Your body has transcended its natural limits.
62 CELESTIAL ESSENCE CONSOLIDATED.
Your mind has transcended its natural limits.
62 CELESTIAL ESSENCE CONSOLIDATED.
Your spirit has transcended its natural limits.
62 CELESTIAL ESSENCE CONSOLIDATED.
Jun was getting really fucking tired of being ambushed.
More specifically, he was just really fucking tired in general.
That had to have been the fourteenth ambush in half as many hours, and by now, he was feeling thoroughly spent. And not just physically or emotionally either. He’d been pushing his mantra to the very limits of his capabilities nonstop, ever since the very first surprise engagement.
Apparently, you couldn’t just do something like that without incurring certain debilitating costs in return. Not at his level of advancement anyway.
His head was, quite literally, killing him, seeing as the pulsing migraines were so intense at times that thinking became an absolute chore.
Not something you wanted to be actively grappling with whilst in the middle of a life-or-death struggle, believe it or not. He truly felt as though, if he had to conceive one more of those infernal blade cyclones, his brain would actually explode from the strain.
And his body hadn’t gone unscathed in the repeated clashes either.
He was a bruised, torn, and pulverized mess.
His body so stiff in places that it was a genuine struggle to even move at times. It had gotten to the point that he’d resorted to letting his enemies come to him in the last few fights, because just the thought of putting in any more effort than he absolutely had to, made his stomach churn with nausea.
Even the mending pills and tonics, he was finding, could only do so much. Not to mention his clothes, which were basically just shredded rags at this point. Not that it really mattered so much down here. Because really, who was going to judge him? The rats?
Ivory, for her part, wasn’t doing much better.
Her abilities having taken a far greater toll on her mentally than his own abilities’ backlash and any number of physical wounds he’d received combined. Gone was the bubbly companion of only a few hours before. Now, in her place lay a limp, drained husk whose every breath was a raggedly labored affair—her skin an ominous sickly grey where it’d previously been a pristine, alabaster white.
It might’ve been less concerning if she had a way to even marginally recover after each high paced engagement, but, as it was, she only appeared to be getting worse.
Now, that wasn’t to say that they’d gained nothing from their ordeal. His own personal advancements having helped considerably in easing the burden Ivory bore in just keeping him alive.
First, in terms of beast cores alone he had to have collected upwards of a hundred and fifty of the things. It was to the point that he was genuinely concerned he’d reach his dimensional bags weight limit pretty soon if he didn’t find somewhere to deal with them all.
More importantly though, while a hundred odd beast cores weren’t anything to sneeze at, it still palled in comparison to the progress he’d made in his cultivation.
*Ding!*
Congratulations!
Your Mantra [Sword Slash] (Good Quality) has evolved.
[Sword Slash] (Good Quality) has become:
[Sword Cyclone] (Great Quality) +10 resonance.
*Ding!*
Congratulations!
Your resonance pillar has ascended.
Advanced from |Blinded Sapling| [20 of 20] to |Aged Stone| [2 of 30].
The path is as inscrutable as ever, though time brings with it its own kind of wisdom. You idle and contemplate. Your entire world contained within a small garden.
Your insight has transcended its natural limits.
250 CELESTIAL ESSENCE CONSOLIDATED.
Name: Beckonfrost Zhaoshen Junwei
Race: Human
Cultivation: Spirit Condensation Realm: 7th Stage
Bloodline: NOT APPLICABLE
Titles: Merchant of Promise, Fledgeling Magnate, Budding Sage
Resonance Pillar: Aged Stone [2 of 30]
Cultivated Body: NOT APPLICABLE
Body: 0 Stars (2,539 Celestial Essence)
Mind: 0 Stars (2,539 Celestial Essence)
Spirit: 0 Stars (2,149 Celestial Essence)
Insight: 0 Stars (541 Celestial Essence)
Just like the last time, it hadn’t been some great epiphany or revelation that’d led him to make this breakthrough in understanding.
It couldn’t have been, since his mind had been rather occupied at the time with the simple act of staying alive. It’d been during one of the previous engagements, while being harried by an especially persistent rat-kin—in what had honestly been one of the toughest fights thus far—that he’d come to a sudden, heart stopping realization.
Not because of how brilliantly inspired of a notion it was, but because of how suicidally dense he’d been up until that point. Ultimately leaving him with but a single pertinent question. That question being:
Why in the name of the emperor was he only using his hands?
Sure, it made sense in the context of a fighting style, or some sort of combat-oriented approach, but he was no great warrior. He didn’t have years' worth of experience to rely on in his fights. Stances, fighting forms, and techniques were entirely foreign to him.
