First off, Heidas was a lawless, cold world. If you were strong enough, you could do anything. This was somewhat like Earth, but to a much greater extent.
Second, the cultivation system of Heidas, while unique, was somewhat familiar to Gong Lu, as back in the day, he did enjoy reading Xianxia novels quite a bit.
Cultivation entailed drawing in different attributed energy, Qi, and absorbing it to nourish the spirit realm. When a child was awakened, their martial spirit, which lived in one's spirit realm, was excited, and it was this martial spirit that not only determined one's attribute, but also was the focal point of what the cultivator could do. Using the martial spirit to draw in Qi and strengthen the spirit realm and body with different cultivation techniques raised one's cultivation level. According to what Gong Lu had learned, these were the cultivation levels, from weakest to strongest:
1st stage: Martial Refiner. Access to Qi, martial spirit, and spirit realm. Stage of refining and purifying the body. Different cultivation methods achieve different results. 9 levels.
2nd stage: Martial Warrior: Builds up Qi. Cultivation method determines amount and how much Qi is built up. 9 levels.
3rd stage: Martial King: Focuses on aura. Aura type dependent on affinity. Can start condensing a domain.The domain is finished at the 4th stage, when the natural laws combine to form a domain with different effects depending on the cultivator.
4th stage: Martial Emperor: Access to natural laws. Cultivating these results in higher insight, which improves strength of martial skills.
5th stage: Martial Saint: Focuses on the mind. Depending on cultivation technique, can reach Hidden Mind stage, where the mind is like a machine.
6th stage: Martial Overlord: Cultivates everything in the stages below it, but this time drills them deep and makes them more profound. Uses a different type of energy to saturate these things, and the peak of the stage is reached when they arrive at their natural limit for that energy.
7th stage: Martial Legend: Strengthens and transforms the spirit realm, which is where the martial spirit is located. This strengthening also increases the power of the martial spirit.
8th stage: Divine Ruler: Makes the spirit realm become a world, where things exist at the owner's whim, creating an inner world.
9th stage: Divine Sage: According to legend, becomes one with the universe. The power of one's surroundings is at their disposal.
On this planet, talent was a combination of the speed at which one could draw in Qi, the speed of gaining insight into various things, and other factors. Essentially, the higher the talent, the faster one grew. Martial spirits also had different classifications, with some stronger than others. Both talent and martial spirits were classified into ten levels, each with a huge difference between the one below it: F, E, D, C, B, A, S, SS, SSS, X.
Different attributes of Qi excelled at powering different things, and had diffferent specializations. For example, Light attribute had weak defense and mediocre attack, but had the highest speed among all the attributes. Wind had weak defense, but stronger than Light, and had higher offense but lower speed. Fire had the highest explosive strength and extremely high attack, but medium speed and medium defense. Earth had the highest defense, Life gave regeneration, and so on. As such, Gong Lu planned on taking full advantage of his ability to choose his attributes.
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Talent Birth Circumstances Miscellaneous Boons Bloodline Affinity Martial Spirits Currency: 1,004,243
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As a previously avid reader of Xianxia/eastern fantasy novels, Gong Lu knew exactly what to do, feeling right at home. First off, what he needed the most was talent. His background and such didn't matter as much, because with enough natural endowments, he would be able to join any faction and enjoy a high position. Martial spirits and affinities would come after talent, and Miscellaneous Boons and Bloodline, while interesting, would be at the near end of the priority list.
So, talent first. It seemed to be divided into 10 categories, like what Gong Lu had learned previously.
Talent F:100 E:1,000 D:5,000 C:10,000 B:50,000 A:100,000 S:500,000 SS:750,000 SSS:1,000,000 X:100,000,000 Random: 75,000(unlimited amount)
Gong Lu wouldn't say that he was a gambling addict. He was just lucky, all of his life. Gong Lu would frequently visit casinos because he next to never lost, and actually, it net him quite a bit of money. So, as an incredibly lucky person, and someone who was very aware of it, how could he resist?
Rolling talent...
Talent gained: S
Roll again?
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Despite being extremely tempted, Gong Lu had to decline, because he had already received a payout rate of 5, and wasn't too greedy.
So now, onto his Affinity choice. Gong Lu was curious to see what Legacy was, as he did not receive any information about it in his painful "brain transmission", but Affinity, and then Martial Spirits, were more important. Upon tapping on Affinity, Gong Lu was met with a very large list of affinities, but also a filter option. As Gong Lu wanted affinities with a high offense, he selected that filter and looked at the new list.
