Chapter 70 – PIll gotten gains
Of course, there were certain floors with Echo’s plan to make Adam as indestructible as conceivable. Firstly there was still a massive SP usage, and though, of course, saving Adam’s life was worth using all the SP they had – it had resulted in almost all their current reserves being used, despite Echo’s efficiency gains.
Secondly, though seemingly completely unimportant to Echo, for his particular research – it meant Adam lost all his memories up to the last ‘save point’ as it were. Obviously, this would not be the best of all possible scenarios if he was actually in the middle of fighting someone, which ordinarily would be the life and death situation warranting such costly SP usage – Libby worried about Echo; he almost matched Bones fervor for experimentation and complete disregard for plain common sense.
There was something to be said for a human mindset.
So where to get more SP from – well, that was easier enough, they had taken the long route there walking, but that was no reason for taking the long way back, as Libby had the coordinates for their original entry to this realm, where ever it was.
They waited till night again, which always gave them a good eight hours to flit about the place before anyone poked their head in to check on Adam – it had been three days now, and the routine of their captors had been like clockwork.
Gate-ing back to the chamber with the tower and its barrier magic script – Libby was able to use the array on her side to siphon off enough SP, within about two hours, to resupply Adam’s spirit sea.
While this was going on, Adam proceeded with his training in the PD. From what Adam could understand, which was considerably more than a day or so ago. The hours he had spent approximating ten were equivalent to a few weeks in the real world. He had now come to realize that, yes indeed, this was more than general mentalism that he was learning, but something he could only imagine was akin to Yantra, the learning of mental symbols of power.
Yet, unlike Yantra, the symbols could not be chosen but were mysteriously given to you – how he still did not understand. He presumed it must be like affinities whereby the individual had an innate one to a particular element, for instance.
It seemed like a gacha game to him as he was supremely curious to know what he was going to get. However, it didn’t seem like you could get a mediocre one – so all good.
Libby was helping him with his body tempering, so they had stolen some more pills and elixirs from the order for that. It seemed more than fortunate that they had – well, everything they needed, especially Echo being able to repair his body as normally the various stages were meant to take many months to complete.
With Echo able to help his body tolerate all the drugs he was taking without him having a heart attack or his meridians rupturing, or his dating breaking – which was all very possible.
He thought it was no wonder that not many cultivators made it that far.
So far, he had felt some difference when reaching the 9th stage of the tempered body, in that his senses had all improved vastly – that is, his normal senses. He could hear sounds at a distance and pick out things that previously only Libby had been able to – actually, presumably, she could sense things even further away now as she had been using his senses, only filtering the sounds.
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His eyesight was enhanced, also making things he focused on look like they were under a microscope – he was sure he would be able to see things more clearly that were far away, but he couldn’t really try that out at the moment.
Next, he needed to get through the Earthly Yuan Stage before he could actually try to get to the first stage of Symbol mastery.
Adam was just glad that he could do a martial art and weapons training, as he felt like he was just reading the same stuff over and over again with his mental study.
The cultivation wasn’t so bad as Libby had a far better handle on it and had given him the equivalent of training wheels, essentially. Whenever he looked for the Qi flowing through his body and tried to direct its flow – if he was doing it right Libby would not only tell him but highlight things and where he should be focusing internally, projecting things straight into his mind’s eye, overlaying it onto what he was already seeing (if anything).
At least it was better than the Mental stuff; with the cultivation and tempering, his stats actually started going up again. With the mental stuff, the books said things like “focus on that that cannot be seen” – yeah, right, super helpful.
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The guys from the order seemed to be really weird; either they had completely forgotten about him, were quite happy for him to die, or that he had an immortals constitution – as they had not even given him any water in the past three days.
Well, their crappy treatment of him helped to assuage his guilt at abusing their hospitality – well, robbing them blind.
On the fourth day, when they finally checked on him, it was the guy he’d seen the first time, Raful- something he couldn’t even remember, but he had seemed decent enough. It was then that he realized, of course, the guys didn’t need to actually do something as trivial as enter the room; they could obviously check remotely – alarm bells then went off that they knew about his midnight escapades.
The guy slipped in, closing the door quietly behind him, obviously doing something he shouldn’t have. So Adam played along and kept quiet. The guy just slipped him a note.
The note read, “You must escape within five days.”
Adam thought five days was too long – they had checked out the place, and there seemed little else they could get from the place.
Now the question was whether to kill all these guys or maybe torture them a little to see if they could explain anything that might help them fight against Elios or find out what he might be up to.
It was unlikely that these hermits would say no anything that useful, but Libby was keen to find out.
Adam thought they would probably try and kill him if they ever saw him again after he’d ransacked their order. They had technically tried to kill him by withholding water from him for three days when he hadn’t even raised a finger at them. So he thought fair enough, except for that Rufelo geezer.
So it was that at about 3 am that night, after taking every book, elixir, ingredient, and scrap of parchment or scroll they could find in the place and all the plants from the order’s herb garden, they appeared in Rufelo’s room.
He passed the guy the same piece of paper, putting a hand over his mouth, but had written on the back, “Do you want to live?” which he thought cut to the heart of the matter. The guy jolted awake but had sense enough not to shout anything; Adam had already put the light on – one of those interesting magi script lights that Adam now cursed he hadn’t had a look at, no doubt Libby had thought, so no worries.
The guy just nodded his head – and involuntarily joined their team as Echo teleported a new member of the squad into the guy’s spirit sea to ensure he kept on their side or at least didn’t try any monkey business.
The old guy looked around for something, then Adam realized, of course, the only thing the guy would be worrying about taking with him was a dam book. Adam just mimed padding his pocket, which he had pinched along with his clothes back from where they’d stowed them.