As we kept walking down the road towards our destination, I could still see Fungus unconsciously try and scratch his ear that we had recently cut off and then regrown with one of my Regeneration pills, as well as fidgeting with his left-hand fingers and walk without putting too much weight on his left foot, as the freshly-grown nerves were still not functioning at their full capacity, leaving him with a persistent sensation of tingling. Still, it was a small price to pay if we could manage to get the Ming Imperials off our backs permanently, since the fewer groups we would have to deal with in the future, the better it would be for our sanity.
After we had left the makeshift cave a few days ago, I had asked both Carmine and Xibei why they kept following us, because they were not directly involved with any of our trouble, yet Xibei had simply said that it would be below his Bard status to ignore such a grand adventure that lay before him and Carmine had told us that she just wanted to get to the nearest city with an Adventurer’s Guild to ask about the wellbeing of her family, but because she was clueless about the Eastern World altogether, she was just following us for the time being, as we were the only friendly people she knew inside of this country.
When we had arrived a few days ago at a couple of small towns further down the road which did not have an Adventurer’s Guild Headquarters inside of them, I had noticed Fung sneak off into the night together with little Will-E which still held Carmine’s Pickaxe, and then come back covered in dirt a few hours later while wearing a huge grin on his face, as he had seemingly uprooted entire warehouses of luxury goods belonging to the Ming Imperials and stored them inside Will-E’s Core which was significantly larger in size, and could swallow the whole buildings intact.
The reason he did that was to acquire “normal” goods that we could peddle with the non-cultivator populace, as none of us had any gold on ourselves anymore, since all we ever carried inside our rings were spirit stones as a currency, and trading those would make us look suspicious, since Monks were supposed to be broke-ass paupers that only had enough loot to subsist from one day to another. It is why nobody ever bothered to attack any Monks with the intent to steal, since even the dumbest thief knew that Monks did not have anything on them worth a damn as a rule of thumb.
We were also surprised when Mr. Nobi had shown up out of nowhere and had started chasing after us, as we became afraid that we were being tracked again by our enemies, but Nobi had reassured us that it was not the case, and that he was the only person that would ever be able to find us because he was the only one in the possession of a blood-jade token that was attuned to Fung’s blood-signature, a token that always pointed towards Fung’s location like a compass, making it a Fungpass. Not even the Imperials had such an item, since it had been given by Fung to Nobi personally, as a sign of confidence in the bodyguard’s loyalty and abilities.
Since he was already present, we had decided to deploy the whole “Fung is dead” strategy for fooling the Imperials, and also apologise to the Tai Clan for the missing warehouses. Cutting Fung into pieces had been quite a painful experience for both us people doing the chopping and the boy himself, but we had all deemed it necessary for the ruse to look authentic. After we had gimped Fung, I had fed him an improved version of the Regeneration Pill that I had cooked up, which had been reduced to a single month-worth of cooldown Pill Poison instead of 1 year like the previous one, to grow back the boy’s missing body parts. We had then packed the sheared-off giblets into some slow-melting ice that had been conjured by Lingfeng, filled a chest with high-purity Grand spirit stones, and then told Nobi to deliver the package to the Tai’s Clan Head as privately as possible.
After Nobi had left, we had dumped the empty warehouse buildings inside some nearby forest-clearings, while surrounding the wreckage with what looked like Demonic Summoning Rituals painted in Immortal Rooster blood, thus shifting the blame for the theft of the warehouses on the demoniac’s heads, as they were known to cause such catastrophes, and then leaving the authorities oblivious about our involvement.
As we kept traveling towards the next town that actually had an Adventurer’s Guild Headquarters inside of it, I had decided to fill my time with something useful, as I tried to use my astral projection that I had left within the Heavenly Library to maybe do some light reading, yet the moment I activated it, I fell face-first onto the road as all of my balance and muscle-feedback sensations got jumbled up, causing me to fall like an idiot.
