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Jin, Child, a word if you can.
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"Yes Senior Afara, how may I help?"
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That little girl, the one that was together with the merchant boy you beat up, who is she?
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"Her? I think that’s Elder Lingfeng’s remote long-lost niece or something. I think she’s here waiting for the autumn exams, she’s not even a disciple yet."
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Strange...I sense great potential in her…and danger…
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"What do you mean, Senior?"
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She is...irregular...similar to yourself. A twisted destiny awaits for her, but I cannot ascertain what type...
She is like a blank sheet of golden paper waiting for someone to write upon it. Jin!
You must tread carefully around her! For now, please heed this Senior’s advice and keep an eye on her whenever you can.
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"But Senior, I hear she spends most of her day going into the forest with that Fung fellow. Who knows what erotic things they are doing in the bushes over there every day!"
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Again, you go astray with your foolish and youthful imagination!
Not everyone thinks with the sausage hanging between their legs you know!
You should just pick one of those five girls that are fawning over you in your class and just get it done already.
You are a hormonal mess, and it’s affecting your concentration!
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"But I can’t just choose any one of them! It would break the hearts of all of the other ones! Don’t you think I have not noticed their desires? I’m not THAT dense!"
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Yet you pretend to be, and you are just stupidly stringing them along in hope of achieving...what?
At some point you will have to pick one of them, and the rest will become pissed off at you, so the sooner you break the chain of disillusions, the better!
Less distractions for your Cultivation!
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"Ah, if only it were that simple, Senior!"
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It IS! You’re just acting like a moron instead!
Why will you not listen to me when it comes to this issue as well?
Have I ever led you astray?
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"No Senior! Perish the thought! I owe you my life!"
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Then do as I say. GO FUCK YOURSELF with one of those chicks, whichever doesn’t matter, and get it out of your system.
Heck, just go to a brothel instead, if you are so squeamish about picking one of them.
Professionals always know how to handle that stuff better than a naive virgin that would freeze at the mere sight of your salami.
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"Yes, Senior, I will try my best!"
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And follow the strange girl when you can in your spare time!
Her and the merchant boy are most likely hunting, rather than fornicating in the forest.
An admirable endeavour and a good way to level up, albeit much slower than the Fire cultivation method I have imparted to you.
Even yourself, you could use some wilderness survival experience.
Just...don’t set fire to the whole forest when you go into it. It would just draw unwanted attention.
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"Will do, Senior!"
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Now back to Cultivating! You’re slacking off! Starting from next morning, try to follow them both, but make sure that you do not get noticed!
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A week later, Lingfeng had almost totally recovered and had resumed his Sect Elder duties. He had been strongly congratulated by all of the other Elders, since he was now basically number 2 level-wise in the whole Sect, behind the Sect Master.
Since he had recovered enough, we had also resumed our microbiological studies. The new glassware had arrived, and now we had some proper Petri dishes that we could use, and I had also worked on my Agar base craft by using a series of filters to make it as clean as possible.
“What the heck were we trying to achieve anymore, you have already proven your point” You may begin to wonder.
Well, microbiological cultures are not used for only proving the existence of invaders, but rather for testing out which products kill them best instead.
Basically, what I was looking for were substances or alchemical products that existed in this world which could act the same way as an antibiotic.
The first thing that we had tried was to harvest different types of fungi, because I knew for a fact that the Penicillium strand of fungus was quite good at killing bacteria.
Of course, none of the fungi from our first batches had proven to be effective in that sense, but there had been observable differences between in the spread of the bacteriological infection between the different fungi samples in the petri dishes
I had also tried to start a research that was more “magically inclined” in nature. The healer Lady Yao had been kind enough to provide us with a much larger room, where we could fit different types of magical formations on the floor, and check if any of them had an altering effect upon the growth of the bacteria.
And indeed, just as I had expected it, some of the formations that were aimed at “cleansing” the body of its “impurities” were actively suppressing the development of bacteria, but other formations that were aimed more towards “healing” and “regrowth” were actually hastening the development of the cultures.
