Zach lay on his bed, cozy Spongebob covers made it look like a childs bed.

Still, he didn't really care as those covers were truly comfy. So he lay down as comfortable as possible after what just happened and inspected the guidebook more closely.

It was brown, with many small patches of a leathery substance in multiple different browns.

A lot of threads and stitches made it look like patchwork of the same brown colors on both sides.

He just realised that the sides of the pages were a deep emerald green. But opening the first page showed a normal yellowish white paper.

The first page read:

"Guidebook(Epic)"

Opening the second page showed a chapter summary with only 3 entries in the summary, including 1 QuestionMark.

"Overview"

Cultivation for idiots.

System

?

Opening the next page gave a wall of text in plane English,written in blue ink with beautiful calligraphy but still perfectly readable. It said:

Epic Introduction

You are Confused, Bewildered, Flabbergasted or just Disgusted by yourself.

But its not the worst to come.

You have been chosen to represent your planet in the Intergalactic Tournament of Peace and Communication.

Denying your invitation will result in immediate and permanent death!

Prepare your body, mind and spirit for what's to come next. But don't worry, with this (Epic) Guidebook you will be able to cultivate and get stronger on your own in no time! Still, you will probably die against the champions of your universe...

(Earth Analysis shows no signs of Interplanetary communication or any contact of other life-forms in the last 1000 years. Let alone the low levels of Ambient Essence available. Don't Worry! This will give you an advantage with the system!!!!).

But you will probably still die. Prepare for it. The System will integrate after reading common guidebook introduction afterwards. Eat, Plan, Equip and Sleep before you Finish reading! A few warnings.

Beware of indebting yourself! Beware of spreading information! Beware of being mislead by false information! Beware of Risk vs Reward! Beware of FOLLOWING THE SYSTEM!!! Zachary Rubistone, you will enter your first dungeon after reading the introductions!

Think about your powers, project an image of what you want to do with them before you finish reading. FORM A CORE AND NETWORK BEFORE THE INTERGRATION. 1. Root. 2. Trunk. 3. Fruit 4

..... Intercepting Information... Pending... This is the limit of information the epic guidebook can give you before the Integration!

Reading the last line made him flinch back to reality.

The moment he read the last sentence, unexplainable and excruciating pain emerged in his head.

Dropping the book onto his bed, he grabbed his temple with both hands and gritted his teeth. Fighting through the pain.

A minute later it subsided and he hesitantly picked the book back up. Checking the last line, he saw that a chunk of the text was missing and rewritten in black and plain writing.

Beware of indebting yourself! Beware of spreading information! Beware of being mislead by false information! Beware of Risk vs Reward! This is the limit of information the epic guidebook can give you before the Integration!

He saw the modification of the text and his heartbeat skyrocketed. He immediately realised what this meant. The "(Epic)" Guidebook gave him information he was not supposed to have. And something... intercepted and censored it.

But he still remembered what it said. Engraving it inside of his Soul. After reading enough novels, watching animes and movies and contemplating on all the foreshadowing and sketchy moments, he gained an instinctive feeling for everything related to sketchy.

And this was ringing his alarm-bells.

Cultivate and beware of the all powerful mind manipulator/Guide that will help him to fight in some Intergalactic Tournament of Peace and whatever. Yeah right.

And yet he had to admit to himself that he felt exhilarated.

For some reason, he wasn't content with living the "Cog on a Wheel to fuel the Gear all these corporate sharks need" kind of lifestyle. And for another reason he dreamed of going into dungeons, risking his life and getting rewards for his risks.

Remembering the fight against that goblin, he realised he wasn't so sure of himself anymore.

Forgetting about the fight he dropped the book on his bed and started to contemplate on what to do.

That headache scared him off. But he still felt this inner excitement of finally getting to have real fights, with a hopefully not so tyrannical system and as it seems cultivation, stats and the likes.

If his +1 stat child killer title was any indication of Litrpgs features.

Trying to distract him from his experience he checked his phone and saw it was 6 Pm. Deciding that Social media was a good use of his next 2 hours he browsed short for short, reel for reel, toktok for toktok.

For a moment loosing himself in redundant content.

Figuring he had wasted enough time he took the book and checked out the next page of the guidebook.

It was 2 pages long and he just skimmed it with his eyes, afraid the integration would trigger with just reading the last words.

Carefully he tested if he can over-bent the book, so it only showed the first page. Seeing that it's possible, he got comfortable and started reading.

