Lucas was startled as when he woke up, he felt the warmth of a flame flicker by his feet – frightening him. Images of forest fires raced through his mind as he jolted forward, ready to scramble to his feet and bolt at a moment’s notice to escape danger. That was until he saw the woman who'd killed the big wolf he'd been facing before he'd passed out, who now sat on the opposite side of the fire to him, whose slight smile revealed how amusing she found his alarmed awakening to be.
Lucas’ eyes met the woman’s own, and as he scanned her scarred but beautiful face, he felt his heart start to beat a thousand beats per second as he knew exactly who she was after only a second of looking at her.
He tried his best to restrain his emotions from coming out, but soon tears began streaming down his face, and all the emotional continence he had tried to build over the last day completely collapsed. For even after going through all that he had, the agony, the loss, and the excruciating pain, nothing could have prepared him emotionally to see his mother again.
He had been 4 the last time he had seen her in person, and if it weren’t for the photo that had been taken of the event, he knew he wouldn’t even have been aware of what she looked like. His father had done his very best to limit the interactions he’d been able to have with her to a couple of phone calls a year, mostly on birthdays, but they could never be video calls. His mom “disgusted” his dad, and Lucas had been unable to do anything but obey his father’s stupid rules to the letter, or risk being beaten.
She looked startled at his overwhelming reaction, clearly not expecting it from a random boy who’d just woken up after surviving a battle with a pack of bloodthirsty wolves. Then, he spoke the only word he felt like he could say, and it seemed to dawn on her as well just who she was talking to – with her eyes lighting up with both concern and uncertainty.
“Mommy…” Lucas barely had managed to whisper, his ability to talk coherently being severely limited by all the sniffling and breathing in that he was doing.
His mother didn’t say a word for far too long before she finally spoke with tears starting to form in her eyes as well.
“Lucas? Is that you?” She asked pleadingly, her hand moving to cover her mouth.
Lucas nodded, as he could no longer even speak – he was in full cry mode, and he didn’t care. After a long window of hesitation, his mother crossed the distance between them, placed Lucas in her lap, and carefully patted his head as he wailed into her chest.
She did her best to comfort him as he unleashed the floodgates. Most of his tears were because he hadn’t expected to see his mother ever again after the system's arrival, and he couldn't describe how incredible it felt for her to be holding him in her arms. Yet a lot of his tears were undoubtedly some of his pent-up tears that he’d been trying his best to hold back all day whenever his mind had betrayed him and had thought about the fate of his grandpa.
An hour must have passed before Lucas finally stopped crying. The mother and son pair sat in total silence, his mother just holding him closely – which was more than enough to comfort him. This state of silence lasted for a further 10 minutes until she asked him a question, “Lucas, sweetie, what happened to your father? Why were you out here all alone? Can you please tell me?”
Lucas hiccupped before responding, “He is dead. They’re all dead. Father. Grandfather. Brother. Sister. All of them. Dead. And I…” His sentence cut off as he started breathing in and out rapidly. If he’d had any tears left, the words he’d said would have unleashed another wave of them.
His mother hid her emotions well, but he could tell she was surprised. She stroked his hair gently before asking, “How long have you been all alone?”
Lucas sniffled, before replying, “A Day and a bit.”
“So, he died recently then?” She asked, though her voice came across as if she hadn’t meant to ask the question aloud – the question being far more detached and cold in tone than concerned and or motherly.
However, Lucas still answered the question with a curt shake of his head.
She seemed to realise her mistake, as he started holding Lucas tighter, before then asking softly, “Then who had been looking after you until the day before yesterday?”
Lucas’ body nearly manifested tears out of thin air at this question, but he eventually stuttered out a reply, “G...Grr...Grandpa.”
“I see.”
“He was killed fighting against a World Boss,” Lucas said, anticipating the next question with a miserable prescience.
His mother could only comfort him more sweetly in response. Amanda felt like asking an incredible number of questions, but even though she wasn’t the best person when it came to comforting mourners, she knew that too many questions at a time like this would be extremely emotionally damaging for the boy. He needed time to mourn, that was clear, and as the boy's, mother she could grant him that much.
Their endearing reunion was interrupted by the sudden appearance of a hideous-looking bear, with its fur a rancid sulphur-yellow, and its weird snake-like slits for eyes a fiery shade of red. Both Amanda and Lucas scrambled to their feet, with Lucas frantically probing his surroundings with his eyes, trying to find where his spear was and failing to find it anywhere.
The intensity of his need to participate in the fight proved unrelated to how necessary he was to defeat the foe, as after a quick punch from Amanda, the hideous bear was reeling backwards. And, after another devastatingly powerful punch, the bear collapsed onto its stomach and after a third punch to the skull, it was dead.