Mental note to self - beware of Healing! If not used properly it could AGGRAVATE an infection instead!
Our research had come to a point where we needed human samples. Of course, we had kept our activities pretty much on the down-low, because we did not want to attract the attention of any foreign parties with what could actually become a revolutionary discovery, like the creation of antibiotics.
Therefore, because of the human subject reason I had suddenly found Lingfeng waiting for me at the door the next morning.
"Morning Trina."
"What is up with you? You look like you just tasted the rainbow right out of an unicorns ass!"
"Bleh...bad dream! Anyway...I found a subject that might fit our needs. You should come with me, but I have to warn you about the “context” first. He’s a death sentence prisoner."
"Really? What’d he do?"
"Murder, rape. Anyway, come with me...you should see him first."
We headed into a direction in which I had never went, and wound up at a place that could have half been used for a police station on the upper floor, and half for a torture dungeon on the lower one. I assumed that this is where they usually took the more unruly types when things got serious.
All of the “cells” were heavily fortified, spell warded, and had many formations inscribed onto the wall and on the outside of the bars. Basically, the small prison had a pretty tight security overall, but I guess that it was a proper setup given the context, since the place dealt with cultivators rather than with normal people instead, and cultivators could easily twist steel bars with their bare hands if they wanted to.
In one of the cells lay a disheveled guy in shackles, and he looked like he had been recently beaten pretty badly. The striking feature that I found about him though, was that he had a tightly clenched jaw, and he had been unable to even reply back to us when we had questioned him.
When he had gotten captured, he had been cut with a dirty blade and he had now dveloped Lockjaw, or as the disease is correctly known on Earth, Tetanus. You have to remember that this is another world, vaccines were not things that have been invented yet, so nobody has “mandatory” immunity shots to Tetanus just like everybody gets in school, back on Earth.
I was somewhat surprised that cultivators could still get infected with the “commoner’s” strands of infections, but the “test subject” was not that high level yet, barely two levels into Foundation Establishment, so I guess that his cultivator-boosted immunity levels were not that high enough-yet to combat everything off. This fit me just fine, but I was quite hesitant about what to do with a “living” subject, since I needed some body and blood samples that conflicted with the “living” status of the subject.
"You do not have to worry about that. The dude is going on the chopping block today anyway. You are still way too kind, child." Lingfeng said to me when he saw the face I was making.
"What did he do to deserve it? Execution sounds kind of harsh…"
"I told you already. Murder, rape and hiding the bodies. We found three young female disciple’s bodies hidden in some barrels in his basement, dessicated in salt. They had been missing for a while now, and nobody knew where they had vanished off to. I guess that in the end, it was this pervert's fault."
Great, a psycho serial killer. That sort of makes me feel slightly less guilty for what I’m about to do with his body.
"Is he a Demonic Cultivator? You said that there were measures in place to detect those!"
"Nope, sadly, he’s just a normal cultivator, but rather a very fucked-up in the head one. No girls seemed to like him because he was gloomy all of the time, and I guess he cracked in the end and went overboard."
Sheesh! I should get Fung laid sometime soon then, so he doesn’t develop deeper complexes about his self-image and goes off the rails.
I should check out who that Shi chick he was complaining about is afterall.
"Are you sure he’s guilty?"
"100%, he even admitted it and bragged to the guards about how the girls had screamed under him, before the Lockjaw shut him up."
Well, that settles it then. I guess that I do not have to be squeamish about this round of human experimentation, for the moment.
After about one more hour of waiting, Lady Yao also arrived, so the guards “politely” picked up the murderer by beating the shit out of him again, then with a shackled prisoner in tow, we all headed to the Hall of Medicine, towards our new “larger’ lab room.
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"Hmm...what the hell are they doing? Why are they dragging that guy to the Hall of Medicine, Senior? I heard that he’s a murderer that the Sect has caught recently!"
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Isn’t it obvious, boy? They need him as a guinea pig!
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"Guinea pig? What for, senior?"
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How the hell should I know?
