As Lucas walked behind his grandfather in the direction of the alien’s home base, having followed the same country lane for hours now, his mind was still stuck in the dark confines of the cave. As while his grandfather had lay sleeping, he had seen something truly terrifying.
At the very edge of his vision, he had seen a terrifying-looking black gremlin with eyes that were the color of sulfur. It didn’t move, nor did it ever even blink, yet it spoke. Its voice spoke in hushed whispers and uneven tones, making its words sound like they were being rambled by a madman from one of those strange TV shows that his father had watched.
Lucas had suppressed his fear momentarily and etched closer to the gremlin, trying to figure out what the words it was saying were. However, as soon as he took a single step closer, the whispers became blood-curdling screams. Not just any blood-curdling scream, but his screams. And the words sent horrifying chills down his spine as he remembered them and all that was associated with them.
“PAPA! RIGHT BEHIND YOU!” were the words that the gremlin was screaming directly into his ears. Lucas felt nothing but fear as the sound of his own screams being played back to him reverberated in his ears over and over again, in a deafeningly loud loop of terror and misery.
His mind had been flooded with the memory of his papa’s final burst of effort to save him and the goblin chief’s downward swing that had decapitated his father right in front of him. How, in the very moment he had thought himself saved, his whole world had fallen away right before his eyes.
The image of his father’s head rolling away from the rest of his body had haunted Lucas’ mind ever since the event had happened, only half a day or so ago, and yet now this gremlin was intensifying everything in his mind. It was torturing his mind with the memories of the worst moment in Lucas’ entire life, and Lucas had been entirely helpless to stop it.
He couldn’t remember when he had started crying, for a time became irrelevant as he cried and whimpered out of both fear and misery. However, after a while, he felt an altogether different emotion well up inside of him. Hatred. He hated goblins, he hated the system, he hated all of it. Why had it come for him?! Why did all of his family have to die?! Why?!
Then, after his hate-fueled rage subsided, Lucas remembered that his family wasn’t all dead. That his grandfather, despite everything, was alive and taking care of him. However, at the moment defined by his pure and righteous hatred, he had forgotten the old man completely.
He felt shame fill his heart. As his grandpa had shown him far more love and kindness and protected him from far more danger than his father or older siblings ever had, his mind was still unable to unconsciously associate the older man with the category of family.
This sense of shame quickly extinguished the remaining embers of hatred and anger within him, but Lucas knew that he had not truly dealt with those feelings. Instead, he had only delayed dealing with them, for now. However, now that he was walking with his grandpa and doing very little else, his mind had time to wander and it was returning to that dark place.
He shook his head. Then looked up at his grandpa, hoping that the older man would start a conversation, but he seemed to be focused on something in front of him. Lucas assumed it was something to do with the system that his grandfather had access to, but still wanted to make sure, “What you are looking at Grandpa?”
His grandfather simply looked down at him and smiled before saying, “Oh. I was just looking at the system map of Earth and plotting a course that will allow us to also pick up some more of those treasure chests along the way. There might be something good for you in them after all.”
Lucas nodded, though not really understanding his grandfather’s words since he hadn’t seen his grandpa actually gain anything from the chest in the cave, but he didn’t say anything about that. As if his grandpa thought there was some value in looking for some chests then he had to have received something, Lucas wondered what that thing was but was a bit nervous to ask. So, instead, he asked, “Grandpa do you think I could get a weapon from one of the chests?”
The look on the older man’s face was one of confusion, then pride, before the old man sighed and said proudly, “I’m here to protect you, you shouldn’t worry about having to fight yourself. Your grandpa is pretty strong you know.”
Lucas couldn’t restrain himself as his grandfather’s words reignited a storm of emotions within him and he shouted back in his grandfather’s face, “NO! Papa was strong and look how he ended up! I don’t want... I don’t want Grandpa to…” The boy burst into tears of sadness as well as frustration. Eventually, he managed to finish his words, “I won’t be able to defend myself if you were to… die.”
