Regardless of what Lucian wanted to know about Mages, he suppressed his desires and made his way back to his dorm, exhausted and wanting nothing more than a good night’s rest to recuperate after such a tiring sparring session. His path back to his room was much less eventful than he expected it to be though, as the students who would usually heckle him and throw some shade and ridicule his way were unusually quiet this time around.
‘It seems word has spread quickly of my spar with Sofia.’ He mused to himself. This could be the only reason why things were so normal for him at the moment. Other than that, he couldn’t think of any other reason.
It seemed the news of him not only accepting Sofia’s ‘request’ to spar, but also taking it seriously and not cowering like nearly all of the student populace expected him to was enough for him to slightly improve their image of him. While it was a small improvement, for the time being it was better than nothing.
Lucian couldn’t care less for the sudden changes in the way he was treated — it only reminded him of the hypocrisy that plagued this place, and most of the rest of the world in fact. The way people’s opinions could change so quickly and easily over something as small as this was only made it clearer to Lucian that he could rely on nobody but himself.
In a way it was similar to the way society worked back in his previous life. The people on Earth at least pretended to hide their selfishness behind good deeds or false pretences, but deep down everyone knew that if an opportunity presented itself, with the catch of having to throw someone else under the bus, the large majority of people would accept it in a heartbeat.
That was much like this new world Lucian found himself in, only the people of this place didn’t even try to hide it. Strength ruled all, so Lucian showing just a modicum of potential and change in his behaviour and temperament was enough for other people to start judging him differently.
Soon enough, he found himself back within the confines of his dorm, allowing him to at least relax a little after that exhausting spar with Sofia. He removed his clothing and threw it into his bathtub, before collapsing onto his stiff bed, taking a quick glance at the clock on the wall.
‘Oh? It turns out our little training session lasted longer than I originally thought. A whole hour has passed.’ Lucian was surprised to find that his fight with Sofia didn’t last 5 minutes or so like he originally thought, but much longer. Realising this, he was curious to find out whether he had actually gained anything from it or not. Originally, thinking it was just 5 minutes, he didn’t expect to even see a single budge in his stats, but with it actually being much longer, his expectations were raised a little.
Without much further consideration, he checked his stats.
[Name: Lucian Verdan. Age: 12. Sex: Male. Vitality: 1.02, Agility: 0.7, Strength: 0.61, Mind: 0.1. Status: Exhausted, tired. Body is in need of rest.]
‘They actually rose!’ Lucian’s keen eyes spotted the changes instantly, recognising that all three of his physical stats had risen by 0.01 each. While only a minor increase, it came from just 1 hour of sparring with Sofia! The ratio of gains from training this way was much, much better than when he trained his footwork, or even cultivated his breathing technique!
He hadn’t even seen a single increase from his two hours of footwork practice, and he only really saw gains of a similar level from cultivating his breathing technique. Knowing this information, Lucian could only hope for more students to approach him for some sparring sessions in the future, but he didn’t make any changes to his training plans to accommodate it. He would only accept the requests of others to spar; he wouldn’t go out of his own way to find other people to spar with.
Knowing this information, Lucian fell into a deep sleep with a slight grin on his face.
‘Everything is going according to plan…’
***
A week soon passed, and a lot had happened. Firstly, Sofia didn’t turn up at the Grassy field a second time. Lucian was a little surprised to see the field empty after glancing over it the following day, since Sofia had made it abundantly clear that she had claimed it as her training spot. However, seeing such a good place being unused, he naturally had to take the chance to get some more Sword technique training in. Even after 7 days, Sofia didn’t show back up at the place for whatever reason. But Lucian didn’t really care to know either.
Secondly, Lucian had kept to his training regimen diligently during this time. He spent every morning after waking up cultivating his breathing technique, following the same movements he had been told to do by the AI. He took things slow, not wanting to commit any mistakes or blunders that could affect his progression in any way shape or form.
Following the previous pattern that seemed to be working for him, Lucian focused his efforts on smaller parts of his body, and over the last 7 days had worked through all of his toes, and had moved onto his fingers. Within the next two days, he would be finished with his fingers as well, leaving him with the difficult choice of what to move onto next. However, this decision was for the future Lucian in two days time to make, right now, he had other things on his mind.
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The last 7 days had been quite fruitful for him. The increases to his stats from his breathing technique had steadied out, decreasing slightly from the first two revolutions he made with it. In total, he received a clean distribution of 0.04 in each physical stat after 1 successful revolution, a total increase of 0.12 over all. This was a little lower than the 0.14 total he had received from his first two revolutions, but Lucian had been expecting this ever since his AI had warned him about the effectiveness of his breathing technique decreasing after each successful revolution.
