Benton slowly lessened the effect of his gravity burst, lowering him to the ground. Once he landed, he stowed the cyclops’ corpse in his spatial ring. It occurred to him that the fight would have gone a lot better had he known about the beast’s weakness earlier.
He should do something about that oversight, but it wasn’t like he could just snap his fingers and gain as much knowledge of spirit beasts as he wanted. Oh wait…
Heavens, he really didn’t think that situation through, did he? Next time he was spending points, he’d add a technique to give him knowledge of spirit beasts to his buy list.
Self-recrimination complete, he turned his attention to the question posed by the popup. Did he want to choose his rewards?
A far higher priority in his opinion was to get back to the village and make sure that everyone was okay. He was low enough on qi that he’d need to consume a handful of spirit coins to afford a Quickstep traversing such a great distance, but he had plenty of the consumables available.
As he glanced down at himself, his appearance gave him pause. Far from looking like an all-knowing, mysterious master, he looked more like a hobo than he had since he’d first appeared at the village. He really didn’t want his disciples to see him dressed in torn, dirty, bloody robes.
But he needed to know if everyone was alright. Soon. Now.
Then it hit him. One of the rewards was contingent on the percentage of people surviving. The System should be able to tell him that quantity, and sure enough, after he posed the question, it did just that.
100%
He let out a very relieved breath. Everyone had survived. That was the best news he could have gotten.
For a moment, he worried that some of them might have ended up injured, needing him to come heal them, but he remembered how many pills he’d left them with. They’d be fine.
Feeling like he’d been rushing around like a chicken with its head cut off for entirely too long, he took a very deep breath and exhaled slowly. He took a moment to appreciate what he’d accomplished.
In less than a year, he’d built a sect of over two hundred members who were progressing nicely and who seemed to hold him in high regard. They’d surely had challenges at the village with the spirit beasts that attacked, and they’d come through those fights stronger.
He himself had become quite overpowered. A regular cultivator of his level would not have been able to defeat a beast with an aura, especially not one strong enough to control a beast tide. His techniques were complete cheats.
Benton had a lot of be proud of.
After a few moments of letting himself bask in his and his sect members’ accomplishments, he sighed. There were miles to go before he slept. First things first. Getting clean.
He Quickstepped to a nearby pond, bathed, and dressed in a fresh robe. After finishing, he felt much, much better. Refreshed.
Satisfied that his sect could survive without him for a little while longer, he said, “System, I’m ready to choose my rewards.”
Congratulations, Host, for surviving the beast tide! Based on sect members solely defeating beasts at and even above their level, the ease of Host dispatching higher level threats, and a final Average Loyalty of 7.9, the System grades Host’s performance as an A+, the top rank Host can achieve without special circumstances.
For achieving an A+ grade, Host can choose one of the two following benefits:
Heightened Personal Potential
Heightened Sect Member Potential
Benton’s first impulse was to feel quite good about receiving top marks. His second impulse was to dig deeper into the first of the two prizes. Both won to one extent or the other.
If Host chooses Heightened Personal Potential, the restrictions on cultivation for reaching Nascent Soul, Diamond Body Cultivation, etc. will be removed. Achieving those metrics will instead trigger the ability to reach the next levels of cultivation, making each set of major realms that much easier to achieve.
If he grokked that correctly, the benefit would allow him to immediately ascend to Nascent Soul and, upon reaching one thousand sect members with the required minimum Average Loyalty, he’d be able to ascend to Nihility.
That was nice. There were only a handful of Nascent Soul cultivators on the continent and none at Nihility level that anyone knew about. He’d be quickly catapulted to, or even above, the ranks of the best.
He asked the System about the next choice.
If Host chooses Heightened Sect Member Potential, all current and future sect members and/or disciples will be allowed to choose to increase the rank of their spiritual roots by a single minor step.
That prize was ludicrous. Groundbreaking. The reward would allow an E to move to E+ or an F- to an F. Immediately. With apparently no chance of failure.
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More importantly, an E+ could move to a D- and so on for D+ to C-, C+ to B-, B+ to A-, and something that boggled his mind, presumably from A+ to S-.
Jumping to the next major rank was a big deal, changing the destiny of the cultivator in question.
Crazy.
Even if not moving to another major rank, each of his sect members from now to forever would be a bit stronger, achieve a bit higher realm, reach each minor realm a bit faster, and learn their techniques a bit easier. For each sect member, it would be a small but important increase. For the sect as a whole multiplied over eventually thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of members, it was absolutely amazing.
Once word got out that his sect offered such a boon, he’d have to beat away applicants with a stick. He’d have to beat away other sects with a stick as well, but that was a problem for future Benton.
His inclination was that there was really no choice. He was all about making his disciples stronger, not himself. Besides, whatever criteria the System threw at him, he was confident that he would eventually reach, and with the beast tide conquered, there was no pressing need for him to advance quickly.