In fact, he strongly believed that the only reason he’d survived as long as he had, was due entirely to the imparted vision, the near constant influx of celestial essence, and the circulation method he’d stumbled upon. That, and Ivory’s continued assistance, of course. Seriously, the number of times she’d pulled his rear out of the fire, he didn’t know if he could have survived this long without her.
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If it weren’t for those four things, he had no doubts whatsoever that he would’ve died a long time ago in these gods' forsaken caves.
Getting back on topic, what reason was there for him to adhere to the conventional methods of fighting, if it wasn’t a contest he was likely to win? And if he couldn’t out-skill his opponents outright, could he not put them off their guard by being entirely unconventional instead?
He’d long since learned how to condense and release multiple ruby red blades at once, and it was a process utterly removed from any particular origin so far as he could tell.
What was, therefore, stopping him from releasing said blades from anywhere on his body? His stubborn refusal to think outside of the box, that was what. He’d first needed to break himself out of the insidious mindset that, “You would use your hands to swing an actual blade, so any aura blade you create has to originate from your hands.”
Once he’d finally gotten over that bad habit, then learned to actively manipulate the blades once they’d already been formed—far easier than it sounded, seeing as, more and more, his abilities were beginning to feel like extensions of himself—the notification of his mantra’s evolution had appeared.
It didn’t make a lot of sense to him—that he was essentially being rewarded for correcting his own innate stupidity—but hey, he wasn’t complaining. In all honesty he’d likely need all the help he could get if he was to have any chance of escaping this gauntlet alive.
In other news, or, he supposed, lack thereof, he’d still yet to figure out what advancing his resonance stage did for him exactly. He was apparently an aged stone now, though he couldn’t really say he felt all that much different compared to before. In any case, the way things were going, he’d passively grow his resonance as he progressed, so whether it ultimately proved fruitful or not should become apparent the further he advanced.
Which brought him to yet another worry he’d been grappling with.
Simply put, his cutting mantra just wasn’t cutting it anymore.
After facing off against a wide range of powerful opponents, he’d come to realize that it wasn’t the fix all solution he’d once believed it to be. Sure, his mantras were plenty powerful, especially after the upgrade he’d received, but they weren’t the solution to every problem. Case in point, the two bruisers that’d just thrown him around like a rag doll.
And while his cyclones had eviscerated their auras in the end, he hadn’t been able to do much more than deliver shallow cuts when he wasn’t putting the whole of his intent into a single sword slash. Then, when push eventually came to shove, he’d been forced to rely on raw attributes and his circulation method to just barely rebuff their attacks—nearly breaking himself between the two in the process.
He couldn’t help but think that if he too had the concept of crushing, fights like those would become child’s play.
With a groan, Jun staggered over toward each of the steaming corpses, both from the group he’d just fought and the one that’d come before. Gathering up all the heads was still an excruciating chore, though he never even considered leaving them behind. He had plans for them after all.
When he was finally finished with his grisly task, despite every fiber of his being screaming in protest, he turned away from the gruesome sight, made sure Ivory was nice and secure in the crook of his arm, and limped his way towards what he could only hope was salvation.
The strange structure Ivory had spotted ahead a few hours back.
Ever since entering this impossible space, he hadn’t seen heads nor tails of an end to the vastness. It’d just seemed to go on and on indefinitely. Though to his great relief, his fears of an infinite cavern expanse turned out to be unfounded. By the soft glow of his system screens, he caught sight of what he first pegged as a natural phenomenon. A steep, practically vertical cliff face that could only have been a feature of the cave system, he thought.
The closer he approached, however, the less sure of that he became. Until he was practically on top of the thing. It took him a full thirty minutes to travel from one part of the grand edifice to the other, and by then it was undeniable. The smooth stone blocks stacked atop one another? The intricate and ornate spiral carvings lining every inch of masonry—wherever the black marble wasn’t chipped, missing, or polished smooth by the passage of time that was.
It was a wall.
A massive wall hemmed in by stone monoliths of truly prodigious proportions, given that his head didn’t even crest the smallest toe on the statues’ sandal-clad feet.
While truly colossal in scale, and holding an intangible sort of weight to it, the wall itself wasn’t a particularly well kept bastion. Great spiderweb cracks dug deep fissures into the stonework—likely hairline if one were to take the full scale of the structure into consideration, while still wide enough for five men to walk abreast from his relatively puny perspective. An ancient city for giants apparently.
For the next half hour Jun explored what turned out to be, in truth, a city made for, and most likely by, giants. As far as he could tell it was as massive in its scope as it was in scale. But most peculiarly, those of gigantic descent didn’t seem to have been the only denizens of the fortress city.