The old man had clearly not expected the outburst of emotion, but at the same time, he didn’t find the emotional fragility to be too surprising after all the events he had witnessed.
However, before he could console the boy, the sound of a nearly inaudible growl brought Arthur’s full attention to their surroundings, and he spotted that there was a large bear-like creature walking towards them.
Arthur was initially astonished. A bear?! In the countryside? He knew that there had been various re-wilding projects nearby introducing wolves back to the countryside, but this was the first time he had seen a monster not native at all to the area appear to attack him.
However, after a brief moment of shock, Arthur activated the Battle State perk after telling Lucas to get as far away from the beast as possible. The boy looked terrified and ran as far as he could in the opposite direction of the bear, just as Arthur ran towards it with his knife poised – ready to fight the monster head-on, his recent slew of victories making him confident.
Yet, he had been too confident. The monster was nothing like the other monsters he had faced as of yet and this became alarmingly clear as the monster unleashed a wave of fire from its mouth aimed directly at Arthur. It was only thanks to his increased focus and reaction time from the Battle State perk that he managed to get out of the line of fire and continue charging at the monster.
But now, his guard was fully up. Upon reaching within melee distance, the huge animal actually jumped towards him, and its claws began to glow as it once again descended – seemingly trying to pounce on Arthur like a cat hunting a mouse.
Arthur quickly got out of the way, but the secondary shock waves from the power of the bear crashing into the ground nearly caused him to lose his balance. However, the bear had seemingly also taken recoil damage from using the pouncing ability as it struggled to get back up once again onto its four feet.
However, Arthur couldn’t really exploit this moment of weakness on the monster’s part as the bear would jerk out its appendages in whatever direction he tried coming in from – effectively blocking Arthur from attacking unless he was willing to risk getting his body cut in half by the monstrous claws that the bear had on each of its paws.
With his opportunity to harm the beast with his knife unexploited, the bear soon got up once again and things became even more troublesome for Arthur. The bear seemed to possess a level of intelligence, and it started using its fire breath to try and control Arthur’s movements so that if he tried getting out of the way of the fire, then a huge paw would await him.
However, with Arthur’s superior intelligence and agility, he was just about able to avoid being fatally trapped by the bear. Though sometimes he was just a millimetre too close, and blood would spurt everywhere from newly created gashes that now littered his body.
He wasn’t worried about bleeding out or anything so far, as his healing ability had proved itself reliable in the past, but the fact of the matter was that if he got too grievously injured, he had no idea how long it would take to or if he would even recover.
Pushing those thoughts aside for now, Arthur’s mind singularly focused on any method he could think of to try and kill the beast. He had to, otherwise, he might just die.
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Lucas ran and ran, past ditches and across rivers, until he eventually collapsed from exhaustion. His legs had already been aching from so much walking, yet now they were almost pulsing with visceral pain.
He honestly felt like crying, but he kept his tears back. He had already cried so much in the last few days. He’d cried about his father dying. He’d cried about his brother and sister dying. He’d cried when he thought his grandfather had died, and just a few minutes ago he had cried about getting a damn weapon to fight with, like the weak boy that he felt himself to be. For just how much crying was he going to do?
He could actually hear his father’s words in his ears. They told him to be strong. To not cry. To be a man. Yet, the more he thought about his father the more he wanted to cry, which depressed his feeling of self-worth to near absolute zero.
He hated that he was so weak. He hated that he couldn’t stop crying. And, deep down, he knew that he hated his father for making him like this. The man who had beat him savagely whenever he hadn’t got the right grades in school, or if he had been blamed for something by one of his siblings, or whatever it was. That man, his father, had not prepared Lucas in the slightest for the situation he was in - aka the only time when his father’s brute strength would have been worthwhile. He hated his father for having died. And now, the only man who had shown him kindness was risking his life to buy him time.
Lucas stewed in his own impotent hatred, rage, and self-pity for what felt like hours but had actually only been a few minutes. Then, his hatred was replaced with another emotion, bone-chilling fear. He felt chills run down his spine as he spotted a zombie notice him also and start to walk towards him.