Lucas looked on with amazement at his mother’s strength, but what once again intrigued him more about her attacks was the potent dark energy that engulfed her every strike. The energy was familiar, if not identical to his own, and Lucas was able to push his feelings to the side for a moment to ask nervously, “Mom, are you a… a demonic cultivator?”
Amanda looked at Lucas and nodded, and as she walked towards him again she replied softly, “Yes Lu. You know about demonic cultivation?”
Lucas blushed at the endearing nickname, having not heard it in a long time, before he replied quietly and nervously, “Yeah, I do.”
Amanda noticed that the boy was tense, and he looked afraid. She asked, “What’s wrong Lu? Tell me.”
Lucas nodded before doing his best to inform his mother about the incredible amount of danger they would both be in if their demonic cultivation was ever discovered by the authorities. It was weird to Lucas as so far in his life it had been always adults explaining things to him, but now he was doing his best to explain everything he knew about the multiverse and cultivation to someone who did not know as much as he did. It felt… good. It was nice to feel useful after all.
Amanda absorbed all the information that Lucas was telling her, but she could tell that the boy’s information was incomplete, probably because most of the lecture from this Oliver fellow must have gone over his head. She’d gathered from their conversation, and the context of their encounter, that her son had somewhat of a talent for fighting and cultivation – but still the boy was young and so his not recalling everything perfectly was only to be expected.
Even so, the more she heard, the more she realised she was a very small fish in a humungous ocean too big to be even comprehended by her mortal mind. Yet, a single underlying fact about everything the boy was saying shone like a north star – guiding her thinking and allowing her to come to grips with her own smallness. That single fact was that the old world and its rules and society were gone, and it was never going to come back.
The world of today and the future was one defined by power alone. Amanda, if she wished to survive and to protect Lucas, needed more and more power. This realisation sent pleasurable sensations coursing through her body, originating from what she now knew to be her demonic core. It, more than anything or anyone, had been what had kept her alive in the face of the bloodthirsty monsters that now roamed the earth, and she had every intention of using it to grow even more powerful.
Plus, if what her son believed was right, she didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. She was now forever bound to the demonic cultivator life, a reality that sat quite easily with her. It wasn’t like she wasn’t used to being viewed as lesser. As scum. She’d been on the wrong side of the law far too many times for most people in the past to see her as anything other than a good-for-nothing criminal.
Just changing the name and scale of the authority that was after her didn’t affect her psyche one bit, and by embracing this path to power wholeheartedly, she would hopefully grow strong enough so that no authority, no matter how strong, would dare face her wrath. The fantasy did much to soothe her anxiety from being confronted with the fact that she was just one among decillions of people in the multiverse.
In just a few days she'd grown dozens of times stronger than she had been before. Her mind had grown powerful enough to probably rival even the greatest of geniuses from past eras of Earth's history. So, she had every reason to suspect that after a decade or more, her power might truly be terrifying to behold. The system granted all of its users the chance to become unfathomably mighty and just the faint hope that she might one day take that chance emboldened her spirit to seek out power with true fervour. Plus, if she didn't, she told herself, she and her sweet child be crushed by the prejudices of some intergalactic authority bent on wiping out all demonic cultivators.
Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.
A word from Lucas suddenly whisked her away from her thoughts of power.
“Wait a second,” She said, before pausing, and then continuing, “What’s a dungeon?”
Lucas told her what he understood about dungeons, and Amanda could not help but smirk a little. These dungeons sounded familiar to her trial. This meant though likely extremely dangerous, such places would provide unbelievable rewards upon being cleared – hopefully. Now that she'd heard of this dungeon, she immediately wanted to start heading towards it, but she reigned in her compulsive mind with thoughts of her son’s safety.
Sure, he took after both her and his father in terms of having a bit of talent for violence and, with the spear she stowed away in her User Inventory, she did not doubt that the boy would be capable of dealing a significant amount of damage to any monster. However, was it really right of her to bring her own child into such a dangerous place intentionally just so that she could pursue her own power?
However, her doubts were soon assuaged when the boy looked at her pleadingly, new tears streaming from his eyes, and he begged, “Please Mom, can we go and clear the dungeon. You are really strong and though I know it might be dangerous, I want to be strong too. I never want to have to…” genuine tears began swelling in the corner of the boy’s eyes as he thought about all the people he’d lost since the system arrived.
Amanda looked at the boy's tear-soaked face and decided she needed no more convincing. The boy was already one step ahead of her and his genuine conviction to grow stronger made her prouder than she would ever be able to express to him. As even after years of not seeing him and him having been raised by a scumbag of a man, her little Lu had grown up to be a boy who wouldn’t back down and who wanted to be strong. In other words, the boy was trying to be like her, the thought causing a bright happy smile to form on her face.