Affinities(High Offense) Fire(500) Wind(500) Darkness(500) Lightning(600) Void(750) Force(1,000)
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If the prices of the affinities are to go by, then Force seemed the best, so, with his tremendous amount of points, it seemed like a simple choice to Gong Lu.
Now, with the affinity out of the way, we should worry about the martial spirit. However, since Force seems to be such a rare attribute, there aren't many martial spirits that can be selected for it. Of course, by many, Gong Lu meant relatively many, which meant that there were still thousands upon thousands of options.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
So, Gong Lu narrowed it down. It was truly ridiculous to have so many points and not use them to their maximum extent, so Gong Lu said that their prices had to be above 90,000 points, lest his points go to waste.
Everchanging Force Bear(60,000) Mountain's Strength Tiger(70,000) Thousand Blades Eagle(85,000) Empyrean Might Titan(100,000) Two Martial Spirits(250,000) Three Martial Spirits(500,000)
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Gong Lu was shocked. The fact that he could have up to three martial spirits, and by association, three spirit realms, three affinities, and three cultivation techniques, was insane. Simply insane.
But before thinking about it, Gong Lu had to decide on a martial spirit. This was an easy decision, since Gong Lu would always just buy the most expensive option when he could. And, since he had a million points compared to the hundred thousand, he purchased the Empyrean Might Titan.
Immediately, his mind started working overdrive, trying to figure out how to optimize it. The instant he saw it, Gong Lu clicked on it, but now Gong Lu had to decide how to use this tremendous boon. He already had the offense covered, so Gong Lu could go one of two ways. He could go for the "Assassin" archetype, and use tremendous attack and speed to crush his opponents, or could go the "Warrior" archetype, with incredible attack and defense to receive blows like they were nothing, and give back killing strikes. But what did Gong Lu want? Speed or defense?
Well, after a moment of deliberation, his choice was made. Gong Lu wanted the most straightforward, honest fighting style possible. He did not want to dodge or trick, but instead crush opponents under his sheer might. This was because of his previous life, which had entirely entailed of scheming and tricking and committing acts that would normally be considered evil for "the greater good". And suffice to say that Gong Lu detested every second of it.
So now, when he was given a second chance, a chance to live again, Gong Lu wanted to distance himself as far away as possible from the morals of his previous life. This meant that when people tried to use intelligence to harm him and when people tried to outsmart him, that he would stand tall and weather the storm without so much as a wince. And the only way that he could achieve this was to crush the schemes near him with absolute power and render them useless. It was only that way that he would be able to escape plotting in his new life.
And Gong Lu wanted his fighting style to reflect that. So, defense and attack it was. He had the attack affinity down, so he just needed to find his defense affinity.
So, Gong Lu repeated the process he used to find the Force affinity, and learned that according the system, the Earth affinity had the absolute highest defense. Despite having the lowest value at 500 points, along with all the other common affinities, Earth still had the highest defense, so Gong Lu gladly bought it. Logically, the price would be a combination of the rating of the overall power, so offense, defense, and speed, and the rarity of it. Earth, while possessing an extremely high defense, the highest, in fact, had an abysmal speed and a mediocre attack, resulting in its low rating. It was also rather common, which did not help it.
Gong Lu still had one affinity and thus one martial spirit completely free, but he wanted to hold that off until he decided on the martial spirit for his Earth affinity. Earth was more common, and thus had more martial spirits, but Gong Lu still reduced the list down to a manageable number when he filtered the martial spirits to those with the highest defense and cost.
Earthen Scaled Dragon(61,000) Revolving Mountain Ox(70,000) Deep Canyon Armadillo(79,000) Yggdrasil(81,000) Silver Peak Elephant(85,000) Divine Bulk Crocodile(94,000) Universal Tortoise(100,000)
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Obviously, following the previous pattern Gong Lu purchased the Universal Tortoise, which cost the most.
And he had one affinity and martial spirit left to choose. Well, what else could he have? He had the defense and offense down pat, and speed was useless for his fighting style, so, what about... regeneration? Something that would truly drive his opponents into despair. Gong Lu could picture it...
His opponent, after expending all of their energy to give him a deep cut on the shoulder, watching in utter horror as his flesh knitted itself back together at speed visible to the naked eye. They crumpled to the ground, knowing that victory was impossible.
Gong Lu laughed. Yes, indeed, that was his choice.
