Coughing my lungs out, and spitting black blood, that's how my day started. A few seconds of being inside the Noxious Swamp was rather dangerous to anyone alive.
I barely looked around in surprise, as a nearby mountain also exploded in a huge volcanic eruption, but I didn't wait for the sound of the explosion to reach me, and instead shifted my location inside my pocket dimension called Qian Yuan's Treasure Vault, worth 40 CYOA coins.
Here, a large hallway with thousands of walkways lead to 4096 doors, and each of those doors lead to a storage vault filled with treasures, anything from pills and herb gardens, and up to rare materials that a Divine cultivator might need to craft a rare item.
I just stumbled towards the pill shelves and searched for a detoxifying pill.
'Heavenly Spirit Clear Pill, used to cleanse decay qi. Worth 30000 spirit stones.' my special Discerning Eyes skill located on a distant shelf, so I dragged myself to open that green porcelain bottle and ingest a single pill. A staple of xianxia novels, my eye skill could analyze and discern anything, providing not only the name and function of an item, but also their sell value at an auction house.
As the pill coursed through my veins and meridians, I sat down on the floor to reflect of my poor life choices. Yes, gaining 30 more points in the CYOA from the Noxious Swamp filled with decay qi seemed like a good idea at the time, just like the active volcano location that also added 20 more points.
Those points will allow me to grow stronger and obtain more good perks. But right now, I was a prisoner of my own making, locked inside a pocket dimension while hot magma and pyroclastic ash covered my dimensional shift point.
As a meager 2nd level Artisan in the Houtian Realm, I had more skills and perks as well as precious items than anyone alive in the world, except some old monster that ate suns and dragons. On the other hand, a Houtian cultivator was still mostly mortal, and even at the 10th level he would only live for 200 years, if he was careful.
Thus, my expensive 50 coins Heavengaze Tower would be mostly useless right now. Increasing time flow by 1000 times would only make me die that much faster.
As the Clear Pill worked its way through my body, another perk shined, the one called Body of the Reaction God. This new body of mine had two important properties, one obtaining three times the rewards from any pill or material ingested for cultivation, the other was to eliminate drawbacks such as toxic accumulation and plaque buildup in my meridians. Basically, I now had the body of a spirit beast, but was still human.
I would have survived the minute exposure to the Noxious Swamp even without the Clear Pill, but I wasn't about to start taking chances, more than I already had.
Plan A, cultivate to the limit of my Basic Cultivation Techniques, and reach the next Realm called Xiantian. More strength was always good, as would the extra lifespan I would gain. I decided to start my adventure young, as to benefit from more lifespan and brain plasticity to adapt faster. Thus, my body was now barely 6 years old.
My Artisan background told me the children in cultivator clans would begin their cultivation around the same age, or maybe even sooner. In some ways, this a good thing as martial exercise and cultivation sutras would be easier to learn.
At the same time, give dumb kids the power to blow up houses with a punch, and they would abuse it. Mortals lived in terror of another Young Master passing by and murdering dozens of people for not reason. And things only got worse as the little monsters grew up, since cultivator clans and sects only cared by reputation and face, instead of educating their disciples properly.
My Xianxia Protagonist perk also ensured I received a good dose of cultivation realism, becoming an orphan after my Yuan Artisan clan from the Stillwater Village was murdered over a Young Master refusing to pay for his new toy. Having an adult mind inside my young body helped keep emotions under control, since my new family would be doomed anyway, sooner or later. Can't have a Protagonist without a bloody revenge story, can we?
My white cultivator robes were starting to disintegrate from the decay qi, so I took them off and burned them over some Everburning Coals from a vault. Like all my artifacts, the robes would re-appear a week later if lost or destroyed, which was quite a nice quality of life perk from the CYOA.
The chest of self-replenishing Spirit Feast would keep me fed and help my cultivation as well, while a small bag of spirit stones would be enough to fuel my cultivation for the rest of my life, as the stones would increase in grade and quantity as my cultivation realm grew. Not something very important right now, but at some point Immortal Crystals would become too expensive to buy, even with the resources in my treasure vault.
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Quan Yuan had collected thousands of rare materials, but most of them would only be useful up to Divine Realm, and mostly by blacksmiths and Formation Masters. There were only 10 vaults for pills, and 10 more with herb gardens, so it seemed the creator of this pocket dimension wasn't very interested in Pill Refining.
I began exploring the treasure vault and collecting samples from every item and material in my infinite-space ring, which was in itself a very precious artifact. Infinite is a big number, in case you didn't know. Not only infinite but lasting for eternity and unbreakable. Also keeping the things in temporal stasis inside, useful right now to preserve pills and herbs, but later it would be even more important.
