Back at the city, they all agree to log off and meet up in an hour. Sen takes care of his needs, then goes and has a short meal with his sister. They agree over the meal that the E ranked core should be sold for F ranked cores, and that they should split them evenly for everyone, as Sen only happened to get the final blow.
While waiting for the time to meet up, Sen goes back online, picking up a little more information about the game. Nobody has succeeded in cultivating a body enhancement skill at this point in time, or at least, if anyone has, they haven’t posted about it, so what exactly they grant you is a mystery.
Eventually, he gets sick of the same three posts being repeated over and over. ‘Why am I sore?’ ‘How do I learn skills’ and ‘powelevel me plz’ are repeated in different words over and over. Sen shuts off the computer, and goes to the capsule. It’s a bit early, but he can just wait in game.
As the arena that comprises his home space changes to the square, he’s impressed by how full the square is. It had quite a few people before, but now it is simply packed. He shoots off a message to everyone in his group saying to meet up in front of the store where they will sell the drops. He squeezes his way through the crowd, and has Tir call him one of the automated vehicles to bring him to the market district.
Once he arrives, he checks his messages, and sees they everyone except Lynna has already logged on and agreed to the meeting place. It isn’t long until Xue and Jennifer arrive in the same vehicle, and Jennifer waves to Sen as Xue just walks over. They wait about five minutes before Lynna arrives.
“Did you know there is a party system?” are the first words out of her mouth.
The group shakes their heads in a negative.
“Well there is. The only thing it does is make it so you all enter the same instance though.” She quickly invites the group to a party, and everyone accepts.
“Tir, why didn’t you tell me about parties?”
“It didn’t seem relevant, parties come into play when you get to instanced dungeons, which are only found at rank E and above.”
Sen sighs, at least there is a valid reason for not informing him. As the group enters the massive gaudy store, they see the number of people coming in and out is significantly greater than the number of people actually in it. It seems that the store is instanced after all. They all get in line, and wait for the short amount of time it takes to get to the front, then sell all of their random loot drops.
Once they have gotten some crystals, they all head over to the energy crystal store, and trade in their base crystals for ones they needed. The E ranked crystal gets all of them three rarer F ranked crystals, and after everyone downs the crystals that they traded for, all the others have gotten their stats up to or above F rank, with a single E rank for both Jennifer and Lynna, while Xue, who had started at F rank in all her stats had gotten both her speed and strength up to E.
Sen has done the most hunting, so with the cores he buys he is able to get his energy stat up to E to match his strength and speed.. They all make sure to save some of their crystals for contribution points, and they soon all hop in an automated vehicle to get over to their respective schools.
Once there, Sen trades in the twenty rank F hobgoblin cores left over from his purchases, getting two thousand contribution points, which isn’t enough for an F ranked skill, though it is enough for a G rank if he wanted to get one. Once he’s done admiring the different skills he can buy in the trading area, he checks the booklet to see if there are any classes on arrays, so that he could find Julie, as he hadn’t added her to his friends list when he met up with her earlier.
Luckily, there is a continuation of the array class he nearly slept through earlier in just fifteen minutes, so he walks over to the location written on the booklet. As he wanders around, he admires the various rock gardens, all of which seem to be arranged in mysterious ways, stones of varying sizes seeming to almost, but not quite form perfect patterns.
He arrives, and finds Julie sitting up front, the only person in the class.
“Hey Julie, I was wondering if you would want to come hunting with my group sometime? We could really use someone who knows how to make arrays.”
“While I appreciate the offer, I can barely say that I know how to make arrays. The system in this game is amazing, and one of the most complicated I’ve seen. All I can do now is make the most basic illusion arrays to stop monsters from seeing you.”
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Sen scratches his chin, feeling a bit awkward. “Well, that’s pretty much what we need, we just need someone to set up something like that for when we need a break.”
Julie looks at him for a moment, before agreeing, and they add each other to their friends list. Sen quickly escapes before the class starts, as he doesn’t want to be put to sleep, and decides to try out one of those rooms with an array to make controlling energy easier. He pays a measly fifty contribution points to get the cheapest one for an hour, simply having to press which room he wants on a computer screen, sets a timer, and takes out his bones like air skillbook to look through. He quickly turns to the page, wondering why they’d gone with an actual book rather than a digital version, and soon finds the part showing the flow of energy in the spine.
Once he gets there, he puts his consciousness to sensing the flow of energy in his body, and tries to make it flow in the same pattern as is shown on the book. His energy seems to be easier to control, and his sensing of it seems to be more clear than ever before. He feels he can control the most minute of changes, though his copying of the pattern is only going slightly faster as a whole.