Lucas scrambled to his feet. His every instinct told him to run away again, but he had no stamina and his legs demanded rest. The fear of fighting that had coiled into his heart after the last fight bore its teeth within his heart. Then, his father’s words from the time when he’d lost a fight with one of his classmates rang in his ears, “If you can’t even run away properly, what value do you have? Be a fucking man and punch the ever-living shit out of your opponent until they stop fighting back. That is what real men do.”
The words ignited the boy’s repressed anger and hatred for his father and he realized he wanted to take out his frustration on this damn zombie. So, he charged at it. His fear was now totally irrelevant.
Yet, as he got closer and closer to the undead, the entity’s body morphed in his mind into the body of his father. An insufferably smug smirk and all. Lucas kept on running despite, his small hands already clenched into fists and he readied himself to punch his father as hard as he could.
Once he got close enough to the zombie, it brought down an arm to slap at Lucas but he simply absorbed it in his anger, and he tackled the monster’s legs - bringing it down to the ground. Then, he sat on the undead’s chest and began punching at its face with his hands and somehow he could see them do real damage.
They were actually hurting the zombie that looked like Father. Lucas relished in this discovery and hastened the pace at which punches landed on the monster’s necrotic flesh. He didn’t care that black blood now covered his entire body, or that the monster had probably broken many of his bones as it tried resisting, he just kept on punching away at it. Until it eventually stopped entirely and he zoned out for a few minutes.
He was lost in a frenzy of hate, anger, and pure glee. This was his first victory ever. Against his father even. The zombie lay dead before him, his father lay dead before him, and he wasn’t terrified or sad. Only, elated.
He was strong. He would be able to help out his grandfather now. There was hope for him after all.
However, just before the adrenaline ran out and the pain from his numerous shattered bones caused him to black out, a strange red panel appeared before his eyes. As soon as he tried reading it, however, everything turned black.
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Demonic-Core Formed Successfully (Metamorphosis 0% Complete)
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Arthur’s fight with the bear had not much improved in the last 30 minutes of fighting with it. Its defenses were too good, and its skin too thick. However, Arthur noticed something in the periphery of his own vision, he had received at least 5 system prompts while fighting with the bear. Simultaneously, he had started noticing himself grow ever so slightly more nimble with each new system notification appearing in his vision. However, he could not allow himself to pull them up as that risked him being too distracted to avoid the bear’s attacks.
So, he could only guess as to what they were, but he had a pretty good idea as to what they were and the implications were big.
He had firstly suspected that the prompts could be about his Small-Bladed Weaponry skill leveling, but he doubted that he’d gained 5 levels in the skill with this one fight, especially as he had killed hundreds of monsters in the last few days with his knife and received no levels in the skill at all.
The second, more likely, thing that the prompts could be were his Automatic Cultivation skill informing him that his cultivation had improved. That would explain his perks becoming better small increase by small increase, but that would also mean that he had massively sped up the process of cultivation by engaging in this combat with the bear monster. So, with that idea in mind, he came up with a strategy to try and kill the beast. However, it had its risks. A big one in fact.
He would try and engage it in an intense battle so as to speed up his cultivation even more, so that he could feel the effects of taking not only a step forward within a major realm, but traversing the divide between major realms, and taking his first step into the next major realm. He hoped that upon that transition to the next realm, he’d receive enough of a boost so that killing the bear would become plausible.
If his theory was incorrect, however, he’d have exhausted himself and likely not killed the beast - leaving him more vulnerable to attack. However, as he had no other plausible options, he charged at the beast once more and began exploiting every opening he could, having already learned all of the bear’s bag of tricks making the whole thing just a matter of physical capability. It was exhausting but after a few minutes, he was rewarded with an incredible feeling wash over him.
A giant golden exclamation mark appeared in the periphery of his vision, probably telling him that he’d reached the next realm. He didn’t look at it for more than a split second, immediately refocusing his mind on the task of killing the beast.