This writing looked lazy, in a ballpoint pen, with black ink and horrible handwriting.

Almost reading it in a boring voice, it wrote:

"Guidebook Introduction"

Cultivation for idiots

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Cultivation, at its core, is manipulating inner energy, also known as Qi. Qi can be obtained by Breathing in Ambient Essence and purifying it inside the Core.

Collecting and manipulating inner energy inside the Body and Soul is cultivation at its most basic.

Moving Qi can amplify any attribute of the Body, Soul and Spirit, from senses to cognitive abilities, even influence Ambient Essence.

To cultivate one must be in synchronisity with nature and ones self, in layman's terms, meditate and move your Qi through conduits.

Connecting Roots, Trunk and Fruit, to create a own Tree of cultivation.

The Essence of cultivation begins with your Core.

Roots branching through your body, originating at the navel and connect with the abdomen and legs. Even reaching arms, toes and fingers. Fingers and toes representing leaves. Legs represent Roots and Arms represent Branches. Nonetheless, all parts are interconnected but have a main connection between Roots, Trunk and Fruit.

That made him pause, as that makes no sense. A tree doesn't have leaves on roots. A random thought, so he focused back to reading the wall of text.

At the Roots you will create a small physical manifestation of individually purified Ambient Essence, Qi that connects Body and Soul.

Your Core.

Your Core also works as the gateway to the Soul.

The Conduits directly connecting Core and Heart are known as the Trunk.

Beginning at the Core and ending at the heart, it allows a cultivator to enhance his Physical Attributes through cultivation.

Both are connected to your Fruit, located around your Brain. The Fruit is also connected to the Soul, forming both a spiritual and physical Fruit.

Nurturing the Fruit increases yet another set of attributes.

The Soul is a cultivators heart, the Spirit the cultivators mind and the Body a cultivators Vessel. If all three work in tandem a cultivator can ascend, reaching a new level of power and potential.

He could practically smell someone sighing when writing it.

The System is not necessary to ascend or Cultivate.

Although its highly recommended and after the initialization help will be supplied in the form of Dungeons, Quests, Rewards, Supplement Classes and Techniques...Blabla. Leveling and Stats will be available after entering the Beginner Dungeon.

There was literally blabla written.... But there was another part written below, small and back in blue calligraphy.

(Epic) Ps:

Beginner Dungeon Timer: 2 Weeks.

Beginner Dungeon entry Timer: 1 Week.

Location of Ambient Essence: Dungeons, Location of Tutorial Gate: Zachary Rubistone's Shower.

Location of Beginner Dungeon: Zachary Rubistone's appartment building, Cellar. Type: (Unknown).

He finished reading and awoke from his hypnotic reading.

He contemplated if he was actually on some drug or was actually going crazy and should ask his Mother if she also saw the book, or even if she could read it. But no.

It was too risky to drag her into this, and the book already said he can't or shouldn't spread information.

He was at the end of his wits. If all of this was true, he really got thrown into something way beyond him.

He thought of himself as some kind of genius if the Apocalypse ever came, or if he was isekaied.

But now he realised how complicated this was going to be. Cultivation wasn't like in novels with pills and potions or paths make him overpowered or a master or path book to guide him.

Or maybe it was.

He didn't read the second page yet and the (Epic) Guidebook entity (it read like someone wrote it just for him) told him that Earth had Ambient Essence. Even if it said it was low.

That meant there was a chance for other cultivators to already exist. Even if he highly doubted it besides maybe other contestants?

That was something to think about but not really relevant right now.

He still had a week left for the Beginner Dungeon. As the type was unknown he really hoped it wasn't individualized.

And he also had to integrate the System, whatever that meant.

Now thinking about it, it sounded like its gonna be painful and maybe even messy if his novel experience was anything to go by.

Ejecting various forms of impurities was a common trope in cultivation novels.

And if his lifestyle of fast food, yellow bull and kuka kuala was any indication of how pure his body was he already had ideas how thats going to turn out.

Or he actually slipped in the bathtub and was still unconscious or in the hospital, waiting to wake up.

Which was completly plausible, hopefully he wouldn't wake up after winning the tournament....

Although the book in his hand was actual evidence.

Also slapping himself still hurt. Meaning it was either elaborate or got a conscussion and his brain was creating an elaborate dream whilst he was healing.

Picking the book back up again he saw that there was another, not so long, page of text left to read.

But he remembered the (Epic) information telling him to get enlightenment, whatever that meant, before finishing reading.