His wondering about how much the better rooms would help is cut off as his distraction causes a mistake in the pattern he’s trying to create, and he goes back to focusing on the flow of energy, slowly losing himself in the small variations, whorls, flows, and eddies of the energy he’s trying to copy.
He feels he’s getting quite close to getting it when his alarm goes off, and rather than giving up, he growls, pays for another four hours in the room, and goes right back to where he left off. Time seems to have no meaning as he modifies the flow, and after a while, the flow of energy seems to snap into place, and his sense of time comes back as he stops changing things.
Checking the time, he notices that it’s been working on it for three hours. When he starts moving, he instantly stops. He can feel the air flowing around him. Pushing out the sense that he shouldn’t have, he tries to push at the air with his mind, and it quickly flows away from his mental touch. Moving his hand up, he gives the air another mental push, and he can feel the air moving, caressing his palm.
He grins. While he won’t be able to do something as exaggerated as a wind blade, with this he can easily reduce any air resistance, speeding up both his movement and sword swings. Deciding to spend the last bit of time he has in the room practicing, his first step makes him feel just a slightly bit off until he realizes that his weight has actually decreased by a bit.
It only takes him a minute or so to adjust however, and he has fun using the wind to try and push him along in the direction he’s moving, though with the little control he has he’s not able to speed himself up, just decrease the wind resistance by a bit. He’s having fun when he starts to get light headed, and he notices that his energy had decreased by a large margin, so he’s forced to stop and leave.
Going out of the room, this time he notes that his sense for his energy fades a significant amount. “So I thought you said it would take a week to finish the first bone in the bones like air?”
“That is the average. Your time places you within the top three percent, even accounting for using the array to assist you.”
Sen frowns, he doesn’t want to be the top three percent, he wants to be all the way at the top. He’ll just have to rely on his swordsmanship to surpass those who are better at learning skills it seems. He pats the sword hanging on his shoulders, then opens up the handbook he got when he joined, he should probably learn a skill or two from the free classes.
He settles on one because it starts in thirty minutes, giving him time to log off and handle his real body before it starts. Once he gets back in game, he walks on the meandering paths through the rock gardens, soon arriving at the classroom, which unlike the arrays class, is almost entirely packed full of people.
He’s stuck getting a seat at the back, and sits down to wait for the lecture to start.
“The skill I am about to show you is called weight of the mountain. It’s a skill that empowers your blow to crush any resistance offered. While it is a G ranked skill, if used by a high level user, it can create an amazing amount of force.” The lecturer waves his hand, and a massive block of granite appears on the stage he’s standing on. The very fit looking lecturer takes out a sword larger than Sen’s, raises it overhead, and lets out a shout as he smashes it towards the block of stone.
An image of a mountain seems to materialize over the sword as it moves, and when it collides with the granite, an earth shattering sound appears, an explosion of gravel coming from where the stone used to be. The fragments of stone that used to be a large granite block are stopped by some sort of energy field at the edges of the stage, losing their momentum and falling to the ground.
“This is the large success stage of weight of the mountain. At this stage, an image of a mountain will overlay your weapon, increasing the power of your strike proportional to the size of the image. To learn it to this point requires both an excellent mental image, and excellent energy control, though almost anyone can learn it to the small success stage.” The man then waves his hand, and on everyone’s desk appears a paper showing a diagram of how the energy has to flow. The diagram almost looks like a mountain range, sharp peaks of energy with wide bases, the flow of the energy being entirely stable, none of the variations in speed that Bones Like Wind had.
It’s much simpler than bones like wind as well, only repeating the same pattern up the arms and into the sword itself, not being too particular about where exactly in the sword and arm the energy has to be flowing, though he is sure it has to be much more precise for the higher levels of it.
Everyone files out of the classroom with their papers in their hands, and head over to the training rooms, where people start to disappear into their own instances to practice. The first test Sen does does absolutely nothing, and he refines the flow of energy to try and match the pattern better. He repeats this for about a half an hour, trying to hold the image of a mountain falling with his blade as he patterns his energy, and finally he gets a blow which rather than sinking a bit into the ridiculously tough training dummy, sinks halfway into it, while utterly crushing the outside of it.
Sen gins, it seems he finally reached the small success stage. Looking around, he sees that no one else has succeeded yet except for one very small boy. Sen shrugs, he’s not going to be the best with skills, so he’s going to be the best with his swordsmanship. He practices the weight of the mountain skill a couple more times to make sure he remembers it, then sends a message to the group to see if they want to meet up, this time including Julie.
Unfortunately, they all reply that they’re not available for a while, practicing skills, and the only one who wants to meet up is Xue, to fight him in the arena. Sen shrugs, that sounds like a plan. He’ll get to learn how the organized PVP works in this game, and have some fun while he’s at it.