The signs were subtle yet prevalent once you knew to look. Indications that far smaller residents had once walked these streets. Recesses hollowed into the stone revealed human sized double doors and gaping tunnel entrances. Walkways were burrowed directly into the street like long, winding trenches that seemed to go on indefinitely.
Like small veins beneath the real foot traffic of the city.
Could a species humanlike in stature really have coincided with these apparent behemoths? Jun couldn’t even begin to imagine what that must’ve been like. People taking up the role of small rodents in this impossible city’s metropolitan ecosystem. Living entire lives behind residential walls and scurrying underfoot beneath the heels of giants. How had they avoided being squished all the time?
Looking around at the desolate, uninhabited place, he figured that, perhaps, they hadn’t.
Ultimately it wasn’t really any of his business, and it wasn’t as if thinking on it further would supply any real answers. He’d long since given up on any hopes of retrieving his breathing manual. He just wanted to get to the surface as soon as humanly possible.
So far, since approaching, and then entering the city, he hadn’t come across another ambush or even seen one of the big furry creatures in passing. It was a nice little break, though it wasn’t a change of pace he’d trust his life to. Which was why he was seeking out someplace to hide away for a while and recover.
Picking the first human sized door at random, he entered to find a dust covered space that, while huge compared to his own family's estate, was not nearly as unfathomable as the rest of the city as a whole. He was standing in the entrance hall of what appeared to be a large mansion.
The floor tiles were checkered and there were still crooked frames on the walls—though any paintings they might’ve contained had either been stolen or had long since rotted away. The entrance hall and conjoining rooms were something of a mess—a moment of turmoil and clear distress somehow preserved in a strange, timeless stasis.
Items were strewn everywhere, and furniture was toppled as if knocked over in a hurry. There were large divots in the stone, craters pocked the floor, and burn marks blackened many of the walls and ceiling—indicating whatever evacuation, or extinction event had happened here, had in no way been peaceful. No bodies though… Or skeletons he supposed.
How long did it take for bones to decompose? Wait, do they decompose? Or do they just stay all… bony.
Cautiously Jun made his way through the first floor—the occasional shorn half of a discarded tome turning to powder beneath the weight of his tread. Finally, after a roundabout circuit throughout the main rooms, he found the grand staircase, and took them two at a time.
After his cursory sweep, he’d concluded that the place was as deserted as the rest of the forgotten city. That and if he didn’t find a place to rest soon, he might be forced to pick any old spot in the open and take his chances.
He limped down wide hallways—throwing open doors at random.
Those that hadn’t already fallen completely off their hinges. He was never met with anything that seemed appropriate. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t just pick one and be done, but he felt that he could do better than a few rotten blankets covering half decayed furniture. And then, fifteen or so doors in, he heard it.
The burbling sounds of running water.
After hours spent walking through a near endless expanse, and then a dead city where he only really had his footsteps as company, the reassuring sounds of nature were almost eerie in their normality. Still, it didn’t stop him from rushing towards the noise as best as his broken body would allow.
Eventually leading him to round a corner onto a hallway ending in ornate double doors. Reaching them, he pushed one open—eliciting a prolonged creak. On the other side he was met with a sight that nearly took his breath away.
In sharp contrast to the dead city and the cave system beyond, this room smelled almost overpoweringly of life. It was a bathhouse, though one unlike any he’d ever seen.
A large pool of clear blue water was fed by a cascade of waterfalls that flowed down from the natural rock formations making up the furthest wall. The waterfalls’ true origins obscured from his vantage by the overgrown plant life practically dominating the area.
Plants that had once likely been well maintained or even purely decorative, had taken over the space in the best way imaginable, creating a miniature oasis in this otherwise desolate wasteland—the whole scene brightly lit by luminous crystals imbedded in the walls and ceiling.
The suffused white light somehow serving to brighten the very atmosphere itself as it bounced from craggy rock walls, to fluted columns. From reclining marble statues onto sparkling azure water. Which in turn, returned said light onto the tree canopies above, in ever shifting highlights that rippled—as if with a life of their own.
Just staring at the scene brought him a sense of tranquility. To the point that he felt his eyelids begin to droop as the stress of the past few days compounded all at once.
Before he could pass out then and there, however, Jun shed his filthy rags, set an unconscious Ivory down on the water's edge, then dove headfirst into the pool of the oasis.
The water hit him like a cold slap—brisk, though not unpleasantly so. Instantly a cloud of filth bloomed out from his body, only to be swept away by invisible currents. With a gasp, he breached the crystalline surface and shook himself like a wet dog.
Swimming backwards until he sat snug against the rim of the pool—on an underwater shelf made for that very purpose—rationally he was aware he should probably wash himself off more thoroughly before finding a proper place to bed for the night.
But, before he could even finish that thought, he had already fallen into a deep and dreamless slumber.