I never dabbled that deep in the way of medicine before, but if the Guild Mistress of the Healers is involved, then it must be something decently big.
Remain distant, but keep following them…
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This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
"Yes, Senior!"
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Once we got to the Hall of Medicine, we placed the “subject” within a confinement formation that had been pre-arranged. After that, we all dressed up in “clean” lab gear with leather gloves, facemasks and overcoats, making us all look like a team of surgeons.
When Lingfeng asked the prisoner if he had any last words, the guy just gave us the finger with both hands. I didn't even get to see Lingfeng cast the spell, when a blade of compressed wind just burst out of his hand and instantly chopped off the guy’s head, separating it clean from the body.
Holy fucking shit man! That’s some dangerous fucking-ass skills you got there, m8! No wonder he was a mage in the Hero’s party, Lingfeng is a beast! He cut that dude down like he was harvesting grain, and the prisoner was a Foundation Establishment cultivator! SCARY!
Lady Yao and myself immediately burst into action, and began to take blood samples from the gushing wounds, then after a while, we also stripped the body down, placed it on a table, then swabbed away samples from all parts of the body like the armpits, hands, joints, navel, feet, and even the more...private...parts. Anything can be endured the name of SCIENCE!
Which also led to the next problematic part. Dissection. Lingfeng was quite unsure as to why we wanted to carve the guy up into pieces, finding it similar to the desecration of a corpse, but Lady Yao told him that cutting up bodies was quite a common practice in the medical field, if you really wanted to learn properly how the “internals” functioned. You couldn’t actually heal back a missing kidney, if you did not know where it had been located in the body in the first place. Or at least along the lines of that logic.
The process...was gruesome. The tools were inadequate, since we did not have items like a medical rotor-saw to cut through bones, but rather “medieval” level wood and metal saws to work with. Lingfeng had helped quite a few times by using his wind blades to sever certain components away from the body.
I had puked all of my breakfast into a corner several times over, but I had overall endured, because I knew this knowledge was useful to me.
I just kept telling myself that there's no difference between the corpse in front of me and the Christmas pig or Thanksgiving turkey that I used to carve back home on Earth for my cooking needs. It’s all animal meat and bones in the end!
That still did not help. All of the components were gruesomely “human”, especially the head. Oh the terrible, terrible head, with it’s crazed look and still clenched jaw staring forever back at us in madness. It became even worse when Lingfeng chopped the damn thing right in the middle splitting it clean in two halves, so we could retrieve the brain samples.
We had also collected a large amount of samples from all of the prisoner’s bodily fluids, and now possessed quite a large “collection” of Petri dishes. We had even put aside a bunch of the fluids in clean glass vials for later research.
There had been one very important difference that I had noticed though. All across the body, inside all of the muscles and even inside some of the bones lay a vast web of carbon-black-colored elongated fibres that had proven to be extremely resilient and hard to cut. In all honesty, I immediately assumed that given their uncanny tensile strength and stubbornness, those fibers WERE actually carbon nanofibers, since carbon nanotubes and other variants of carbon allotropes are known to be some of the toughest materials known to nature, and were also non-toxic/neutral to the insides of a body.
If I were a System and I had to find a way to strengthen my “players” from the insides of their fleshy bodies, I would have probably gone with the nanotubes as well. Having those things inside of a body and having them become properly distributed and controlled inside all of the bones and organs would result in a superhuman being outside the scope of “mere” mortals, which is exactly what this planet’s cultivators were.
When I asked Lady Yao what the fuck all of those black fibres were, she told me that they were the “manifestation” of the meridian network in the real world. She did not seem surprised even one bit by seeing the fibres, and told me that it’s quite normal to find those there. The higher a cultivator became, the more of those fibers the body wound up containing, I was told.
Lingfeng also came and added that having TOO many of those fibers resulted in a mental “corruption”, usually in the form of some sort of madness. Apparently the threshold was at around 50% fleshy body vs 50% System-made body, and if a person or a Spirit Beast went over that, it would become a monster and start acting weird. In the case of humanoids, going over 50% usually resulted in a loss of emotions, with the apathy levels increasing the more the System had replaced the insides of a person percentage-wise, until one became a heartless “robot”. In the case of Spirit Beasts, they became much more feral and destructive, and would eventually turn into Monsters and Abominations that had to be put down.