She brought her boy into her warm embrace and nodded her head, before eventually saying, “Let’s head off then, shall we? This dungeon won’t clear itself.”
Lucas smiled up at her and nodded his head in response. The two quickly found the entrance to the dungeon after only an hour of active searching, and now both stood before the strange bone-crafted door with some amount of fear and trepidation in their hearts. The dungeon certainly looked the part of a place filled with powerful monsters strong enough to tear men limb from limb, and for a moment, both mother and son felt doubt fill their minds.
However, after both felt a surge within their gut, their confidence returned, and Lucas especially felt a new vigour course through him as he thrust his newly returned spear forward towards the dungeon’s entrance. He then looked up at his mother and saw a slight smirk on her face as well. Both were now ready to enter the dungeon and become stronger.
So, not knowing what else to do, the two of them placed their hands on the door and a system prompt appeared in their vision.
Dungeon Found!
Name: Grand Lich’s Crypt
Level: 40
Rewards: UNKNOWN
ENTER AS PARTY? Y / N
Both selected yes, and the two of them vanished from their spot outside the dungeon and suddenly reappeared inside the dungeon. Amidst a valley of humungous bones, and 10ft tall skeleton warriors who wielded spears almost 4x the size of Lucas himself.
One such spear was now hurtling towards the mother and son at an unbelievable speed. Both dodged, but as they did so, they seemed to share a single, undeniable thought. We made a mistake.
----------------------------------------
When Arthur had fully recovered from his injuries, he got up and did his best to follow the map towards the nearest river. He was quite parched, and he really needed to wash the blood off his new clothes, so the river’s water would have to do as he didn’t have any other options available to him.
As he walked, he decided that he should probably start thinking about what he should do with his new stockpiles of different points. He would have normally liked to wait and have Oliver’s advice to help guide his hand, but he had no idea how long his damn uppity perk would stay inactive, so he wanted to distribute his stat points at least before the perk came back online and it did it for him.
He had 196 stat points to distribute in total. He had thought that as he was dealing with a larger number, he’d have had a far more difficult time deciding where each point should go, but in fact, he found it far easier. He decided that it was not necessary to invest any points into his spiritual stat as he already had 65 points in the stat from his cultivation gains and that was more than enough for the moment.
So, after he allocated his 65 Spiritual points, he could move on to other stats. He wondered why he couldn't buy any new perks when he'd been able to do that before, but even after he checked the user manual no answer appeared to him, so he just decided to accept it and move on - allocating his 65 points between the 3 basic spiritual perks.
[III] Breath of the Demi-God (Lvl:6->Lvl:7) | Cost: 5 Spiritual Point
[III] Heavenly Qi Gathering (Lvl:6->Lvl:7) | Cost: 5 Spiritual Point
[III] Core Mastery (Lvl:7 -> Lvl:8) | Cost: 5 Spiritual Point
With his spiritual stat sorted, Arthur moved on to his next most important stat - his physical stat. However, he needed some more information on how his physical stat perks were doing after his bloodline’s upgrade and what he found startled him to his very core.
[III] Herculean Bone Strength (Lvl:1 -> Lvl:2) | Cost: 10 Physical Point
[III] Herculean Organ Function (Lvl:1 -> Lvl:2) | Cost: 10 Physical Point
[III] Herculean Muscle Strength (Lvl:1 -> Lvl:2) | Cost: 10 Physical Points
[III] Herculean Bodily Healing (Lvl:1 -> Lvl:2) | Cost: 25 Physical Points
The cost to upgrade each perk was incredible. Arthur was now starting to doubt whether his 196 stat point horde was even that impressive if all upgrades eventually became this expensive. The only thing he could hope for was that the cost was justified by the potency of each upgrade, but that was by no means a sure thing. There was much to think about.
Deciding that his current, rather overwhelming, strength was probably sufficient for the moment, Arthur believed that investing any large amount of his points into the stat would probably be superfluous. However, he couldn’t deny that becoming physically stronger due to his bloodline had done a lot to win him the fight with the hydra so he couldn’t exactly ignore the stat either – that would be a tad ungrateful. So, he decided to compromise and invest 30 points into the stat, raising all 3 of his basic physical perks to level 2.
The next stat he decided to invest in was his mental stat and he did that by putting 66 points into the stat. He believed this a rather necessary investment as Arthur wasn’t sure whether or not the fact that his Automatic Cultivation perk had undergone an upgrade would mean that if it suddenly turned back on, he’d be again at risk of death. In general, he very much wanted to avoid that. So, he invested a lot of points to bring his mind up to a new level just in case.
