Chapter 23 – Life 5.5 – Year ??? – The Message

You have died as a Low Rank 3 Titanium Swordsman (Yang).

You have killed 362 Water Demons in this life.

You have killed 513 Earth Demons in this life.

You have killed 439 Metal Demons in this life.

You have killed 265 Fire Demons in this life.

You have killed 322 Air Demons in this life.

Calculating…

Your connection to Earth will be improved by 200% in the next life.

Your connection to Water, Metal, Fire, and Air will be improved by 150% in the next life.

You have killed 1 Titanium Demon in this life.

You have killed 2 Magma Demons in this life.

You have killed 5 Darkness Demons in this life.

You have killed 5 Sand Demons in this life.

You have killed 3 Storm Demons in this life.

Calculating…

Your ability to form a Rank 2 Element containing Earth will be increased by 20% permanently.

Your ability to form a Rank 2 Element containing Air will be increased by 10% permanently.

You have wounded a Low Rank 3 Bone Crafter (Yin).

You have killed 15 Rank 2 Bone Golems.

Calculating…

Your ability to heal from broken bones is permanently improved by 50%.

Your connection to Life will be improved by 100% in the next life.

You have killed over 1000 Demons in total.

You have killed over 25 Rank 2 Demons in total.

You have killed over 1000 Demons in this life.

Calculating…

You permanently progress through the first Rank 50% faster.

You permanently progress through the second Rank 10% faster.

For each life, you may select two Rank 1 Elements to increase affinity by 100% for the duration of that life.

You have formed your first Core.

You have formed a Titanium Core.

You have prevented a Demon from forming a Sand Core.

Calculating…

You can permanently form Cores 10% more easily.

Your next Metal or Earth based Core can form 25% more easily.

Your abilities permanently do 100% more damage to Sand Demons.

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*GAHH!* I have to- I can’t- I- I…

Right. Right. I was the Titanium Swordsman, but he was not me. He was killed, but I persist. Right. Okay.

These people with the Life element… they’re pretty fucked up, right? First all that shit on the Harmonium, both with normal Rank 1 Life affinity and then especially that kid’s dad and his Blood affinity… and now this Skeleton Emperor and his Bone affinity. I suppose there was the 3rd Emperor, he combined Life with… was it Fire or Air? Fire made more thematic sense, but I think it might have been Air… anyway, he combined it with something to make Lightning, and he was only *somewhat* awful. He went out in person to protect his empire, so for that I have to commend him, at any rate. Not to mention coming up with that insane cannon thing using a tiny amount of remaining gunpowder, that was smart.

Interestingly, the scientist seems to think that true Titanium shouldn’t conduct electricity like that, it’s a nonmagnetic metal. But I guess true Titanium isn’t blue, either, the Empire just called it that because it’s the name for a super-strong metal. Though, the strange words that show up between lives seem to call it that too… do they only speak in words I already know? Hmm, but then it mentions things about Cores, which must mean the special swords made in the Rank 3 process… and I had never called them that, and neither had anyone else. Curious.

But that was beside the point! What the actual hell was that skeletal freak talking about before he killed the Swordsman? I wanted to discard them as the ravings of a madman… but he clearly signaled me out as a reincarnator. Did some monster he fought really tell him about me? He said he received a message in the vibrations of his bones… which was insane and terrifying in equal measure. Not to mention a terrible way to send a message to someone.

And then there was the message itself. “Two words: Go Faster”. The fuck? Was someone really not only keeping track of me, but also thinking that I wasn’t working fast enough? Fast enough for what? I think it was plenty fast for me to go from a nobody who dies in the woods as my first death, to one of the most powerful people on the continent in my fifth. I doubted there were many people going out there and forming Cores, the process was just too strange and risky… though, the words still said the Swordsman was “Low” Rank 3. There hadn’t been qualifications like that on the other Ranks, so that was new. It says the Skeleton Emperor was a “Low” Rank 3 as well, implying some of those bones (maybe the ones in his arm?) were compressed just like the Swordsman’s special swords.

But how does one move beyond “Low”? The Swordsman had compressed his energy as far as it would go, killing hundreds of Demons, and he couldn’t make more than those 6 swords… to reach “High”, wouldn’t that take ages? Or was there just something I was missing? Ugh, how was I supposed to ‘go faster’ when the path forward was always so unclear? Not to mention, my best way of getting stronger required dying and starting all over again!

Okay. If I needed to ‘go faster’, then I needed a life that was powerful. Powerful enough to not get killed off by some psycho, even if they had somehow reached the 3rd Rank. I also think that I wanted the next life to still be a Yang focus. Yin focus people could get stronger with practice with their element, and their defenses were great against others of the same element, but they were often isolated, kept away from true combat. That sounded great, but combat wasn’t something that could be avoided for long in this world. At least in the case of Yang people, combat directly made them stronger.

Plus, at higher tiers, I think Yin people had a bit of a weakness. If they couldn’t find some of their elements to absorb, they were significantly weaker. It wasn’t a problem at Rank 1, since things like Water or Earth weren’t exactly uncommon, but their absorption rates got significantly worse when they combined elements. A Magma Yin, for example, could only absorb the Fire or Earth they were used to at extraordinarily low efficiency. But finding their actual element… well, their options would be to be friends with a Magma Yang, have a captive Magma Demon, or, in this specific case, live in that one Volcano City place that the Harmonium was at war with.

That unfortunate Sand-Molder who went on a mission with the Swordsman… he told a story of a Yin who took the rare element of Corrosion… so rare, that he knew no Yangs who had it, and the one demon who had it was killed. Though, I did have to wonder… did he try absorbing rusted metal? That would be Metal that has taken on Air and Corroded, so maybe that would have been a good source… but regardless, Rank 2 Yins had to find their element with special tricks, while Yangs just had to kill Demons and wait.

Choose your next Focus: Yin or Yang.

Good timing. I choose Yang.

Focus Chosen. Choose two Rank 1 Elements to enhance by 100%.

Now this was a bit trickier… but, I think I have the beginnings of an idea. I’ve done the math, and there are 15 possible pairs to make with 6 elements. Fog, Light, Blood, Darkness, Titanium, Silver, Steel, Magma, Sand, Storm, Corrosion, Lightning… and of course, Bone. That was 13. The remaining 2 were both parts of the Life aspect, the one that I worried made people insane. But if that strange message really was telling me to ‘go faster’… I needed an edge. I needed an element that no-one had ever heard of before. So, the first element I chose would be Life. The second… hmm. What would it make with Fire? A living flame could be dangerous… but it would be dangerous both to enemies and to friends. In contrast, living metal could be pretty interesting. The scientist had memories of some old moving picture story, where a man from the future would turn into liquid metal, slip through the bars of a jail cell, then turn back into a person. I doubted that such an ability was in the cards, but surely SOMETHING interesting had to be available…

I choose Life and Metal!

Elements Chosen. Reincarnating…

Alright, kid. Something’s going on here, and I’m not sure what it is, but something thinks we need to move faster. That means getting stronger. Kill lots of demons, all that you can! Condense a Core, as fast as you can! You gotta-

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-go… fast? Hmm. That sounded somewhat familiar, but I didn’t know from where… maybe one of those weird Ministry of History people said it?

Oh yes, now I remember. It was the motto of an ancient character, the blue spiky creature who ran around collecting rings. Onic the Hedgehog! Not sure why I remembered that, of all things… perhaps those History people and their love of random facts about the Pre-Apocalypse were rubbing off on me…

Still, better than that time all their talk of ‘Xianxia’ stories made me dream of a Chinese empire and a warrior with a blue sword for weeks on end…