I also picked the Blacksmithing and Formation skills in my build, and the free Discerning eyes skill. So, trust me when I tell you, making another Spatial Ring like mine, it was completely impossible for a mere Divine Realm cultivator. I doubted that any of my CYOA artifacts had an equivalent in the outside world.
None of my other artifacts had these attributes, as they could break and store a limited quantity. It gave me a goal to reach, the damn ring. But later.
For now, plan A. The Heaven Basin secret realm would open in 3 years, and I should try to become strong enough, to profit when it did.
Thus, I went to search inside the pill vault for Essence Gathering pills and Body Transformation pills, as well as the weakest Soul Forging pill I could find. Pills were not strictly necessary, and I could use raw herbs instead with my special body, but this body was still fragile like a child. Best not abuse it too much, for now.
A routine of meditation, physical exercise and qi gathering cultivation began the next day, and for three months I persevered until I reached the 3rd level of Houtian with all three cultivation methods for qi, body and soul. It wasn't anything big and spectacular, but it was progress. The CYOA did say I would start with an above-average talent, and my perks would expand on that, most importantly the perks of Bewildering Brilliance and the Xianxia Protagonist.
The Brilliance made me learn everything much faster, and it also made my body keep up with my insights. I wasn't in a hurry though, as my rate of growth was sufficient to reach Xiantian in 3 years.
And so it went, day after day and practice after practice. A normal child would have got bored or failed to keep the routine, but I did have my adult mind and the perk of Unbreakable Will. It was a crucial perk though, much like my unbreakable ring, my mind will never falter, and allow me to ignore pain or wounds. It wasn't that I didn't get muscle strains or bone drilling pain when punching a plate of metal. Instead I could simply ignore that pain and keep going.
I waited to reach the 5th level of Houtian before adding combat techniques into my training routine, not that Houtian techniques were very complicated anyway. I just didn't want to damage my meridians before they were fully grown. Spiritual organs like meridians or the dantian core, and other such as the Dao Heart were located inside the body, but also inside the spiritual body.
As a Houtian cultivator I didn't have yet my dantian core, only a node of meridians that distributed qi inside my body like the heart did with blood.
This made external qi manifestations like fire and ice be very tiring and damaging to the meridians, so I kept my combat training at minimum.
At 8 years old and the 8th level of Houtian, I began a few blacksmithing projects, things like a helmet, a shield and a spear, crafted from the lightest materials I could find in the treasury. Six Vein Balsa Wood for example, or a Black Iron Eagle feather, for my spear.
My 150 cms tall shield still weighed over 30 kilograms, and the spear over 10 kilos, despite using these light materials. I couldn't even lift most materials in the vault, while stuff like the famous Six-Yang Crimson Iron was so heavy it formed it own gravity field. My ring could still pick up a beam of Crimson Iron and store inside the ring, which may become important later.
Anyway, about 2 years and a half after I arrived in this world, I reached the 10th level of Houtian and began preparing for my first realm ascension.
In general, if someone reached this point they had 50% chance to go further, possibly exactly on the median line of talent and intelligence. I knew I was above average, so I shouldn't have a problem. Still, better be prepared than not.
Using some of my spirit stones and new armor and weapons, I constructed a Tribulation Array and sat inside of it, with my wooden helmet on.
A single warning from my Tribulation taker perk, and a feeble lightning bolt struck me from above. The Formation Array held for a second, then dispersed as the Tribulation lightning hit my head and knocked me out.
For a moment, I found myself as a floating soul, superimpossed over my body and all other pocket dimensions around, including the Treasure Vault, the Noxious Zone and the Heaven Basin. Although the vision was very short, I did have the Perfect Memory perk so I could review what I saw at my leisure.
The entrance into the Heavin Basin was an encrypted metal door into the side of a giant mountain, with its peak so tall it went outside the atmosphere and into outer space. The entire mountain was covered in dwelling of all kinds, from courtyards and plaform houses to floating islands and crystal palaces, while a giant spinning wheel was rotating around the mountain peak like...a gravity wheel on a space station.
A dimension inward, the volcano had finished exploding and the lava had cooled somewhat, with few patches of red magma still flowing downwards.
Most of the Noxious Swamp had been burned and covered with volcanic ash, which might make my escape a bit easier, perhaps.
Two more dimensions inward, my spiritual core or dantian had also formed, holding inside my CYOA artifacts that were not in use, including the Heavengaze Tower. And inside that tower, a ghostly old man sat with a bored face at the edge of a floating platform, looking out in the distance.
That was quite a surprise, I admit. Did my CYOA provide the obligatory old master along with the Tower, or was it the Xianxia Protagonist perk?
Either way, it was time to meet this mandatory exposition grandpa.