In all honesty, I now somewhat understood the general logic of the System. It would start upgrading a person as it “leveled up” by slowly and gradually replacing all of the “fleshy” bits with the “better”, System-made versions, including all of the internal organs and bones, allowing for the “end product” to become a sort of a system-made super-cyborg hosting the consciousness of the “user”. It’s no wonder that the Hero of the Sun had been able to “regenerate” his entire body after being beheaded! The System had just built a new body for him out of System-only hardware!
The Hero of the Sun had apparently been an exception to the rule of apathy because of his “passive skills”, since he had been able to retain most of his “humanity” even after being chopped up into pieces and then re-assembled by the System many times over the years.
Another similar exception were all sorts of “ancient” beasts that resided right at the heart of high Qi-concentration zones, but were still considered to be “sane” in the end. They could also “regenerate” their bodies from even a meager drop of blood, making them near-impossible to kill.
The disturbing part on the other hand was the fact that I had now realised that the System was capable of doing whatever the fuck it wanted with any of it’s users, down to the atomic level. It could basically even replace your whole brain without you even noticing, and that shit did not sit very well with me!
Timmy: Do not worry about any of that stuff. It’s what I am here for. There will not be any “negative” upgrades done to you by the Planetary System. You just worry your pretty little ass about surviving for another day, and leave the internal upgradin’ worries to lil Timmy! I’ll do you no wrong!
Allright, level 100 Superhuman Cyborg Cultivator, here I come! Soon...ish…
Maybe?
Just as we were walking out of the Hall of Medicine building once we had collected and jarred all of the samples, making us glad that we were finished for the day with the whole gruesome business, a scholarly dude in fine robes but filled from head to toe in mud and riverside algae ran past us. He kept muttering murderous stuff while also writing down on a mud-caked notebook.
"Just you wait, you infernal beast! I shall have my vengeance! You will suffer at the might of my magnum opus!"
*Shlorp shlorp drip drip shlorp*
"Well, what got HIS panties in a punch?" I pointed at the soggy scholar.
"Aw that? “Evil Terror Lew” probably just did his thing again. He always does that to new recruits that join the Hall of Arts." Lingfeng explained.
"It’s a sort of a hazing ritual for the artists. The elder disciples convince the younger freshmen to take the “back” route by pretending that the main gate is “locked”, then the freshmen have to go around and across the bridge that lies over the river while following the golden road that goes through the Royal Water Gardens of the Sect, when they try to reach the Art Pavillion’s back entrance.
The gardener there keeps a wild water troll as a companion that everyone from the Hall of Arts calls “Evil Terror Lew”, and the pest just loves to grab any new faces that try to step across his bridge, then throw them in the river-mud below while laughing his ass off. The newcomers usually wind up smeared and dishonored, but the Guild Master from the Hall of Arts simply refuses to get rid of the troll, since he has become a sort of a mascot and running joke for that place. He always tells the muddied students that it was their own fault that they did not dodge the troll in the first place, and that they should pay more heed to their own Cultivation.
Many of the students then try to use their art-inclined skills like mesmerising lyrics, hypnotizing paintings or alluring dances to get back at the troll, but they all wind up failing miserably and then get thrown back in the mud again. They have no idea that the true reason the troll has never been kicked out is that there's nobody here in the Sect capable of kicking him out. The dude is over 100+ Paragon levels and is probably stronger than the Sect Master."
"Is that troll such a scary being?"
"No, he’s quite a nice guy once you get to know him, I even go to play chess with him during certain weekends. But I think he has “character issues” because he had a rough childhood that left him with a bit of a sadistic inclination. He really enjoys the pitiful screams of the new artists in the mud."
"So, I should try and avoid taking the back road and bridge when I go to the Arts pavilion. Noted."
"Well, yes, unless you plan on intentionally taking an impromptu mud bath."