His Battle State perk was good and everything, but if it was physically impossible for you to kill the enemy in front of you - it proved totally useless, so it had partially deactivated. However, with a new degree of strength behind his knife, when he finally managed to stab the bear it roared in pain as it actually managed to penetrate through the tough skin.
Emboldened by this, his Battle State perk roared to life once again, and after 20 more minutes, the battle was over and more system prompts flooded in. However, Arthur did not focus on this fact for very long.
He had to find Lucas. He just had to. So, he bolted off in the direction that he’d seen the boy run in when the fight with the bear had begun.
Arthur’s heart pounded in his chest as his mind raced with potential scenarios. What if the boy had gotten lost and Arthur never found him? What if the boy had been killed by a stray monster? What ifs were Arthur’s enemy when it came to keeping calm as he surged forwards.
Unlike every other family member he had lost so far, Lucas ’ death would fall squarely on his shoulders and he wouldn’t be able to blame anything or anyone other than himself. He had made himself the boy’s protector and promised to literally be his guardian, and yet he might have been too slow in defeating the monstrous bear to actually protect him. The thought haunted him.
So, when he crested a hill and finally saw Lucas ’ body limp on the grass, with blood covering him and a zombie’s corpse nearby - his whole reality started cracking. His heart roared like an engine as he took in the sight. He felt the world about to fall out from under him.
With more willpower than he knew he had, Arthur forced himself to calm down and check on the body. He rushed over to the boy's body and Arthur swore that he’d never been happier to see a boy’s chest move up and down. Lucas was alive, or at least breathing. And, it even seemed that the boy had managed to take down a zombie by himself. Though, Arthur could tell that the boy had taken no small amount of damage in the process, with many of the boy's appendages having very prominent signs of bones having been broken.
Arthur sat beside the boy and laid him on his back out in front of himself. Before he quickly scanned the surroundings before then opening up the system coin shop and going to the Medicine General Shop.
General (Medicine) Coin Shop:
Balance: £11,020
Discount Due to Membership Tier (Gold): 40%
[F] Grade Body Healing Pill (6) - Cost: £25 -> £15
[E] Grade Healing Pill (2) - Cost: £150 -> £90
[D] Grade Restoration Pill (1) - Cost: £2,150 -> £1,290
Arthur had no idea what these different grades meant, other than that the higher the grade the more powerful the thing was - obviously. However, what if taking two high-grade pills in a day was more dangerous to Lucas than the wounds he already had? Arthur was not sure he was willing to risk that happening, so he bought the [E] Grade Healing Pills instead of [D] grade pills as a form of compromise between healing potential and risk.
This time he was ready for the pills to drop so he caught both of them in his hands easily enough. He looked at the pills with some consternation but pushed doubt to the side for a minute as he decided to test the pills on himself before giving one to Lucas, making sure that taking too many pills in a day wasn’t a problem. He realized it was not a very scientific test as his body was much older, much stronger, and much more advanced than Lucas, but it was all he had so it would have to do.
When the pill touched his tongue, it melted, and Arthur felt his whole body shiver as the few remaining signs of his battle with the bear disappeared completely. As did much of Arthur’s exhaustion from fighting with the bear as well as some of the weakness he had felt encumbered with going back decades. The pill was truly incredible despite only being the middle most expensive thing in the medicine shop.
He then realized that healing pills seemed to have a far steeper cost gradient as one went up in the grades compared to food/nourishment pills. He guessed he understood that and was only grateful that he had his discount to rely on to get him cheaper prices, otherwise, he may end up broke pretty quickly.
Arthur refocused his attention on the unconscious boy in front of him and he placed the pill up against the boy’s mouth. Arthur felt relief wash over him as he saw the boy’s body stitch itself back together again. The bones that had clearly been broken mended, and Arthur could only hope that the pill would also help heal mental damage - but he knew that was probably expecting far too much. He guessed he just wanted the best for the boy and to not see him suffer.
Whilst he stood guard over the boy’s unconscious body, he finally checked his system notifications. Feeling a bit daunted by it all. Time to go through each one, one at a time he thought to himself. Then, a thought occurred to him, and he decided he might as well go the full hog with all the system prompts and check on his full status while he was at it.
