Shen was moving towards the people he felt with his Battle Sense.
Mastering War had made it easier for him to master Combat, which then made it easier to master Sharpness. Now that he had mastered three Concepts, he understood the process of progressive Concept improvement better than ever before.
Moreover, having his entire foundational Concepts finally at the master tier gave him a kind of anchoring on Reality, an intimacy with the way things worked that he couldn't even explain.
All that contributed to him improving his understanding of all his Concepts by leaps and bounds. And that, in turn, greatly benefited his Skills.
Mere hours after mastering Sharpness, Shen had pushed his Skills the extra mile they needed to level up.
| Skill Level Up — Windstorm Spear Art (C-) — Level 5
| Skill Level Up — Zephyr-Gale Footwork (D+) — Level 7
His speed reached a new high, and he killed so fast that he was getting out of targets nearby. The Alicia woman was barely keeping up. He was usually already leaving whenever she reached him.
After the level up, the new information given to him by the system pushed his improvement rate to even higher heights. It contributed greatly to everything.
His learning ability let him instantly absorb all he could and apply it to all he knew. His understanding of Zephyr, especially, was one step away from mastery, with Flow just a little behind.
Unfortunately, that had been a fleeting peak of his learning journey. After the flux of new information and all he did with it, he noticed diminishing gains with killing weaklings.
Shen realized that he hadn't been that wrong about how useful fighting weaklings was; he had merely not considered that forcing them into life-and-death battles could push him a little further. He had squeezed the last drops of potential insights he could from people so much below him.
And that's when he started to get worried.
He needed to develop an aura. It was fundamental for his existence. There was nothing more important than that in all of Creation for him.
But he had no idea how to accomplish it, and killing weaklings wasn't pushing him further even in his non-mastered Concepts; so, how could it help him with the mastered foundational Concepts?.
His existence, Shen realized, would become one of endless killing without ever accomplishing his one goal in life.
The realization brought him to despair. He forced himself to kill even faster and more effectively, to squeeze the very last drop of potential from those people's sacrifices for his benefit. He hoped that would be enough to let him develop an aura.
It wasn't.
And that's when the terror started.
Shen kept killing, yet he learned nothing. He kept killing, yet he didn't improve. He kept killing, yet he had reached an insurmountable bottleneck.
He kept killing, and killing, and killing, but he...
He didn't want to kill anymore. Neither the current him nor the one in the depths of his mind wanted to continue.
Yet they couldn't stop because Shen refused to deny himself, and killing was a core part of himself. It might not have been so in the past, but it was now, and that's all that mattered.
The deep, annoying part of him pointed out a lesson for him there. He had been punished for refusing to submit, and now that same trace of his personality was working against him. Trusting too much on himself and his instincts, being inflexible when it cost him nothing but his pride, might not be the—
Shen yawned to stop the boring thoughts and kept running.
He had more killing to do. It wasn't fun or fulfilling, it served no actual purpose, but it was who he was, and that's all that mattered.
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Shen was running on a street full of abandoned cars, trying to feel anyone with his Battle Sense, when a bright explosion of violet light happened far ahead of him. He was forced to blink, and when he opened his eyes, there was an enormous hole in the world where the explosion had happened.
It looked like one of the portals he had seen in the Eternal Empire, except it was much bigger. The half-circle was at least a mile wide, demarcated by a thick frame of slowly-moving violet light.
"Inspect," he said, and a giant tooltip appeared in its middle.
| D Rift — Rebellious Gnool Cult (0%)
| Protection: 5 days
| Duration: 2 months
| Guilty of: communing with the Void
Shen was ecstatic. That was a D-tier Rift! It should have actual strong people for him to fight! That's precisely what he needed!
He rushed at it at once.
The portal looked like a common hole, except it stood in thin air. On the other side, it revealed a vast desert before an enormous fortress surrounding and set on a massive rock mountain. The creatures on the other side had also noticed the portal if the approaching dots on the skies or the dust rising from the ground was any indication. They were likely aerial and ground troops coming from the distant fortress to investigate things.
Going through the portal felt like leaving an air-conditioned room on a hot day. The alien desert was the kind that had solid, dry, cracked ground rather than sand. Shen felt his body working harder because there was less oxygen in the air, but it was nothing it couldn't handle.
