulled at it.
A short while later, a now mangled-chest corpse lay in front of him.
He reached within the chest and pulled the heart out.
Looking at the heart as if it were the most coveted treasure in the world, he started eating it. It's the most delicious thing he had ever eaten in his entire life.
With renewed vigor, stemming from the energy circulating in his body from the juicy meal.
He approached his opponents again at a breakneck pace, only to find them locked in a heated battle on the ground, the sword away from them.
He reached out for the sword, held it up in front of his face, turning it side to side with a satisfied nod, as if he even knew what he was doing.
By the time the two disciples had gotten entangled on the ground and finished fighting, the winner was the martial arts guy.
Done with his fight, the martial arts guy stood up and approached Seph with caution; he bowed down, hands clasped in respect, before attacking with a leg kick, which Seph couldn’t dodge in time and it hit home, pushing him back; the monkey screeched behind Seph, but Seph couldn’t look back at him at that moment.
Seph raised his new sword high, ran fast towards his opponent, and went down with an overhead arc towards his shoulder. Surprised by his speed, the martial artist dodged at the last second to the right.
Seph thanked his stars that no one else who spawned with him in this room seemed to know that eating people increased their energy, speed, and their strength.
Or maybe the martial artist didn’t have time to extract his opponent’s heart.
Thinking fast, he attacked his opponent with a horizontal arc, which his opponent couldn’t dodge fast enough, and the sword cut a quarter of the way into his side; the martial artist screamed from the pain, but knew that his very existence depended on this, so he held the sword with both hands and pulled it away from Seph’s arms.
Seeing that his new toy got taken from him, he sprinted towards the martial artist, and tackled him to the ground, making his opponent wince in pain; at this point, Seph smiled at him diabolically, while straddling his chest, and lunged at his neck, biting until blood covered the ground, and the writhing body underneath him stopped moving.
Seph raised his head, blood running down his mouth, looked up, and gave his angriest war cry ever. Something was changing within him. He knew it was happening, but he wasn’t against that change at all. It exhilarated him.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
*****
image [https://imgur.com/XfBSXXC.jpg]
Seph was deep in thought over what had transpired; he was becoming more wild, even though he didn’t see anything bad from his opponents so far, they were fighting for their very survival like him. His teeth felt sharper somehow, and his mind went blank when he snapped at his opponent’s neck, and by the time he was aware again, the guy had been long dead, and Seph had been drinking his blood nonstop!
Seph got up and went to the prize pedestal. The stasis field around the prize had dissipated now, and an alluring blue stone was sitting on top of it.
Upon closer inspection, the stone had an eye carved into it; its color was an azure blue, clear, with no blemishes.
Reaching out, Seph holds the stone in his hand.
Seph thought, "This must be the most expensive item I've ever held in my life."
“Congratulations, Yin Disciple, in your hand is a skill stone. Skill stones are very rare in the world. However, you can find them in a myriad of places.
Once you go out of here and explore the world, and get taught all the basics by your sect, you will start figuring out where to find skill stones, where to find martial art manuals, where to find special magical gear, and so on.
To learn a skill stone, you have to hold it near the body part carved into it, and push your yin energy into it, keep at it till the stone dissolves in your hands, only then will you be able to use the skill, by circulating your yin energy to the body part that now has the skill.
The skill you got is the Eye of the Appraiser. It’s, as the title says, a skill used in appraising any item you will ever see. You can’t use it on living beings. The more you use the skill the more proficient it becomes, the more levels it gains, and the more features you unlock for the skill. Skills have as few as five levels, or as high as twelve levels; Eye of the Appraiser is an Epic skill, which means it has 10 levels of progression, each level will need certain requirements met so you can progress through it.
Only you can decide what a skill’s purpose is, and how you can make use of it. It can let you retire and take a less risky job appraising items somewhere, and it can make you the best opportunist cultivator there is as you can use it to know obscure treasures, or find hidden rooms during your adventures and so on.
You can also use it to become the best trader alive, and so much more. Nothing is as simple as it seems. Life is not one visible track through a mountain. There are myriad paths and myriad ways to live it.”
Seph lay with his back on the ground, looking up at the sky; each room didn’t have a roof, only the walls and the sky, but it felt like it wasn't the real sky of the real world; something felt off about it.
Seph was thinking about the words of Scorn. He tilted his head down to look at the azure blue stone in his hand; it hadn’t been a long time, but from where he was yesterday as a water carrier, to holding a skill stone of epic quality in his hand, to be on the verge of getting better at this, means the next rooms will be much easier for him; he was finally making real progress.
He brought the stone up to his eye and started absorbing the skill. As the process was taking a long time, he looked inward and started messing around with the energy inside his body from the last heart he had eaten; he tried to circulate the energy around his body while being successful in his attempt; it was a slow motion, making very slow progress, he kept at it for three days as he continued to push energy from his hand to the skill stone, three days while he realized exactly how dead he is, he didn’t need to eat for the entirety of the three days; he didn’t need to go to the lavatory. He could not breathe if he wanted to, but he breathed anyway because it helped circulate the energy around his body faster.
Meanwhile, the monkey was biding his time, messing around by himself, eating the vines on the walls for sustenance.
Once the three days were over, the skill stone dissipated from his hand, and he felt it imprinted on his left eye. He pushed energy into his eye to use the skill.
After using the Eye of the Appraiser, he noticed that everything was colored a light, transparent blue. He looked over at the sword that was a little distance away from him.
Appraising... Name: Iron Sword Type: Sword Quality: Basic Durability: 75% Magical Ability: None
“Okay, that’s a pretty excellent skill,” said Seph, rising from his lying position on the ground now. He walked over to the sword and picked it up.
Then he looked down at his chest armor.
Appraising... Name: Leather chest armor Type: Torso gear Quality: Basic Durability: 95% Magical ability: None
“Fuck, why is every piece of equipment that I have of basic quality, it seems the rarest thing any of us could have found, was the skill stone that I used, now that I think about it, I never knew what that root I found was,” Seph headed to his original spot where he left the bucket full of herbs, and picked the root, checking it with his skill.
Appraising... Name: Earth Root. Type: Basic alchemy material. Location: Found in deep caves, in underground places rich in Yin energy. One of the basic herbs used by cultivators, rare for mortals to find, but very common for immortals.
“Okay, that’s pretty handy. I wonder if that location description will work for rare herbs too."
Appraising... Name: Fire Grass. Type: Basic Alchemy material. Location: Found in the driest of places, where the heat is unbearable for mortals, and around volcanoes. Even though it’s basic, it’s much harder for mortals to find this grass than many other popular herbs that mortals can get lucky finding in the world, because of where they naturally grow.
“I don’t know, Sun. Can I call you Sun? Like Sun Wukong of legend, the Monkey King, I always liked to climb trees to see the various wandering actors that would come to our village, and put on a play for the people, about different legends, that way I didn’t have to pay money I didn’t own!”
The monkey didn’t object to the name, and made happy screams, putting on his patent wide-toothed grin and nodding in confirmation.
“Awesome, I guess we've finally settled on a name for you. This is a broken skill! And all this is in level one of the skill! Imagine what it could do at level 10!"