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"Daaamn, Xibei, what the hell happened to you?"
"Aw, hello Jin. I got grabbed by that insufferable troll from under the Royal bridge and I got tossed into the mud. I should have seen this coming the moment all of the seniors began acting suspicious. Ptew...damn it, I still have sand and algae in my mouth. Also, my clothes are ruined! Does that fucking troll even know how much these clothes cost? How much time and effort has been placed into sewing them? No, he just *splash* tosses people down in the river like it’s totally natural!"
"Are you going to be ok? Also, you kind of smell, you should go change!"
"I’m ok. I guess it’s just my pride that got wounded. I will recover, and then I will create a Living Art masterpiece that will blow the mind of that troll open for sure!"
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Hah, this foolish one is just asking for a second trampling.
That troll is way out of his league.
Even I would be hesitant to face the wrath of that creature!
Books and trolls do not mix well, you know!
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"Wanna get a drink after you change your clothes? It’s on me, you look like you could use one!"
"Sure...thanks pal. What the hell are you doing here at the Hall of Medicine anyway? I thought you would be cultivating up there at the forges with cinders stuck up your bumhole."
"Erm...I had a slight Healing emergency. Minor burn, and all that..."
"Right...you and your fellow pyromaniacs! You will all burn yourselves to death eventually!"
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Not if I can help it!
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During the time while we were waiting for the cultures to grow, myself and Fung had continued to delve inside of the forest.
I had been urging Fungus to follow a rather strict regime when it came to his archery, a regime which I was also following. Since I was now considered to be a cultivator, there was absolutely no reason why I would not be able to perform near-superhuman feats that would have left the people from Earth gasping for air in amazement! When I had been back on Earth, I had been a major medieval weapon geek, including ancient bows. It was the reason why I had been able to sculpt myself one from scratch. The other thing that I remembered, from watching a dude called Lars on YouTube, was how to rapid-fire arrows.
He had taken rapid shooting to another level of mastery, shooting 10 or more arrows in under 5 seconds without any issues.
A major problem of most ranged “ancient” weapons was their absolutely crap rate of fire compared to modern firearms, and not their stopping power. An arrow could easily go through an entire deer just as easily as a bullet would do if you shot the arrow correctly. The difference between the “old” and “new” ranged weapons came from the fact that modern guns would be able to pump you with 10, 100, 1000 more projectiles in the same timeframe compared to bows or crossbows, even if the medieval weapons were of the repeating type like the chinese chu-ko-nu.
I had tried being a smartass “revolutionary inventor” again and had asked Fung if he could find me a few crossbows of the same type that he could “borrow” from back home, and he had come back with quite a few. The crossbows could be then stored inside a spatial ring in a “loaded” , ready-to-fire mode, and they even showed up as “stacked” on top of eachother in the interface once they were “stored”, if the “base” items were of the same type and build. One would then be able to swiftly summon a crossbow, shoot it, drop it, summon the next crossbow, shoot that one as well, drop it then continue in the same fashion until all of the “loaded” crossbows got depleted. That idea had seemed very nice in theory, but in practice we had found out that while the method wasn’t absolutely bad since it actually worked quite smoothly, the rate of fire was still lower then what a simple well trained bow and arrow ammo-hold could achieve. The time that it took to drop the old crossbow, summon a new loaded one, grab the new loaded crossbow by the shaft and then point it at the target was almost twice as long as the interval for shooting a well gripped set of arrows.
Still, I could see some sort of utility for this method if I could figure out some sort of a way to make “special” bolts, like some sort of “grenade” tipped bolts that would explode on impact.
For our efforts, Timmy had given us both the [Rapid Bow Fire] and the [Shoot-and-Run] passives that belonged to the [Archery] skill tree, which increased the rate of fire and allowed a person to shoot a bow while moving or running at the cost of accuracy.
When we ran into “hostile” targets like some of the boars who had a tendency to charge and then try and gore us with their tusks, we would then play a game of “pump the target full of arrows”, with one of us distracting the target in a taunting, annoying fashion that gamers would definitely call “pulling aggro”, then running away while the other person would stand still and shoot his arrows more accurately. After being pincushioned, none of the low level forest beasts could now stand in our way.