A small white text appeared on the top-right corner of his vision, a simple "0.00%" that he guessed was related to the percentage he had seen outside on the tooltip.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Shen rushed at the enemy, and the enemy rushed at him.
The aerial troops got closer first.
They were twenty black wyverns, each carrying three beings on their backs. The two beings at the front and the back wore black plate armor, while the one in the middle looked half-human, half-hyena, wearing only light clothes, also black.
The wyverns dove to the ground when they were about twenty miles away. The two armored beings on each wyvern jumped off, and then the hyenas rode the flying beasts back to the distant fortress.
Shen Inspected his forty enemies while still running full speed ahead.
| Knoll (E) — 200 / 200
The system let him know that although those creatures were sapient and had names, he would not see their names. They had been relegated to little more than training dummies for their crimes, nothing more. It was already merciful to let them fight back.
Shen felt disappointed at them being E-rank, but the D-ranks were probably the leaders of those creatures. These should be scouts or first-responders.
All forty gnolls wielded double axes. They didn't seem to care that Shen was D-rank. They rushed at him in a V formation aimed at him.
He smiled, clenched his spear, and activated his Battle Sense.
He got a feeling of light resistance from their black armor. As long as he pushed his spear's Sharpness to the utmost, he could cut them like an ordinary knife going through butter. The bodies inside the armor would be even more easily split apart.
Tactically, they were the best he had faced to date. The V formation wasn't intended on stopping him but on surrounding him. They were sacrificing the one at the tip, counting on Shen to get to the middle of the formation out of stupidity.
Shen's smile widened, and he did exactly as they hoped.
The gnoll at the front had probably been picked as a sacrifice because he was a terrible fighter. Shen had no trouble leveraging his speed and technique to pierce the being's skull before they could do anything with their axes.
| Gnoll (E) | 7,419,064 → 7,419,189 AP
It had been a while since Shen got AP for a kill like this. He had completed a lot of Bounties in the past two days, but it was usually him killing hundreds or thousands of people for no AP and then executing the actual target for tens of thousands. Getting AP like this—and the extra 25% from his Title was already included—felt nostalgic, reminding him of his time in the tutorial.
To his surprise, and also like in the tutorial, the gnoll turned to light together with everything they were wearing. It seemed the Alliance didn't want humankind to use the rifts as a way to amass equipment or resources.
Shen kept running, hoping those beings would show him something better than the humans had.
They did.
When Shen reached their midst, their armor released a violet light. Shen felt like he was suddenly moving through water while half the gnolls approached at peak E-rank speed to attack him.
He was tempted to fight like that, but it would be dangerous if they had some other hidden ace in their sleeves. So Shen released his Foundational Qi around him and defied whatever was affecting the surroundings.
Shen felt magic was involved in their armor's magic, but it was surprisingly weak-willed. He immediately guessed magic equipment had remnant willpower from whoever enchanted it, yet they weren't made to fight proper, living beings with willpower.
Well, at least the equipment trying to bind him hadn't been created with that in mind—which was weird, considering their function was exactly suppress another living being. His best guess was that they had been designed to subdue manaless warriors, who couldn't push energy into their surroundings to seize the environment's control from the enchantments.
To the gnolls' credit, they had a backup plan. While half were approaching, the other half put their weapons back on their belts and produced thin metal nets from a compartment in their armor.
Thanks to his mastery over the Concept of Sharpness, Shen felt the nets would resist his spear better than the armor. He would be able to cut them if they were held tightly. However, if they were thrown against him, he wouldn't be able to cut them midair.
It wasn't a matter of lacking Sharpness. It felt like the thing had been created precisely to avoid his Concept.
He was, however, strong enough to tear it apart with his bare hands.
Those gnolls were terribly outmatched.
Shen's Foundational Qi crushed the enchantments' hold over his surroundings, and he rushed at the nearby gnolls unhindered by anything. He learned quickly that these knolls were skilled but simply too slow for his D agility and level 7 D+ footwork. He cut five before a few threw their nets at him, and he easily avoided them before killing the rest.
He resumed his journey toward the fortress before the corpses had even finished turning into light. At the top corner of his vision, the percentage had been updated to 0.01%.