It took me quite a little bit of time after the fall to adjust to the new sensations flooding the insides of my head, since splitting my mind's focus between walking in a straight line with my real body which was travelling down the road and also wandering throughout the library with my astral-projection's secondary body had been quite a daunting task to get accustomed to, because my mind literally existed in two places at once while still feeling like the same person, making everything seem insanely confusing. In the end, I had been forced to “train my brain” to treat all of the secondary body's limbs as “extra appendages”, so that the commands they were receiving would not overlap with the ones going to my real hands and legs. If you have ever tried imagining yourself having four hands and four legs, then you would get the general idea about how the sensation felt.
Training my brain to handle an “extra body” had taken me quite a few days, which had included certain amount of unfortunate periods when I had looked like I had gone bonkers, as I kept waving my hands and my legs into the air like a crazy person, to try and separate the inputs that were going towards the real hands from the ones that were going into the astral projection, and I had also endured certain periods where I would literally crawl like a worm across the floor with either the real body or the astral one after I would bump into random things and then fall down like a toddler, but I knew that the skill would be insanely valuable to me in the future, so it was worth to put up with all of the suffering and the grinding for now. The other guys in my group weren't better off either, since all of us had the same access pattern to our astral projections, and they were also struggling with separating their real body away from their astral one, making us all look like some insane circus act whenever we stopped to rest by the side of the road and attempted to connect to the Library.
Personally, I was mostly having problems with being focused on more than one task at the same time. I had tried to do two things concurrently, one with my real body and one with my astral projection, but I could only fumble with both actions, as the only thing that I was able to do at the moment was to switch my attention from one body to the next really fast, like alt-tabbing from one window to another continuously on a PC.
I wasn't really that surprised about the poor results, since the astral projection body’s execution of the instructions was still dependent on my actual physical brain together with the execution performed by my real body, hence the neuronal-pathway conflicts, the jumbled up information and messy outcomes. If I really wanted to perform two separate things at the same time, then I would need to grow an "extra brain" inside of that astral projection through some unknown method that would allow me to execute certain tasks independently from the main brain, and I had no idea how to do that yet. Still, having the access to all of the information stored within the Heavenly Library had proven to be an extraordinary boon to my intellectual growth, as I had actually begun to learn some of the spells from my priority list.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Pre-written “System-Made” spells that can be learned from books were weird things. In truth, they were just simplified constructs of Intent that has been confined within certain parameters. It felt almost like coding, because if you were to break down the spells into their logical sub-components, they began to look similar to computer programming, as they were filled with “variables” and “if-then” clauses that made the spells behave in a predictable manner. Once I knew a spell, I would need to construct the path of manifestation for it onto my spiritual root-branches which would become the spell-circuit that the Qi would follow when expelled from the body. After I had established a certain desired-outcome “logic” within the spell circuit, the white Qi would then flood the branch-pathway, and just like an electric current running through a circuit board, it would become changed and twisted into the form that I desired it to be before being either expelled out of the body in case of the offensive spells or reinforcing my internal structures in case of the defensive or healing spells as a result. The spell “circuits” were capable of changing even the nature of the Qi that was running through them, as you could have White Qi as the input on one side and then have Fire Qi come out of the other end, or any other variant of Qi for that matter, as the White Qi could simply become anything else, since it was originally attributeless. This is why elemental-attuned cultivators had certain advantages over “normal” cultivators when it came to their elemental spells, because they would only need to fuel their spells with their already-attuned Qi and not require a “converter circuit” anymore, which would allow for something else to be added to the spell in place of the converter, like for example a power amplification circuit that made the spell stronger for the same exact Qi cost.
Of course, if I ever so desired, I could have attempted to even “program” my own spells from scratch, but it was an extremely risky endeavour which was simply just not worth the suffering, since if I had enough knowledge at hand from many other spells, I would simply be able to just copy-paste snippets of “code” from inside of “old” spells that were already proven to work properly in real life, and then create a new and structurally-sound spell that would not blow up in my face when used, because it relied on the wisdom of its predecessors to avoid any pointless risks.