We had even set up our own little mini-target range in one of the forest clearings that lay closer to the sect, and kept practicing trick shots every day when we were not herbalizing the shit out of the proximities.
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"Senior, what the hell are they doing? Why is she hanging upside down? I can see her panties!"
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She’s trying to shoot the bow while upside down.
It’s a good method to compensate for your center of gravity if you ever find yourself off-balance or stuck in some awkward shooting positions.
Also, that girl does not strike me like the shy type.
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"Fung is not even blushing! Is he gay or something?"
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Nope, he probably just got used to it after being repeatedly exposed, so now he’s simply ignoring it.
UNLIKE SOME STUPID STUDENT OF MINE THAT JUST REFUSES TO GET LAID!
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"Senior, you hurt me! Conquering the heart of a young flower is such a difficult endeavour!"
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Hard my ass! All of those bimbos that keep fawning all over you, they would spread their legs for you at the mere mention of intent.
I have no idea why you keep acting like a fucking eunuch in their presence.
If you were a TRUE man, you would fuck all five of them at the same time.
Nothing beats a good ol’ orgy, take this Old Senior’s advice.
I can even impart some “longevity” techniques to you that you can use for such a purpose, if you want me to.
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"Not for the moment, Senior, I’m good."
….
"Hah! Now she’s shooting while doing backflips? That’s pretty awesome, Senior. Can I learn something like that for my fire bolts?"
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Yes, the girl and the merchant boy do seem to have some surprising skills.
Not sure how many of them are actually applicable in combat, the techniques look like something only a barbarian would think of, but I HAVE seen barbarians defeat well “trained” fancy pants young masters like yourself just because they had obtained the upper hand when it came to the element of surprise.
And to answer your question, yes we shall also begin some training for mobile shooting.
You need to learn how to fry your enemies while being swift on your feet.
I have just the training regime in mind to...SHIT, what the hell is that?
I’m detecting a large Monster Qi signature in the proximity!
CHILD, STOP WHATEVER YOU ARE DOING AND RUN AWAY RIGHT NOW!
A HIGH LEVEL MONSTER IS HEADING STRAIGHT FOR YOUR POSITION!
RUN LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT, BECAUSE IT DOES!
WHY THE HELL IS SUCH A BEAST IN THE SAFE ZONE ANYWAY?
🔥
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*BOOM!*
While we were practicing our daily bow routines, the forest suddenly shook from the noise of a powerful explosion. When we turned around to see where the noise was coming from, I saw a humanoid figure totally engulfed in fire running past us with the speed of more than a hundred miles an hour.
"Fungus, WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?"
"I don’t know! Some sort of Fire Elemental?"
*GROOOWL! HARGHHURGHRAWR!*
Immediately after the fire-figure ran past us, a huge-ass wolf burst from the bushes, standing almost as tall as Fung’s chest, and Fung was a fucking tall-ass man. It smelled of singed hair, and was absolutely furious.
Since the fire-man was now way too far away for it to catch, the Dire-Wolf redirected all of its fury onto us two.
We instantly began to run like chickens, and began to deploy our well practiced kiting setup. Fung began to yell expelatives at the angered beast, and it took very little for the huge gray-black wolf to go after him.
As he began running around, he would try to spin backwards from time to time and unleash an arrow, but he was either missing or barely grazing the beast. I swear I saw metal-sparks fly when one of the arrows hit the wolf’s fur.
My hands were trembling, and I was getting really freaked out and was having trouble nocking my arrows, until I remembered Earth Dad’s saying: “Panicked minds die, calm minds live! FOCUS!”
God dammit it Timmy, is there no fear suppression or bullet time skill among those hidden options of yours?
The moment that specific thought came into my mind, Timmy began screaming back:
Timmy: Your Intuition has unlocked a Hidden System Option.
The [Combat Serenity] Hidden Skill has now been unlocked in your menus.