The rising dust on the ground was soon revealed to be caused by about a hundred armored gnolls mounted on worgs—larger back wolves with shining white eyes. They wielded heavy bows and split apart when Shen was approaching. They intended on shooting arrows at him while keeping their distance.
Shen was once more disappointed when he saw only E-ranks among them. The worgs were fast, maybe even faster than what E+ agility alone could make anyone, but he was much faster than them. The arrows were enchanted, but nothing he couldn't deflect with his blade or redirect with Zephyr Qi.
He made short work of those warriors and resumed his journey once more.
The next batch of flying enemies was a group of three hundred wyverns, only half of which were transporting armored gnolls. Instead of two armored gnolls each, the other half had two gnolls in leather armor. The armored gnolls were put on the ground, and their wyverns returned to the fortress. The hundred fifty others stayed behind.
As soon as Shen engaged the three hundred gnolls on the ground, the ones in the wyverns attacked. They hurled spells, metal nets, and explosive crystals at him. It was a nice break from the monotony he was used to, but his superior stats and Skills put him leagues above them all.
They tried to make up for it with numbers, and, to be fair, the gnolls were better fighters this time. Many of them exchanged a blow or two with Shen before he killed them.
Well, to be honest, he could've cut even their axes' blades if he wanted, but that would've expended too much qi. He didn't know how many he still needed to kill in that rift. He had hundreds of thousands to go if the percentage was any indication. At the very least, he needed to keep enough qi in reserve to run away from there if something happened.
Many mages on the wyverns were able to slow him down without directly touching his soul, thus avoiding his innate soul defense. However, he still felt their mana close enough that pushing his Foundational Qi upon his surroundings would put him in a fight of wills against them. Doing so against so many would be a bad idea, so Shen despaired for two seconds before uncovering a way to fight it.
It involved keeping qi only inside his body and was heavily inspired by things Alicia had previously talked to him about.
He pushed the Laws of Reality inside him in the opposite direction he felt the mages were doing it. However, while he had just matched the enemy pull when fighting the enchanted armor, this time, he pushed harder. That way, his qi created ripples beyond his direct action, like a pebble thrown at a lake or a gravitational pull generated by a heavy body.
It worked wonders, and he found that their superior numbers didn't matter in that indirect combat. Shen had mastered Concepts while they hadn't. His hold over Reality was overwhelmingly, absurdly, indescribably greater than theirs, so it was pathetically easy to stop what they were doing.
Once again, Shen fought unhindered. He became a reaper amid the few hundred people, dodging attacks and killing his enemies with at most two swings of his spear.
He was almost caught once when he tried to push a net away with Zephyr Qi. The metal seemed to resist the energy in a way he had never felt before. He barely nudged the object to the side, but his speed still let him dodge it.
After killing the ones on the ground, he contemplated throwing his spear against the wyverns but decided against it. If they grabbed it, he would find himself unarmed.
So instead, he surrounded himself with Zephyr and Flow Qi and jumped.
Reaching D-rank had made him lighter, but he had never been so close to mastering Zephyr or Flow before, so this move wouldn't have worked. Now that he was close, he made the wind flow around him, removing the air resistance above, making himself aerodynamic, and propelling his body further upwards—or sideways. By his estimates, he had been running at around forty-five hundred feet per second when he jumped, which was enough to go far on momentum alone. His application of qi let him change the direction he was shooting at, turning him into a homing missile of sorts.
Shen's entire went through an unfortunate wyvern's body. That took away most of his momentum, but he was close enough to another wyvern. It was tricky, but he managed to land on the beast.
That was all he needed.
From there, he used his great dexterity, superior footwork, high speed, and the Concepts of Zephyr and Flow to jump from wyvern to wyvern, killing beasts and riders with ease.
Shen had shot upwards so fast, by surprise, and killed so swiftly that it was only after he had killed over a hundred people that the wyverns dispersed. They were too close though, and he killed a hundred more before being forced to fall back to the ground—almost like a feather, thanks to Zephyr.
The wyverns didn't approach anymore.
So Shen resumed his rush toward the fortress, hoping they didn't take much longer to throw D-ranks against him.