At fifty sect members per month and with the overall mood of the villagers favorable to him, he fully expected to fulfill the criteria for Nascent Soul in less than a year and a half and probably much faster than that. Maybe even under a year.
Cultivation was a journey of centuries and millennia. Prioritizing speeding his journey at this low stage made no sense. In comparison, helping untold numbers of his sect members was too good an opportunity to pass up.
“System, the description says that the sect members will be allowed a choice if I pick that benefit. How does that work exactly?”
Host’s disciples and sect members will not see a screen like Host does. Instead, they will be overcome with a strong intuitive sense that, if they choose to do so, they have the opportunity to, at that time, upgrade their spiritual roots by dropping into meditation. Future sect members will feel the same intuition shortly after being inducted into Host’s sect or being made a disciple.
Benton nodded. He’d been scared that they would all suddenly get pop up screens. The ability to spontaneously upgrade their rank was weird enough. Adding strange floating boxes to it would be a little excessive.
He definitely planned to take that second option but decided to wait to officially claim it until after he had a chance to prepare his people.
“System, I want to see the second reward.”
Congratulations, Host, for surviving the beast tide! Based on 100% of sect members and villagers surviving the beast tide, Host can choose one of the two following benefits:
Bloodline Pagoda
Trials Pagoda
Interesting. Very interesting.
Benton asked the System to explain the first choice.
The Bloodline Pagoda allows sect members and/or disciples to awaken and improve their bloodlines.
Captain Obvious much?
“System, I need more information than that. Please give me basic background on bloodlines and information such as can the sect members choose a bloodline? How much can it be improved? Etc.”
Bloodlines arise when a human has a powerful spirit beast in their ancestry. Since such relations are sought out by cultivators as a means to increase power and prestige, it is estimated that greater than half of all humans have at least of a trace of a bloodline. The pagoda leads the sect member and/or disciple through a safe process to awaken that bloodline. Subsequent visits over time allow that sect member and/or disciple to improve the power of that bloodline. The amount of improvement possible is a property inherent to the bloodline in question and the amount present in the human. It is not possible for a sect member and/or disciple to select a bloodline as a human may only possess a single bloodline that is passed down to them through their family. If the mother and the father have different bloodlines, only the strongest will be passed to the child.
Okay. That cleared things up quite a bit. He liked adding power for his disciples and per Su’s memories, bloodlines could either greatly ease a cultivator’s difficulty in advancing or enhance physical prowess or grant the use of an overpowered technique or any number of other possibilities. It sounded, though, like the exact benefit was random, a fact that he didn’t appreciate at all.
“System, tell me about the Trials Pagoda.”
The Trials Pagoda allows one sect member and/or disciple to participate in a trial each day. Admittance to the trial may cost Sect Points, and the cost is variable depending on the trial that is selected. Should the sect member and/or disciple pass the trial, a reward is given. The trials that may be chosen are:
Advance Cultivation or Technique
Add or Modify Qi Aspect
Improve Spiritual Roots
Through a series of questions, he learned some interesting facts about the Trials Pagoda, including the variable safety of the trials, ranging from completely safe for advancing cultivation and techniques to possibly deadly when trying to improve spiritual roots. Given that death was on the table, he started to sour on the concept of the trials.
Then again, that result was only for the most consequential of the three trial types, which was a complete gamechanger. After all, there was nothing that said a sect member couldn’t improve their roots multiple times, assuming they were willing to risk death and he was willing to spend the Sect Points.
At first, he didn’t see the first trial type as a huge benefit, thinking it basically just sped up what his sect members would accomplish anyway. In an emergency like the approaching beast tide, it would have been worth it to spend Sect Points to get a few more cultivators into the Foundation Establishment realm, but with that potential disaster averted, they could afford to take things more slowly.
After a bit of thought, though, he understood the true benefit of that trial type—bottlenecks. Sometimes, cultivators hit a wall and couldn’t advance their realm or their technique, regardless of resources, the quality of their methods and techniques, or their talent level. They might get stuck for a month or a year or a decade. They might never breakthrough.
If he understood the System correctly, the pagoda could help with that.
The second trial type also provided a big benefit. A cultivator was born with their qi aspect. Given his maxim about being in a cultivation world, he was positive that someone somewhere knew how to add to it or modify it, but from Benton’s knowledge and Su’s memory, he didn’t know of a way other than the offered trial.
He’d already seen how much benefit having access to multiple qi aspects offered. The thought of his sect members having a similar, albeit more limited version, made him happy.
With the three trials and given enough Sect Points, he could raise almost anyone to immortal status.
That realization led him to another equally profound one—the trials pagoda was a freaking point sink. He shook his head. Every game had them, and he should have suspected something like it happening once Sect Points started to become so prevalent that he literally had no idea what he would spend all of them on.
Darn.
“Well played, System. Well played.”