[II] Enhanced Brain Processing Speed (Lvl:10) | Cost: N/A – Your Tier is too Low to Evolve this Perk.
[II] Enhanced Brain Capacity (Lvl:8 -> Lvl:9) | Cost: 2 Mental Point
[II] Enhanced Brain Subconscious Function Capability (Lvl:10) | Cost: N/A – Your Tier is too Low to Evolve this Perk.
[I] Battle State (Lvl: 8 ->Lvl:9) | Cost: 9 Mental Points
After much consideration about how it was that he would distribute his points, his mental stat perk page now looked rather impressive. Though not in comparison to his bloodline-boosted stat pages, but Arthur was starting to suspect that judging by that standard would be absurd. Especially as the new mental power was just unbelievable to him, so he was in no way going to complain about it.
With exactly 100 points left, Arthur decided to split his three-digit stash in half, with 50 points going to his social stat, and 50 going towards his system stat. Here too he looked at his stat perk pages with mute satisfaction.
[I] Personalisation (Lvl:1 -> Lvl:6) | Cost: 1 System Point
[I] Glutton for EXP (Lvl:5 -> Lvl:6) | Cost: 1 System Point
[I] User Coin Pouch (Lvl:5 -> Lvl:6) | Cost: 1 System Points
[II] Enhanced Thresholds (Lvl:10) | Cost: N/A – Your Tier is too Low to Evolve this Perk.
[II] Enhanced Gains (Lvl:10) | Cost: N/A – Your Tier is too Low to Evolve this Perk.
[II] User Inventory (Lvl:3 -> Lvl:4) | Cost: 7 System Point
[II] User Manual (Lvl:3 -> Lvl:4) | Cost: 3 System Point
[II] Enhanced Speech (Lvl:1 -> Lvl:2) | Cost: 2 Social Point
[II] Enhanced Etiquette (Lvl:1 -> Lvl:2) | Cost: 2 Social Point
[II] Enhanced Persuasion (Lvl:1 -> Lvl:2) | Cost: 2 Social Point
[I] Analyse User (Lvl:6 -> Lvl:7) | Cost: 2 Social Point
[I] Language Learning (Lvl:7 -> Lvl:8) | Cost: 8 Social Point
Arthur dismissed his stat perk pages as he finally came in sight of the river. He stripped down to his underwear, entered the azure blue waters, and moaned as the cold water washed over his healed but still battered body.
He was startled for a split second when his eyes finally caught his own reflection in the unusually clear water, as his face had now de-aged significantly. If anyone were to look at him, they would presume he was only in his 40s, rather than nearing 100 years of age as he was.
His youthful visage was at once alarming to him, but at the same time, it was also strangely reassuring. For it was a visual sign that he had many more years left to live and that he’d therefore need not fear passing before Lucas was fully grown and able to take care of himself.
After he’d washed all of the blood off his body and did a half-decent job at washing his rather torn clothes of the stuff too, he exited the river and began following the path he had set earlier towards the Imperium’s base.
Before he began running, however, he played around with the rest of his points. He eventually decided to split his newly acquired 172 skill points 3 ways, with 57 points being invested in each of his primary class skills – which raised the level of each skill many times while unfortunately not increasing any skill’s rank.
When it came to his trait points, Arthur needed some assistance from the user manual to inform him what he could do with them.
(User Manual: Trait Points – Trait points can only ordinarily be used to upgrade your currently possessed perks. However, perk points can be used to purchase new perks upon the completion of a ‘Trait’ type dungeon.)
Arthur had nodded at the user manual prompt before he brought up a list of all of his traits and their effects just to see what he should upgrade with his 50 trait points.
Lucky (Lvl:10) - Your likelihood of receiving bonus rewards from system prompts is increased by 10%.
Blood of the Hydra (Lvl:10) – Health Regeneration is improved by 25%
Qi Pylon (Lvl:5) - You draw in Qi 25% faster than others.
In the end, the allocation of trait points proved far easier to decide upon than any other. He put 15 points into his Lucky trait, 15 points into his Blood of the Hydra trait, and the last 20 points into his Qi Pylon trait, bringing all 3 of his traits to level 25.
Upon his choices’ finalisation, he felt a number of things in his body begin to change, as he felt his core begin to vibrate with excitement next to his stomach, and he could somehow tell that his blood had become far more potent than it had been. Or, to put it simply, he felt unbelievably fantastic.
With his decisions now made, Arthur dismissed all of his system prompts and began bounding back towards the Imperium’s base as fast as he could. Driven to run even faster by thoughts of his poor grandson’s potential state of mind after he’d been absent for so long.