Still, learning how to understand "Spell Code" and the inputs and outputs required for it to work properly was out of my reach for the moment, as the most I could do was barely understand the basic functions of the spells I was reading, but at least I had learned that it was not an impossible task. Custom spells, here I come! At least, someday into the future…
For now, the only spell that I had bothered to learn and had actually inscribed onto one of my branch-tentacles was a Regeneration spell which came in the form of a heal-over-time effect that persisted for about 15 seconds each time it was cast, but the amount that it could heal each “tick” was rather small, allowing for only superficial wounds to get healed even if the whole duration passed. The spell could not help with regrowing limbs, but it would stop the bleeding in case of a missing part of the body. Still, it was decently cheap to cast when it came to the Qi expenditure, and I could just simply keep on re-applying it to my allies or myself over and over until fully healed, at least from a HP point of view, if not bodily integrity.
I have to remind you that they were two different things, as Hit Points referred to the amount of punishment that a person could take before getting knocked unconscious, and bodily integrity referred to how structurally sound the physical body actually remained. For example, you could deplete somebody's whole HP with a single well-placed chair to the head just like Fungus had done to Jin at the Hall of Medicine, but still have the idiot remain mostly intact from a bodily integrity point of view, since Jin did not have any missing components after the chair had struck except maybe for a few missing strands of hair and a little bit of blood loss.
On the other hand, you could also have a warrior that was permanently missing a hand for example, which would signify the loss of about 9-10% of his bodily integrity, but would still remain at 100% HP if people kept healing him, as they would not allow the pain of the missing limb to affect his future actions, especially if everything was happening in the middle of combat.
The regeneration spell that I had learnt did both things at the same time, as it decreased the pain and the mental strain felt by the victim of any harm by recovering their lost HP, but also did some minor repairs to the actual body as it stopped any bleeding and closed most superficial wounds. If left running for long enough, and if the “deep wounds” of the patient were not critical enough to endanger the life of the victim, it could even perform a full heal of the body's integrity as long as there weren't any missing major chunks, like for example fully heal a deep stab wound to the gut, arms or legs without any subsequent issues.
Still, even as wonderful as my new-found Regeneration spell seemed to be, I also wanted to have a powerful instant heal at hand that would perform immediate Major Repairs to the internal organs, even if the Qi cost would be prohibitive.
Unfortunately, I had not found the proper book for such a thing yet, as most of the healing spells I had encountered were constructed in the heal-over-time style, and basically did kind-of-the-same-thing as my Regeneration spell, give or take a few points or perks. The main reason that I had chosen to learn this specific variation of a Regeneration spell out of them all was because it had the ability affect remote targets at a rather large distance, which was something absolutely mandatory to have inside the chaos of a combat field, where there's no way for a healer to afford to run from one friendly target to another just to simply lay their hands on their bodies for a healing spell recast.
I say unfortunately because the Library did not seem to have any sort of automated indexing system, at least not one that I could find, since that might have actually been the real job of the Automaton Boss that we had blown up at the entrance, so I was forced to literally pick up each and every book or scroll away from their shelves and check the contents to see if the spells contained within were in any fashion compatible to what I needed them to be, which proved to be quite a time-consuming endeavour, even while using the instant-reading-speed skill.
There was an immense bonus to doing all of this though, because my Intellect attribute would get raised by a little bit each time I would read one of the books, since my knowledge sub-attribute kept increasing with each and every new Tome that I retained, with also very minor gains to comprehension and wisdom coming from the sides, when I was actually able to understand what the books I was reading were trying to depict. Timmy had been right to warn me about the differences between rote memorization of a text, which is exactly what the Skill was doing, and the actual understanding of the wisdom contained within the words. While I would retain forever the perfect form of the text inside of my head when the Skill activated, it did not instantly create any logical neuronal pathways or connections that would associate the contents of the text with other memories that were similar in nature that I already possessed, like a regular learning session would do. Those would only be created after I would spend the time to re-parse and contemplate upon the wisdom of the words contained within the text, as in taking-my-sweet-ass-time to understand what the authors had wanted to say in the first place inside of the books or scrolls