However, he had also gained some insights and experience over the last week. His instincts told him that if he focused on bigger targets when cultivating, he would see higher gains when completing a revolution. As an example, if he focused his concentration of circulating the life force accumulated in his entire hand, rather than just each individual finger, he speculated the gains from that would be much more worthwhile. But with each increase in rewards, came greater risks.
Lucian knew he wasn’t yet ready to move onto attempting his luck with larger accumulations of life force. Instead, after he finished with his fingers in the next two days, he would find himself at a roadblock in his breathing technique cultivation. His fingers and toes were the smallest clusters of life force in his body, and the next item slightly above them at the bottom of this list were his hands and feet.
However, he had already established that he wasn’t ready to move onto them yet, so how else was he supposed to proceed with his breathing technique cultivation? Well, quite frankly, Lucian didn’t know either. Whether he liked it or not, he would have to unwillingly put a pause on training his breathing technique until he figured out the solution to this problem, though he suspected the answer could be something as simple as becoming stronger.
‘This just shows that I can’t fully trust everything the AI says, as it is just as new to this world and its customs as I am. It is bound to make mistakes every now and then. The only thing that matters is whether it can learn from them or not.’
However, he had thought about this enough. Instead, it was time for him to check his stats. He had been holding off on doing this ever since his spar with Sofia. He wanted to surprise himself a little, only asking the AI to feed him the data on what he had gained from each cultivation session, but not actually seeing how his actual stats themselves had increased.
There was no particular reason for this, he just wanted something to look forward to after a long week of painstaking training, and while seeing immediate results after each training session would be satisfying, seeing those results all collected together at the end of the week and the new level his body would be at would feel much more satisfying.
He only just waited until he had finished his final sword technique training session of the week before the big reveal.
‘AI, show me my stats.’
[Name: Lucian Verdan. Age: 12. Sex: Male. Vitality: 1.75, Agility: 1.36, Strength: 1.27, Mind: 0.1. Status: Exhausted, tired. Body is in need of rest.]
‘So I’m officially an Apprentice Knight now.’ Lucian didn’t know what he was expecting to see when he opened up his stats, but his expression remained rather indifferent. His emotions were unperturbed.
Something deep inside of him was half expecting to experience some sort of ‘breakthrough’ phenomenon the moment his lowest phyical stat, his Strength, approached that major milestone of 1.0. But no such thing had occurred actually. Lucian was pretty sure he would have noticed such a thing earlier in the day. Instead, it seemed the title of ‘Apprentice Knight was actually more of a formality than an actual rank, like Mages were separated by.
‘Perhaps you only really experience such a thing when becoming an Official Knight?’ He considered, but didn’t really pry more into it. The academy didn’t really tell them much about what really entailed becoming an official Knight, and they especially didn’t teach them anything about becoming an Apprentice Knight either, considering everyone there was already one before even entering the academy.
Lucian could go and ask one of the few students who were already Official Knights for some insights, but he wasn’t close enough with any of them to bother going through such a thing. He suspected he’d find out himself when he approached the 2.0 mark in his stats anyway.
Other than that, Lucian started running some calculations through his head.
‘Discarding the 0.56 I’ve received in each stat over the last 7 days from my breathing technique cultivation, that leaves an increase of 0.1 from my other training, and an extra 0.07 in my vitality from the remainder of the herbal mixture, which has sadly run out now. Hmmm, not bad I guess.’
Lucian didn’t really know whether this was good or bad, as he didn’t really have a second set of data to compare his own to. But one thing he did know was that if the other students—or even teachers—found out about his speed or progression, they would be incredibly shocked. His time over the past 7 days wasn’t just spent idling around and training, but he had also gleamed a few facts that he found interesting.
Firstly, it seemed either the students were unaware of their Knight training methods lacking a crucial factor (a breathing technique). Otherwise, most of the students there would already be near to or already surpassed the threshold to be an official Knight. This was something Lucian didn’t quite understand at first, but it made sense when factoring in this new information.
The teachers and professors might know a thing or two about it, as they were the ones in charge of supplying these training methods to the library, but for some unknown reason it seemed they were keeping very tight lipped about it. Either they were just as unaware as the students, or there was some secret that Lucian had stumbled upon.
Lucian was convinced of this fact, as he himself could now be considered a part of the middle ranks with his stats. He was already stronger than many of the students there, who were far ahead of him only a week prior. Their slow rates of progress made sense when realising they only had their footwork and weapon techniques to train with and increase their stats.
A rate of 0.1 per week was abysmal compared to what Lucian had achieved with his breathing technique. Alone, it was nearly 6x as fast as their training, but since Lucian was also keeping up with his footwork and his sword techniques, he was closer to 7x as fast as the rest of the student populace. In fact, that figure was likely higher, as he was using an improved version created by his AI, so they might be seeing lower increases to their stats compared to him.