The skill progress bar has been added to your status screen.
Description:
You can now remain much more calm during combat situations. The more you level this skill, the less jittery you will get when shit really hits the fan!
Timmy: Your Intuition has unlocked a Hidden System Option.
The [Enhance Processing Speed] Hidden Skill has now been unlocked in your menus and is available for purchase.
You must first spend a Skill Point to enable the use of this Skill.
The skill progress bar has been added to your status screen.
Description:
Spend Qi to temporarily boost your Perception and Intelligence. You will be able to absorb and process a lot more information during the same time frame, resulting in something that will look similar to “bullet time” from your point of view.
FUCK. YES YES PURCHASE PURCHASE!
Timmy: You now have 11 Unassigned Skill points left.
ACTIVATE!
Since my “conversations” with Timmy always seemed to somewhat occur at the “speed of thought”, it only took a few milliseconds of real life time for me to unlock that new skill and activate it. As soon as the skill got enabled, I felt a torrent of Qi flood my crown dantian and all of my sensory organs. I could sense everything around me MUCH MUCH clearer, giving me the impression that time itself had slowed down somewhat. I did not waste even a blink, so I drew all of my held arrows and swiftly shot them in sequence straight into the massive wolf.
*Klonk Klonk Khrrst Thunk Klunk Kling Thunk*
Five arrows out of all 7 that I had shot had been deflected by the thing’s metal-like fur, but two arrows had hit true, and it now began to slightly limp, with one arrow stuck in one of its shoulderblades and one in its neck.
As a retaliation, the wolf suddenly jumped in one swift motion, and landed right behind Fung, clamping his jaws right around Fung’s sash. Fung immediately spun around and delivered a roundhouse kick to the beast’s snout, but by doing so ripped both his pants and belt off. His salami was now advertising itself freely to the world, as he kept running around with the wolf on his tail. I had to end this quickly, before my Fungus or his attached Bratwurst got eaten!
Timmy, there has to be some way for bow-wielding adventurers to deal with heavily armored targets. Cough up the skill!
Timmy: Your Intuition has unlocked a Hidden System Option.
The [Piercing Shot] Hidden Skill has now been unlocked in your menus and is available for purchase.
You must first spend a Skill Point to enable the use of this Skill.
The skill progress bar has been added to your status screen.
Description:
Spend Qi to temporarily enhance your arrows with an armor piercing effect. Ignore a certain percent of the target’s armor based on your archery skill vs the target’s active armor and defensive passive skills.
PURCHAAAASE!
Timmy: You now have 10 Unassigned Skill points left.
I instantly summoned another 7 arrows which was my current hold limit directly in the palm of my hand using my spatial ring. Since the arrows would get recalled in the position that they had been in when stored, if I had previously put them away vertically, then they would come back out vertically-aligned once more, allowing me to grasp them directly into the palm of my hand immediately.
I used the new [Piercing Shot] skill with all of my new shots, and instantly felt drained as my dantian got emptied of its Qi. Wow, shooting these things cost a lot of QI!
Fortunately, the skill worked wonders against the enhanced fur and hide of the wolf, and all of the arrows struck true.
*ThThThThThThThunk!*
The wolf immediately got pierced all over his side by my arrows, and suddenly plummeted to the ground with a thud.
It remained there spasming and raging, but would not relent yet. I pumped another 7 more arrows into it, before it wasn’t able to move anymore. Still, the animal kept growling with an absolutely unnatural fury, sporting bloodshot maddened eyes that betrayed a deep insanity.
Fung finally ended the poor thing’s rage with a well placed arrow in the brain.
Timmy: Your Party has slain: [Elder Dire Gray Wolf] level 20.
Timmy: You both have gained Normal Experience, split apart according to the Party Loot Distribution Charter.
Timmy: Current settings: 50-50%, Free for All looting.
"FUUCK! What the hell is this thing doing out here? Why would a monster show up in the safe zone?"
"That’s a monster? But it’s only level 20?!"