So he refocused on the brief cultivation summary. It was confusing, his head no able to put it into a mental picture.

So he got some paper and color pens and started to draw a tree and a person. Rereading the guidebook introduction over and over and trying to grasp what it wanted to say.

He even googled some info about trees just to be informed.

Suspecting that he had to cultivate and create a core without the help of the system he wrote down ideas and notes, creating a stack of deciphered information on paper(So badly written it was unreadable).

What the Guidebook told him was so complicated and vague, no real info on what to actually do besides grow a tree, that it forced someone to integrate.

Even if he was a random character in a novel. No Super-Giga-Chad-Ai/System, or Author for that matter, should be able to create or manage something so complicated.

He was missing something.

His guidebook said something, but something deleted it.

Or maybe it could.

Some novels explained its systems as a univers sized AI, Farming Planets and Realities for any Fuel and races to Cultivate and Grow more capable.

Through Ambient Essence, probably.

So what does anyone do in such a situation? Submit?

No!

You defy the heavens and this System, Abusing loop holes, and in the end of the story, destroying the evil entity, freeing millions in the process.

And at the end of the story? He just realised no story he ever read finished, besides maybe Father of Repeating, or some older books like Larry Cotter and Farmer of the Things.

A thought for later. So he came back to reality after daydreaming of unimaginable scales and entities that could destroy everything known without anyone actually realising it and got back to thinking.

The tree was easy. A tree with the bottom part in brown, representing the Roots. The Trunk was in purple, going up to the branches and crown. Sprouting into leaves represented his Fingers and Toes, the paradox.

Roots don't have Leaves! That made no sense to Zach so he made a fat note on his papers.

He felt confident about that guess, but he wasn't sure so he just continued the rest of his Cultivation Tree.

Then he started to think about the Fruit.

It will be in yellow because he had no other colors at hand and he was honestly just too lazy to search for red or something cool.

Thinking about what a Fruit on a tree represents, he contemplated on what this will represent in his cultivation.

A Root Technique, Trunk Technique and Fruit Technique sounded instinctively correct.

The Root will most certainly be the foundation of his cultivation as it represents his Core, and probably his "Mana Storage" or "Qi Storage".

It also acted as his purifier for Ambient Essence to cultivate.

And the Roots of trees take in nutritions to grow the tree and its Fruit, after hard labour.

The Trunk is probably the body of the Cultivator, the Guidebook said it was a representation of the Body, allowing him to improve his Physical Attributes through Cultivation. Maybe even as a byproduct by nurturing the trees Fruit?

His Fruit would end up being the final product of the tree and most certainly something important, maybe like R, an Ultimate.

But it wouldn't exist without the rest of the tree. It was all interconnected and working in tandem.

And if all of those parts worked in tandem perfect synchronicity and efficientcy, he would ascend.

Was that an end goal? Or was that the term to level up in his Cultivation? The Guidebook was way too vague and the only thing he had were assumptions.

There were Supplemental Classes, guessing that meant techniques and options that help his Path. But it was useless right now, so he put it out of his mind.

He looked back at his drawings, A tree with all 3 parts in different colors. And a person with the same parts next to it, but this one had a few lines going around, again in specific colors.

His supposed network of conduits.

The Guidebook said everything was interconnected, and seeing it on paper made the inner image a lot easier to imagine. Sadly, Zach had aphantasia and was thus unable to really imagine anything in his mind, no picture clear imagie in his head.

Although now that he drew down the tree and person he had an easier time to imagine those pictures in his mind. Closing his eyes, it felt like he still saw those papers in front of him.

Invigorated by this, he tried to meditate. On his office chair in front of his table, and executed his ideas.

The moment he forcefully breathed in, focusing his mind on those drawings, he felt a sharp sensation down his throat into his lungs.

He immediately flinched out of his "meditation", feeling a deep searing in his throat and thorax.

Did he do something wrong? Was he about to experience a lung collapse? Was the smoking inhibiting him of Breathing Essence? Did he cripple himself? Did he even Breath in Essence?!

Were a few of many questions racing through his head.

He had no idea what happened.

Then he felt his vision blackening and he lost his balance. Still sitting down he keeled over sideways.

Falling off the chair, he felt himself gravitate towards the sharp edge of his expensive pinewood table.

Pain erupted at the side of his head and his point of view showed the dusty floor.

A moment later Zachary Rubistone lost consciousness and found himself in the already familiar darkness.

Suspiciously lucid and eager after this pathetic display, he planned his next move.