You have reached the 7th step of the [Qi Gathering] realm!
…
You have reached the 12th step of the [Qi Gathering] realm!
You have taken the first step into the [Qi Condensing] realm!
Total Reward: +10 Points into your Spiritual stat
Arthur nodded his head, glad of his own progress. He’d felt the realm increase when it had happened so he didn’t linger long on the particular prompt, especially as he had ceded control over spending spiritual points to the damn system and his perk.
You are the first Earthling to reach the [Qi Condensing] realm!
Reward: Trait: Qi Pylon (Lvl:5) | Rarity: [Epic] | Effects: You draw in Qi 25% faster than others.
BONUS: Skill: [Basic] Qi Manipulation (Lvl:1)
Arthur chuckled to himself, wondering whether this was really a trait that he deserved. However, he was more than happy to have it as having it would boost his cultivation and thus his ability to protect his grandson.
You have killed a [Pest] [Wild-Boss] Fire-Elemental Bear (Lvl:44)!
Reward: 101,294 EXP, 6 [Silver] Coins, 2 [Bronze] Coins, 40 [Copper] Coins, 2 Trait Points
(Note from User Manual: Monsters tagged with [Pest] are considerably stronger than [Vermin] ranked monsters. Though they are largely still considered weak by most civilized worlds, which yours is not. So, good luck dealing with these hideous monsters!)
(Note from User Manual: Monsters tagged with [Wild-Boss] are considerably stronger than their regular monster counterparts, but not as strong nor as lucrative to kill as regular [Boss] monsters of the same level. However, they are more likely to give coins to the user upon their death than either normal monsters or [Boss] monsters.)
Arthur’s eyes nearly bulged out from his skull as he realized he had just faced a monster nearly 3x his level. Though it was frightening that such monsters roamed the countryside now, Arthur couldn’t help but feel a small amount of pride at his genuine achievement. He knew that he’d technically killed monsters 15x his level when he’d fought against his first wolf, but this was different. They were weaklings, and the bear had most certainly not been. Hence why the bear was of a higher rank than the other monsters Arthur had faced so far.
With a proud smile on his face, he looked at the next prompt. His jaw almost hit the floor upon reading it.
You have leveled up! (x5) Quintuple Level up Special!
Stat Point(s) awarded: 35
Skill Point(s) awarded: 20
System Stat Perk Acquired: Glutton for EXP (Lvl:1)
New Level: 20
Progress to Next Level: 14,489/21,000
Arthur could do nothing but simply move on as he had nothing that he felt he could say to this particular prompt. He dismissed the level-up prompt and turned to the final prompt, his system status. He smiled weakly. It was a bit too much to take in.
ARTHUR GOODMAN ’S STATUS:
Tier: [F]
Class: [Rookie] Guardian Butler | Progress to next Class Rank: 1.2%
Realm: 1st Step of the [Qi Condensing] realm
Level: 20
PHYSICAL: 20 | MENTAL: 36 | SOCIAL: 25 | SPIRITUAL: 74 | SYSTEM: 15
HP: 200/200 | HP regen p/s: 2.02
STM: 400/400 | STM regen p/s: 1.
MP: 360/360 | MP regen p/s: 1.65.
Qi: 925/925 | Qi Regen p/s: 1.156
Balance: £11,590
Traits: Lucky (Lvl:10), Qi Pylon (Lvl:5) & Lesser Regenator (Lvl:1)
Skills:
[Advanced] Cleaning, [Advanced] Dispute Management, [Advanced] Cooking, [Basic] Small-Bladed Weaponry
Arthur sighed upon finishing reading it all. Now. Now he had to spend 35 stat points. On what? He had no idea. That was until a system prompt appeared in front of him, its contents astonishing.
Perk: [III] Automatic Cultivation (Lvl:1), suggests an additional 20 Stat Point investment into the Spiritual Stat.
Arthur was totally speechless. Just what kind of upstart perk was this?!