Now that he knew what to look for, Gong Lu bought Life for 750 points in the Affinities section. It was lower rated than Force because it had horrible attack, defense, and speed, and was literally only good for healing and helping people recuperate. However, despite these abysmal qualities in other categories, the Life affinity was highly demanded for in Heidas, due to its rarity, and was thus still rated quite highly.
Force was rated the maximum, 1,000 points, because of not only its incredible rarity, but also its wide range of use. One could not only use Force for domineering attack, but with skill, it could be used to not only augment the power of one's attacks, but also decrease the power of the attacks of others. It was very versatile, and still well specialized with the highest attack. The only downside was that Force Qi was very hard to cultivate and gather, but was also difficult to use correctly and mentally taxing to control. The drawbacks ended up somewhat balancing out the benefits.
But that was besides the point. Gong Yu was going to select his Life affinity martial spirit.
He used the same method to narrow the choices down as with the last two, and a suprisingly few amount came up.
Rejuvenating Elixir Hummingbird(83,000) Benevolent Ruby Elk(92,000) Truejade Qilin(100,000)
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It was simple to guess which one Gong Lu picked. After receiving the Truejade Qilin, he began to wonder about Miscellaneous Boons and Bloodlines. He had roughly 100,000 points left, which should be enough to purchase a good amount of these.
So, first Gong Lu decided to visit Miscellaneous Boons, because Bloodlines, while useful, would stop being useful once the strength of the owner of the bloodline surpassed that of the origin point.
The list was surprisingly small, and compared to Gong Lu's expectation of having to use a filter option, there was a limited amount of options.
Miscellaneous Boons Become extremely handsome/beautiful(500) Gain immunity to seduction(1,000) Gain innate resistance to all types of damage(10,000) Gain random innate ability(10,000) Have a much higher connection with affinity/affinities(11,000) Instinctively know cultivation technique(s) that is/are perfect fit for martial spirit(s)(13,000) Gain the ability to consume anything in exchange for power(15,000) Get triple luck in all things(20,000) Get a random treasure, martial skill, and storage ring upon turning 10 years old(30,000)
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Despite some of those being... extremely random, Gong Lu was glad that he decided to pay a visit to Miscellaneous Boons. He first wanted to purchase all the things that he could take extra advantage of due to his triple martial spirits, which consisted of "instinctively know cultivation technique(s) that is/are perfect fit for martial spirit(s)" for 13,000 and "have a much higher connection with affinity/affinities" for 11,000.
Upon purchasing these two, Gong Lu found it a necessity to augment his already terrifying luck by a factor of three for 20,000 points, which was worth every point. The random treasure, martial skill, and storage ring could potentially be a horrible choice due to the random part, but with his recently tripled luck, Gong Lu believed he could get something extremely useful.
The rest were useful, but could all be gained either through other means outside of purchasing them or weren't incredibly useful, so Gong Lu passed on all of them except for the boon that made him handsome. How could he resist for just 500 points?
The Bloodlines page was... not unexpected, but not predicted either. It was average. It seemed that none of them would completely elevate his strength to a new world, so Gong Lu only purchased the random bloodline for 5,000 points. He was relatively confident that it wouldn't backfire on him, which it could, and screw him over. How sad would it be if Gong Lu missed out on some awesome familial bloodline for a crappy one like a "Soft Snow Chihuahua". He might just die of shame...
But his luck was now inhuman, so Gong Lu wasn't too worried.
So, with 11,000 points left, Gong Lu was helpless. He could only purchase the immunity to seduction and the random innate ability, which he found to be better than immunity to all types of damage.
And with a little over 200 points left, Gong Lu confirmed his choices and was met once again with the suited woman from what seemed like ages ago.
"Hello, Gong Lu. I hope that you made the right decisions in those purchases, as they are final. No returns!" She stated ominously. Gong Lu didn't know how to feel about that, but he put it in the back of his mind and focused on what she said next. "Anyways, now that you've made your decision, we're going to bring you to your new body in Heidas. As your consciousness is going to be transported into the body of a fetus, the experience will be quite disorienting. Of course, not as bad as if we were to do so without the protection that we will give you, but still. The feeling will be quite strange. In fact, your consciousness and mental energy will not be affected in any way be the change, so, if you chose the perk that gives you a cultivation technique that fits your martial spirit, then you will be able to begin cultivation from the womb. Also, I only gave you the basic information you needed in order to make educated decisions on what you purchase, and nothing more. As a rule, we make it so that people learn about their new world through socialization and the methods one would normally go through. With all that out of the way, I bid you farewell."
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