"ONLY she says! BAH! I keep forgetting that your common sense is null. A level 20 beast is in no way comparable to a level 20 human. Beasts do not get auto-leveled like humanoids. Beasts kill or feed themselves to level up. So to reach 20, it means that this fucker here (he kicks the dead wolf) has killed a lot of things to get that high. It’s also Qi contaminated. Did you see how it kept raging even after we filled it with arrows? No normal animal does that! It probably ventured into the high-density Qi zones thinking that it might be able to handle it, but it only got Qi contaminated and got turned into a monster. The problem is, why the hell did it show up HERE? It should have died back in the deep forest. We have to report this to the Sect!"
"Yeap, we will. After we loot this fucker. I’m not wasting a fur pelt that can bounce back arrows. And Fungus dear, put some pants on. Your banana is showing."
"Aw sh…" Fung turns all red, then summons a pair of spare pants from his ring.
No need to be ashamed there big fella, you’re pretty well hung down there. That Shi lady doesn’t know what she’s missing!
As we suspended the dire wolf’s corpse from a nearby tree-branch so we could bleed it, another random thought hit me.
Hey Timmy. Where’s the Autoloot bodies option hidden at? There's gotta be some sort of Autoloot or Autoskin option somewhere, no Hero would spend half a day with his hands up a body’s guts just to get one set of materials and meat.
Timmy: Your Intuition has unlocked a Hidden System Option.
The [Autoloot] Hidden Option has now been unlocked in your menus.
Description:
Because you are a lazy ass...cough...I mean SUUUCH a BUUUSY person, the System can now break down the bodies of the foes that you have slain into usable components and automatically store them inside of your inventory if possible.
I also share the discovery with Fungus, and he gets the unlock as well.
[Autoloot] option is now Enabled.
Tap ⊞ for extra options and filters.
⊞
-Loot all Items from body: YES/no
Tap ⊞ for a list of items that should be ignored during auto looting.
-Skin target: YES/no
Tap ⊞ to see a list of creatures that this feature should work on, otherwise this skill will skin even humanoid targets.
-Butcher target: YES/no
Tap ⊞ to see a list of creatures that this feature should work on, otherwise this will break apart even humanoid targets.
-Harvest components from target: YES/no
Tap ⊞ to see a list of creatures that this feature should work on, otherwise this will loot components even from humanoid targets.
The wolf suddenly turned totally black for one split second, then a *THUMPHF* noisy burst release of air came from the body as all of the pieces it was now comprised of began to fall down to the ground in a messy pile of skin, meat and bones.
Timmy: You cannot Autoloot this body because you do not have an inventory container that is currently capable of a remote manipulation and storage feature.
Well, damn. Wait a second, Fung has a ring that most certainly has those options! I should have him try instead.
As soon as Fung walked over the pieces, as all of the “useful” stuff got instantly moved to the insides of his ring.
"Well, that’s fucking convenient! Fungus, you’re on looting duty from now on!"
"Soo… what’s new? HAH!"
I mentioned the problem of what the System considered as “useful”.
In the case of the common wild animals, “useful” was considered to be just about the entire corpse, as far as the Autoloot feature was concerned.
Even the shit that was inside of the intestines of the animals was getting labelled by the System’s way of thinking as “useful”, and was getting its own “square” in the ring display after partitioning, since it could be reused as fertilizer. Of course, we did not want for Fung's ring to get filled with so much misc crap, so I had him deselect stuff like the intestines, the bones, the internal fluids and other useless stuff from the auto looting menu, and left only the stuff that could be used for crafting or cooking on the enabled section.
Which now resulted in the funny outcome that whenever he walked over the body of a fresh kill, the meat, the fur, the fangs or the horns would vanish into thin air because they would get stored inside of the ring, yet left on the ground would remain a shit, blood, bile and gut filled mutilated skeleton.
If we were to somehow get into to combat against other humans, and we would leave the looting options enabled even for humanoids, then I could see Fung walking among the dead bodies of his fallen enemies, with all of the corpses instantly becoming horrifyingly mutilated skeletons of his former foes whenever he passed by. It would make for quite a fear inducing-picture!